The Oldie February 2024 by The Oldie

MY RESTAURANT HELL – ROWLEY LEIGH IN PRAISE OF HYMNS

AN WILSON ‘The Oldie is an incredible magazine – perhaps the best magazine in the world’ Graydon Carter

February 2024 | £5.25 £4.13 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 435

Benny Hill at 100 by Andrew Roberts

I once met Ian Brady – Robert Bathurst The art of dying on stage – Simon Williams spat – Prue Leith My

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Benny Hill turns 100 page 14

Features 14 Benny Hill’s peaks and troughs Andrew Roberts 16 My pal married a bore Charlotte Metcalf 19 Hell of setting up a restaurant Rowley Leigh 21 How to cut your enemies Lulu Taylor 22 My adoring Chinese pupils Gregory Kerry 23 Playing dead on stage Simon Williams 25 Cost of American living James Fletcher 28 The Jewel in the Crown turns 40 Roger Lewis 30 Joy of pipe-smoking Nicholas Lezard 32 I’m a colour-blind artist John Rattigan 34 My super rats Nick Newman 35 The first iron suspension bridge Mark Palmer

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was the British Berlin Tattoo? Anna Foden

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Tarnished Jewel in the Crown page 28

12 Modern Life: What is DNA printing? Richard Godwin 33 Prue’s News 37 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips 39 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson 40 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 41 Country Mouse Giles Wood 42 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 43 Small World Jem Clarke 44 School Days Sophia Waugh 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Memorial Service: General the Lord Ramsbotham James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 50 I Once Met … Ian Brady Robert Bathurst 48 Memory Lane Betty Spanswick 63 Commonplace Corner 63 Rant: Downsizing Ronald Crowe 65 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips eoldie@ Art editor Michael Hardaker subscri Supplements editor Charlotte Metcalf ption. co.uk o Editorial assistant Amelia Milne r phone Publisher James Pembroke 01858 Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer 438791 At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Books 52 Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters, by Sinclair McKay; and Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him, by David Reynolds Geoffrey Wheatcroft 53 Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, by Charles Glass Benedict King 55 The Shortest History of Sex, by David Baker Theodore Dalrymple 57 Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood, by David Mamet Benedict Nightingale 59 Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench Daniel Hannan 61 My Friends, by Hisham Matar Justin Marozzi

Arts 66 Film: Wonka Harry Mount 67 Theatre: Macbeth William Cook 67 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Frances Wilson 69 Music Richard Osborne Oldie subscriptions To order a print subscription, go to https://checkout.theoldie.co.uk/offers, or email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791 Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £51.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69 To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet/mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’

Pipe dreams page 30 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 73 Gardening David Wheeler 73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 81 Bird of the Month: Bittern John McEwen

Travel 82 Pembrokeshire’s killer riptide Harry Mount 84 Overlooked Britain: Swarkestone Hall Pavilion, Derbyshire Lucinda Lambton 86 On the Road: David Baddiel Louise Flind 92 Taking a Walk: The poetry of Dorset Patrick Barkham

Reader Offers Literary lunches p33 Reader trip to Sicily p79

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The Old Un’s Notes Stanley Price (19312019), the playwright and screenwriter, had many lucky encounters. His witty stories, which all appeared in The Oldie, have been collected by his son Munro Price into a delightful book My Lunch with Marilyn and Other Stories. As a young reporter at Life magazine in the 1950s, he escorted Marilyn Monroe to lunch; took on 12-year-old Bobby Fischer at chess (he lost); and met Ernest Hemingway and Noël Coward, while they were in Cuba filming Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.

He is pictured (right) on a 1964 photo shoot for Time magazine with Mandy Rice-Davies, of Profumoaffair fame, as Fanny Hill. Stanley is posing as an elderly hair fetishist. An aspiring actor in his schooldays, Stanley watched an assured Harold Pinter playing Macbeth at Hackney Downs School. A year later, in his first year at Cambridge, Stanley was Player King to Peter Hall’s Hamlet, killing off his acting ambitions. Once he was kissed by Sophia Loren. Alas, she was made up as an old lady: ‘I leaned forward and my lips

Among this month’s contributors Rowley Leigh (p19) set up Kensington Place and Le Café Anglais restaurants. Together with Tom Hodgkinson (p40) on the Idler team, he beat the Financial Times on University Challenge in 2008. Lulu Taylor (p21) is a Sunday Times bestselling novelist, editor and interviewer. Her latest book, The Forgotten Tower, is out now. She lives in Dorset. Simon Williams (p23) was Captain Bellamy in TV’s Upstairs, Downstairs. He and his wife, Lucy Fleming, play her parents, Peter Fleming and Celia Johnson, in Posting Letters to the Moon. Prue Leith (p33) is a judge on The Great British Bake Off. She set up Leith’s restaurant and founded Leith’s School of Food and Wine. Bliss on Toast, her book of Oldie columns, came out in 2022.

Stanley Price lets Mandy Rice-Davies’s hair down (1964)

touched the cold, greasy latex of her cheek.’ He recalls Noël Coward, about to open his Private Lives in Bury St Edmunds, pronouncing, ‘I go to Bury St Edmunds – not to praise him.’ In 1982, just after his West End hit play Moving (about moving house), Stanley did move house – to Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill. Days later, he woke to see a police cordon outside, and Kate Adie with TV cameras. Three doors away, the serial killer Dennis Nilsen had dismembered six of his victims and deposited them in the drains. The Prices tried to resell the house, but were stuck there for 17 years.

Our radio critic, Valerie Grove, is thrilled that Dodie Smith’s most popular play, Dear Octopus, is being revived in February at the National Theatre. While writing Dodie’s 1996 biography, Valerie hoped to see all Dodie’s favourite works performed: a film of I Capture the Castle – eventually made, starring Romola Garai – and a new 101 Dalmatians – ditto, starring Joely Richardson and 101 live puppies. But Dear Octopus remained unseen, except in rep and am-dram. ‘Too old-fashioned,’ said the National. It was Dodie’s friend Josephine Tey (author of The Daughter of Time, about The Oldie February 2024 5

The Murder of the Princes in the Tower at old Madame Tussauds, burnt down in 1925 – from Bonfire of History, a new book by Christopher Joll and Penny Cobham

Important stories you may have missed Traffic delayed as car hits hedge Suffolk Free Press

Person taken to hospital Wrexham Leader Camber Sands Pontins will not be used to house asylum seekers Kentish Express £15 for published contributions

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Richard III) who implored her to write a play ‘with no one in it under 30’ because ‘young love wearies my desiccated soul’. Only our oldest readers might recall the original pre-war production, starring John Gielgud, or even its West End revival in 1967, with the comedy duo Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge as the couple celebrating their golden wedding with a four-generation family reunion. In 2024, it’s Lindsay Duncan and Malcolm Sinclair. The Old Un wonders whether the jokes will survive along with the characters. One of the small grandchildren is challenged to utter the rudest word she knows. ‘It’s too awful,’ she says … then whispers, ‘District nurse’. Apparently in 1938 this brought the house down.

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‘My straighteners are broken’

Seventy years after it first appeared in 1954, Kingsley Amis’s masterpiece,

Lucky Jim, has been reissued in hardback by Hatchards, London’s oldest bookshop. This prompted Oldie contributor Michael Barber to recall a radio interview he did with Amis. The author, clutching a whisky, sang the song composed by the novel’s protagonist, Jim Dixon. The derisive ‘Welch tune’ was aimed at his boss, the odious Professor Welch. Based on the finale of Beethoven’s C Major Piano Concerto, it went like this, with Amis’s emphases marked: ‘You ignorant clod, you stupid old sod, you havering, slavering get… You wordy old turdy old scum, you griping old piping old bum…’ It is distinctly reminiscent of another masterpiece, Fairytale of New York, by Jem Finer and the late Shane MacGowan: ‘You’re a bum You’re a punk You’re an old slut on junk Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed You scumbag, you maggot You cheap lousy faggot…’ Might MacGowan have been influenced by Lucky Jim? After all, MacGowan won an English scholarship to Westminster School. MacGowan’s headmaster at his prep school, Holmewood House, near Tunbridge Wells, Robert Bairamian, said of him, ‘He was very unusual indeed – one of the most unusual personalities I’ve ever, ever

met. I thought he would end up in the drama scene. At Westminster School, they asked whether I’d written his English paper. They said they’d never seen anything like this before.’ Surely it’s time for a budding English don to write the definitive PhD on ‘The Influence of Kingsley Amis on Shane MacGowan’.

‘My wife’s found a great way to save money – she spends mine’

A muted cheer for the late gangland villain ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser (1923-2014), who would have turned 100 on 13th December. Fraser’s chosen career might be one of the few callings in life where being known as ‘mad’ is a positive asset. There are different accounts of how he earned the sobriquet. The most popular version is that he came by it when, as a young man, he feigned insanity during a two-year stretch at Pentonville for smash-and-grab and as a result was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Another possibility is that it

Mad, bad and dangerous Fraser

DON ARNOLD/WIREIMAGE

RIP Dame Edna, Sir Les Patterson and Barry McKenzie

stemmed from his role as an enforcer for London’s notorious Richardson gang, and his practice of extracting his rivals’ teeth with a rusty pair of pliers. Once dubbed ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’, Fraser enjoyed a virtual season ticket for the dock at the Old Bailey. Towards the end of his life, he calculated that he had spent more than 40 years behind bars, and insisted he had loved every minute of it. There was something peculiarly British about many of Fraser’s criminal enterprises. On one occasion, he managed to lock himself into a bank vault he was robbing on a Friday night, and had to await the staff’s return on Monday morning. Years later, he and an accomplice were arrested when their getaway car ran out of petrol during a chase through the Rotherhithe Tunnel. In 1991, Fraser survived being shot in the head outside a London nightclub, but refused to tell police who the gunman was. ‘If you play by the sword, you’ve got to expect the sword,’ he reasoned. Advancing years failed to tame him. In June 2013, the 89-year-old Fraser was served with an ASBO, having assaulted a fellow resident at his care home after he found him sitting in his favourite chair.

Radio 4 will pay tribute to the late great Barry Humphries (1934-2023), a treasured Oldie columnist, on his 90th birthday. Barry Humphries: Gloriously Uncut is on 17th February at 8pm. The show features Oldie contributor and cartoonist Nicholas Garland, who, with Barry, created Barry McKenzie, the Private Eye cartoon strip. Another Oldie contributor, film director Bruce Beresford, who directed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, appears, as does Oldie editor, Harry Mount. Barry was remembered in a state memorial service at the Sydney Opera House in December. He richly deserved a state memorial service but wasn’t always adored in his native land, where some Australians thought he was mocking them. At the Oldie, we always

revered him. In Barry Humphries, we got four columnists for the price of one: Barry himself, Barry McKenzie, Dame Edna Everage and the great Sir Les Patterson. How tolerant Oldie-readers are – in three years of his columns, no one ever complained about the earthy philosophy of Sir Les Patterson, except for one complainant, who thought Sir Les was real: ‘The thoughts of Sir Les Patterson are disgusting – it’s quite extraordinary that HM the Queen should have appointed him as her cultural attaché to the Court of St James.’ Tired of trying to get a waiter’s attention? The solution comes from a loyal reader in Scarsdale, New York. After futile attempts to attract a waiter for some hot water for the tea and butter for the bread, and a chance to order, Susan Teltser-Schwarz took matters into her own hands. She got hold of the

telephone number of the restaurant, called the front desk to alert someone to send a waiter to the fourth booth on the right. It worked like a dream. Susan says, ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves!’

Anglican congregations may be dwindling, but the Church of England’s bureaucracy is full of beans, if the Diocese of Chichester is to be taken as typical. It lists a formidable array of diocesan managers. They include a facilities administrator, digital media co-ordinator, capital-assets project officer, pastoral reorganisation officer, director of apostolic life, assistant vocations officer, programme delivery manager, PA to the director of ordinands, officer for lay vocations and ministry, rural officer, head of wellbeing, Bishop’s LGBTI+ liaison officer and many, many more. In total, there are 70 of them. How ever did Jesus cope with just 12 apostles? The Oldie February 2024 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

My wife and I love a good Trollope We’re so obsessed with the novelist that we fought over a single copy of The Way We Live Now

BBC

Sir Alec Douglas-Home had a passion for flower-arranging. Harold Wilson adored the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Winston Churchill was an accomplished artist and recreational bricklayer. Gordon Brown once invited me to an evening of poetry-reading in Downing Street. Whenever I visited Sir Edward Heath at his home in Salisbury Close, he talked as much about music and sailing and orchids as he did about politics. Heath was especially proud of his orchids. ‘Fidel gave me the orchids, you know,’ he’d say, his shoulders heaving happily. Castro also sent him a fine box of Cuban cigars every Christmas. To remain happy beyond your political heyday, a prime minister needs a passion beyond politics. That was Margaret Thatcher’s problem. Politics were her life. My wife and I were lucky enough to get to know her during her retirement. She had many wonderful qualities, though no great sense of humour (I always felt that must have made bringing up Mark quite challenging) and not much small talk if you veered away from the political arena. She had no hinterland or passion beyond politics, so that when she ceased to be Prime Minister, she had no other resources to fall back on. If you want to be happy in later life, be sure to cultivate a passion that will keep you stimulated when your official working life has reached its terminus. I was reflecting on this recently when I spent a happy evening with Sir John and Dame Norma Major. Sir John (81 in March, still looking 61) is the best company because he has a unique way with words. He manages extraordinary eloquence in everyday conversation through simplicity of expression and originality of thought. He has a wonderful range of interests, from cricket to Ella Fitzgerald. We were meeting up because of his passion for the works of Anthony Trollope.

In the 1990s, Major was one of the prime movers in ensuring that the great Victorian novelist gained his rightful place in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, next to Trollope on TV: Lewis Carroll, Susan Hampshire in just below The Pallisers Edward Lear, just above Philip Larkin. Major is a vice-president of the Trollope Society, alongside actors Timothy West, 89, whose audio readings of Trollope are must-listens for anyone who loves good stories grandly told, and Susan Hampshire, 86 and still (I promise you) looking younger than springtime – and irresistible as Glencora in the 1974 BBC version of The Pallisers. I’m a vice-president, too, though I have no claim to Trollopian fame – other than in having read every one of his novels and having become notorious because of the way, once upon a time, my wife and I devoured The Way We Live Now – a stand-alone Trollope novel I recommend if you’ve always meant to give him a go but haven’t got round to it. On holiday in Turkey, my wife and I unpacked our bags and discovered that each of us thought the other had brought the books. This was before the advent of Kindle, and our Turkish resort (Bodrum, known locally as Bad-room) boasted no Englishlanguage bookshop. All we had was The Way We Live Now which my wife was carrying in her hand luggage. We read it together on adjacent sun-loungers. My wife would read a page, then carefully tear it out of the book and pass it to me. I don’t feel guilty about this. It was a

paperback. It wasn’t built to last. We have the complete works of Trollope in the fine hardback edition produced by the Trollope Society. They sit proudly on the shelf alongside my great-grandfather’s complete works of Dickens and the complete works of Thackeray I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh 30 years ago. These handsome hardbacks I never open. I don’t believe I have looked into a single volume of one of them, even once. They are for show – and for leaving to the grandchildren. The paperbacks are for devouring – and destroying as one pleases. My boyhood friend Julian Fellowes (Lord Fellowes of Downton Abbey) is President of the Trollope Society – and of the Thomas Hardy Society. The Trollope Chairman is Dominic Edwards, whose literary tastes are impressively broad. He is also a member of The Friends of Tilling, where admirers of the Mapp and Lucia novels of E F Benson get together (sometimes kitted out in 1920s fancy dress). I am the proud President of the Tillingites and President of the Oscar Wilde Society, too. I’m patron of the Friars Club, where admirers of Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter and Greyfriars School) meet over chocolate cake and hot buttered crumpets. One of our number has just discovered a whole stash of unpublished schoolboy stories by Hamilton… Yaroooo! The point is: from Aphra Behn (I think I’m a patron of the society that honours her) to Elizabeth Gaskell to P G Wodehouse to Enid Blyton (I dress as Noddy for the AGM), there is a literary society to suit every taste. If you have a favourite author, join the club. We all need a passion to fall back on as time goes by. Gyles’s latest book is Elizabeth – An Intimate Portrait The Oldie February 2024 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Apple of my eye lets me down My phone was my master – until it confessed to its faults

matthew norman An email advocating an iPhone update has arrived from Apple. It arrived a few weeks ago, to be more precise. But I have been saving it, unopened and unread, for a New Year morale-booster. There must be those to whom January is either an active pleasure or a neutral irrelevance, and to them I doff my cap. To me, the New Year is a torment of bleakness and despair; a waking midwinter nightmare when the Godfearing take to slippers and dressing gown, and shuffle aimlessly about an underheated residence questioning, with heightened intensity if less expectation than ever of stumbling upon an answer, the purpose of human existence. This is why I have been husbanding that email. Apple is a vigorous communicator, sending several weekly emails of varying incomprehensibility. But of all the myriad forms of communiqués, the one announcing an iPhone update is the crème de la crème. It offers the tantalising prospect of perfecting not merely the device but also, by reflection, the life of the nominal owner, who is in truth its slave. When I first bought one, about 15 years ago, I blithely assumed that the relationship was effectively completed by the purchase: that I would use the object to make calls, listen to music and anything else of which it was capable at the time. I had no idea that it was more akin to an imperious pet than a piece of touchscreen technology, and that caring for it would be such a relentless burden. Over the years, there have been scores of emails urging that the phone be plugged in overnight so that a security fix or some staggeringly crucial new feature be installed. So far, frankly, these updates have tended toward the disappointing. But isn’t that the magical thing about the New Year? With it comes that 10 The Oldie February 2024

electrifying jolt of fresh hope, and it was in this spirit of optimism that I opened the email this morning. More than worth the wait, I think you’ll agree, it certainly was. ‘This update provides bug fixes for your iPhone,’ it announced, ‘including: in rare circumstances, Apple Pay and other NFC features may become unavailable on iPhone 15 models after wireless-charging in certain cars.’ This is outstanding news. Admittedly, I don’t use Apple Pay, or know how to, and have no clue what an NFC feature might be. It is also the case that I have no conception what wireless-charging in a car entails, nor the vaguest desire to do it. Yet I see now that the possibility of accidentally charging the phone in a car, wirelessly, and so being prevented from using features of which I remain entirely ignorant, was a subliminal terror gnawing insidiously at my soul for too long. The second bug fix outlined in the email, on the other hand, addressed a more conscious fear. I have been almost paralysed with worry about this one for a while. ‘Weather Lock Screen widget may not correctly display snow.’ Although the danger speaks for itself, let’s spell it out all the same. Imagine you are in the car, no doubt wirelessly charging your iPhone at mortal risk to its Apple Pay and NFC viability, when a flurry of white flakes descends from the sky. Having no notion what the precipitation might be, or how it might affect Right: Matthew’s old boss

driving conditions, you glance at the iPhone screen, as legally mounted on the dashboard, for guidance. And there, would you believe it, is the symbol for a wholly unrelated weather phenomenon. Let’s imagine that the widget indicates a monsoon. Do you continue with the journey as planned? Or do you execute a sharp U-turn, and rush home to raise the house on stilts to protect it from the rapidly rising flood, an architectural quirk much favoured on the streets of Manila? While you’re pondering this dilemma, the road becomes ever more slippery. If you only knew what kind of downpour was suggested by a flurry of white flakes, you’d press the swervy-lines button that prevents skidding. But of course you don’t. All you know, thanks to the widget, is that it’s a monsoon – and there’s no dashboard button for one of those. So it is that you lose control of the vehicle, and swerve into the path of a juggernaut. The coroner records ‘Death by faulty widget’, and the grief of your mourners is eventually assuaged by the £20 million compensation paid by Apple to avoid the publicity attending a charge of corporate manslaughter. Given that this would be of limited consolation to the deceased, I will plug it into the charger tonight. The battery will henceforth drain in 27 seconds, as it does after all updates. But that’s a price worth paying to wake tomorrow, cosseted by the knowledge that Apple Pay will never be affected by wireless vehicular charging – and that the next time it snows heavily in London, as it does for five minutes once a decade, I will be correctly informed of the fact by my iPhone.

what was the British Berlin Tattoo? In August 1947, the British Army went foxhunting at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. It was part of the British Berlin Tattoo put on to entertain Berliners and show off the capabilities of the British Army of the Rhine. Thousands of Germans watched military bands marching on the Maifeld, where polo matches and the dressage competition had taken place at the 1936 Olympic Games and the Nazis had held May Day rallies. The 16th/5th The Queen’s Royal Lancers re-enacted an 18th-century cavalry charge in full dress uniform and Scottish regiments performed Highland dances. A stagecoach was held up by highwaymen, and the foxhunting was performed by the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars and their foxhounds. There had been criticism in Britain. MP Stephen Swingler asked how many British Army of the Rhine man-hours and coal the tattoo was going to waste. The Secretary of State for War, Frederick Bellenger, replied that the tattoo would be good for discipline and morale and that a British tattoo in Vienna had been ‘widely popular’ with the Austrians.

what is DNA printing? DNA printing is a technology you should be worried about. You were worried about boring old artificial intelligence? You should probably be more worried about DNA printing. We’re talking benchtop synthesisers that allow you to move bits of genetic material around like letters in a Word document and then print them in interesting new forms. The technology has been around since the 1980s. It used to be expensive, fiddly and under the control of a few vaguely responsible people. However, the cost of the machines is falling rapidly. I just found one online for €25,000. The complexity of forms you can print using them is improving, too. A deadly pathogen is now theoretically possible. One that is resistant to all treatment. 12 The Oldie February 2024

The Berlin Tattoo was widely popular with Berliners. Bones were broken when thousands stormed the gates for the final performance, and the event raised 500,000 Marks for German welfare organisations to send children on a seaside holiday. Whether the tattoo won hearts and minds in the Soviet Zone was debatable. Of the opening fireworks, the East German Berliner Zeitung asked tartly, ‘Was it just me who was reminded of the “Christmas tree” target flares from the bombing nights?’ Spectators were quoted saying, ‘They’re playing our marches,’ and ‘They’ve copied our Wehrmacht Day.’ A letter to the newspaper claimed that an elderly lady recounted her trip to the tattoo in her local bakery with tears in her eyes and said the colourful uniforms and dashing riders had reminded her of Germany’s heyday under the Kaiser. The next month, scenes from the tattoo were used in an East German propaganda film. The Augenzeuge newsreel showed women and children watching the spectacle with eager faces and then moved on to a battlefield, with wounded soldiers and wooden crosses in the snow. ‘The moral seems to be,’ wrote the Times’s correspondent, ‘this leads to that.’ The British Berlin Tattoo became an

annual and then biennial event. Displays became adventurous, with the White Helmets motorcycle team jumping over the British military governor’s RollsRoyce and parachutists descending from the Deutschlandhalle roof. In 1967, the finale was ‘Moscow in Flames’, accompanying Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The Soviets were not happy about a model of Moscow being set alight but, as organiser Major Sir Michael Parker told the Times, they were placated when they were told it was a French defeat. The West Germans were also sensitive but allowed the model to burn, as long as it was quick. With the help of kerosene, ‘Moscow’ was incinerated in three seconds. To promote the tattoo in 1975, a hovercraft ‘hovered’ through West Berlin. Two years later, Britons dressed as Roman soldiers paraded along the Kurfürstendamm with shields and spears. How reassuring this was for West Berliners facing Warsaw Pact weaponry on the other side of the wall is unclear. The Queen attended the last British Berlin Tattoo in 1992 and the British garrison withdrew from the city two years later, but the Berlin Military Tattoo has carried on with German military bands and guests. Anna Foden

And the website makes it all sound so simple. ‘The cartridge-and-chip technology allows even untrained personnel to complete a successful DNA or RNA synthesis in no time.’ I began worrying about all this after reading The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, one of the founders of the British artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind. Suleyman describes the moment at a genetics seminar he attended a few years ago when a respected professor disclosed that a rogue biohacker could now theoretically kill a billion people with some DNA they printed in their shed. ‘All it takes is the motivation.’ What particularly worried Suleyman at the time was that everyone else who attended the seminar went to dinner afterwards ‘and carried on chatting as normal’. What worries him now is what will happen when AI and DNA printing combine. The two technologies ‘will usher

in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen’. But they also threaten to ‘empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.’ We’re talking genetic Chernobyls. The Facebook algorithm taking animal form. Self-replicating armies of rabid bats descending on Cirencester. So Suleyman thinks we need to start regulating this technology, containing it and generally coming up with strategies to avoid sleepwalking into any kind of rabid-bat scenario. And, in the meantime, we just have to pray that these things work a bit like regular desktop printers – ie absolutely terribly. The supervillain is trying to run off a quick porcupine-anthrax hybrid … ah, but the thing jams! You laugh. But it’s our only hope. Richard Godwin

Born 100 years ago, Benny Hill was a milkman, a crooner and a true original. By Andrew Roberts

Hill’s peaks & troughs

14 The Oldie February 2024

‘I get a kick out of taking ordinary girls to places they wouldn’t visit’ success allowed him to abandon stage work and hide behind his characters. He hoped his small-screen fame would result in film stardom, and his cinematic debut in Ealing’s 1956 Who Done It? showed his considerable potential as a light-comedy leading man. Yet British cinema never seemed to appreciate Hill’s range, despite Light Up the Sky! (1960) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) displaying his talents as a character actor. The most intriguing role of Hill’s short

cinema career was in 1969’s The Italian Job. He helped to create the character of the disturbed Professor Simon Peach, who was obsessed with large women, and his is by far the film’s best performance. The comic’s sexuality seems almost adolescent. His brother, Leonard, reflected, ‘Benny finds positive women something of a threat.’ Hill stated, ‘I get a kick out of taking ordinary girls to places they would not normally visit.’ In practice, this often meant a supper of poached eggs and gifts of cheap lingerie and perfume which Hill acquired wholesale. He preferred ladies to address him as ‘Mr Hill’ while pleasing him, telling his friend Bob Monkhouse, ‘It’s respectful.’ At the time of The Italian Job’s release, Hill had transferred to Thames Television with his straight man Henry McGee and his

UNITED ARCHIVES GMBH / ALAMY

e was never a chat-show fixture, regaling the hapless audience with dire golfing anecdotes. He often seemed ill at ease when introducing his programmes. By the 1980s, many younger comedians derided Hill’s output, but Anthony Burgess believed ‘Orwell would have loved him’, and, in 1991, he received the Charlie Chaplin International Award for Comedy. Alfred Hawthorne Hill was born on 21st January 1924 in Southampton, where his father managed a surgicalappliances shop. Mark Lewisohn’s indispensable biography Funny, Peculiar makes the Hill family sound like a British Lion comedy film, with Lionel Jeffries as the stern and parsimonious Hill senior. After leaving Taunton’s School in Southampton, Hill tried a variety of jobs – including as a milkman – and was a dance-band guitarist and crooner in the evenings. At the age of 16, he headed for London in an attempt to become a variety comedian. War service in REME interrupted his nascent show-business career. After the war, he adopted the stage name Benny. For the next few years, there were the familiar rounds of grim venues. He even posed for a body-building magazine to earn a few shillings. At one point, Hill served as Reg Varney’s straight man and suffered the ignominy of being booed off during his solo spot. But Hill persevered, making his TV debut in 1950, with The Benny Hill Show starting in 1955. He co-wrote the scripts with the former Special Branch officer Dave Freeman. Hill proved ideal for the small screen, giving conspiratorial glances to the camera and exploiting the medium. A spoof of Juke Box Jury, in which he played David Jacobs, all four panellists and various audience members, was a tour de force. In 1964, Hill created The Lonely One, a spoof documentary about a young hooligan who aims to be respected – ‘like Lord Sutch’. Three years later, the Observer described Hill as ‘the first star comedian to be created by television’. Television

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two main stooges, Jackie Wright and Bob Todd, whose finest hour was impersonating an inebriated Johnnie Cradock. One inducement was the chance to make films. The semi-silent Eddie in August, screened in 1970, was witty and imaginative, reflecting Hill’s admiration of Jacques Tati. But audiences seemed confused and, regretfully, he never attempted to create such autobiographical work again. Nor

was his idea of dramatising The Good Soldier Schweik ever realised. Instead, over the next 20 years Hill made 58 shows, with ideas of varying originality. He described his younger self as ‘King Knock-off’, a trait that lasted long into his career, borrowing from Buddy Hackett’s record The Original Chinese Waiter to create the character Chow-Mein. The American comedian later expressed a wish to strangle Hill. But, at its best, The Benny Hill Show was a fascinating mélange of a Donald McGill postcard and the silent French comedy of Pierre Étaix. One sketch has middle-aged voyeurs disguised as tree trunks so they can spy on a courting couple. A 1970 show is especially treasurable for Hill’s rendition of Ernie, his self-penned ballad about the fastest milkman in the West. This homage to his

old job became the 1971 Left: with Christmas number one. Hill’s Angels In 1979, Thames sold on The re-edited versions of his Benny Hill shows to US television – Show (1981) eventually, 127 countries Right: The would screen The Best of Benny Hill Show. This Benny Hill was also the year the (1974) producer Dennis Kirkland introduced the Hill’s Angels dance troupe. It was a move reflecting Hill’s belief that his programmes were the nearest shows on television to the touring revues of his youth. His show also moved towards ‘comedy without words’, although one of Hill’s strengths was verbal interplay with such esteemed actors as Patricia Hayes and even Paul Eddington. As the 1980s progressed, The Benny Hill Show deteriorated into a tired end-of-the-pier show. In 1987, Ben Elton told the Daily Telegraph, ‘I’m not saying Benny Hill’s a bad man’ but ‘it does not behove a television company to end a show every week with a dirty old man tearing the clothes off three nubile girls’. The older comedian could argue that his screen character was an inadequate coward who fled irate females, but his image now appeared faintly seedy. Meanwhile, the tabloid press was fascinated by why a comedian worth several million pounds lived in a dilapidated semi-detached villa.

In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968); as Professor Peach, The Italian Job (1969)

Hill inherited the family home and lived in Shirley, Southampton’s answer to East Cheam, when he was between London flats. Chez Hill was the fortress of a man who once dined from Second World War tinned food without labels – ‘It’s interesting to find out what’s there’ – just as his programme seemed a relic from an era of Brylcreem and Woodbines. In his show, too, Hill, indulged by his producer, did not seem to relish change. When Hill died of a heart attack on 20th April 1992, aged 68, the innovative and versatile comedian-writer-musician of the BBC era was almost forgotten. A viewing of his early material is well worth it. Look out for The Visitor, a 25-minute playlet with Hill as a faintly sinister yokel constantly imposing himself on reluctant London acquaintances. His ‘breakfast cha-cha’ in 1965 was created 11 years before the famous Morecambe and Wise routine. Perhaps Hill’s finest hour was in a 1964 ITV adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he was perfectly cast as a Hampshire-accented Bottom. Philip Purser of the Sunday Telegraph, while approving of the performance, regarded his top billing as ‘putting the arse before the court’. Shortly afterwards, the critic received a ‘wildly enthusiastic postcard’ from Hill. The last Benny Hill Show aired on 1st May 1989. Thames’s firing of Hill that year is the subject of many an article about ‘the death of comedy’, but the comic was in poor health, his shows were expensive, and the company had enough footage to satisfy overseas markets. Hill, not unreasonably, thought it would have been nice to have received ‘a pat on the back’. The Oldie February 2024 15

Help! My friend’s married a bore Oh, the joy when friends marry gripping people – and the agony when they end up with shockers. By Charlotte Metcalf

hen my best schoolfriend (let’s call her Maria) married many years ago, I was living in Kenya – so I missed her wedding. I didn’t meet her husband with her until about a year later – and what a night that was. It remains memorable as the joyous, laughterfilled recommencement of a deep friendship that endured until Maria’s death a decade ago. Her widower remains one of my dearest friends, and the fact that he and I hit it off immediately undoubtedly enhanced my friendship with Maria. I have met many couples and become – and remain – firm friends with both partners, as I did with Maria and her husband. Yet the older I become, the harder I find it to adapt to friends’ new partners. We all depend on different friends for particular things, and when a new husband or wife whisks them away, we can be left feeling abandoned and often infuriated. Why does Angie suddenly have to check with Johnny whether she can have a drink with me next Thursday? Or go to a play with me in January? Surely she can make her own mind up about arrangements? Apparently not. Aside from these self-imposed restraints, I am also facing the fact that some of my friends have married downright bores. And this is not just about my resenting being abandoned on the shelf, while the bore runs off with my friend into the sunset. As Maria’s husband demonstrates, there is nothing more delightful than warming immediately to a friend’s new spouse. Suddenly the world seems full of enriching possibilities as we start planning things to do together – sadly unthinkable with a bore. Bores come in all shapes and sizes. I pride myself on being able to chat about pretty much anything. Yet I’ve been manoeuvred into countless conversational cul-de-sacs by friends’ new husbands when, after drawing out of 16 The Oldie February 2024

‘Hands off my husband!’

them every account of their success and every single child’s name, achievement and academic prowess, I’ve not received a single polite enquiry in return. Sometimes it can work the other way round. One husband was so keen to prove he could blend seamlessly into his new wife’s social life that he set out to charm me with his emotionally intelligent curiosity. I flatter myself that I’m curious, but this bore’s attempts to engage with me comprised a volley of questions that might have been lifted from the census. How long had I lived in London? How many children did I have? Where had they gone to school? There was excellent conversation full of amusing anecdotes flowing around us, but each time I was on the verge of drawing us both into it, he would continue on his relentless factfinding mission. Another conversation-stopper husbands can resort to when faced with a friend (of the wife) they can’t quite pigeonhole is ‘So what have you been up to lately?’ It sounds innocuous enough, but when they are meeting me for the first time, I simply have no idea where or how to begin.

There is the husband who spends the first ten minutes eagerly trying to discern whom we know in common before slowly revolving away from me when he finds out I am not related to those Metcalfs. There is the cosy-looking, chatty, friendly but smug husband, whose concerned frown deepens along with his appalled, pitying silence as he discovers my children have not been to a public school and that I don’t have a husband. Being pitied is boring – it leaves no room for fun. Another boring husband was the patronising wag who started chortling and shaking his head when I displayed a difference of opinion, before categorising me, as a journalist, ‘as a woke, paid-up member of the Islington chattering classes’. With wives, it can be a very different story. There are those who are probably far from boring, but I don’t have a chance to find out as they are determined to keep their husbands away from their single female friend on the grounds that I must be desperate, predatory or both. One male friend, whom I have known in an entirely platonic way for over 35 years, is forbidden from seeing me by his partner – she’s convinced I am on an impassioned mission to seduce him. I have another old friend whom I rarely see except at parties. We only ever manage a brief exchange before his wife materialises at his side and fixes me with ‘Have we met?’ It’s easier to retire than to remind her just how often I’ve met her and been asked the same question. There have been moments when my friends have been unimpressed by or positively antipathetic to my partners. One person’s bore is the object of another’s adoration; finding someone boring is entirely subjective. It’s why I try always to feign delight in my friends’ choices, however much my soul wilts at the prospect of another evening spent in the company of their new beloved. After all, they are probably dreading sitting next to me just as much.

Hell’s kitchens You’ve got to be mad to set up a restaurant, says restaurateur Rowley Leigh

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estaurants thrive on disfunction and misery. Sensible, successful people, happily married and with 2.4 children, a cleaner twice a week and a foreign holiday at least twice a year, don’t go to restaurants. Apart from anything else, they can’t afford them, what with all three boys destined for Radley. There are no smart restaurants in Richmond or Hampstead exactly because the residents are too posh. Restaurants thrive on Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each being unhappy ‘in its own way’. They thrive on disfunction and divorce, acting as cover for the lack of a happy home. They thrive on diversity and dodgy dealing – the use of a restaurant is to persuade somebody to something they might not have agreed to without the help of a couple of margaritas and a rather good Oregon Pinot noir. The reason restaurants thrive on diversity is that they present themselves as neutral spaces whose only demand is that you should enjoy yourselves. That imprecation is not always obeyed. You propose on a hilltop, by a waterfall or on a trip to Barnard Castle and in broad daylight. You dump in the dark, in the murky corners of an unloved restaurant. Such dinners aren’t much fun – yet there are family gatherings that seem even more shrouded in gloom. Those who haven’t come to have fun will take it out on the waiter or whoever else is within range. Most complainants save their ire for later, either with vengeful emails to the owner or – the coward’s way out – by posting a filthy review on Trustpilot. It is only the brave who voice their disappointment at the time. One such couple at the Waterside Inn called over Michel Roux (Senior, Albert’s brother) to tell him how feeble their starters had been, that their meat had been undercooked and served on cold plates and that they had not enjoyed anything. Michel said he understood and walked away, instructing the head waiter to remove the couple’s table, leaving them stranded on their dining chairs in the middle of a busy restaurant. Other customers come with an

excessive sense of their own importance and adopt a peremptory tone. One man started ostentatiously clicking his fingers to attract his waitress, Marianne. She studiously ignored him as he waved his arms around, clicking frantically. Eventually he gave up – and Marianne finally approached the table. ‘Didn’t you see me clicking my fingers?’ he demanded. ‘It takes more than two fingers to make me come’ was her curt and devastating reply. If the question ‘Why go to a restaurant?’ is problematic, more mysterious is why anyone would want to run one. It is almost impossible to make a profit. By the time you’ve filed your VAT return, revised your risk assessments, assimilated the blow of another hike in the business rate, spluttered disbelief at the latest utility bill and negotiated a month’s extension from your creditors, you might ask why you got into the business. You thought it might be rather fun. Think again. Imagining that you can charge a fair price for a fair product, you find yourself forced to charge £50 for a bottle of wine that the punter can buy for a quarter of that in their supermarket. The same goes for the food. Nowadays a profit margin of 75 per cent is not unusual. After the VAT man has taken his 20 per cent, a dish costing £30 in a restaurant will have cost the chef cooking it £6. Daylight robbery, you might think. We don’t go to restaurants to buy food or wine. We go partly because we cannot be bothered to cook, serve or clean up after a meal. And we go to be pampered and to Head chef: Michel Roux, Rowley’s old boss at Le Gavroche

be schmoozed a little. All this cooking, serving, cleaning up, pampering and schmoozing makes up the largest part of the hapless restaurateur’s costs. Staff – increasingly hard to come by – are expensive, a chef’s wages having gone up 40 per cent in the last five years. Given these travails – not to mention the energy prices or the huge rise in the price of food – it is heartening that some restaurants thrive. There is no shortage of would-be restaurateurs: honest toilers looking for a piece of the action, or speculative investors who see gold at the end of the restaurant rainbow. There is no magic formula for restaurant success. You might think consistently good food would underpin such a blueprint, but there are graveyards full of chefs who produced great food but failed to control costs and have slid under. Even good service is no guarantee of success, especially if it is too formal or even overfamiliar. Providing either or both of these qualities is, of course, expensive. One of my old bosses, Albert Roux, addressed the idea of restaurant success cynically but succinctly: ‘Consistency is everything: you can be good, bad or mediocre and being consistently mediocre is probably the best way.’ It wasn’t his way. At Le Gavroche, he always strove for excellence and claimed to ‘thrive on difficulty’. That his son, at 60, should choose to close the place, rather than take his foot off the pedal and let it slide into ‘consistent mediocrity’, is only to be admired. After over 40 years in the business, he has merely had an attack of sanity. Rowley Leigh set up Kensington Place and Le Café Anglais restaurants. He worked at Le Gavroche The Oldie February 2024 19

How to make the cut In the Regency period, we developed brilliant ways of putting people down. It’s time to revive them, says Lulu Taylor

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here is someone in my town who cuts me. He walks past me without acknowledging the fact that I am there, or that we know each other. In Regency times, cutting someone was considered a great insult and the Cut Direct the greatest of all. The cutter looked their foe in the eye, and then coldly and deliberately looked away or even turned their back. The cuttee could be under no illusion that they had been publicly ignored and deeply insulted. The Cut Direct was about social power as punishment, and was so potentially damaging that rules about its use had to be observed. A gentleman could never cut a lady, for example, and he also had to be wary of cutting another gentleman who might take such great offence that he issued a challenge. Hosts could not cut their guests – the rule of hospitality trumped personal feelings. Spinsters could not cut married women. They simply didn’t have the social clout and would have looked ridiculous if they’d tried to exert it. The Cut Indirect has the cutter looking straight at the cuttee but pretending not to know them, simply removing their gaze as if they have no idea that they are cutting, though both parties know very well what is being done. This is the passive aggressive form of cutting, perhaps more weaselly in its pretended innocence and more insulting in its belittlement. For all its rudeness, the Cut Direct has a certain respectful quality, at least acknowledging the previous relationship before delivering the cut. The Cut Indirect, with its implication that there is no acquaintance and therefore no insult, is, to my mind, more cowardly. The lesser cuts are, perhaps, easier to bear. The Cut Sublime involves staring at the rooftops, the clouds or the spire of the nearest cathedral, humming in a nonchalant way, until the cuttee has passed by. The Cut Infernal entails staring at the ground or dropping down to tie up a lace or examine a boot until the unloved object has gone.

Stewart Granger (second from right) in the title role of Beau Brummell (1954)

We could add to these another, modern type of cut. The mobile phone has taken the place of the bootlace. The useful tactic of being absorbed in one’s phone, or lost in the business of composing a message on that fiddly keyboard, or the taking of a call in order to ignore a certain someone could perhaps be dubbed the Cut Cellular. Not all cuts are wounding. When I see someone of my acquaintance whom I would normally greet but who appears hassled and harried – perhaps struggling with the infernal self-service checkout in the supermarket while being pestered by children – I pretend I have not seen them, so that they do not have to add small talk with me to their woes, unless they wish. This is surely the Kindest Cut. In Regency society, a cut delivered by a person of fashion or status had the power to destroy lives. It could result in total ostracism. The wilderness beckoned and the shame could last for more than one generation. The Cut Direct from the pinnacle of the ton, the Prince Regent, marked the decline of Beau Brummell’s dazzling social career. In 1813, at a masquerade ball jointly hosted by, among others, Brummell and Lord Alvanley, the Prince Regent greeted Alvanley but cut Brummell. Brummell responded,

referring to the Prince Regent, ‘Alvanley, who is your fat friend?’ It was brave. Public opinion considered that the Prince had abused his power on this occasion, and Brummell survived socially – just. But debt and lack of royal patronage eventually took their toll. He fled England to escape debtors’ prison and died a few years later, insane and – perhaps worse for that greatest of dandies – slovenly in his dress. At least we can be grateful that the Prince didn’t deliver his deadly cut until after Brummell had made it fashionable for the upper classes to clean their teeth. Cuts have nothing like the same power over social life and death now, but feeling purposefully ignored is still horrible and confusing. My cutter does not even glance in my direction, but marches by as though I am not there at all. This might be the Cut Oblivious. Possibly he honestly doesn’t remember me, despite long conversations at our neighbour’s annual New Year drinks. As with the tiresome person who doesn’t appear to recognise you on being introduced at parties despite your having met lots of times before, you can’t be sure. Are they merely forgetful? Stupid? Short-sighted? Possibly they enjoy being unbelievably rude, or need to exert insidious control through erasure – the Cut Narcissistic. It’s tempting to challenge a cut, but rising to it is to show you care. They have shown they don’t. Victory to them. The best way to respond, then as now, is with grace, good manners and equanimity. And if one desires to cut off a friend – as is sometimes necessary – then a polite but firm cessation of contact is better than any public insult, for everyone involved. Lulu Taylor is author of The Forgotten Tower (Macmillan) The Oldie February 2024 21

To Sir, with Love

’m an English-language teacher, working in Nanjing, China. I work in a private school alongside as delightful a group of young women as any fully-functioning mature gent could wish for. This situation began seven years ago. The school was new – as was the teaching job, for three or four full-time and a couple of part-time local women, all in their twenties. Having direct contact with native English speakers was a novelty. There were other foreign teachers – Canadians, Australians, Americans. I was the only experienced, bona fide Englishman. At that time, I had not traded my soul for a mobile phone as the younger guys had. So, in break times, I made more effort to speak to the Chinese teachers while the gauche, youthful idiots sat heads down, focused on some internet trivia. At first, I wasn’t so sure the women

I liked to think there was something about being an old-school English gentleman 22 The Oldie February 2024

welcomed my tentative conversation. They seemed a bit diffident and reserved, as Asian women can be. After a while, though, their smiles and more ready responses dismissed my doubts. The first was Zoe (Western names are normal there). Short and sturdy (for an Asian female), she had a penchant for wearing her long black hair brushed over one shoulder, revealing a long, dangly earring on the other. I made one or two compliments about these without in any way suggesting anything other than simple appreciation. A little harmless flirting. After a few months of my danglyearring observations, Zoe suddenly announced she was leaving. On her last day, I gave her a book – 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. She gave me a fairly intense hug. We said goodbye. We turned and walked away from each other and suddenly I heard her say my

name and there she was again. The final hug was both more intense and tearful. Well, I never. Zoe was just the first. Before her resignation, one of the part-timers had been going out of her way to get my attention. A slimmer, taller, more elegant oriental figure, Yolande didn’t have to put much effort into this. Seeming to be quite a slow, careful thinker and hesitant in her Englishspeaking, this would-be fairy-tale princess was a real delight. That platonic friendship ended only when we disagreed over the war in Ukraine. What was my secret? Never so foolish as to consider myself handsome, I’m certainly not rich, and only moderately successful. I liked to think there was something about being an old-school English gentleman. Eliza told me it was a novelty for Chinese women just to have a man genuinely interested in them – someone who was a good listener, perhaps. And, certainly, Chinese men don’t seem to have much to recommend them in the romance stakes. Their own joke is that, before marriage, men treat their partners like princesses; after marriage, like servants. Taiwanese Eliza was the most dangerous one. Single and around 40, she almost persuaded me to get divorced – until I stopped to think that a 25-year age difference might prove a bit much. She soon moved on – marrying, far more appropriately, a Guangzhou businessman who was actually younger than her. Congratulations. Meanwhile, I was distracted by Leonie (‘Come to the cinema with me’); Grace (‘He knows I’m into him’); Lynn (unhappy marriage); Jade (divorced); Kaylia (younger, single, quite mixed up); Jasmine (even younger and flouncier); and, latterly, 31-year-old Luna: ‘My husband is still a boy.’ Well, I tell her, so am I … at heart. Younger women: the true elixir of life. Oh God, could I be any more like Rupert Murdoch?

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Gregory Kerry, 68, an English teacher in China, is astonished by how many of his young pupils take a shine to him

Dying to please When Simon Williams was killed off in Upstairs, Downstairs, his agent promised him it would be good for his career

or actors, killing and being killed are all in a day’s work. Their real dread is ‘dying a death’ on stage. In The Archers, we eagerly await the arrival of our new scripts, with trembling fingers. We turn to the final scene to see if we are being killed off. Sentenced to death, a desperate actor will (lightheartedly) suggest returning as his own twin! As Captain Bellamy in Upstairs Downstairs, I was due to be killed off in the Great War. But when the show won a Golden Globe in the US, my fate was upgraded to missing presumed dead – and eventually I was declared fit for action in a further series. My agent believed that dying would be good for me. ‘Darling, everyone’ll know you’re available.’ (Availability is known to be an actor’s finest asset.) Accordingly, the producers promised me a suicide at the end of the final series; and what a novelty it was to be greeted in Waitrose with ‘So good to see you alive.’ I don’t like guns. I don’t like people who like guns. (Sorry, America). I’m terrified of them, everything from water pistols to Kalashnikovs. Where weaponry is concerned, I’m all battledress and no knickers. In Doctor Who, my character was required to gun down a Dalek as it slithered towards me. We filmed it again and again. The next day, the director called me in. ‘Watch this, you big girl’s blouse!’ There I was, flinching with every shot. Bang. Flinch. Bang. Flinch. On the receiving end of gunfire, I was once set up with a vest under my shirt primed with tiny explosive pellets. There were wires down my trouser leg to synch their detonation with the pistol shots. ‘Don’t look so worried, Simon, it’ll look super,’ cajoled the explosives expert, as she failed to notice I had the vest on inside out. Far from dying, I hopped about screeching like a cartoon cat. Sam Goldwyn, the Mr Malaprop of Hollywood, once said of an actor that he needed to ‘put more life into his dying’. I once slipped a nifty blood capsule into my mouth to be crunched in my

death throes. Silly me, I literally jumped the gun and bit into the capsule too soon and, as I pleaded for my life, bloody spittle splattered my assassin’s face before he’d even cocked his pistol. At the interval of a whodunnit that my wife, Lucy Fleming, was in, the murder victim was left lying by the French windows, but when the curtain went up on Act Two, the ‘dead’ actor missed his call to get back in position. His fellow actors persevered, valiantly staring at where he should have been. Then, in clear view of the audience, the missing corpse crawled very slowly under the curtains, back into position, mouthing to Lucy, ‘Sorry, love.’ Her next line was ‘This looks very fishy.’ Brought the house down. When I had been murdered in television’s valley of death known as Midsomer, I grew restless lying dead all day as the forensics spouted their gobbledegook, and the director shouted, ‘For God’s sake, Simon, can you be a bit deader, please?’ My son, Tam, really was wounded live on stage during a Shakespearean battle scene. The action was immediately halted, and the fight-arranger rushed on stage, shouting ‘Where’s the health-andsafety officer?’ From the floor, Tam groaned, ‘I’m here.’ Weapons are actors’ bête noire. When the gun failed to fire in a tense stage play, the assailant gave his victim a gentle kick and he duly fell to the ground ad-libbing, ‘Aaaah – the boot was poisoned.’ Faced with the same problem, Fenella Fielding took aim with her revolver and purred demurely, ‘Bang. Bang.’

Murder most foul: Simon Williams

The celebrated Edwardian brothers Lionel and John Barrymore (not famed for sobriety) had to fight a duel to the death on stage, but when the crucial dagger flew into the orchestra pit, they found themselves in deep trouble. John, who was meant to be killed, grinned up from the floor and said to his brother, ‘What am I supposed to do now – starve to death?’ An ardent Arsenal fan who had a long spell lying dead on stage slipped an earphone under his wig so he could listen to a crucial game. When his team scored in extra time, the corpse punched the air, crying, ‘YES!’ Producers are notoriously sanguine about death; when the wee man who had been the human cannonball in the circus for 30 years died, the great P T Barnum told a press conference, ‘It’ll be a long time before we find another man of his calibre.’ Dying on stage is so familiar that I’ve even written a poem about it: Lying Doggo Actors have a dread Of pretending to be dead. If you are poisoned, stabbed or shot You’d better find a comfy spot. What’s best by far to go for Is a death behind the sofa, Where you can blink Or breath or think, Hidden from the stalls, Until at last the curtain falls. Simon Williams stars in The Archers The Oldie February 2024 23

Poor in the USA After seven years in America, James Fletcher is delighted to be returning to Britain, where everything is much cheaper

have been a regular visitor to the United States for over 30 years. I lived there from 2016 till November 2023. In the ’90s and early 2000s, a visit to New York was comparable or cheaper than one to London. A good hotel was £200 a night. American CDs, electronics and food were mostly cheaper than in London. Food, taxis and entertainment were on a par. You knew where you stood. Then in the early 2010s something happened. America became expensive. And I mean really expensive. A Google employee, recently relocating from London to New York, was thrilled with a 3x (as they call it) salary increase, until he landed in New York and discovered why. The cost of living is 3x that in London. A minimum tip in a restaurant rocketed to 20 per cent. A glass of wine suddenly cost the same as a bottle in London – £27. A main course became routinely £45. And a new habit of hidden charges emerged, with the cost of that £200 hotel room ballooning to £600. Only 36 per cent of Americans now believe the American Dream is still alive; the one that promises reward for hard work, and that you too can dream of a bigger bank balance and a brighter tomorrow. Displaying wealth is a national pastime in America. It’s either wealth you have, or wealth you wish you had. For those with money – or the ability to borrow it – it’s a galaxy of overheads: staff, several houses,

aircraft, boats and a fleet of cars. Or it’s cladding yourself in brand names and hiring a sports car to play the part. And then there is the real world for the vast majority of Americans, who really struggle to survive. In the state of California alone, 171,000 are homeless – many in unspeakable squalor. A rapidly widening division of wealth means rich and poor are forced apart, with an ever-decreasing understanding of how the other half lives. This is important if you want to understand the shock Trump win in 2016 and why, once again, he leads the Republican field by a significant margin. In Britain, there are far more interactions between the well-off and less-well-off. Your local pub is a prime example. Toffs in one corner and working lads in another. I’m not suggesting it creates social fusion, but queuing for your drinks and having small talk while waiting for your round ensures proximity to those from another walk of life. The same happens at a GP surgery, thanks to the NHS. It happens, too, at supermarkets, where all classes go, and at universities, which attract and mix people from all backgrounds. In America, there are dive bars with a pool table, or upmarket cocktail bars with prices far beyond the reach of lower earners. You have the drive-through fastfood operation or ‘fancy’ restaurants. There is little social cross-pollination of people from different backgrounds in a social setting. The two most common interactions

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THE AMERICAN COST OF LIVING GLASS OF WINE IN A RESTAURANT (INC TAX AND 20% TIP) $27.30 (£22.75) MID-LEVEL DINNER FOR TWO IN ANY CITY (INC TAX AND 20% TIP) $350 (£291) ACELA TRAIN NEW YORK TO WASHINGTON (ONE WAY) (3 HOURS) $421 (£350) CHEAP UNIVERSITY (PER YEAR) $18,000 (£15,000) MOST EXPENSIVE (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO) (PER YEAR) $85,000 (£70,833) HOUSE-CLEANER (PER MONTH) $200 (£166) ANNUAL PROPERTY TAX: $500,000 HOUSE IN WISCONSIN $8,450 (£7,041) $5M APARTMENT IN NEW YORK CITY $96,250 (£80,203) AMBULANCE $1,300 (£1,083)

between rich and poor occur, unsociably, at petrol stations and at Starbucks. Factor in the cost of an undergraduate degree – ranging from $18,000, at the cheaper end, for Bunker Hill Community College (where Robin Williams taught in Good Will Hunting) to $85,000 a year at the University of Chicago. Private medical insurance starts at $12,000 a year. The next time you feel aggrieved with your council-tax bill, spare a thought for our American cousins who pay property tax averaging $8,000-150,000 a year. It doesn’t cover rubbish collection. Thus the divide in America and the lack of social mobility. You have to be rich to afford a top college, or any college. Two-thirds of Americans don’t have a college degree, and therefore little chance of a senior job. You have to be seriously rich (or well employed on a company policy) to benefit from the best healthcare. And you have to be at least affluent to avoid the industrially produced, appalling food that viciously compromises your health – and points you towards the health system you can ill afford. Medical-bill defaults represent the majority of debt collections in America. Union power in America is awesome – think pre-Thatcher era. The closed shop is alive and kicking. Recently, Hollywood and the automotive industry secured higher wages for their workers. In one sense, fair enough, because the cost of living has risen exponentially. On the other hand, Netflix immediately announced a subscription increase. In Britain, narcissistic materialism is sadly far more evident than it was seven years ago, when I left. But I’ve never been more certain of the safety nets – the NHS, state education and university within financial reach – and the opportunities they provide. I just couldn’t get used to the disregard the wealthy American society has for the less privileged. Now I’m back in Britain, I’ll be complaining far less, as I down a £6.90 glass of Pinot noir at my local pub. James Fletcher is the director-producer of The Accidental President The Oldie February 2024 25

Forty years after The Jewel in the Crown hit our screens, Roger Lewis is shocked at how creaky it looks now

Tarnished Jewel

eing at university, I never saw The Jewel in the Crown when it was originally broadcast, between 9th January and 3rd April 1984. I was aware, nevertheless, of the critical plaudits. ‘It’s important television,’ the newspapers assured us. ‘A model of what the medium can do.’ Without ado, it scooped up Emmy Awards, Baftas and Golden Globes. Late last year, I finally got round to watching all 14 hours, and it is wretchedly bad, at least 12 hours too long, structurally hopeless. Characters we’ve been expected to care about drop out of the story. There are lots of loose ends and casually reported deaths. If the pace is painfully slow and sluggish, as if viewers in the eighties were slow off the mark, the settings, too, never look authentic, instead advertising themselves rather blatantly as scenery. 28 The Oldie February 2024

Udaipur, Shimla and Mysore were no doubt used as locations, but they are no better than painted backdrops, as in provincial rep. There’s no subcontinental heat or dust. Interiors were shot at Granada in Manchester. The lighting is damp, grey, Lancastrian. The first thing I noticed were all these extraordinary voices, particularly the women – Fabia Drake, Rosemary Leach, Rachel Kempson, Anna Cropper. Today the only one with an eccentric swooping voice is Maggie Smith. Forty years ago, they were all at it, emphasising oddities

Does any of it stand up today? Dennis Potter, Thomas Hardy adaptations?

of diction – speaking slowly, overenunciating like anything, turning dialogue into a sort of warble. Peggy Ashcroft, who did have a beautiful voice, as Barbie Batchelor mars her diction by for some reason impersonating Edward Heath – frightful diphthongs interceding to show there are parlour-maids in the character’s background. The actors, too, behave in The Jewel in the Crown as if they are on a stage, advertising Royal Shakespeare Company credentials. Eric Porter is a particular culprit, playing an elderly queer, a bogus Russian count, Dimitri Bronowski. He gives himself a foreign accent, his clothes are foppish, he smokes cigarettes from a cigarette-holder, he limps and carries an ebony cane. Were such mannerisms considered clever? The subject is the British in India, in

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Forty years on: Geraldine James as Sarah Layton and Stuart Wilson as Jimmy Clarke

the dying days of the Raj. The racism is vicious, the general philosophy being: just because the natives can be taught the rules of cricket, don’t expect them to become English gentlemen. The memsahibs, paranoid about rank and protocol, are shamelessly cruel, seething with contempt when encountering Indians, even posh ones, like the Nawab of Mirat (Saeed Jaffrey) or Pandit Baba (Marne Maitland). Nor do these horrible women stop there. Judy Parfitt’s Mildred Layton is nasty not only about the locals; she’s nasty about those in her own circle who don’t measure up socially at the club. She loves cutting people dead – and to think Judy Parfitt later became the sweet old nun Sister Monica Joan in Call the Midwife. Here, physically she resembles Claire Foy. The object of chief contempt is Art Malik’s Hari Kumar, a gentle soul who translates poetry and who was educated at an English public school. He is framed for the rape of Daphne Manners (Susan Wooldridge), and once in prison is abused, possibly sexually, by the Ronald Merrick of Tim Piggott-Smith. Piggott-Smith won best-actor prizes galore for a performance which today jars, to a laughable degree. His lips frozen in a permanent sneer, Merrick is the chippy grammar-school-educated martinet who hates everyone, including himself. His loathing is signified by a false arm and horror-film make-up – scars, burns, a boss eye. You expect him to sleep in a coffin and play the organ in opera-house cellars. It’s no surprise he’s later unmasked as a sadomasochistic homosexual, who does things to boys in the bazaar. Merrick is increasingly and absurdly disfigured. The entire series is suffused with, or infected by, Merrick’s emotional coldness and deadness. What seems to happen, as the plot unfolds, is that the inexorable

Charles Dance as Guy Perron

The way they were: Art Malik, Susan Wooldridge and Tim Pigott-Smith

themes of homosexuality, lesbianism (between Mabel Layton and Barbie Batchelor) and infanticide – all these perversions (as they’d be deemed in those days) – are metaphors of imperialism, its rottenness and hysteria. Yet at this distance, The Jewel in the Crown is less about the British and India in the forties than it is about classic class television drama in the seventies and eighties. There are long speeches, sentence after well-formed sentence. Nobody in the real world speaks like that. In the real world, dialogue overlaps, is cut off, peters out. People come out with fully formed paragraphs, delivered with an air of ghastly irony, only in bad novels and plays. When the series was made, there remained an exaggerated respect for the literary side of things – for Paul Scott’s books, in this case. The result is

stultifying, with everyone concerned, from Christopher Morahan, the director, to Ken Taylor, who devised the scripts, to Charles Dance and Geraldine James, portraying the love interest, intent on making The Jewel in the Crown come over as a masterpiece. They were quite incapable of seeing how bogus everything was. But then this was the era in which Anthony Burgess and Iris Murdoch were revered. They are unreadable now. I wonder, does any of it stand up today – Brideshead Revisited, Edward and Mrs Simpson, The Fortunes of War, Dennis Potter dramas, Jonathan Miller’s Shakespeare series, teatime Thomas Hardy adaptations? Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Riverrun) The Oldie February 2024 29

My pipe dream Nicholas Lezard knows he looks affected but he loves the cheap, calm lift he gets from smoking a pipe

It is an aid to reflection and an aid to thought. It is a pause in the routine 30 The Oldie February 2024

Two-pipe problem: Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone); Gandalf (Ian McKellen)

him, nine times out of ten he turned out to be an idiot, but didn’t he look wise? The linking of intelligence and pipesmoking, as spurious as the linking of intelligence and wearing glasses, perhaps owed much to the perception of the habit’s being the kind of thing professors, dons and boffins in general did. It is certainly something Sherlock Holmes does, his definition of a particularly knotty problem being one that might take three pipes to solve. (How long that is poses a bit of a pieceof-string problem, since a pipe can last up to 45 minutes, depending on the kind of tobacco, how tightly you’ve packed it and how long you leave between puffs.) Other more contemporary iterations of the brainy pipe-smoker include Pierce Brosnan’s professor in Mars Attacks and Sam Neill’s astronomer in the delightful Australian film The Dish, but the most resonant modern representations of pipe-smoking come in The Lord of the Rings, both books and films. Purists may decry most of the changes the director Peter Jackson made when translating the books to the screen, but one thing everyone agrees on is this: thank goodness he kept the pipe-weed in. Tolkien was anxious to keep elements of the New World out of Middle-earth, but with potatoes and tobacco he said, ‘Sod it,’ and put them in anyway, because he liked them. Good for him. Now to the health bit. Pipe tobacco is

cured in such a way that, as with cigar tobacco, its nicotine is absorbed through the buccal mucous membranes. In other words, you don’t inhale pipe smoke. Indeed, you would be very ill-advised to try. The lungs are delicate, filigreed organs, and are expressly designed to resist smoke inhalation. The mouth, on the other hand, can put up with any kind of nonsense – up to a point – and you’ll find that the pipe (and the cigar – but pipes smell a lot nicer) delivers a nicotine kick that can leave you almost reeling. Native American pipe tobacco was said to be so strong that smokers actually hallucinated; I can believe it. As for why you would want to absorb nicotine in the first place, what I would say is that it is one of the cushions on the divan of pleasure (along with alcohol, sex and whatever else tickles your fancy). It is an aid to reflection and an aid to thought. It is a pause in the routine, a moment out of time. Just as a cigarette is – but, as I say, better for you. Also, amazingly, cheaper. Pipe tobacco, even the really good stuff from Latakia and the Balkans, is not heavily taxed, and a little goes a long way. You can find a pipe half-smoked at the back of a drawer from months ago and when lit it will still taste sweet. And everyone will think you’re brainy; maybe even a wizard. We’re old here, in this magazine. And it won’t do any damage at our age. What are you waiting for? Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

smoke a pipe. There. I said it. Now, of course, one shouldn’t smoke anything, because smoking is bad for you. And most people don’t. Only about one people in ten now smokes, although that figure zooms up late in the evening at parties and pubs, where every ex-smoker decides they fancy a puff of something, and could they cadge one? This proves difficult when you have a pipe; for a pipe is personal, and its mouthpiece is covered with your germs. That sounds most unsavoury, but the truth is that pipe-smoking is considerably better for you than smoking cigarettes (as for vapes, we don’t really know about their longterm effects). I’ll explain why in a minute. First, though, pipe-smoking has a bit of an image problem. I don’t suppose my endorsement of the practice is going to change this, but I’ll have a go anyway. First, if you’re under a certain age, smoking a pipe is seen as an affectation; the kind of thing that hipsters – people with eccentric clothes who live in Shoreditch – might do to separate themselves from the herd. These are now a dying breed, but there is enough of a residual folk memory for people to look at a pipesmoker and mutter to themselves a word that begins with ‘tw’ and rhymes with ‘hat’. This is no longer a problem, however, after a certain age. What that age is depends on the individual, but I’m going to go with 60, which is mine. If you’re old enough for free prescriptions in England and free bus travel in London, then in my book you’re old enough to do what you please. Pipes are associated with venerability and wisdom, as well as a certain kind of patience. Before the 2007 smoking ban, there was a lovely old man who would sit at the corner of the bar, puffing on a pipe and having no more than two or three pints all evening, saying little. Every pub had one. Of course, when you spoke to

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TheThe Oldie Oldie February Month 2024 2016 31

I’m a colour-blind artist John Rattigan’s condition has made his art more original – and led to him buying a hideous turquoise car

y name is John Rattigan and I’m a colour-blind artist. Even in my chromatically challenged condition, I have a fine-art degree and an MA and I taught art for over 30 years. Not in the rarefied atmosphere of an art college, where colour-blindness may not necessarily be a drawback in the world of installation, video or performance-based art, but in the secondary sector with its attainment targets, GCSEs and A levels. As a practising artist, I haven’t taken refuge from the world of colour by turning to sculpture. I’m a painter who uses colour in an unabashed full-on way. There are some common misconceptions surrounding colourblindness. It is very rare to be totally blind to colour; to live entirely in a monochrome world. More often than not, those who suffer from the condition are deficient in discerning hues from the red/green end of the spectrum. It is more common than you think and is primarily a hereditary condition, affecting eight per cent of the male population in most countries. It affects only 0.5 per cent of the female population. They are the prime genetic carriers but tend not to be afflicted. I’ve already used terms such as ‘deficient’ and hinted at those who ‘suffer’ or are ‘afflicted’ by colourblindness – but exactly how much of a problem is it? It would certainly be a problem if all art-making centred around descriptive, observationally based art, where the emphasis is on the slavish reproduction of appearances. Luckily for me, when I entered art college in the early 1970s, no one put any barriers in my way – unlike the experience of friends who tell me that when they applied in the 1950s and 1960s,it was often a stipulation of many art courses that you should be fully functioning where colour vision was concerned. I always knew, even before I was officially diagnosed (in a school 32 The Oldie February 2024

medical via those Ishihara colour tests, where you do or don’t see various numbers embedded in circles of multicoloured dots), that mixing and matching certain colours was often a problem. And, strictly speaking, there is no cure for the condition. Even today, I can find myself in a pickle. I once bought a new car and as I drove it home, I wondered why the salesman was so keen to sell the showroom model, a beautiful, glistening, metallicgrey colour, and give me such a generous discount. When I arrived home, I knew why. My partner took one look at it and told me its strong turquoise hue reminded her of a particularly repellent bathroom suite she’d had to live with in the 1970s! I rarely have any difficulty with perceiving or using strong primary or secondary colours. Rich, saturated reds of the post-box variety, citron yellows, strong oranges or greens don’t pose a problem, especially if the colour fits an object’s generic profile. Violet/purple is a challenge because of the red component, as is brown. The real area of confusion often occurs when all these colours are treated tonally. If you are colourblind, you can play the colour-mixing game. You move down the chromatic scale of a colour such as red, by adding ever increasing amounts of white, edging towards very pale pink. Then you do the same with green, grey or brown. You will find that if you make any of these pale enough and shuffle the final swatches, then, hey Works by Jon Rattigan, master of colour. Left: Balancing Act (2023). Above: Monkey Tondo

presto, you probably won’t be able to put them into their original order ever again! Therefore, the primary survival strategy I adopt in my studio is always to keep tabs on where my colours originate from. There is nothing worse than mixing a batch of colour and removing the label or any reference to its identity. Also, for my own sanity, I rarely embark on any painting project that’s concerned solely with pure transcriptions of what I see. Hyper-real portraiture of the painted variety is avoided at all costs! Yet even the best observational art is about the selection and reordering of perceptions. Even artists who place colour at the centre of their practice rarely use it in a purely descriptive manner. Post-Impressionists such as Cézanne and Gauguin adjust colours to create structural building blocks or for symbolic/expressive reasons. For every artist who depends on naturalism, there’s an equal number who distort and realign what they see. Compare Holman Hunt with Aubrey Beardsley or Lucian Freud with Frank Auerbach. Rather than run away from colour, I have often confronted it head on. Ultimately, I refuse to be intimidated by my genetic inheritance. A teaching colleague – a biology teacher and fellow sufferer – once said to me, ‘Look upon it like dyslexia; and think about all the poets, writers and scientists who had to overcome that condition.’ If you find you’re one of this small percentage, don’t turn your back on colour. Embrace the contradictions that come with your so-called colour-blind state and think of the quirky or original contributions you could be making to the world of art. As long as you don’t work in the conservation department of the National Gallery or want to design maps for Ordnance Survey, there is endless scope for invention and creativity.

Prue’s News

If you can’t stand the Twitter hate, get out of the kitchen Most of the time, I have a very easy time of it on social media, with tweeters being nice about my colourful necklaces or glasses, or liking my cooking hacks. But I’ve occasionally had doses of toxic hate. Once because I suggested on Question Time that Laura Pidcock, Jeremy Corbyn’s loquacious supporter, give it a rest so the panel could answer the question, which was about housebuilding. I was accused of being indifferent to the homeless and an uncaring Tory bitch. That’s a bit rich – I’ve voted Conservative only twice in 60 years: once for John Major, in the election when Tony Blair got in, and last time, to my shame, for Johnson. Another time, my son, Danny Kruger MP, who is a Tory, was unwise enough to say in the Commons that women could never have complete ‘bodily autonomy’ because no one does: you aren’t allowed to glue your body to the street; you aren’t allowed to pump it full of heroin. And in the case of abortion, there’s another body, the baby’s, involved, and he was uneasy at the idea of allowing

Question Time spat: Pidcock v Leith

women to terminate a pregnancy up to term. All hell broke loose, and I was accused of spawning a woman-hating monster. Also, of failing to reel him in (he’s nearly 50!) and of sending him to Eton (guilty as charged). I don’t agree with Daniel on many things. He’s Christian; I’m atheist. I’m in favour of assisted dying; he’s against it. But that’s fine. We even made a TV documentary together and managed to discuss the pros and cons without coming to blows. There’s more to him than a Twitter storm allows. He’s spent his whole career worrying about disadvantaged communities:

as a student, he led a convoy of vans full of blankets and medicines to Croatia in the war; he spent ten years running a prison charity; as a policy wonk, he’s been concerned with what used to be called ‘levelling up’. So of course it’s upsetting to find myself blamed for his imagined iniquities as well as my own. But if my Twitter feed is occasionally awash with this poison, his must be much, much worse. No wonder so many MPs quit. One of the few good things about social media is the occasional joke, such as this one from a hotel-owner: ‘Dogs are welcome in this hotel. We never had a dog that smoked in bed; set fire to the blankets. ‘We never had a dog that stole our towels, played the TV too loud, or had a noisy fight with his travelling companion. We never had a dog that got drunk and broke up the furniture. ‘So if your dog can vouch for you, you are welcome, too. The management.’ Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

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The Oldie February 2024 33

Invasion of the super rats After 44 years of rodent-free life, Nick Newman’s house is under siege

GILES PILBROW

‘R

ats!’ was not the four-letter word I uttered when I saw the oily rodent scuttle across the kitchen floor and disappear into a hole the size of a champagne cork under the fridge. For the first time since moving to London in 1980, I had encountered a sewer rat – perhaps not surprising given the estimated UK rat population of around 150 million. I have drawn many cartoons about the old adage – ‘You’re never more than six feet away from a rat’ – but now the cliché had become a grisly reality. And the distance was considerably less than six feet. Once my wife had bravely blocked the hole (with a champagne cork) and I had climbed down from the kitchen chair, we called in the experts. Where had ratty come from? Why now, after 44 years of rodent-free London living? And how could he afford to live in Wandsworth? The first pest-control firm we contacted promised ‘100-per-cent success’, which more than justified the £350 fee, for three visits. Step one was to tackle the ‘ingress points’ – blocking off obvious holes by stuffing them with wire wool, which disagrees with ratty digestive systems. Step two was laying down poison. If our visitor negotiated the wire wool, the poison would finish him off. This might take several days. He might return to wherever he had come from to end his days, or – more likely – expire somewhere in the kitchen. The smell would tell us he’d snuffed it, followed by the flies. We had much to look forward to. Our hopes were shattered when we found, the next morning, that our visitor had pushed the wire wool out of the hole and spent the night exploring the

34 The Oldie February 2024

32 The Oldie January 2023

kitchen. Rat poison was scattered everywhere, along with droppings and a puddle of urine in a saucepan. The rat-catcher returned the next day, replaced the poison and shoved more wire wool into the tiny hole. Two days later, my daughter and granddaughter were more than surprised to see another rat sauntering across the kitchen floor. With the rat-catchers came lurid tales of ratty encounters – like the rat in the care-home bathroom, ‘stabbed to death’ with a screwdriver by the pest-controller, only to be found moments later sitting happily on the side of the bath. Or the lady who complained of a rat in her lavatory. It had negotiated the U-bend (rats can tread water for 72 hours) and emerged in the toilet bowl. Then there are the millions of super rats, which have developed a resistance to anticoagulant rodenticides and actually thrive on poison pellets. We were advised to have our drains inspected for cracks. Construction work had begun on a site nearby – and may have disturbed a nest. Our neighbours too had problems. A drain video camera would cost £200 – worth it if it established where the rats were coming from. It didn’t. A month of quiet ensued, before fetid whiffs began to emanate from behind the skirting board. Our ‘guarantee period’ had expired – so another visit cost another £60 plus VAT. The pestcontroller removed a large decomposing rat, groaning, ‘Have you got a carrier bag? God, I hate having to remove these things!’ We rather hated the bluebottles that buzzed mercilessly around our kitchen for a week. Happy months passed until late summer,

when the sound of more scratching announced that the ‘100-per-centsuccess’ promise was more of a government-style pledge. A new pest company (‘eradication guaranteed’) removed an 18-inch-long dead rat under the kitchen units. This and two rat traps cost a further £300. The new rat-catcher managed to photograph a larger hole behind the fridge – progress at last! Said hole also contained another (live) rat, beady eyes twinkling in the gloom. We were reassured that this chap was unlikely to hang around, as rats are neophobic – disliking anything new. The site had been disturbed, and this would scare him off. For now. The company advised us to employ their drainage team to excavate ten feet down outside our kitchen wall, accompanied by a structural engineer to ensure the house’s foundations were not compromised. Estimated cost: upwards of £1,000 plus VAT. In desperation we asked our own builders to remove our integrated fridge freezer. This revealed a football-sized hole stretching back about three feet, leading who knows where. The drain team was unwilling to investigate the hole from inside the house. So our builders returned and bricked it up. Since then, no more rats (touch wood). We feel sceptical about pest-control companies (UK market: around £1 billion annually). They put down poison and traps, and insert wire wool into visible orifices, but in our experience are reluctant to get their hands too dirty. Still, we have learned many interesting rat facts. The collective noun for rats is ‘a mischief’, they can chew through metal, terracotta, concrete and brick – and just one pair of brown rats can produce as many as 2,000 descendants in a year. We have also developed a sneaking admiration for these clever survival experts, who invaded our lives and caused much merry ratty mayhem. Nick Newman is a cartoonist and writer who works for Private Eye and the Sunday Times

Bridge champion Mark Palmer applauds the rebuilding of the Union Chain Bridge near Berwick-upon-Tweed – the first iron suspension bridge in the world

THE FRIENDS OF THE UNION CHAIN BRIDGE; PA IMAGES / ALAMY

he Royal Border viaduct bridge, whose 28 arches soar high above the River Tweed at Berwick-upon-Tweed, takes all the plaudits. But meander upstream for a mile or so and you’ll come face to face with an even greater masterpiece and one that warms the cockles of unionists’ hearts on both sides of this expanse of water, which has England on one bank, Scotland on the other. ‘Vis Unita Fortior’ (United Strength Is Stronger) reads a plaque high up on the English side; ‘Vis Unita Fortior’ echoes another on the Scottish side. This is the Union Chain Bridge, which, completed in 1820, was the first iron suspension bridge in the world and so remains the oldest surviving one. ‘It’s right up there with the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Akashi Straits Bridge in Japan,’ says Robert Hunter, chair of the Friends of the Union Chain Bridge. Officials representing all those bridges and many more have over the years travelled to this scenic border crossing, paying their respects and marvelling at a project that revolutionised civil engineering. A few years ago, its future was in doubt, but Scottish Borders Council and Northumberland County Council managed to work together without rankle, as the bridge was dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. Today, cars (one by one only), pedestrians and cyclists can once more use the bridge, watched over by a man sitting on the English bank, carrying rolled-up documents under his arm and looking proudly towards the iron rigging and suspended platform. The man in question comes in the form of a newly commissioned bronze sculpture of Captain Samuel Brown, who designed the bridge and oversaw its construction at a time when no one knew for sure whether a bridge without a central arch or pillar could take the weight of vehicles – or would plunge into the river below.

Top: before. Middle: during work, only the English and Scottish towers remained. Bottom: the re-opening

The doubters were proved wrong and Brown, who was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1838, is probably the most famous engineer many of us have never heard of. Born in 1776, he joined the Royal Navy at the age of 19, ending up as a captain after taking part in the Napoleonic Wars. During his naval career, he set himself the task of improving the reliability of rigging and mooring by using wrought-iron chains rather than hemp. So confident was he about his invention that in 1811 he equipped a 400-ton ship called Penelope with iron rigging, stays, anchor and cables and set off on a voyage to Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. It was mission accomplished and, almost immediately, the Navy adopted Brown’s patented iron chains as rigging for all its new ships. But it was winning the commission for the Union Chain Bridge that marked the turning point in Brown’s career. What’s more, the bridge only took a year to build, at a cost of around £7,700, whereas a masonry bridge – of which there are three nearby in Berwick – would have taken far longer and cost at least £20,000. The single span was 449 feet and some 18 feet wide, hung from 12 chains suspended from two stone pylons built from local sandstone, both of architectural merit in their own right. Brown’s day of reckoning came at noon on 16th July 1820, when a huge crowd of some 2,000 people gathered on both sides of the bridge, while all manner of boats bobbed about in the river, waiting anxiously.

There were bands of the so-called Berwickshire and Northumberland Militias, tents, marquees, several ‘places of refreshment’, as the local paper put it, and ‘persons of distinction’. Brown was the first to cross, driving his carriage, followed by 12 loaded carts weighing 20 tons (he claimed the bridge could support 360 tons). Then some 600 people rushed to stand on the bridge, as the bands played the National Anthem. At its opening, the bridge was painted black in respect for George III who had died in January of that year – but within months of George IV’s succeeding to the throne, it was painted green. One of the first budding young engineers to inspect Brown’s creation was the 18-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and in the famous photograph of him standing by a wall of cables are chains made by Brown. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge is modelled on the Union Chain Bridge. Restoring the bridge took longer than building it in the first place – and has cost around £8 million. Some £3 million came from the Lottery. The bridge reopened this year, to great fanfare (pictured). At one point, it was hoped that a member of the Royal Family might open the rebuilt bridge but, presumably, its political symbolism ruled this out. Brown said the bridge would ‘further the means of augmenting and promoting still more, the social intercourse and mutual friendship and esteem, between the two ancient nations, now happily united together’. Suffice to say that this gracious border crossing must be a bridge too far for those who want to see England and Scotland go their separate ways. Mark Palmer is travel editor of the Daily Mail The Oldie February 2024 35

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

Hair today – gone tomorrow

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Bearded women, say goodbye to bristles A woman I have recently made friends with is a proper person. Let me tell you a tale to illustrate this. When Grania (fake name) married her husband, 50 years ago, she inherited a Dame Margaret Rutherford-style formidable aunt, who came complete with bristling beard and moustache. Grania, being a proper person, saw it as her duty to go and visit the spinster aunt regularly, even though she lived an inconvenient distance away. One day, Grania gathered her courage and told the battle-axe, ‘What I’m about to say is coming from a place of love. When ladies get older, they often grow hairs on their face which they can’t see themselves because their eyesight isn’t what it was. But the good news is there is something called depilation, which takes these hairs away – and there is a little salon just down the road from here.’ Shortly afterwards, Grania received a letter from the aunt. It commended Grania for her bravery – as it had dawned that others must have noticed the hairs as well, but been too cowed to say anything. She announced that the depilation parlour had been visited and top-up visits were on the agenda. And later, in recognition of the place of love from which Grania had been speaking, she received a substantial legacy in the aunt’s will. Today we must all be our own Granias. Even in our twenties, women can grow unsightly facial hairs, increasing in volume as the decades pass. Research by L’Oréal has shown that almost 40 per cent of women aged 45 and over have an excess of facial hair growth, especially under the chin, which happens to be the least inspected area, as we never think to look below the chin line. More often, the trouble spot is the upper lip. To perform ‘Grania watch’, we will need to stand in bright light, wielding a 10x magnifying mirror to spot the offending hairs.

Smooth operator

The late literary giant John Gross, editor of the TLS, was delighted by a new word he had found. A baffona was defined as ‘a woman with a not unattractive moustache’ and we were able to identify a black-haired femme fatale in the literary world as a baffona. Paradoxically she was a stunner because of, not despite, the moustache. But baffonas are few and far between, and most women need to get rid of these moustaches. Be warned. Waxing is too fierce and can leave a bright red strip. In threading, the victim lies back in a comfortable chair in a salon while the clinician uses twisted threads systematically to rip out all the hair in the moustache area.

A baffona was defined as ‘a woman with a not unattractive moustache’

Both threading and waxing take out too many hairs. A black-haired colleague, aged 30, who has flawless ivory skin, boasted that this was entirely due to a visit to a dermaplaning parlour where the therapist wields something called a dermatome. This has an oscillating blade that moves back and forth to ‘skim’ off evenly the surface layers of skin. Gratifying layers of previously unseen grime and flaky, dead skin came off with each scraping. You can buy a dermatome yourself, but only a professional will make sure you do not have any microcuts or scratches. All well and good in the short term – but it is a mistake for younger woman to use such overzealous ‘Agent Orange’ treatments. Only stiff, dark hairs need to be removed. You can do this by tweezing, using a magnifying mirror. The so-called vellus, or near invisible down on the face, should be left when you’re young. It was designed by nature to regulate temperature and evaporate sweat. In later life, hormonal changes can cause this down to become more of a pelt. A fifty-something friend now uses a woman’s shaving tool on her facial pelt. She paid £22.99 to the Gurelax store for an elegant little device which she runs over her face. ‘It just sort of buzzes over your face, collecting hair,’ says Sarah. ‘It doesn’t pull them out, which is probably why it’s not painful. It is just like shaving for a man. It is really fun to use. And what you do at the end is undo the little cap bit and there is a collecting area where all the fuzz has collected, and that is obviously very satisfying. I do this about once every two months.’ But young women are blessed with a light, peachy down. This can be flattering as it provides a blur effect, as well as being attractive in its own right. Think how lovely peaches are. The Oldie February 2024 37

Oldie Man of Letters

Great hymns abide with me In praise of the hymn-book that sold 150 million copies a n wilson I was chatting to my Iranian fishmonger the other day about the oral tradition in poetry. His grandfather had lived in a small village, with no electricity or running water, and only dust roads. Being one of the only literate people in the community, he would entertain the other villagers, either by reading aloud to them, or, just as often, by reciting poems and telling old tales. I asked if they still read Omar Khayyam. He said his grandfather could never understand how Khayyam, one of the brightest stars in that scintillating galaxy of Persian poets, had managed to survive without being killed as a heretic. Great poetry, said the fishmonger, was for knowing by heart and it bound whole communities together. Unlike religions or politics, which often bind people in a sinister manner, shared tales and shared poetry bind benignly. One sad day, the fishmonger’s grandfather had seen a steamroller come into the village. The local government built a tarmac road. Then came electricity. This, said Grandpa, would be the end of poetry, folk tales and evenings round the fire with shared stories. I told him my dear old dad had been a heretic, too, and, although by no stretch a literary man, he knew the whole of the Rubáiyát by heart – in Edward FitzGerald’s translation. I thought of that conversation with the fishmonger when reading an excellent essay in Slightly Foxed magazine by my friend and heroine Ysenda Maxtone Graham. It was about Hymns Ancient and Modern. Hymns Ancient and Modern used to be a major bestseller. Between 1860 and 1960, some 150 million copies of the hymnal were sold throughout the world. Every school assembly would have used it – or a book loosely based on it. The words of the hymns, and their tunes, were fixed in the heads of generations.

steamroller laying tar on They still play Abide with the dust road, he knew that Me at the FA Cup Final but his community was about few viewers know the words. to break up. Everyone Like the villagers in Iran, being glued to the we were bound together flickering telly just wasn’t (regardless of social class or the same as sharing background or, I would poems and stories. submit, by religious faith) Our society became by knowing The King of Broken Britain and lost Love My Shepherd Is or any cohesion when we Immortal, Invisible, God stopped learning Only Wise. Now the only Ysenda’s favourite hymns generally known hymns, and my father’s are Christmas carols. The scene in Evelyn The very good book favourite poems – sometimes called parlour poetry, because Waugh’s Decline and Fall is it served the function of entertaining unimaginable now, where every groups and families in the evenings. man in the prison knows O God, Our Some people think that you don’t need Help in Ages Past – and sings it to a memory if you’ve got an iPhone. The altered words which indicate the fate very word ‘memory’, which once denoted of poor old Prendergast. the inside of our heads, now is most My father, reciting Khayyam, or my commonly used of the material stored in aunt, quoting great chunks of our phones and laptops. It does not mean Shakespeare by heart, were not at all a bard such as Homer, strumming his unusual for their generation. lyre and knowing poems the length of the They loved Field Marshal Wavell’s Iliad by heart. anthology Other Men’s Flowers (1944). I think, looking around on the bus at It’s over 300 pages – yet the Field children and young adults, they probably Marshal says in the introduction, ‘If don’t have any hymns, poems or stories I cannot claim that I can now recite by in their heads. They don’t have heart all the poems in this anthology, I think I can safely claim that I once could.’ memories; they have megabytes. There are two bits of our brain. One is Everyone knew poetry. At home, guided by logos, and processes facts, we used to have a little book called information, data. It may be that, for Poetry for Repetition. By the time I much of what logos requires, an iPhone was seven or eight, I knew many of works just as well as a brain. these verses by heart – ‘Not a drum was But the other bit of the brain needs heard, not a funeral note…’ ‘The boy mythos. It needs merely imagination – stood on the burning deck…’ ‘ “Charge, but shared imagination. This, surely, is Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!”/Were why the millennials, even if in other the last words of Marmion.’ respects they seem to have grown up, still The point about these poems is that cling to Harry Potter. huge numbers knew them by heart. If I know several people in their twenties you quoted, ‘I remember, I remember…’ who read or listen to Harry Potter all the more or less anyone, from the bus time. But they don’t know Abide with conductor to your local earl, could finish Me, and they think Homer is a cartoon the line: ‘…the house where I was born’. character in The Simpsons. When the old Iranian saw the The Oldie February 2024 39

Town Mouse

On the slow road to happiness

ROBERT THOMPSON

tom hodgkinson

Cities can be dangerous places for a mouse. There are hazards everywhere. As Dr Johnson noted in his poem London: ‘Here malice, rapine, accident conspire Now a rabble rages, now a fire.’ To these ever-present threats, we could add the new motorised menaces that prowl the streets. In this mouse’s words: Now kamikaze drivers cause mouse to burrow-creep And juggernauts unfeeling disrupt his precious sleep. Conscious of the dangers of speed to life, limb and tail, I have welcomed the recent introduction in London of a 20mph speed limit, whether driving a car or riding my bicycle. At first, slowing the car down to 20mph required a bit of an effort. It seemed unnatural. But soon you get used to cruising at a slow speed. It makes driving less stressful. And journeys take no longer, because of all the traffic lights. And, for bikes, it’s bliss. The streets 40 The Oldie February 2024

feel less perilous. Add to that the multiplication of bicycle lanes and we appear to be moving towards the two-wheel-friendly environment of Copenhagen. What’s more, speed kills and slowness saves lives. A campaigning website called 20’s Plenty quotes research on the effects of the slowdown on bicycle-related injuries in London: ‘The introduction of 20mph limits,’ it says, ‘is linked to 21%-lower injury odds for people who are cycling compared to 30mph roads.’ The Welsh government introduced a slowdown across the whole country in September last year. Every town now has a 20mph limit. A vocal minority of Welsh residents are griping, but this looks like an excellent policy. Towns should put people first and motorists second. Slowness is good and makes the streets safer for mice and all the animals of the towns. A lot of my friends – the

foxes – have moved into the city lately and are making a very good life for themselves. They love the slowdown, and so do I. It makes the city more convivial. As an advocate of slowness, I was shocked to receive a letter from the police notifying me that I’d been caught speeding. ‘But I am such a sensible mouse!’ I thought. The Devon police told me I’d been caught by a speed camera going at 38mph in a 30mph zone at 11 at night on a rural road near Totnes. I had the option of paying a £100 fine and getting three points added to my licence, or taking a speed-awareness course. I was already very aware of the dangers of speed and so was about to pay the fine and get the points, and wait for them to go away. Then Mrs Mouse chipped in. ‘I’ve done two of these courses and they’re very good fun,’ she said, ‘and interesting, too.’ So it was that eight of us gathered for a Zoom call one afternoon with an amiable Brummie instructor called Rocky. Rocky told us that around 1,700 people are killed on the roads in the UK each year. Fifteen years ago this figure was nearly 3,000, which shows that great strides have been made. He added that there are 25,208 serious injuries, and that, luckily for an urban mouse, the countryside is more dangerous. Fifty-six per cent of all fatalities happen on rural roads. This means the Devon police were more sensible than I thought when imposing a 30mph limit. And it’s something worth considering by any oldies planning a move to the country. Thirty-eight per cent of deaths happen on urban roads, while motorways account for only six per cent. Motorways are safer because there are no pedestrians and not much activity. I have advised my friends the badgers to stay away from them, all the same. Participants on the course told Rocky they tended to break the speed limit when they were late. So Rocky gave us a few tips, such as leaving earlier and setting two alarms. Another suggestion was to give a vague arrival time to allow for delays. ‘Mum, I’m aiming to be there between three and four.’ He also pointed out that speeding doesn’t get you there any faster. The bloke who zoomed past you a minute ago is sitting at the same set of traffic lights as you. I emerged with a determination to drive even more slowly than ever. It’s a win-win.

Country Mouse

Bob Geldof was right – I’m irritating giles wood I once shared a taxi with Bob Geldof. I don’t recall the whys or wherefores. But I do remember that the problem for Bob, on that particular journey, was not the taxi-driver’s airing of classic taxi-driver’s views, but the views expounded by his fellow passenger – namely me. Within a very short space of time, Bob had cottoned on to a truth expressed by my late father, Godfrey, that I am ‘a permanent victim of the idée fixe’. Like a dog with a bone, once I start on a topic, I just can’t give it a rest. And yet I find the chatty habit in others insufferable. The main reason for my unbroken record of not visiting London for three months is my fear of Mary’s unfortunate habit of striking up conversations with taxi-drivers. I know where this failing comes from – it was engrained during her provincial upbringing in Ulster, where the craic was woven into the social fabric. She paints a jolly picture of her childhood, characterised by milkmen, coalmen, clerics and factory bosses all enjoying the craic as they ‘laughed till their sides ached’. Mary sees all personal encounters as a chance for craic. But in my more stand-offish English book, with taxi-drivers it’s best to maintain a formal relationship. ‘Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ has become my rule, as I’ve noted how often conversations have turned into monologues, as the driver seizes the chance to inflict his resentments on a captive audience. Besides, these days, I am busy at home in the cottage. The gardening has had to go on a temporary back-boiler, as I recover from a shoulder injury. So I have achieved a much more efficient work/life balance. It was a pop-up gardener – who did a better job of clipping shrubs into

agreeable, broccoli-floret shapes, and in half the time it took me – who really forced me to undergo a paradigm shift in time use. I now use Mondays to recover from the weekend and recharge my batteries. I remind Mary of one of the favourite sayings of her late guru Betty Parsons: ‘You are never wasting time when you are recharging your batteries.’ The time released through not performing mindless outdoor chores could technically be redirected towards my neglected art career and tackling long-overdue commissions. Yet I have chosen to redirect this time instead towards self-education and consciousness-raising. For various reasons, I missed out on university. The Open University would be one option for insatiably curious folk like me – but there’s an even easier option at the click of a remote control. With all three female members of my family cohort refusing to engage in discussion of breaking news stories, at least one of us needs to be grounded in the reality of the turbulent world we live in. It therefore falls on me to keep

tuned in to the stories behind the scenes, via innumerable YouTube channels. Yes, I know of the addictive nature of this facility, the temptation to see patterns where there is none, to become obsessed by the idea of puppet masters and conspiracies, only to be found, three weeks later, curtains drawn, drinking water from the dog’s bowl. That could never happen to me. The dog needs exercising and Mary needs feeding if she’s to keep on ‘working’ to help pay for the streaming services that can anaesthetise her by night, having wound me up by day. No reality check can beat the slap in the face administered by the plainspeaking ex-US Army Col Douglas Macgregor, as he delivers his measured responses to what are surely the most unthinkable scenarios being enacted in the Middle East. For light relief, I skip to a classical review channel on YouTube. A light Monday lunch of crumpets, Serrano ham and Heinz tomato soup provides the sustenance for the afternoon summit: an Oxford debate featuring three giants – Rory Stewart, George Monbiot and Mark Cocker. The latter can be relied on to never pull his punches on environmental matters. Although the debate – ‘The Battle of the Countryside: Britain Should Rewild Its Uplands’ – took place four years ago, it features all the cross-currents of current thinking about the UK policy for the upland environment. It’s better than being there in person, because if your mind wanders, you can rewind! Mary is increasingly inviting people to lunch in the cottage – in a bid, I suspect, to dilute the intensity of my own rolling news bulletins. I have begun to welcome the company of these people – some of them strangers to me. Where else will I find a politely receptive audience for my new range of idées fixes?

‘I was hoping there’d be no meetings here’ The Oldie February 2024 41

Postcards from the Edge

The end of my Channel-ferry love affair

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny says au revoir to the day trips she once adored It’s said that you always know when you do something for the first time, but you don’t always know when you do something for the last time. But I’m fairly sure that something I’ve done for the last time is cross the English Channel as a foot passenger. Popping on to a ferry ’twixt Dover and Calais was a day trip I often enjoyed in times gone by (Newhaven to Dieppe was also a delight). But it has now become a grindingly disagreeable experience, as I discovered recently. It seems the ferry companies don’t want foot passengers any more. Most of the carriers no longer allow crossChannel transport on foot (as opposed to motor transport). Of all the ferry companies plying the waters of La Manche, only P&O welcomes tourists on foot – though I’m not sure if ‘welcome’ is the word. The check-in time for this short sea crossing of 20 miles is a ludicrous 90 minutes in advance. The schedule of available ferries has been restricted. There is no longer a shuttle bus from the train station at Dover to the terminal. The terminal itself is harsh, stark and uncomfortable. And the coach taking passengers from the terminal to the ferry drops off the travellers twice, along with their luggage, for forensic security procedures and passport control. On the day I travelled, there was an awful lot of hanging around in the cold, waiting to be ‘processed’. I paid £135 to P&O for the return day trip. It was unsurprising, on the way 42 The Oldie February 2024

back, that the small group of piétons vowed ‘Never again’. Pedestrians, remarked one of the travellers, are now second-class citizens on these ferries. In an era when the public are asked to used their cars less, in this context the car is still king. Border controls are a necessity – but they can be managed speedily and efficiently. The Eurostar from London to Paris is now a superb, seamless procedure. Luggage security is part of modern life but, like the passport inspections, it seems to be exceptionally badly arranged for ferry foot passengers. I had the pleasure of a nice lunch in Calais with a good friend. But next time I want to cross the Channel, I’ll take the Eurostar to Lille and a French train thereafter. The day of the cross-Channel foot passenger is over. The late Bernard Levin, who died 20 years ago this year, was once the most famous journalist of his age. He’s just appeared in a BBC programme, The Remarkable Journey of Bernard Levin, still available on BBC iPlayer. Bernard walked out with a number of women, of whom I was one, although I think I was rather more in the chorus line than in a starring role. My abiding recollection of our relationship was me desperately pretending to appreciate interminable hours of Wagner, when I’d much rather have listened to Cole Porter or pretty ballet music. Bernard was immensely clever, and in many ways very sweet, but he had some old-fashioned attitudes to women. He

liked to tell me, concerning literary translations, ‘Les traductions sont comme les femmes: quand elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles; quand elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles.’ ‘Translations are like women: when they are beautiful, they are not faithful; when they are faithful, they are not beautiful.’ It rhymes better in French, which is perhaps evidence of the unsatisfactory nature of translations. As I was smitten, I was fidèle, although perhaps insufficiently belle. Anyone who has an unused fur coat in the back of their wardrobe should give it away. Send it to Ukraine. Dispatch it to the United Nations winter appeal to keep refugees warm in cold climates. Most British women have stopped wearing fur coats for fear of attracting the ire of animal activists, but it’s a shame if these very practical garments go to waste. Although I don’t think animal protesters are quite so active these days – now that the Just Stop Oil lobby has taken centre stage, and lying down on motorways has become a much more exciting form of protest than throwing fake blood at women in animal pelts. Ironically, one way to reduce the consumption of oil-based energy would be to return to wearing fur, a most effective, organic and planet-friendly form of natural heat. An old school friend suggested we should meet again soon: ‘For it isn’t any younger we are getting.’ What a charming evocation of Hiberno-English, now probably archaic. Old Irish phrases in English were often euphemistic and politely deflecting from the harsher realities of life, such as ‘I disremember’ instead of ‘I forget’. Or calling a relentless downpour ‘A fine soft day’. So, it isn’t that we’re growing older. It’s just that we’re not getting younger!

Small World

Love’s young dream becomes a nightmare

Britain’s least romantic spot? Ramona’s boxroom in a tower block jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents… As a younger man, I had a very simple dream. One day, I would be sitting up in a full-size bed next to a charming lady on a Sunday morning, newspaper supplements left right and centre, as I read to her an interesting news item which we would then debate and be witty about. Instead, I was stuck shivering in Ramona’s rented boxroom on the 700th floor of a tower block, scrolling through a non-firewalled news site. I was sitting on the bed next to Ramona, a woman with rusted-beetroot hair – after a failed YouTube experiment about making your own hair dye. She was actually lighting her own pipe. She was lighting her shag – and I wasn’t getting one. To resurrect some element of my dream Sunday, I slid up to the politics column and explained to her, with an introductory chuckle, ‘Some fella called Cleverly has mistaken a constituency for a shithole.’ Ramona, between puffs, wasn’t listening. She was reminiscing about her cleaning days: ‘I was having it in a dark cupboard with the early-shift cleaning supervisor. Bank ended up filthier than when we started cleaning it!’ She elbowed me with a long, loud laugh. ‘Any chance of some toast?’ I enquired of my gal pal, who looked increasingly as if she’d wandered out of a desperately sad line illustration in a Dicken’s first edition. She scoffed, triggering her cough, which became a lung-shaking hack. When she’d recovered, she explained, ‘Toast? What with? The kettle? I don’t know if I’ve got a toaster… Is there anything on your side?’ In this unfurnished room – which Ramona had taken to be an instruction rather than a description – everything was on the floor. Amidst a battlefield of aborted Lego builds and flimsy fungalhaven foot spas, there was no toaster. She recalled, ‘I threw it at Gavin only the other night – so it must be somewhere.’ I realised that I – someone with a low

bar when it comes to acceptable romantic partners – was finally feeling the ick factor. It didn’t entirely disappoint me. There was an ease in no longer having to impress the admittedly easily impressed Ramona. I floated round to her side of the bed and pulled her upright, suggesting we go out to the afternoon karaoke at a windowless social club she liked. ‘Ooh yeah, show off my new do,’ the poor thing pondered. ‘Plus Gavin and Danno might be there.’ I felt like Pinkie in Brighton Rock, about to break the heart of his moll. But once we were installed at a table with five other locals, I could barely hear myself over the football and Gavin and Danno’s fanny talk, let alone break up with her. So, instead, I nodded towards ‘Stevo The Karaoke Bastard’, as his portable disco signage read. I shouted in Ramona’s good ear, ‘Listen to the lyrics. I’ve got to tell you something and it’s all in this song…’ The bittersweet opening bars of Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) began. I wish Paul Young had sung a song called Wherever I Pop Down My Balaclava, That’s Where I Probably Take Off My Pyjamas. But, still, it was near enough to the truth for Ramona to understand: Gypsy Jem was moving on.

I cried genuine tears as I gave my rendition. No one whooped louder or cheered more than Ramona as my song finished. If she didn’t love or even fancy me, she really appreciated me. Returning to the table, I had to tap her twice on the shoulder to distract her from Danno, who was balancing pound coins on his forehead. ‘Did you understand the message I was trying to tell you in the song?’ I asked. ‘Have you lost your hat on the bus again?’ ‘No, Ramona. I think we should see other people. Well, I know you already are – I mean, I need to see other people.’ ‘Aww,’ she said sweetly, ‘is it that little woman from the loose-sweet stall on the market?’ ‘No, it bloody isn’t. She’s about 90 and she’s not little. She’s just got no legs.’ ‘Hey, don’t knock it till you try it,’ Ramona said. And that sentence – it could be her motto – was the last thing she said to me. When I exited the bar, she was on her way back from the toilets. She signalled I should wait, before silently lowering a secret something into my pocket. It was a bar mat she had crafted into a penis shape. I would have preferred it to be a heart. That’s why we had to part. The Oldie February 2024 43

Sophia Waugh: School Days

My idea of Hell? Covering for an ill teacher People don’t think much about illness when considering the pressures schools face. And yet it is a real source of anxiety and conflict. The least popular member of staff is the person with the responsibility for organising cover. Those who’ve taken that job soon regret it, and pass it on to someone else as quickly as possible – if only so that people will smile again when they see them walking into a room. Most schools now have members of staff there solely to cover lessons. This is a bonus for the teachers (who always used to take all the cover lessons) but it’s a thankless job. Children cheer when the cover staff arrive, immediately sit in the wrong seats, do no work and misbehave. We had one young man who lasted under a month before he left a lesson, and the school, in tears. There are stricter rules concerning how much teachers can be asked to cover – we can still be asked for emergencies but not for planned or long-term absences. But who’s going to say no if asked to cover for another member of their department? No one. We’ll do it and grumble. To be honest, it’s almost preferable to take a lesson not in your subject, as you

44 The Oldie February 2024

can’t be expected to teach it. You can just be very stern at the front of the classroom while the pupils get on with the set work. The nasty thing about us is how we look askance at long-term sickness. ‘Is she really ill or is she swinging the lead?’ ‘I’ve covered for him twice this year already. What’s he playing at?’ We raise an eyebrow at a long-term absence, suspecting the worst. I’m afraid I am a bit of a doubting Thomas. Show me the wound, and then I’ll cover for him. Except now the tables are turned, and it is I who am off sick – two weeks and counting. To be fair to me, I tried to go back to work. I told the consultant I was going to go back in and work at half-cock – and it was his turn to raise an eyebrow and tell me no, I wasn’t going back to work in a hurry. He said, ‘Teachers and doctors are the same. We think the whole system will fall apart without us. It won’t.’ A part of me was relieved, of course. I could go back to my bed with a clear conscience, huddle down and sleep and sleep. But it does not take long before the worries kick in. What is my form up to without me? Will they feel deserted? Who will stick up for X, a lovely boy

who just keeps getting minor things wrong? Who will make sure the Year 10s get properly to grips with A Christmas Carol before we have to move on to the next thing? How much is the department hating me? I have moved in with one of my daughters, who is proving a very kind nurse. One of her chief jobs (self-elected) is to stop me getting on to my work emails. She is right – there is nothing I can do, and reading them only causes more angst. One, sent to all members of staff, said that they had had the worst day for cover for 21 years, and of course the guilt hit me. An anxious mother emailed the school about her son, and I answered her. But now the school has somehow changed my account so that people emailing me get automated out-of-office replies. I should be glad, but I feel panicky. What am I missing? Do I even still exist? Of course the school is managing very well without me, and of course the children probably don’t even notice I’m missing. But, to be honest, I can’t wait to pick up the reins again.

sister teresa

Roll up! Roll up! The cathedral circus is here The necessity for my New Year’s resolution became apparent several weeks ago. It is going to have to be the avoidance of prejudice. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, very specifically warns us against favouritism when passing judgement (1 Timothy 5:21). The usual person one favours is oneself, often without taking nearly enough time and trouble to think about other people’s opinions and indeed feelings, which may be hurt. I was harrumphing to an Anglican clergyman friend from the Norwich Diocese about how disgraceful it was that those in charge of the beautiful, numinous and awe-inspiring Norwich Cathedral should have installed a helter-skelter in its nave, back in 2019. He told me I was wrong, and gave several reasons why. The main one was that it encouraged people who would normally never go to church to visit their own cathedral: their birthright. The number of visitors to the church went up

by 40,000 thanks to the scaffolding working on its temporary installation. fabric, and so not The cathedral is vast, and accessible to most. the helter-skelter occupied only I felt ashamed of my a fraction of its space. And it uncalled-for and blinkered wasn’t there permanently. opinion. I checked the Once there, visitors helter-skelter on the became aware of the silence internet as I had assumed surrounding them, as well as that it would be vulgar. I of the beauty of the medieval found it a pleasing and building. Many stayed to visit elegant object in its own the numerous side chapels, Norwich’s helter-skelter right: red, white and gold, and took time to pray there. heraldic colours, which They found a sense of peace which flowed effortlessly from the vast stainedthey would not have come across without glass window behind it. the helter-skelter. Paradoxically, thanks There was nothing vulgar about it – to its presence, they were able to discover and even if there had been, would it have what sacred space means. mattered? Much of creation is very Best of all, the view from the top was vulgar indeed: one has only to think of sensational; for perhaps the first time in sunsets or some of those strangelythe cathedral’s long history, many coloured deep-sea creatures to find members of the public were able to see, oneself wondering just what God thought close to, the ceiling bosses for which the he was up to when he made them up. building is so rightly famous. Normally I should start pulling myself together these are visible only to those on and avoid prejudice now. Join me?

Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of Prisons, gave a tribute to his predecessor Lord Ramsbotham at a thanksgiving service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey. ‘Stephen Tumim, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, had retired, a successor was urgently sought and the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, wanted someone who would back his tough stance on crime policies. Who then could be better, it was suggested, than a recently retired general called Rambo? ‘And so, in December 1995, he began in the role that was to redefine the next 25 years of his working life. ‘Within days, he set the tone for his tenure as Chief Inspector, leading his team into Holloway Women’s Prison and then, almost immediately, leading them out again – refusing to continue with the 46 The Oldie February 2024

inspection until something was done about the appalling squalor and the shocking treatment of women in the prison. ‘During his tenure, David and his team devised the four tests for measuring the health of a jail – safety, respect, purposeful activity and rehabilitation. Twenty-four years later, these remain the gold standard by which the inspectorate continues to judge prisons.’ General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff, spoke about Lord Ramsbotham’s military career. Ramsbotham was Commander UK Field Army and Inspector-General of the Territorial Army. His son James Ramsbotham gave a tribute. Grandson Matthew Ramsbotham read the lesson from Romans 12. Grandsons Christopher and Jonathan

Ramsbotham read from Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. His other son, Richard Ramsbotham, read a poem written by Charles Sharp, a prisoner in HMP Wakefield: ‘Do not condemn me for all that I do. Fundamentally I am the same as you. Try not to censor all my words. It’s only the chatter you’ve often heard.’ The Right Rev Anthony Ball, Canon Rector, gave the bidding: ‘We shall celebrate the skill and dedication shown in a distinguished Army career and the passion for promoting improvements in our penal system.’ Hymns included Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven and He Who Would Valiant Be. Grandchildren Charlotte Walker, Christopher and Jonathan Ramsbotham read lessons. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY

Memorial Service General the Lord Ramsbotham GCB CBE (1934-2022)

The Doctor’s Surgery

Parkinson’s law Is there a connection between loneliness and the cruellest disease? dr theodore dalrymple April is the cruellest month, no doubt, but what is the cruellest disease? There are many contenders for this crown of thorns, and among them must be Parkinson’s disease. Of course, no judgement on this matter can be final, for the many different forms of suffering are incommensurable. A recent paper has suggested that loneliness may be a risk factor for the development of Parkinson’s. The medical records of 491,603 people in Britain aged between 38 and 73 were followed for an average of 15½ years. Of these, 2,822 developed the disease during that period. All the participants were asked at the outset of the study whether they often felt lonely: yes or no. Those who answered yes (18.5 per cent) had an increased risk of developing the disease by comparison with those who answered no. Even when the study was controlled for possible confounding factors, such as smoking, obesity, lack of education and previous psychiatric history (oddly, and no doubt for concealed philosophical reasons, the investigators did not include marital status), an association remained, though reduced by a third. The association between loneliness and the disease manifests itself only after a delay of five years. Before five years, it is undetectable. What does all this mean, if anything at all (other than the industry of the investigators)? Although we are constantly reminded, indeed warned, that correlation is not causation, the authors expend some effort in suggesting how loneliness may be translated into Parkinson’s disease. If there is causation, it might run in the other direction. It is now thought that the disease takes a long time to develop, and loneliness might be a consequence of the subtle, incipient changes that precede the disease. And while the authors of the study tried to control for certain relevant factors, they could not

control for them all. Indeed, they may have missed the most important ones. Had they included them, the association might have dissolved altogether. The simple question ‘Do you often feel lonely?’ may not reflect anything other than a propensity to answer the question in a certain way. Besides, a man may feel lonely in the midst of a party and yet well accompanied while crossing the Sahara on his own. Someone who feels lonely at one point in life might not feel lonely for the entire subsequent 15½ years. Nevertheless, the authors have no hesitation in concluding that their ‘study adds evidence on the detrimental health impact of loneliness and supports recent calls for the protective and healing effects of personally meaningful social connection’. In other words, the claim is made that the rather feeble statistical connection is in some way causative. But do we really need medical evidence that the feeling of loneliness is undesirable? Suppose we discovered that there was no correlation between that feeling and

the development of Parkinson’s disease. Would we say, ‘Oh well, the feeling of loneliness is all right, then. Nothing to worry about’? Is this not a manifestation of an almost pagan attitude to the concept of health? One of the few totally disinterested good actions of my life was in my student days when, as a social service, I befriended an old lady who lived on her own in a newly constructed tower block. She soon came to share it with mad abseilers down the front, drug-dealers, arsonists and untreated chronic schizophrenics. I visited her once a week for years. I still have all her letters. For this immigrant from rural Cork, writing did not come easily. Whenever I arrived, she would ‘put up a salad’ for me. She was a very good person, and I felt guilty sometimes that my visits were something of a chore to me, for they were important – and I think a source of happiness – to her. But I never thought I was preserving her health.

‘Have you tried spending time with couples who are worse off than you?’ The Oldie February 2024 47

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

Liverpool’s wage bill SIR: I read in A N Wilson’s column on higher education (January issue) that in 1960 the Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University earned more than the striker of Liverpool FC. This is very probably true, as until 1961 professional footballers were subject to a wage cap of £20 per week. This was overturned in 1961 by a campaign by Jimmy Hill, which has led to the obscene sums that footballers are given today. Yours, Richard Churn, Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire

‘Life is pointless’

Kind Mrs Charles Wheeler SIR: Shirin Wheeler was Charles Wheeler’s daughter, not his widow (Old Un’s Notes, January issue). Her mother was Dip Singh, whom I remember well for her generous hospitality in Bombay some years ago. My family and I had just arrived in India and were introduced to Dip Singh by a mutual Indian friend. She entertained us to a memorable and prolonged dinner on our first evening, and then insisted on giving us lunch the next day at the Willingdon Club, where I narrowly avoided losing a lot of rupees to Parsee lady members at the bridge table. Simon Courtauld, Etchilhampton, Wiltshire

Do not resuscitate SIR: Thank you, Matthew Norman, for highlighting (‘The dying of the light’, January issue) so eloquently and 48 The Oldie February 2024

sensitively the eagerness of doctors to extend life when it is unviable. An important issue. I was reminded of my own experience with my father who had a heart attack aged 85 and, despite a DNR order, a stent was inserted which allowed him another hellish, miserable seven years – he subsequently suffered a stroke, failing and extremely painful hips, a terrible care home and dementia. I will never forgive myself for allowing it to happen. Yours, Belinda Burton, Wilmington, East Sussex

Books do furnish my room SIR: I share, with A N Wilson, a passion for Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (The Oldie passim). What I don’t share with him is a private education, a degree from Oxford or a successful career as a writer. So why have I, a workingclass boy from north London, read A Dance three times, as well as all his other novels? What do I have in common with Nick Jenkins and his friends? I was born in 1935. During the Second World War, my mother was an avid reader of romantic novels. We lived near a library – and when she chose her books each week, she would leave me to browse in the children’s section. I chose my books, all of which were written by middle-class authors. I could sail a lug sail dinghy around Windermere (thanks to Arthur Ransome) before I was ten years old, before I even knew where it was. I happily played in leafy Metro-land with William Brown and his pals, enjoyed midnight feasts in the ‘dorm’ with Billy Bunter, Bob Cherry and co, went on West Country adventures with the Famous Five when the only other place I’d ever been to was Clacton, as an evacuee, and – did I imagine it? – sailed with Aubrey de Sélincourt!

I subsequently passed the 11-plus, had a grammar-school education and went on to have a moderately successful career as an artist. As a mature student I graduated with a degree in fine art. It wasn’t until the 1960s that I read any novels that spoke of the working classes, by working-class writers. Literature is a great leveller, and libraries introduce us to other worlds and the lives of the people who live there. Long may they remain. Les Burton, Reepham, Norfolk

‘Why do they call you “iceberg”?’

The teacher’s nightmare SIR: How many years will it take for nightmares about my 30 years at the chalkface to abate? Sophia Waugh has just (February issue) revived one of them for me with her recollection of arriving unprepared to teach A Christmas Carol to a less than co-operative class of Year 9s. We called them third-formers in my day, and they were just as terrifying to teachers who displayed any vulnerability. The worst of my recurring nightmares has me arriving for a double period on a hot Friday afternoon without a clue about what I’m going to teach or how I’m going to teach it. Almost as bad is the one in which exams are looming but a senior colleague has commandeered all the textbooks for his own classes and my pupils have learned nothing the whole year. What a relief it is to wake up to the knowledge that, for me, school is out for ever. Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

Hospital Medical School back in the 1970s: Sad: the heart sighs as the head has its way. Mad: the head shakes as the heart holds sway. Bad: the conscience crumbles as vice turns to folly Glad: the voice sings – but too loud and too jolly! After retiring from 35 years of consultant ENT practice I am worried, like many who don’t earn their crust in the healing professions, by over-diagnosis and over-treatment, especially in specialities based in metaphysics. Graham J C Smelt, FRCS, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Mad, bad, sad, glad patients SIR: I agree wholeheartedly with Rachel Kelly (‘Not mad, just sad’, January issue) in her doubting the wisdom of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders aka DSM-6 (or is it 7 now)? Her article reminded me of my summary of psychiatry, written when I was a junior doctor at St Thomas’

‘He’s transitioning to Georgette’

Telford’s wide span SIR: In her fascinating piece on her ancestor Isambard Kingdom Brunel (November issue), his descendant Bella Thomas says, ‘The Arkwrights and the Telfords of this world specialised.’ I beg to disagree. Thomas Telford, the orphaned son of a shepherd, who was born and raised on a remote farm in Dumfriesshire, was as versatile as they come. In addition to designing the suspension bridges and aqueducts in England and Wales for which he is best known, in 1801 he devised a master plan to build roads, bridges and harbours in the Scottish Highlands in order to help stem the tide of emigration. As a result, 920 miles of new roads and 1,200 bridges were built. Then there was the Caledonian Canal, a feat of engineering that included 29 locks, which are still operational. He also built several new harbours and docks, a new town called Pulteneytown at Wick in Caithness, and 32 churches as well as 43 manses for the Church of Scotland. In London, Telford built St Katharine Docks. Abroad, he supervised schemes in Poland, Germany and Austria, as well as the Göta Canal in Sweden, which links the North Sea and the Baltic. Thomas Telford was hardly a specialist. Emma Tennant, Newcastleton, Scottish Borders The Oldie February 2024 49

I Once Met

Ian Brady In 1980, for one day only, I had an access-all-areas pass to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Martine Burnaby, in whose house I was lodging, was a prison visitor, a volunteer who would go into the jail and liaise with inmates, represent their concerns to the management and aim to settle disputes. No locked door was barred to her. I was a law student – so she swung it with the Home Office that I could shadow her. It took just a phone call from her; no cumbersome checks or risk assessments. Previously, Martine had taken her friend Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, later editor of the Sunday Telegraph, on one of her visits, during which they went into an isolation unit housing IRA inmates. A few days later, the very recognisable Perry received word from sources that he had been ‘put on the threat list’. It wasn’t my first time in the Scrubs. I’d been to a whodunnit put on by the prisoners’ drama society. It was their third scheduled performance. The second had been cancelled because of a siege in B Wing. The actress Carolyn Courage had been brought in to play a part, appearing on stage in a skimpy nightdress. This caused a massive, show-stopping, chaotic

uproar. The lead actor harangued the audience until they calmed down, threatening to walk off and cancel the rest of the show. My previous experience of Ian Brady, ‘the most prison had been evil man ever’ limited to Porridge. I remembered Fletcher taking the governor hostage in his office. He was rifling through all the drawers to see what he could find. Opening a filing cabinet, he discovered a decorated cake. ‘Ah, look,’ he laughed, ‘a cake in a file.’ I was concerned that the visit would be just a voyeuristic exercise, taking an exciting ride on the misfortune of others. Once inside, there was a palpable sense that I was in the sump of society and something must be done with the inmates during their sentence. But what surprised me was my sympathy for the world-weary, overworked prison officers, whose entire careers were spent in jail. Most prisoners get out within ten years. Tailing Martine as we sailed through

the prison was a fascinating, transformative experience. We met a twinkly-eyed Greek man who had said, in defence of his charge for murder, that it was only a small gun. The head of laundry, Mr Fusco, was in despair that inmates were throwing their pants out of the cell windows. A meek double murderer with a limp handshake couldn’t understand why he was Category A, kept in his cell for 23 hours a day. In the hospital wing, cleaning the floor and with an officer in close attendance, was Ian Brady. Martine needed to see him to explain that the literature he had ordered was regarded as unsuitable and that it would not be provided. I stood next to him. He was grey, angular and hollow-looking, with swept-back hair. He was grumpy at the news being given to him. The officer was by his side to protect him against attack, and the hospital wing was deemed the safest place to prevent that. We went to the office of the governor, Mr Honey. He described Brady as manipulative and wholly unreconstructed, the most evil man ever in his charge. A difficult thing to quantify, but if anybody knew, Mr Honey did. Robert Bathurst

The Office – a 1944 episode

In 1944 I started work aged 15 as a junior shorthand typist in a solicitors’ office. I am now 94 and in a very different world. The following is a satirical evocation of office life in 1944. What I want to say to the boss (but don’t): • Don’t telephone when you want to dictate; just press the bell beneath your roll-top desk. Makes me feel important. • When dictating, hold a cigarette in your mouth as you mutter. This calls for my specialised form of lip50 The Oldie February 2024

reading and the haze of smoke has an amazing effect on my sinuses. • Never make a list of the letters or deeds you wish to dictate before you send for me: erratic stabs at the shoals of letters on your desk will keep me in your office longer, ensuring I have a rush getting the post ready for six o’clock. • I can doze while you make numerous phone calls, but please don’t wake me suddenly to ask for the last thing you said. • When the weather is freezing and we’re down to burning old books and bits of wood from elderly desks, please don’t lean on the mantle, screening me from the fire. (I felt no sympathy when you scorched your trousers.)

• Did you ever consider, when I was a junior, that each day I was last to leave this narrow, high, Dickensian building, having to carry all the post and parcels down a long flight of steps in unrelieved blackness, with responsibility to lock up the premises before racing through the town to catch the post? • It was almost as much fun to visit the archives kept in an old barn, where dead flies lay in their dozens, and I needed to wave away the cobwebs and blow off the dust to find a file. • I was only the third female allowed (because of man shortage) to join the staff of this legal office. The desks were designed for deeds to be written by hand.

With the desk too high and the chair too low for speed typing, I sat perched atop two cushions, each about a foot deep. Not good for the spine. • But I respected you and you respected me. You, who drove ambulances in the First World War, lost your wife in childbirth and your daughter in a fire. Your humanity and sense of humour remained firm. In those days, we still had a ‘stiff upper lip’ and we knew what really mattered in life. By Betty Spanswick, Crewkerne, Somerset, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books They once met Winston GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters By Sinclair McKay Viking £16.99 Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him By David Reynolds Collins £25

52 The Oldie February 2024

The men behind Churchill: Keynes, Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, Bracken, Edward VIII

other people. Sinclair McKay has published several well-received books on wartime subjects, Bletchley Park and the bombing of Dresden, and the excellent Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century. His new book Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters is a sprightly trot through the great man’s life by way of people he knew or merely met. They run from Mrs Everest, his nanny, whom he

called Woom (Freudians please note) – and who was the person closest to him in his childhood, certainly closer than either of his frightful parents – to his daughter Diana. Along with another two of the Churchills’ four children (Mary Soames being the shining exception), Diana led an unhappy life of amorous and alcoholic turmoil, ending in her suicide in 1963. It was 15 months before Churchill’s own death and, frail in mind

GARY WING

We had better start bracing ourselves: November sees Winston Churchill’s sesquicentenary. He was born on 30th November 1874, and his centenary in 1974 was somewhat muted, not surprisingly as it was less than ten years since his long-drawn-out death and unforgettable funeral in January 1965. This year will doubtless make up for it, with endless documentaries and articles and, of course, books. Even if Churchill doesn’t have quite as many books devoted to him as Jesus or Napoleon, his bibliography has been increasing inexorably, sometimes with a loud sound of pots being boiled and barrels being scraped. In the increasingly frantic search for some new angle, one answer is to link Churchill with something or someone else: the Bodleian catalogue now contains more than 60 books with titles beginning Churchill and… You can take your pick from Empire, America, Ireland, Zionism, the Bengal Famine, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Attlee, Orwell, His Money, His Horses or his cook. And I ought to add a mea culpa for having added recently to the great corpus of Churchilliana. Two new additions to the groaning list take similar approaches – Churchill and

as he was, he might just have taken in this miserable news. Other personal snapshots include John Maynard Keynes, whom Churchill consulted when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, although his decision to return to the gold standard at the pre-war rate provoked The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, Keynes’s most sparkling pasquinade. Others beside took a mixed view of the great man. After the debacle at Gallipoli, the Prince of Wales said that Churchill was ‘nothing short of a national danger’, but they later got on more friendly terms (or ‘They exchanged words over cigars’, as McKay rather bathetically puts it) – with disastrous consequences for Churchill. At the time of the abdication crisis in December 1936, he foolishly championed the cause of King Edward VIII, as the prince by then was, to retain his throne as well as Mrs Simpson, and was shouted down in the House of Commons. Even worse examples of Churchill’s judgement were seen in his choice of friends and advisers, notably Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. They were what Evelyn Waugh had in mind with his brisk phrase just after Churchill’s death, ‘always in the wrong, always surrounded by crooks’. Bracken was a man of most unlikely origin who attached himself to Churchill and made himself very useful as his financial factotum, a role he performed even while holding government office. And Beaverbrook was bully, a liar and altogether a scoundrel, to whom Churchill was strangely addicted even when ‘Max’ was betraying him. He might have appeared in Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him by David Reynolds. Now a retired Cambridge history professor, Reynolds is a prolific writer, whose works include In Command of History, one of the very best books about Churchill of the past 30 years, which describes how he wrote – or supervised the writing of – the vast six-volume The Second World War. This highly personal, and highly misleading, account would have been better called War Memoirs, like Lloyd George’s valuable and much neglected account of the Great War as he saw it, but Churchill’s work nevertheless long dominated the historiography of the second war. In his new book, Reynolds chooses some of the same people as McKay, in a mixed bag, with some essays better than others, quite apart from the fact that the chronological arrangement lures the

author into one more biography of Churchill by any other name. There are one or two stylistic tics that in my grumpy way I find irritating, such as the Americanised form ‘As historian Michael Howard observed …’ with no article before the name, which seems to be creeping in here. And Reynolds, a serious and indeed outstanding historian, should really not have adopted the deplorable practice of referring to Churchill throughout as ‘Winston’. He also for some reason refers to Graham Stewart, the author of Burying Caesar: The Churchill-Chamberlain Rivalry, as ‘Smith’. Enough of such quibbles. Let me turn to the book’s virtues, or at any rate the chapters that are most stimulating. Before the Great War, Lloyd George and Churchill became unlikely allies or even friends, although Churchill throughout his life had very few really close friends, as opposed to many friendly acquaintances and working alliances. Their co-operation as radical reformers in the Asquith government prompted the clubland jibe that ‘Lloyd George was born a cad and never forgot it. Winston Churchill was born a gentleman and never remembered it.’ In August 1914, Lloyd George was dismayed by Churchill’s sheer zeal for war. With characteristic disloyalty, he allowed him to carry the can for the following year’s Gallipoli debacle, which was indeed largely Churchill’s responsibility, but not entirely. To the very limited extent that Lloyd George ever felt guilt, that memory might have encouraged him to bring Churchill back into the government in 1917, despite the bitter opposition of many Tory MPs. When the coalition government collapsed in October 1922, the two – both still technically Liberals – parted for ever. Lloyd George never held office again, while Churchill, having adroitly switched sides back to the Tories, reached his apotheosis in 1940. He thought of bringing Lloyd George back into the government then, but Lloyd George said, ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust.’ ‘Between 1886 and 1940,’ as Reynolds writes, ‘two Churchills and three Chamberlains yearned to become prime minister of the United Kingdom, and two of them eventually managed to do so. During that time four served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and three were leaders of the Conservative Party.’ The four Chancellors were the father and son, Lord Randolph and Winston Churchill, and the half-brothers Austen and Neville Chamberlain. At the end of his chapter on Neville

Chamberlain, Reynolds quotes Churchill’s magnificent elegy for Chamberlain after his death in November 1940, but he might also have quoted his elegy for Lloyd George in March 1945, with its paean to state welfare. In 1924, Chamberlain told his sisters that he was likely to be no more ‘than a second-rate Chancellor’ but ought to be ‘a great Minister of Health’, and so he was. Working perforce with Churchill, who was indeed a second-rate Chancellor, Chamberlain in less than five years did more than any other man to form the basis of public welfare and social security in this country, arguably more than the postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee, who is the subject of another chapter. Both these books are enjoyable, and I learned from Reynolds in particular. And yet… To join such treasures on the bookshelves as The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill, with a preface by Richard M Nixon, a friend recently gave me a copy of Winston Churchill CEO: 25 Lessons for Bold Business Leaders by Alan Axelrod. Quite apart from Churchill’s hair-raising personal financial life and his disastrous record gambling on the stock market, his public career might provide many remarkably bad examples for any businessperson to follow. We shall have to take the sesquicentenary as it comes. But is it too much to hope that, after the event, we might see if not the beginning of the end of books of about Churchill, then at least the end of the beginning? Geoffrey Wheatcroft is author of Churchill’s Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy

‘Some day, son, all this will be in China’ The Oldie February 2024 53

Shell shock BENEDICT KING Soldiers Don’t Go Mad By Charles Glass Bedford Square Publishers £22 If the statistics are to be believed, we are suffering from an epidemic of mental illness in this country. The number of those signing off work for mental-health reasons has skyrocketed. Of course, the statistics aren’t believed by everyone. There may be all sorts of reasons for the rise in benefits claims linked to mental-health problems, including fraud. If the rise is linked to a genuine increase in mental-health problems, it is not clear yet exactly what has caused that. During the First World War, Britain and its military authorities faced a similar, if rather more acute, puzzle. Perfectly fit men, who had not been physically injured during the fighting, presented symptoms of such severe shock that they couldn’t – or, as some seemed to think, wouldn’t – go on fighting. Fairly rapidly, the symptoms of shell-shock came to be recognised as a legitimate condition. As Charles Glass points out, the First World War was qualitatively different from all preceding conflicts, in the sheer industrial power of the ordnance the two sides dropped on each other on the Western Front. Even if a soldier wasn’t hit, his senses were incessantly bombarded by a cacophony of noise and blasts, unlike anything seen in any conflict before. It wore a lot of men down to the point where they couldn’t carry on. This book is about Craiglockhart, a former spa, which became a mental hospital for officers during the First World War. It tells the story of the hospital’s innovative treatments and, in particular, the friendship that grew up between its two most famous patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon’s incarceration at Craiglockhart was unusual. He had refused to continue fighting, deploring the war in its entirety, both conduct and objectives. Sassoon came from a socially eminent family. He was also known to have been fearless in the field and had already won the Military Cross – so no one could accuse him of cowardice. Insisting that he had had a breakdown and needed treatment was the easiest way out for everyone. Owen, who hailed from a humbler social background, was less

sure-footed as a poet, and really had had a breakdown. Sassoon took Owen under his wing, to some extent. In particular, he encouraged his poetry and helped Owen finesse his style. Craiglockhart was a little bit like a university. There was cricket and golf to be played, amateur dramatics, concerts and an in-house magazine, The Hydra. For Owen, this regime and the tutelage of Sassoon were liberating. He edited the magazine, wrote poems, which he shared and discussed with Sassoon, and took German lessons from the librarian at Edinburgh University. Sassoon was visited by his friend Robert Graves, who also gave Owen advice on his poetry. Owen’s time at Craiglockhart seems to have genuinely transformed his poetic output. Graves and Sassoon certainly thought so. He arrived almost as Sassoon’s pupil and left as his peer. Craiglockhart’s success was measured by the number of men it got back into the field fighting. Far more patients from Craiglockhart returned to the fighting than from other military mental hospitals during the First World War. Sassoon went back to the front and suffered a bad head injury, which took him out for the rest of the war. Perhaps if Craiglockhart hadn’t been so successful in restoring Owen’s mental health, he would never have had to return to the fighting and might have died a venerable man of letters in the late-20th century. Instead, he too returned to his regiment and to the front, fighting extremely bravely and winning an MC – which was important to him, as he wanted to be on a par with Sassoon as a soldier as well as a poet. He was killed, aged 25, on 4th November 1918, while leading his men across a river. It was a week before the armistice. Sassoon died, aged 80, in 1967. This is an interesting book in many ways, the central part of the story being Owen and his extraordinary transformation at Craiglockhart. The story of how the Craiglockhart regime proved so successful in treating shellshocked soldiers is also fascinating. I put it down wanting to know more about both: Owen’s transformation as a man and a poet; and the regime that was put in place at Craiglockhart – with perhaps a bit more about some of the other patients. But, anyway, a book that is a spur to further reading is a good book. Benedict King worked at the Bank of England

The Earth didn’t move THEODORE DALRYMPLE The Shortest History of Sex By David Baker Old Street Publishing £14.99 Sex is like murder – everyone is interested in it. Indeed, the two are often linked. But it is conceivable that sex might never have existed, or that somewhere in the universe there is life without sex. This book traces its origins on earth and follows it down to the present day, when it appears to be giving us so much trouble. Unfortunately, the author is so afraid that his subject is too dry for the average reader that he indulges, especially in the first half of the book, in a kind of adolescent, facetious humour, which gives a dirty-postcard feel to his prose. With regard to the evolution of the female orgasm, he says: ‘The orgasm may well have evolved to make her relative stillness happen more organically, instead of the female mammal immediately getting up and running off shortly after she pushed her grunting male mate off her, and he lit up the Cretaceous equivalent of a cigarette.’ Or again: ‘Thus, our evolutionary history is littered with alpha-Chad douchebags who turn out to be deadbeat dads.’ One may speculate as to why the author felt it necessary or appropriate to employ such language. Perhaps he wanted to establish that, despite being an academic, he is a man of the people (though this is not very flattering to the people). Perhaps the publisher thought a spoonful of vulgarity helps writing about genetics, evolution and anthropology go down. They might be right – such coarseness might nowadays be to The Oldie February 2024 55

the public taste – but I do not find that thought very comforting. When the author drops his compulsion to amuse his readership at every turn, as he mostly does in the latter part of the book, his expository prose is perfectly serviceable, with a consequent increase in quality. But, still, there are defects in the book. For example, he states, not once but repeatedly, that Homo sapiens emerged 315,000 years ago – not 314,000 or 316,000 years ago, but 315,000. I am far from an expert on the evolution of mankind, but this categorical assertion sounds suspiciously exact to me. If, indeed, it is well founded and generally agreed by experts, I think a line or two might have been included for the general reader on the evidence in its favour. More important, perhaps, is that the author is a neo-pagan without quite realising it. He is disdainful of religion but endows Mother Nature or evolution with all the attributes of the Almighty, complete with purposes and overall design: notwithstanding that the power and attraction of the evolutionary theory is that it explains, or purports to explain, animate existence without resort to such purposes or overall design. Thus features of life can ‘outstay their welcome’; exhaustion after copulation is ‘designed to facilitate the passage of sperm’; ‘evolution behaves like a gentleman for once’; ‘Mother Nature likes it when we have sex with strangers’; and ‘nature always likes an exception to the rule’. This is a kind of unacknowledged pantheism. The author sometimes goes in for the crudest of biologism. When, for example, he states that 0.6 per cent of the population are transgender or suffer from gender dysphoria, he treats this as a raw, straightforward and immemorial biological fact. He doesn’t realise that only four years before this statistic was touted, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of American Psychiatric Association gave a prevalence one seventieth as great. That disparity surely deserves and requires some explanation: the most likely, in my opinion, being that of social contagion, though other explanations are conceivable. The last part of the book, which deals with human sexuality in recorded history, is, however, on the whole, much better than the first part, and probably more interesting to most readers. The facetious tone is dropped, and the author becomes gratifyingly serious.

He is very good on the ironies of the so-called sexual revolution, which at first led to promiscuity but now has led to what might be called an epidemic of unwanted celibacy. He explains clearly why this might be and why the loosening of sexual mores has not led to the increase of happiness and satisfaction it once appeared to promise. He is no golden ageist: every dispensation has its contradictions, cruelties and drawbacks. Man might almost be defined not as the rational animal, but as the animal that cannot be fully satisfied. This book is a missed opportunity. If the author had controlled his desire to be chummy with his reader, it might have been much better. Dr Theodore Dalrymple is The Oldie’s doctor

‘Aren’t you a little too old to be reading comics?’

Hollywood baddies BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood By David Mamet Simon and Schuster I last saw that wayward genius David Mamet padding around a New York theatre. As often, he was dressed in black from top to toe and looked as if he was off to find a cauldron for some modern Macbeth. And here, in his latest collection of short essays, are what might be that pot’s ingredients: outrage, contempt, nostalgia, memories pleasing and awful, scabrous jokes and painfully funny anecdotes. Well, he’s just turned 76 and so is surely entitled to mix and stir the potion as he likes.

As his title indicates, Mamet actually has fierce dislikes – Hollywood producers above all. He sees them as destructive individuals and/or obstructive committees, variously calling them pigs, fools, liars, opportunists, pimps, pirates, criminal dolts, lemmings, bottom feeders, scammers, parasites, toadies, thieves, The Enemy and gormless bureaucrats, whose ‘mob thinking makes me sick’. They all, he says, are ‘flogging nonsense’. And Mamet speaks as the dramatist, screenwriter and director who has moved from Vermont, where he wrote that stage masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, to a city perilously near LA. Yes, he now calls himself ‘the Hermit of Santa Monica, shunning a world that has moved on’. Though he confides in a characteristically quirky aside that, ‘as an ocean, the Pacific disappoints’, the move makes professional sense. After all, he wrote and directed House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner and several other fine films and, he says, found working on set with a skilful crew and the likes of De Niro and Hackman ‘the most exhilarating thing in the civilised world’. Yet, again and again, other screenplays have been rejected or he’s suffered such indignities as seeing himself credited on-screen as the screenwriter for a ‘pile of shit’ (aka the film Hannibal) written by someone else after he had been fired. And indignities proliferate. Richard Zanuck fires Mamet as the screenwriter for Lolita, complaining he made Humbert Humbert ‘seem like a paedophile’. Sam Goldwyn Jr rejects his adaptation of his stage play Oleanna, saying ‘the enormous respect I have for your talent does not permit me to do anything but puke over this pile of shit’. But our author admits to behaving badly too. He snapped ‘Why don’t you f*ck yourself?’, jumped up and left when Neil Jordan, who had flown in from Ireland to discuss a Mamet script, presumed to say he had questions to ask. And was it nice to tell a student who asked him how to increase his chances of writing for television to ‘cut off your dick and eat it’? I myself have found David Mamet a delight to chat to but, no, he doesn’t always do nice. Indeed, his disenchantment extends beyond the movies to an America he sees as teeming with conformist, sententious idiots, ‘screaming “unclean” at anything that might hurt another person’s feelings’. He despises the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion apparatchiks’. The Oldie February 2024 57

He sympathises with men terrified of inadvertently gawping at scantily dressed women. He says the unsayable about racial politics and positive discrimination: ‘We knew the villain of old by his Black Moustache or Black Hat but today by his white skin.’ Well, he always was a contrarian. Oleanna was an attack on aggressive feminism and political correctness that, as he gleefully told me, provoked an entire row of Harvard professors to stand up and boo when the play hit Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet his recent Bitter Wheat, featuring a monstrous tycoon modelled on Harvey Weinstein, might almost have been propaganda for MeToo. He’s said that anger at free-market economics and political corruption inspired his scathing portrait of realestate sharks in Glengarry, yet he now openly supports Trump and Trumpism – which to me is like supporting the end of the world. There’s a lot of ranting and blathering in this book. Meandering too, as Mamet skips from subject to subject: directing, acting, hats, shoes, make-up, the merits of John Cleese, the stupidity of Cinemascope, and (citing one film’s ‘I knew your parents before they died’) clunky writing. But there’s warmth here, too, and melancholy when he remembers old films, old stars and an era when ‘the movie biz was an adventure, the culture raunchy, ribald and energising’. More humility and self-criticism might have made this book more appealing. Also, Mamet should rethink his fondness for unnecessary capital letters, since they, like postal letters written in green ink, don’t inspire trust. Yet this is a book that entertains, provokes and more. It’s slightly mad. It’s also pretty sane. Benedict Nightingale was a theatre critic at the Times

‘Just one “Ah” will do, Mr Tarzan’

Judi Dench in Twelfth Night, 1969

Much ado about rutting DANIEL HANNAN Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent By Judi Dench Michael Joseph £25 I came to this book with low expectations. I mean, I love Judi Dench. She’s a matchless performer, a national treasure and a one-woman repository of our postwar theatrical canon. But I never had her down as a literary critic. Her acting seemed animated by (to borrow Thomas Carlyle’s description of Shakespeare himself) ‘unconscious genius’. The one time I had seen her trying to appraise rather than act the great man’s work, on a BBC programme which revealed that she was distantly related to a lady-in-waiting at the 16th-century Danish court, she struggled to place Elsinore. And, after all, why should that surprise us? We don’t expect footballers to be commentators, or rock guitarists musicologists. The fact that we regularly solicit actors’ views on subjects other than acting would have astonished every previous generation. Samuel Johnson thought that actors were ‘no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs’. Plato saw them as prostitutes, and argued that ‘one should no more act a mean part than do a mean deed’. Rousseau wanted to ban theatrical performances on the grounds that they were a kind of formalised pretence that would rot people’s morals. So I was prepared for anecdotes rather than analysis. No doubt Dame Judi would have funny stories about Trevor

Nunn, but I was not expecting to learn much about Shakespeare’s characters. Boy, was I wrong. Yes, there are anecdotes. But there is also a wealth of original criticism. The 89-year-old actress perfectly remembers whom she appeared with in each performance, what she wore and almost all her lines. The book is presented as a Socratic dialogue, with thoughtful questions by Brendan O’Hea, a director at the Globe, provoking gorgeous flows of recollection. Shakespeare’s characters are, in some ways, more immediate and real to us than our flesh-and-blood friends. This makes us argue endlessly over their motives. We might wonder, for example, what Viola sees in Orsino. The question will nag away at us, and we will not be satisfied with dramatic necessity as an answer. Dame Judi has lived with and within these characters for seven decades. She understands them as no professor of English literature does. You keep seeing them in a new light – often, it must be said, in the same light. Put bluntly, Dame Judi’s heroines are all about the sex. Not just the Juliets and the Hermias and the Mistress Quicklys. No, almost every Shakespearean woman, played by this greatest of dames, spends her days thinking about men. Gertrude ‘always had the hots for old Claudius’. Regan ‘has had the hots for Edmund for a while’. Lady Macbeth kills herself because her relationship with her husband was going cold. Titania (‘Tits’) breaks off her sexual obsession for Oberon only when he magically redirects it. Even Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, might have had a slight thing for her son; Dench likes ‘the muddiness of not knowing if it’s sexual’. The magic of Shakespeare is, as Harold Bloom put it, ‘You can bring absolutely anything to Shakespeare and the plays will light it up, far more than what you bring will illuminate the plays.’ To Goethe, Shakespeare was a German; to G K Chesterton, a Catholic; to Maya Angelou, ‘William Shakespeare was a black woman.’ To Dame Judi, he had one thing on his mind. In her first Shakespearean role, a school performance as Richard II’s devoted wife Isabel, ‘I had to kiss a beautiful boy called Orry Pochin, who I was madly in love with.’ She drew it out lingeringly – and carried on that way for 70 wonderful years. Once, when Dench was making her entrance from the back of a theatre, she recognised Howard Davies, a director, in the audience from his shock of white hair. As she walked past, she dropped The Oldie February 2024 59

a note in his lap: ‘I suppose a fuck’s out the question.’ But when she reached the stage, ‘I saw that it wasn’t Howard at all, but a much older gentleman who looked very alarmed.’ So how did such a woman approach Cleopatra, the most complete, feminine and histrionic of Shakespeare’s ladies, one of four characters (along with Hamlet, Iago and Falstaff), whom the great critic A C Bradley considered ‘inexhaustible’? ‘God. Pfoof. You don’t need to act this stuff, do you? It’s just all there on the page.’ Spot on, Dame Judi. What makes her the actress of her generation is that she never thought she was bigger than the material. Colossal as her personality is, she never interposed it between the audience and the writing, giving primacy to the lines (which she read with rhythm). That’s how to do it. Every actress should read this book. So, perhaps, should every critic. Daniel Hannan is author of How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters

‘I hunt only for food’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Out of North Africa JUSTIN MAROZZI My Friends By Hisham Matar Viking £18.99 Hisham Matar is the real deal. If you haven’t yet heard of, or read, this New York-born Libyan writer, this is your chance to discover someone who writes like an angel. It will be little surprise if My Friends, his latest novel, wins an award or three. Matar has a habit of scooping them up. Published in 2017, The Return, a memoir that manages to be at once bleak, redemptive, annihilating and uplifting, won the Pulitzer Prize, in addition to a clutch of other awards. In the Country of Men, his debut novel of 2006, was shortlisted for the Man Booker.

The Return tells the story of Matar’s real-life return to post-Gaddafi Libya after decades in exile in the West. In My Friends, he returns to fiction to tell a similar and no less affecting story. Eighteen-year-old Khaled leaves his eastern Libyan home town of Benghazi to study at Edinburgh University. Here he meets Mustafa, a fellow Libyan student, whose deepening friendship will anchor him in exile for decades to come. Buoyed by the bravado of youth, they join a protest against the Gaddafi regime outside the Libyan Embassy in London. They do not know it yet, but it is a decision that will turn their lives upside down. On their way to St James’s Square, Khaled feels a presentiment: ‘that all the days from here on will be contingent on this one, that this, more than any other day, was the beginning of the future’. And so it proves. Both are shot and wounded. In real life, on 17th April 1984, the British policewoman WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead by Libyan officials firing a submachine-gun from inside the embassy – a murder for which no one has ever been convicted. Eleven demonstrators were also wounded. Prevented from returning to Gaddafi’s Libya, and to their families, Khaled and Mustafa are thrust overnight and entirely unprepared into the terra incognita of exile. Unmoored from his past, Khaled is adrift in the present, and clings for dear life to anything resembling stability. Just as important, this is the beginning of an all-consuming friendship – ‘the complicated intimacy of two who had shared and survived a terrible fate’. To this Libyan duo is added a third Libyan, Hosam, a writer and roving exile. He is the author of a powerful and strange short story, which, broadcast years earlier on the BBC Arabic World Service, caused a sensation in Libya in general, and in Khaled’s childhood home in Benghazi in particular. Years later, fate flings them together. When Khaled, by complete chance, happens upon a fellow Libyan working in Paris as a hotel receptionist, a game begins in which neither man will ask where the other is from. ‘The first to blink loses. An immigrant’s test of discipline, most probably ancient, for this instinct to pass unnoticed, to veil oneself, must surely be as old as time, as old as exile…’ There are good reasons for such secrecy. The Gaddafi government’s policy of eliminating opposition figures abroad – the so-called ‘stray dogs’ – brought blood to Europe’s streets from the 1980s. Disclosing one’s identity could be a matter of life and death.

Matar writes movingly, and with first-hand experience of the Gaddafi regime’s casual quotidian cruelty. Writers are kidnapped, tortured and killed. The opposition is snuffed out. Matar’s father is one of the ‘disappeared’, still missing, abducted by the Gaddafi regime. Exile, and the fragility and danger it brings, turn Khaled into an easy liar. He lies to his family, for his safety and theirs, to friends and strangers alike. He comes to enjoy the ‘conspiratorial confederacy’ that lying creates between him and Mustafa. It is so much easier to lie than to explain. But it is also destructive, as he discovers with his emotional relationships. Khaled recalls Hosam’s voice as piercing him with its ‘fierce tenderness’, two words that also encompass Matar’s freighted prose. In later life, in the years after the crushed hopes of the 2011 Libyan revolution, when militias rule the roost, civil war stalks the country and whole neighbourhoods have been turned into rubble, Khaled describes how Hosam has changed, undone by the tragedy that has unfolded around him. He sees ‘the doubt around the eyes, the cautious climate in them, and a face like a landscape liable to bad weather’. Khaled and Hosam, if not man-ofaction Mustafa, are, like Matar himself, profoundly bookish types and the literary references come thick and fast, perhaps a little too often. The bibliophile pair quote everyone from Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad and Tayeb Salih to Badr Shakir al Sayyab, Julio Cortázar and Abu al-Ala al-Maarri, the 11th-century Syrian poet, philosopher and atheist. If, all these years later, Matar remains haunted by exile, he must take some consolation from the rich literary seam he continues to mine from it. My Friends is a brilliant, heartscorching and unforgettable novel. Justin Marozzi is author of Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities That Define a Civilization

‘Let’s just pretend we’re in Venice’ The Oldie February 2024 61

Commonplace Corner Sexual harassment at work – is it a problem for the self-employed? Victoria Wood

Does it mean he has to sleep on the wet patch? A Frenchwoman on feminism

If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth. A P Herbert

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. Brigitte Bardot It’s success, not fame, that is quite addictive. I’m addicted to a lot of things and, as it happens, success is one of them. Robbie Williams

Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy. Christine Keeler It is totally impossible to be well dressed in cheap shoes. A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them. To achieve the nonchalance which is absolutely necessary for a man, one article at least must not match. Hardy Amies The things which are common to all (and not capable of being owned) are: the air, running water, the sea and the seashores. Emperor Justinian

TOM PLANT

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn’t you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better. Stephen Potter

Downsizing Here we go again. Yet another survey – this time by the property website Zoopla – has found that 42 per cent of the over-65s live in a home that is too big for their needs,

A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let’s emulate that wise old bird. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Sex-education lesson: Victoria Wood (1953-2016)

Extra-marital sex is as overrated as pre-marital sex. And marital sex, come to think of it. Simon Gray The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

and that older homeowners have 10 million spare bedrooms between them. Why don’t we do the decent thing, the survey asks, and downsize, so that families can occupy the homes we selfish old people insist on continuing to inhabit? My friends and family are always on at me to consider downsizing and freeing up my home to more deserving, younger people. At the age of 80, why don’t I move to a bungalow in Bicester, they ask, or into a nice retirement complex where I can play bridge and practise chair yoga? Why should I? Who says that my home, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, is too big?

Comedy is the one job you can do badly and no one will laugh at you. Max Miller Architecture aims at eternity. Sir Christopher Wren Stephen never knew where he was going, but he always knew the quickest way to get there. Frank Kermode on Stephen Spender I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Ever since King Lear’s daughters ordered him to get rid of his 100 retainers, old people have been bullied into to taking up ever less space, moving to a granny annex in their children’s garden and getting rid of their lifetime’s possessions.

SMALL DELIGHTS To wake on a winter morning to find my windows aren’t wet with condensation. RONALD CROWE, HORNCHURCH, LONDON

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

I’m perfectly happy in my fourth-floor Victorian flat in North Oxford, even if I do have to climb up and down 100 steps every day. I can manage them with ease, and I still enjoy titivating my home and keeping it up to date. If I become incapacitated in the future, there is plenty of space for a carer to live in and look after me. I can’t be bothered with the upheaval of moving, and culling my books, diaries, paintings and furniture to fit into a tinier place. Nor can most of my friends, many of whom are well over 65. While we are able, we are staying put in the homes we have lovingly created over the years. We refuse to be tipped out. LIZ HODGKINSON The Oldie February 2024 63

History

What the Romans did for us A British Museum show proves we were a remote outpost of the Empire

david horspool

The first big exhibition at the British Museum this year (light-fingered employees permitting) will be Legion: Life in the Roman Army. We are promised a show tracing the fortunes of a typical Roman legionary from recruitment to retirement, a career minimum term of 25 years. The legionary in question is, thankfully, not an imaginary Roman – to be filed alongside Asterix’s would-be nemesis, Crismus Bonus, or that bane of the modern schoolkid’s Latin life Caecilius, forever sitting in horto while his servus does all the work. No, the curators bring us a real-life legionary, Claudius Terentianus, a collection of whose papyrus letters survives from the second century AD, written to his ‘father’ (who may have been his godfather), Claudius Tiberianus. Terentianus was not one of those shivering soldiers writing home from Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian’s Wall. Glimpses of those lives are evocatively recorded in some of the earliest surviving written records in Britain, the Vindolanda tablets, which date from roughly the same period. In a reminder of the vast scope of the empire, and its multi-ethnic, multilingual character, the Terentianus letters come from the other side of the known world, from Roman Egypt. And they are written in Greek, as well as Latin. I look forward to seeing these fragments of a way of life almost 2,000 years old, with their timeless requests for warm clothing, complaints about a bad reference ruining a job application (it’s not what you know, Terentianus was finding out). Amazingly, there is a final letter of introduction for a retiring Terentianus, looking for a decent plot of land in which to invest his pension. There will be flashier remnants of the Roman past on show too, including the ‘sword of Tiberius’ – actually a scabbard – made of gilded bronze, with a design

Britannia rule: 1st century AD helmet

showing a general, Tiberius, giving a statuette of victory to the new emperor, Augustus. The sword, from the museum’s own collection, will be joined by the likes of the Dura-Europos shield, a unique survival from Syria of a painted wooden legionary’s scutum, a metre high and decorated with lions and eagles on a gorgeous, burnt-umber background. That will be loaned from its home at Yale University. Everybody is interested in the Romans, of course. Remember the popular recent suggestion – which began on TikTok and made it out into parts of the universe more familiar to Oldiereaders (and columnists) – that all men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. But I do wonder if the British are especially susceptible to the disease. We may be ditching some of the reverence in which classics used to be held, as the subject beats a retreat from state education, in the face of the Vandal hordes of more fashionable pursuits. Quoting Latin tags is more likely to be taken as a sign of being out of touch (or deliberately incomprehensible) than to be considered a mark of being cultured. But the idea of Roman Britain still has pull. The British Museum curators can be sure of a good turn-out. Many visitors will want to see the finds from good old Britannia: along with the Vindolanda tablets, they’ll get the Crosby-Garrett cavalry helmet and the Julia Domna ‘face pot’ from York. Yet our attachment to Roman Britain

hardly rests on its fabulous remains here. There are reminders of Roman sophistication, as at Aquae Sulis (Bath), but Britannia was always a remote outpost. It’s no coincidence that the most famous remnant of Roman rule is a wall, built (whatever trendier recent archaeologists argue) in part to keep out the even more untameable peoples to the north of this edge of empire. When Roger Wilson published his Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain in 1975, he had to admit, ‘There are no Roman monuments in this country which can compare with the Pont du Gard in Provence, the aqueduct at Segovia in Spain, the temples at Baalbek in the Lebanon or the amphitheatre at El Djemin Tunisia … The reason is partly that few such colossal structures were ever built here.’ We have discovered things since then, not least the Roman amphitheatre in the heart of London, beneath the Guildhall. But the fact we have to discover them shows the difference between our buried remains and the ones that smack you in the eye in Wilson’s list. The Spanish had stopped using the aqueduct at Segovia only two years before his book came out. Perhaps British attachment to Rome is really that of the jilted lover. The Romans left in 410 AD, and we have been missing them ever since. In the sixth century, the monk Gildas saw a nonRoman future as a divine curse. In the 12th century, Geoffrey of Monmouth constructed a whole Roman mythical past for Britain, which linked the name of the country to Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, legendary founder of Rome. It was all a fantasy, but it kept the dream of Romanitas alive. Some of that dream will still be lived out at the BM this year. Legion: Life in the Roman Army is at the British Museum from 1st February to 23rd June The Oldie February 2024 65

Arts WONKA (PG) Roald Dahl once said to Kingsley Amis, ‘What you want to do is write a children’s book. That’s where the money is today, believe me.’ ‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Amis. ‘I don’t think I enjoyed children’s books much when I was a child myself. I’ve got no feeling for that kind of thing.’ ‘Never mind,’ replied Dahl. ‘The little bastards’d swallow it.’ That seam of funny malice was what made Dahl’s books so thrilling – to evil-loving grown-ups, as well as children. It’s what made Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) so enjoyable, too. Dahl disliked the 1971 film version but it was full of deliciously wicked caricatures, like spoilt brat Veruca Salt, fatty Augustus Gloop and TV addict Mike Teavee. All that delightful malice has been removed from this prequel, Wonka, which as a result falls disappointingly flat. The premise is a perfectly good one – and Dahl’s stories are so memorable and

protean that they could lend themselves brilliantly to sequels and prequels. The young Willy Wonka, aspiring chocolatier, comes to an alluring town (part Mitteleuropean, classical CGI fantasy, part Oxford) to make his fortune. But his genius for chocolate creations is stymied by the three confectionery tycoons in town who want to wipe him out. These three baddies are normally brilliant actors: Paterson Joseph (Alan Johnson in Peep Show); Matt Lucas; and Mathew Baynton from Ghosts. It says something about how dull the script is – and how lacking in inventive nastiness – that even these three can’t lift the film above dud am-dram levels. Hugh Grant, as a camp, posh Lofty (an original Oompa-Loompa), mines his genius as an effete baddie (see his inspired turn as Jeremy Thorpe) to raise the dialogue above mere plot exposition. Olivia Colman, too, is a pleasure as Dickensian hag-landlady Mrs Scrubbit. As Willy Wonka, Timothée Chalamet is charming – elegantly elfin and gifted at injecting a natural quality into his lines. But those lines are so pedestrian that even he can’t provide the same sort of

otherworldly, slightly creepy magic Gene Wilder provided for Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). The songs in that film – Pure Imagination, The Candy Man and the Oompa-Loompa song – had the benefit of lyrics and music by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The songs in Wonka, where they don’t copy those earlier ones, are limp show-tune pastiches. The writers behind Wonka – Simon Farnaby and Paul King (the director, too) – also wrote the sublime Paddington 2. It’s a mystery how they managed to let this children’s film become so slack, bland and comedy-free. There are more Roald Dahl films in the pipeline. In 2021, Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for £564m. To make a return on that investment, four short films of Dahl stories by Wes Anderson appeared on Netflix this year. Netflix will also release The Twits in 2025. Here’s hoping the film of The Twits is laced with dollops of Dahl’s brand of heavenly evil. Otherwise, the little bastards – and we adult bastards, too – just won’t swallow it.

Timothée Chalamet is a charming, young Willy Wonka – up against Hugh Grant’s delightfully wicked Oompa-Loompa 66 The Oldie February 2024

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

FILM HARRY MOUNT

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK MACBETH Donmar Warehouse, London, until 10th February Why are actors so superstitious about Macbeth? Is it because Shakespeare used real spells, inciting curses from real witches? Or is it because his ‘Scottish play’ proved so popular that it became a reliable stand-by, a perennial last-minute substitute for any new show that flopped? I like to think it’s because Shakespeare’s most attractive villain is actually a terribly hard part to play. Over the years, I’ve seen this slippery role trip up some of our greatest actors, from Derek Jacobi to Peter O’Toole. The role combines too many contradictory traits. Macbeth must be both brave and cowardly; sensitive yet ruthless; by turns a callous murderer and an introspective poet. How exciting, after all these years, to see an actor master this elusive role. I thought David Tennant, the nation’s favourite Doctor Who, might be too nice to play Macbeth. How wrong I was. He grabs the part by the throat and rips the living guts out of it. He takes us on a frightening, electrifying journey, from valiant warrior to evil despot, revealing how base ambition can corrupt even the most moral, upright men. He’s understated in the ensemble scenes, intense and passionate in the soliloquies; there’s no vanity in his portrayal. You can tell how much it costs him. He lays himself completely bare. It’s a thrill to see this heartfelt performance in such an intimate auditorium, where almost every seat is within spitting distance of the stage. Any man who plays Macbeth is only as good as his Lady Macbeth, and Tennant is matched blow for blow by Cush Jumbo. Like his character, her Lady Macbeth is a complex mixture of opposing elements. She must be both powerful and fragile, instigating regicide and then sinking into insanity. Jumbo combines these contradictory attributes extremely well. Lady Macbeth has lost a child in infancy and is now barren. This is the secret grief that binds husband and wife together, and turns them into serial killers. Tennant and Jumbo are utterly convincing as these twisted lovers, driven and destroyed by their insatiable hunger for the Scottish crown. There are many other fine performances. Banquo and Duncan usually seem like little more than bit parts. Here, played by Cal MacAninch

Is this a candle which I see before me? David Tennant and Cush Jumbo

and Benny Young, they emerge as fully rounded characters. Like a lot of Shakespeare’s clowns, the Porter is often terribly unfunny. Played by Jatinder Singh Randhawa, he’s hilarious, reminiscent of Billy Connolly. But it pains me to report that this otherwise excellent production is severely hampered by some eccentric directorial decisions, which put unnecessary distance between the viewer and events on-stage. Director Max Webster has chosen to transmit the performance on a closedcircuit sound system. Every seat has a set of headphones, which you must wear throughout the show to hear what’s going on. When you listen to the show on headphones, the voices of the actors are augmented by spectacular sound effects. Yet, far from heightening the atmosphere, these hi-tech embellishments merely left me feeling alienated, as if I was watching a movie in a cinema, rather than seeing living actors in a theatre. This sense of dislocation is compounded by Rosanna Vize’s futuristic set. Though the main action is confined to a small apron stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience, many of the supplementary scenes are played out behind a glass wall. When you’re watching these actors through bifold doors, listening to them on headphones, it’s a wonder any immediacy survives at all. There’s some curious casting, too. The three witches are relegated to disembodied voices on our headsets. With good Shakespearean roles for women in such short supply, this seems like a dreadful waste.

Conversely, Ross, a Scottish nobleman, is played by a woman, Moyo Akandé, for no particular reason I can see. Akandé does a decent job, but her presence feels like a distraction, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief. I would have far rather seen her playing one of the witches instead. Yet, despite these considerable handicaps, this production still feels like a triumph, mainly due to Tennant and the superb actors who surround him. Tennant’s riveting performance is worth the admission price alone – but he’d be even better in an acoustic version, Macbeth Unplugged.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE It’s a common challenge for actors these days: portray a well-known figure in a drama set in the recent past. Everyone who saw Bradley Cooper’s Maestro in the cinema and then watched five BBC4 documentaries about Leonard Bernstein will have admired the uncanny likenesses. Ditto fans of The Crown. But I’ve just heard a radio play that sets a high bar for 2024. Jeremy Mortimer’s Radio 3 production of Bacon in Moscow tells how the late Francis Bacon’s exhibition in the Soviet capital in 1988 – the first glimpse of Western art the Russians got to see under Gorbachev’s glasnost era – came about. On every count, a thrilling exercise. First, the excellent writer Stephen Wakelam (one of whose previous radio plays revealed why the late Samuel Beckett married his wife Suzanne in 1962 in a secret civil ceremony in The Oldie February 2024 67

68 The Oldie February 2024

retrievable for up to a year ahead, or even for ever. Here are some: Roger McGough’s Poetry Please anthology of wintry poems (‘A cold coming we had of it…’); the novel Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido, read by Sally Phillips. And lovely memories of Maria Callas – not just the Archive Hour on La Divina, but the inventive Words and Music on Radio 3. I promise, nobody mentions that deadly phrase ‘What it means to be human.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Rewind to 2022. It’s season 25 of Silent Witness, and Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox) is in the Lyell Centre, performing a postmortem. Watching from the gallery is the usual clueless detective, plus hunky forensics expert, Jack Hodgson (David Caves). Whenever he sees a fresh kill, which is more or less every day, Jack licks his lips like a vampire and gives his biceps a little clench. Today they are clenched hard enough to burst the seams of his denim shirt. On the slab is a dead white male in his mid-thirties. ‘The presence of bilateral, periorbital haematomas and a fractured nose indicate a heavy blunt force assault,’ says Nikki, who is loveliness itself. Today her hair is braided in the manner of a Dutch milkmaid. ‘A CT scan indicates a skull fracture involving the frontal bone on the left side which continues to the skull base, and there’s intercranial haemorrhage associated with this.’ And there it is! Look closely. Press pause: the stiff’s swollen purple eyelid flickers. It doesn’t shoot up like the lid of a lizard; it just quivers, almost indiscernibly – but enough to prove that Emilia Fox is not prodding the usual purpose-built prosthetic cadaver. I mention this gaffe not to prove that

Emilia Fox: wakes the dead

by season 25 the longest-running crime procedural on British television had well and truly lost its mojo, but by way of crafting a metaphor. Silent Witness is not as dead as it looks. I agree that by season 26 the diagnosis seemed terminal. Jack and Nikki, now an item after ten years of showing no interest in each other whatsoever, saw off the Mafia, made human-trafficking a thing of the past, and survived a deep dive into the dark side of social media. But season 27, which has just begun, is showing definite glimmers of life. The producer, Jayne Chard, raised expectations when she revealed in a recent interview with Hello! that there would be major changes in the new series. She did not mean, however, that we should expect some decent scripts or credible plot lines, or that Nikki and Jack would now be in a thrupple with Velvy Schur, the trainee anatomical pathology technologist who has recently left his ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. She meant that Nikki would be wearing brighter colours in order to highlight her role as a fashion icon. So far, however, she has spent most of her time in a disposable white hazmat suit. The season kicks off with ‘Effective Range’, a two-parter written by Jim Keeble and Dudi Appleton. Episode one begins with a flashback to 2004. Calvin Dunn (Leo Staar), a suspected serial killer who hangs dead ravens upside down from trees and positions his victims on their knees in churches, is being interviewed by DC Ford about his whereabouts on the night of the most recent murder. Smiling at the camera, calling Ford ‘love’ and telling her that ‘the world’s gone mad’, Calvin Dunn is magnificently evil. They’re sticking heads on spikes in Iraq, he explains, lighting himself a fag, so it’s ‘kind of quaint to be worried about little birdies, isn’t it?’. Leo Starr’s performance is so classy that I wondered if I had tuned into the wrong programme. Silent Witness hasn’t had a character this entertaining since season 3. Fast-forward to the present day and ravens are once again hanging like bats in High End woods, and in the local church a strangled man is found kneeling by the altar. ‘There’s parchmentisation around the ligature mark here, and all the way across to here,’ says Nikki Alexander in her postmortem of the John Doe. ‘Generally that suggests a perimortem injury … the ligature abrasions follow a predictable

BBC

Folkestone) had stuck closely to his source material. This was the fascinating book of the same title by James Birch, the gallerist who promised Bacon an exhibition in Moscow and then had to contrive to arrange it with the most duplicitous people in the world. Secondly, the casting was inspired. Timothy Spall, now accustomed to playing painters (Turner, Lowry), and something of a painter himself, was a terrific choice for Bacon. He turned out to be an old acquaintance of Bacon’s from their days hanging out at the Colony Room and other dissolute Soho watering holes in the 1970s. Spall had closely studied the peculiarly posh/camp/spiteful tones of the socially hard-to-place Bacon and reproduced these with rapier accuracy. You simply knew at once that Spall knew Bacon. Finally, Jeremy Mortimer’s direction and mise-en-scènes were beyond reproach. Listeners were transported to Soho dives, restaurants and clubs and to several sinister Moscow rendezvous. There, James Birch (played by Luke Norris), the gallery-owner, meets ex-KGB operators, obvious spies and the lovely honeytrap Elena. The story is a cliffhanger. Bacon said he longed to catch the train from Moscow to Leningrad, to see the Rembrandts at the Hermitage. Right up until Birch’s departure for Moscow, after two maddening years of plotting and wrestling with protocol, Bacon’s suitcases were packed. That was despite his ditherings and dark forebodings about whether he should travel at all (asthma), about the British Council’s hijacking of the whole project, and about the expense and danger of transporting his paintings (who would pay?). A beautifully thought-out, carefully crafted and atmospheric production – the kind where editorial quality control is rewarded. From Reduced Listening. I am not immune from the random appeal of podcasts; my 40-something children appreciate them, but many just resemble conversations I might fall into at what used to be parties but have been supplanted by wakes. A nice little exception is the podcast about the Ashdown Forest in Surrey – Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. Along with advice on dealing with deer, episode six contained an interview with the distinguished biographer Ann Thwaite, who wrote the life of A A Milne and (aged 90) spoke eloquently and warmly about the real Christopher Robin. BBC Sounds is a flawed service, but it means I can commend programmes

Jan

‘Look, son – it’s Superman on his way to fight crime and save the planet from evil’

pattern of horizontal circumscription about the neck, distinguishable from marks left by, say, hanging. No discord bruising.’ According to the internet, the character of Nikki Alexander was originally based on Brooke Magnanti, a forensic scientist at the University of Sheffield. Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour, funded her PhD by working as a prostitute and documented her experiences in the anonymous blog Diary of the London Call Girl. Can the sainted Nikki really be based on Belle de Jour? If so, where, apart from in their both being female forensic scientists, are the similarities? Might this be a confusion caused by the fact that Nikki’s predecessor, Dr Sam Ryan (Amanda Burton), who left the show in 2004 but returned as part of the general weirdness of season 25, was based on another Sheffield forensic pathologist called Professor Helen Whitwell? If I ever find myself on a mortuary table, I would like the examination of my stomach contents to be accompanied by the Silent Witness theme music – a specially commissioned piece called Silencium which is as sublimely lovely as the Siren’s song. And the glass-shattering scream at the end is enough to stir the eyelid of the stiffest corpse.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE MUSIC MAGS No sooner had The Oldie published my jeremiad about the 2023 Edinburgh Festival’s irregular provision of printed programmes than an envelope arrived from an old friend of this column. It contained a splendid piece entitled ‘Programmes from the Past’, from last autumn’s Musical Opinion Quarterly. Written by Monica McCabe, widow of the Liverpool-born composer, pianist and writer John McCabe, it recounted her discovery of a large cardboard box crammed with concert programmes – mainly of the Hallé and Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras – which John had collected from 1949, aged ten, to the early 1970s. What years they were! He’d been young enough to hear Dinu Lipatti play Chopin and Beecham conduct a preposterously overstocked programme of favourites, including Delius’s In a Summer Garden, implausibly paired with the ice storms of Sibelius’s Tapiola. John was a regular attender at Liverpool’s culturally improving Industrial Concerts (7.45pm start to allow workers time to have their tea and change). He was there, too, in 1957 when

John Pritchard launched Liverpool’s Musica Viva concerts, a famous showcase for contemporary music. In the late 1960s, Monica, John and I began contributing to Records and Recording, a monthly title belonging to the egregiously wonderful and never to be replicated publishing house Hansom Books. It had been founded in 1950 by Philip Dossé, a 26-year-old recluse of limited financial means and no known abilities – other than those of hiring and firing editors and persuading the great and the good to write for next to nothing. His first venture was the magazine Dance and Dancers, co-founded with the wealthy and influential Old Harrovian designer, dance administrator and critic Peter Williams. Music and Musicians followed. Then, in 1954, at the height of the Establishment’s witch hunt against gay men, he launched Films and Filming. It offered a serious challenge to the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound. However, the riches Dossé accrued came mainly from the paper’s small ads and raunchy cover photographs. For 13 years, until the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, it was a favoured forum for many in the arts world and beyond. Books and Bookmen (1955) was said to be Dossé’s particular joy. Its shortestserving editor (four days) was The Oldie February 2024 69

review, received anything up to a year in arrears. Robert got round this by paying chosen reviewers 15 guineas for what would end up as fabulously illustrated 3,000- or 4,000-word features highlighting important new releases. Dossé begrudged the outlay but loved upstaging the competition – in this case, that dusty old dowager The Gramophone. Between 1968 and 1972, John and I would contribute between us two, sometimes three, features a month. Meanwhile, Lord Mischief, as Robert was known, was making hay, not least with his covers. For one ‘Critics’ Choice’ issue, he made a mock-up of the alligator eyeing the hapless dancing hippo in Disney’s Fantasia. Nothing fazed him. Nine days after Benjamin Britten had featured outside the newly-built Snape Maltings, the place burned down. I rang to commiserate. ‘Even better,’ purred Robert. ‘The Albert Hall’s on the January cover.’

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON GREAT DUETS

Cult classic: Records and Recording

Goodness knows what our circulation was. As Michael Barber says, those figures were known only to God, the printer and Dossé himself. I remember being dispatched to the Royal Opera House to interview its music director, Georg Solti. He had a large mahogany desk, behind which he’d positioned himself like a praying mantis waiting to strike. ‘So what is the circulation of your magazine?’ was his opening gambit. I had no idea. Someone had mentioned 4,000, claiming it was a loss leader in which Dossé had minimal interest. ‘Around 40,000,’ I breezed, and was promptly granted a 40-minute audience. The editor the three us worked for was an endlessly resourceful and wickedly amusing Scot by the name of Robert Leslie. Too tall to succeed as a dancer, he’d worked as a stand-in on the Boulting brothers’ film sets – principally for Terry-Thomas, who never knew his lines or where to move – and for Henry Stave & Co, the posh record shop in Dean Street. The basic fee was two guineas a 70 The Oldie February 2024

The Oldie cannot let the death of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan pass unremarked. As his evergreen festive floor-filler – Fairytale of New York – crested the charts yet again in memoriam, it hit me: this is more duet than Christmas choon. As Kirsty MacColl and Shane slug it out, full of piss and vinegar, ‘You’re a bum/ You’re a punk/You’re an old slut on junk,’ I thought – now this is romance. If music be the food of love, then the duet is the sensuous prelude to the feast. Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s mouthbreathing, mid-coital gasps of Je t’aime… Moi non plus; Sonny ‘I Got You Babe’ and Cher; Kenny and Dolly declaring they Two’s company: Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, 1977

are islands in the stream – all these are date-night bangers, even if Sir Tim Rice might take his green pencil to some of the lyrics. ‘We ride it together, ah ha/Making love with each other, ah ha/Islands in the stream/That is what we are…’ As a flailing Spotify – the tech giant shed 1,500 employees last month – is trying ever harder to ‘own’ our listening with its Wrapped feature – which scrapes all your data together to tell you who your favourite artists are, and how long you’ve spent listening to them, I decided to ask Spotify for my favourite duets. I’d just listened to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash’s classic version of Girl from the North Country – so I had high hopes of a decent list. ‘Duet music picked just for you’ started promisingly with Shallow, from the remake of A Star Is Born, sung by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Dolly and Kenny made it, Cold Heart by Elton John and Dua Lipa, You’re the One That I Want from Grease, Simon and Garfunkel, and Put Your Lights On by Santana and Everlast – all in all, a solid effort from the streamer. Something Stupid made the cut too – the classic duet, which everyone from Frank and Nancy Sinatra to Nicole Kidman and Robbie Williams has recorded. It’s simple; it’s short. Permit me to end on an anecdote. Some years ago, I was asked to a karaoke night for charity at Abbey Road Studios. Then it was my turn. I chose Something Stupid. But – it’s a duet! I needed a man! The first man my eyes met in the audience were those of the actor Samuel L Jackson. Always alive to a photo op, I pointed at him. ‘You!’ He came on and we grabbed mics. The lyrics came onto the teleprompter. We started gyrating. ‘I don’t know this one!’ he hollered in my ear. How could Samuel L not know the most famous duet in the songbook? It was a fiasco. ‘It’s a good thing you can write,’ said the editor of GQ as I came off stage, ‘because you can’t sing a note.’

PA/UNITED ARCHIVES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Michael Barber, whose amusing memoir of his editorship was recently republished as an Oldie blog. He says Dossé sacked him in person. This was most irregular. The provision of a one-way ticket to Bombay, courtesy of an advertising deal the company had with Air India, was Dossé’s usual way of letting an editor know that his time was up. Records and Recording began – and I began writing for it – in 1957. That was the year the BBC launched Record Review on Network Three – a new station, Radio Times reported, catering for oddball listeners who liked jazz, fishing or learning Spanish from scratch.

Clockwise from left: Kew Gardens by Edward Bawden, 1936; curator Christopher Brown, Bawden’s old pupil; Rag Rug by Lu Mason, 2023

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU

THE HIGGINS BEDFORD ©THE EDWARD BAWDEN ESTATE

EDWARD BAWDEN AND ME The Higgins, Bedford, 17th February to 13th October Edward Bawden (1903-89) was not just a true Essex man – born in Braintree, he lived for much of career at Great Bardfield and died in Saffron Walden. He was also a quiet national treasure, whose work is still widely loved. He was a commercial artist in the best sense, producing popular posters, book illustrations and witty advertisements, as well as murals, landscapes and an impressive body of war art. And he was the first – the only? – artist to be made a full Royal Academician under the designation ‘Draughtsman’.

He left his archive of around 3,000 works to what was then the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery and the Bedford Museum. That trove is the basis for this celebratory exhibition. The show has been curated by Christopher Brown, an illustrator and printmaker, who has marshalled 30 artists and makers to react to Bawden works in the museum. Each was invited to look through the archive and pick the one work that said most to them. The inspirations and responses are shown together. At the Royal College of Art, Brown was a student of Bawden and for a while his assistant. He was encouraged by him to take up linocut, for which he is now best known. As he says, ‘Edward would have wanted his archive to be not just a depository of his extraordinary

Bawden was a quiet national treasure, whose work is still widely loved

collection of works, but a source of inspiration for all.’ The participants include: fashion designer Lulu Guinness; ceramicists Vicky Lindo and Sussex Lustreware; illustrator Jeff Fisher, best known for book covers, including Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; rag-rug-maker Lu Mason; and stone-carver Matt Loughlin. Christopher Brown says, ‘I think Edward would be amused to see that so many artists, printmakers and designers are paying homage to his work. Some of them knew him personally, while others know him only by his work. What links them all is their obvious admiration for the man and his output. Work gave him great pleasure, and the work itself has given and continues to give great pleasure to others.’ Upstairs in the Edward Bawden Gallery, the exhibition continues with an informal collective of Bedfordshire illustrators and proselytisers, known as the Circus of Illustration. They have been commissioned by The Higgins to support eight local artists in producing a body of new illustrations inspired by the Edward Bawden archive. The Oldie February 2024 71

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER WINTER WONDERLAND

Don’t let sarcococca’s tricky spelling put you off. These smallish evergreen shrubs with fine stems and foliage amply repay the purchase price with a prolonged Hallelujah! Days are longer, fair-weather annual abundance of petite yet terrifically strong-scented, white flowers. gardeners are emerging from their They’re happy in the shade too, burrows and green shoots are against a north-facing wall. shooting everywhere. A few blossoming sprigs in Hellebore-hunters are a vase bring more than the active. Galanthophile gurus promise of spring indoors. are on their hands and knees, Camellia sasanqua is rear end uppermost – among the earliest of its bottomising, says a botanist clan to brighten mid- to friend. But Lent lilies and late-winter days. It bears snowdrops aren’t the only flowers. ‘numerous progeny’ (Hillier Of the several winter-flowering again), appreciative of some honeysuckles – shrubby, steadfast, Winter easily grown, easily sourced honeysuckle shelter against a south- or westfacing wall. I’d say its many – Lonicera fragrantissima unfailingly braves the February elements, varieties are too costly to experiment with. But, if tempted, satisfy your yearning sporting small, creamy-white flowers, with ‘Crimson King’ and/or ‘Narumigata’. which are, yes, fragrant. It’s been in British gardens since 1845, when Scottish Leave the plentiful others to folk with heated glasshouses, in which they can bask in plant-hunter Robert Fortune hauled it something akin to a Mediterranean climate. back from one of his China exploits. Two more woody must-haves where A close relative, L × purpusii, is also space is available: Garrya elliptica worthy of a favoured spot, where its ‘James Roof’ for its intriguing pale grey perfume can be huffed. It has a couple of named improvements: ‘Spring Romance’ catkins up to eight inches long at this time of the year; and any of the and the similar, exceedingly freehamamelis (witch hazel) fraternity whose flowering ‘Winter Beauty’. Go on. Buy ‘spidery’ flowers, from the palest yellow both. Sweeten future Februarys. to rich ruby red, adorn naked branches Find fragrance too among the throughout these chilly weeks. daphnes – more expensive but worth But, here again, you’ll need a deep their pennies; sorry, guineas. pocket if you want a group of them, A clue to its sweet odour is embedded in the species Daphne odora. It’s another although there’s no risk of their being slayed by any of winter’s full-on blasts. Far Eastern shrub, for which the mighty Heathers I don’t do. But if you must, and wholly reliable Hillier Manual of Trees & Shrubs advocates some winter protection garden centres will be happy to oblige. They’ll be flooded with them right now. but nevertheless considers it ‘hardy Lamentably leaving aside hellebores enough to withstand frost of considerable and snowdrops – the gardening press severity’. That’s my kind of plant. And overdoses on them at this time of year – I Hillier will guide you to many another. can guide you to some alternative delights. We gardeners are perhaps tempted by For years, I’ve grown Iris reticulata, too much exotica; it empties our wallets, whose ball-bearing-sized bulbs I pot up as well as our gardens.

as soon as they reach the shops each autumn. It’s their clear blues of a spring sky that I crave, beautifully realised in the varieties ‘Harmony’, ‘Blue Planet’ and the newish ‘Alida’. Try them intermingled with sunny yellow I danfordiae and stand by for swathes of uplifting colour on six-inch stems. And what better promise of a forthcoming spring than the equally failproof splendour of the diminutive crocus? Common, perhaps – but so are roses in their season. Plant hundreds come September. Their plenty nourishes the soul. David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD DAHLIAS My wife grows several varieties of dahlia successfully every year. Either they are left in the ground and covered with a mulch after the first frosts, or the roots are lifted and stored in sand over winter. However, there is another use for the roots – which she would not allow, but was favoured by the Aztecs of Mexico centuries ago. They can be eaten. Anyone who doubts the edible qualities of dahlia roots should refer to the Royal Horticultural Society’s book Vegetables for the Gourmet Gardener, in which two pages are devoted to them. They became less popular in Mexico with the arrival of potatoes from South America, But when the plants were introduced to Europe in the late-18th century by the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl, he recommended dahlia roots as food because, unlike potatoes, they were resistant to blight. The roots are roughly oval in The Oldie February 2024 73

shape, some with the appearance, though not the colour, of a small sweet potato, while others that we have dug resemble baby new potatoes. According to the RHS, they can be used and cooked in the same ways as potatoes. Having boiled, sliced and fried a couple of tubers, I would say they have the taste and texture of water chestnuts. With bacon and mustard, they were perfectly acceptable. If anyone cares to experiment with dahlia tubers in the kitchen, beware of those that have been bought recently from a garden centre, as they may have been chemically treated. If grown for food, the tubers should be planted about six inches deep in spring, and most of the flowerheads removed so that the plant’s energy will be directed at the root system. However, I am sure our dahlias will once again be grown this year principally for their glorious summer colour. Among favourite varieties are the rich, dark red of After Dusk, the bright pink Selina, the creamy pillows of Café au Lait and the star-shaped white Honka Fragile. No wonder the Mexicans, having gathered the tubers since time immemorial, decided 60 years ago to declare the dahlia the country’s national flower.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD MY TUBBY VALENTINE

ELISABETH LUARD

Once in a blue moon, Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day, as it does this year. Decisions, decisions. Sins of the flesh or sackcloth and ashes? No need to choose. Cover both bases with a batch of homemade chocolate truffles and a couple of fiery little salsas that’ll make even the shortest of Lenten commons taste good.

Chocolate truffles Roses are red, violets are blue and if you’ve already spent the winter-fuel payment, so are you. Make these exquisite little mouthfuls just before you need them – fresh cream doesn’t keep for more than a few hours out of the fridge. Makes about 1½lb. 74 The Oldie February 2024

500g high-quality dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids) 250ml whipping cream Optional: a dash of strong liquor – brandy, whisky, crème de menthe, rum About 100g cocoa powder, sieved or squashed free of lumps Break the chocolate into small pieces into a bowl. Heat the cream in a roomy pan, remove as soon as it rises and allow to cool for a minute or two. Beat the hot cream into the chocolate with a wooden spoon till it’s smooth. Chocolate melts at body heat – so you need to keep it warm. Beat in the optional liquor. Leave to cool at room temperature for a couple of hours. Whisk with an electric beater till the mixture becomes light and airy and begins to set – 3-4 minutes. If it fails to lighten and set, the chocolate was too lean: melt it gently over hot water with an ounce of two of unsalted butter and whisk again. Drop teaspoonfuls of the mix into the cocoa powder on a plate. Roll them around to coat, making them as spherical as you can, and transfer to a tray dusted with more cocoa powder. Set the tray in the fridge for the truffles to firm. Pop them in a box, tie it with a ribbon, tuck a rose in your teeth and present it on bended knee. Salsa romesco Usually served in Catalonia with bacalao – salt cod, soaked and blistered on the grill – as the traditional fasting food in Lent, and just as delicious as a dip for toasted sourdough with a handful of bitter leaves – endive or dandelion or frisée – on the side. Makes about 500ml. 2-3 garlic cloves, skinned and crushed ½ tsp sea salt 2 heaped tbsp fresh breadcrumbs fried crisp in a little olive oil 2 heaped tbsp toasted almonds 2-3 roasted/ fried red peppers, de-seeded 2-3 large tomatoes, skinned, roughly chopped 1 fresh red chilli, hulled and de-seeded 3-4 tbsp sherry or wine vinegar About 150ml olive oil Drop the garlic, salt, breadcrumbs and almonds into a food processor and whizz to blend. Add the pepper, tomatoes, chilli and vinegar and process till smooth. Add the oil in a thin trickle, as for a mayonnaise, till thick and shiny. Store in the fridge in a screw-top jar. Salsa pibil No need for exact measurements for this simple Mexican salsa. Combine a diced

onion with a handful of pitted green olives, 1-2 de-seeded green chillis and a generous handful of fresh coriander or mint leaves or both. Add the grated zest and juice of one lemon or an orange (or both), mix well and leave to blend the flavours for an hour or so at room temperature. Good with plain-cooked rice and a fried egg, as they like it in Yucatan, land of the Mayas. Store as above.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE INDIA’S WINNING TEAM It’s the curry time of year. I launched this season in NeoByzantine style at the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus, which has been joyously taken over by Masala Zone. While feasting on their excellent starters, I realised that, 160 years after its opening, Ranjit Mathrani’s MW Eat Group is not just the ideal heir of the Byzantine Revival but also well suited to the innovation of the Criterion’s founders, Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond. They met in Melbourne during the gold rush. Unlucky in their search for gold and unsuited to sloshing around muddy streams, they launched the Café de Paris there for successful miners to bathe in champagne. Brilliantly entrepreneurial, they were the first to invite out a team of English cricketers, thus paving the way for the Ashes. Following the success of the Silver Grill in Ludgate Circus, they continued with the Criterion in 1873. One of its dining rooms was the American Bar, ‘a very good place for an undress dinner’, commented Nathaniel Newnham-Davis. The architect Thomas Verity’s design cost them £80,000. The impact of their innovation on casual dining in the late-19th century is matched by MW Eat’s transformation of the Indian restaurant scene – from sticky-carpeted dives serving chicken in spicy gravy to the six-pints crowd, to the delicate and sophisticated flavours of the subcontinent in elegant surroundings. It was Camellia Panjabi, Ranjit’s sister-in-law, who set the ball rolling with the Bombay Brasserie, in South Kensington, in 1982. For the first time, we Londoners were being served regional Indian cuisine amid décor more suited to French or Italian restaurants. She even served seafood, cocktails and good wine. In 1990, her sister, Namita, followed suit with Chutney Mary – with funding from her banker husband, Ranjit, and Neville Abraham, who had already

launched the Chez Gérard Group together. A Chutney Mary was the term given to an Indian girl who wanted to shake off her traditional ways and ape the fashions and dance moves of the modern Brits. Their Anglo-Indian menu reflected this – and, unlike the standard curries of yore, their dishes were cooked from scratch every day. In 2015, they moved from the King’s Road to their even more glamorous site in St James’s Street. It soon won AA Restaurant of the Year. Then came their takeover of tired Veeraswamy in 1996, and Amaya in 2004. There’s no doubt that they gave other Indian restaurateurs the encouragement to aim higher in both gastronomy and location. Mayfair became the new Tooting High Street. Eurocentric Michelin belatedly recognised their very high culinary standards when it awarded Atul Kochar a star for Tamarind in 2001 and for Benares in 2007. Amaya collected theirs in 2004. Yet – with the exception of Yaatra, in Westminster, where I enjoyed a three-course set dinner for £34.50 – most of these high-end venues are beyond my budget. And here’s where Masala Zone wins. Its street menu is a delight for the post-Christmas purse. Starters and main courses come in under £7.50 and £19.50 respectively. The elegance and freshness are still there but at a third of the price and in central locations. There are branches in Covent Garden, Soho and, of course, Earl’s Court. Maybe Melbourne will welcome them, too.

DRINK BILL KNOTT THREE CHEERS FOR BEER The year 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the Good Beer Guide, the Campaign for Real Ale’s annual survey of Britain’s best pubs for traditional, well-kept beer. A stapled, 18-page newsletter preceded it, but 1974’s Good Beer Guide (75p) was properly bound and ran to 96 pages. It also ran into trouble. The entry for Watneys – the Red Barrel brewers of abominable memory – advised readers: ‘avoid like the plague’. Worried about a libel suit, the publisher recalled the first print run, changing the phrase in the reprint to ‘avoid at all costs’. My father, a Cambridge don with a penchant for real ale, was an early

devotee, to the extent that the Good Beer Guide – which, by 1977, had grown to 256 pages – more or less dictated our family holidays. Not for him the architectural musings of Nikolaus Pevsner, nor the stately homes that populated the National Trust Handbook. No, instead we would pile into the Ford Escort and drive through a wilderness of Whitbread Tankard and Double Diamond in search of establishments such as the Three Tuns, in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire. The Three Tuns has been brewing its ales on site since 1642, making it the oldest licensed brewery site in Britain, and it is still going strong. Their excellent beers are available online – threetunsbrewery.co.uk – but, as my father often opined, nothing tastes as good as a freshly drawn pint from a ‘brewery tap’. In the 1970s, the Three Tuns was one of just a handful of pubs that brewed their own beers. Now, happily, there are hundreds: quaffale.org.uk has a comprehensive list and a searchable map. The Escort never made it as far as Cornwall. Nonetheless, I can heartily recommend the Blue Anchor, in Helston, which has brewed its own beer since the 18th century. Their Spingo range of beers are strong (especially the Special), slightly sweet, hoppy and dark, and the pub itself is a cheery warren of dark-wooded snugs, perfect for idling away an hour or two away from the tourist hubbub. And I had a very good, beery lunch recently at Acme Fire Cult, a grill restaurant in Dalston, east London, which adjoins the 40FT Brewery (40ftbrewery.com). Named after the length of the old shipping containers that house its tanks and fermenters, 40FT also has its own taproom, should you wish to eschew food and simply sample the beers. I was particularly taken by the St John Eccles Stout, a seasonal brew that incorporates spiced currants from renowned Smithfield restaurant St John’s Eccles cakes. 40FT is a very modern brewery – it was founded by brewer Steve Ryan in 2015 – and it concentrates on ‘craft beer’, not real ale. But, as I gnawed through thick slices of perfectly pink Longhorn bavette steak and sipped my way through their range of beers, my mind skipped back several decades to the courtyard of the Three Tuns and furtive slurps from my father’s pint. Not so much déjà vu, perhaps, as déjà bu.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a classic white Bordeaux blend, a Pinot Noir from low-yielding vineyards in the Vallée de l’Aude, and a mediumbodied Sangiovese from the heel of Italy. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Château Haut-Rian, Bordeaux Blanc Sec 2022, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 A blend of 60 per cent Sémillon and 40 per cent Sauvignon Blanc: flavours of green apple and a hint of spice. Montsablé Pinot Noir, IGP Haute Vallée de l’Aude 2022, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Strawberry-scented Pinot noir from the Languedoc: juicy and very well made. Sangiovese ‘Terre Allegre’, Puglia 2022, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 Ripe, fruity Sangiovese with soft tannins: perfect with a bowl of pasta and ragù.

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The Oldie February 2024 75

SPORT JIM WHITE PARIS, THE OLYMPIC CHAMPION This is Olympic year. The 2024 Games begin in Paris on 26th July, with some spectacular locations in the French capital lined up to stage events. There will be beach volleyball beneath the Eiffel Tower, open-course swimming along the Seine and archery in the Esplanade des Invalides. Plus surfing in Tahiti – admittedly less accessible by Eurostar. But it is over the coming months, in the lead-up to the Games, that we will all be able to witness one Olympic tradition which never seems to pall: the relentless predictions of doom, gloom and misery. Remember Athens in 2004? For weeks before, we were constantly told the stadiums weren’t going to be ready, nothing had been built and events would take place on a construction site. Or Beijing in 2008, when the insistence was that every visitor – competitors included – would have their mobile devices hacked by the Chinese state for nefarious purposes. Or Rio in 2016, when the Zika virus was at large and anyone pregnant when they turned up in Brazil would end up delivering a baby with an oversized head. Even Sydney in 2000, a Games widely reckoned one of the best ever, was prefaced by the panicky news that great white sharks were roaming around the harbour in the precise spot where the triathlon swimming leg would take place. Nothing, though, could match the prevailing sense of impending disaster that accompanied the build-up to London in 2012. For months we were told nothing would be ready; nothing would work; the London transport system would crumble. Newspaper columnists bleated that it would be better for the country’s selfesteem to cancel the thing now. It was going to be a national humiliation. I remember going to a dinner party about a month before it began and saying how much I was looking forward to it. I was roundly turned on by all the other guests. They informed me the whole thing was a grotesque misuse of money; it would be total chaos – an embarrassment. I pointed out that to anyone who had ever been to Wimbledon or Ascot or Lord’s, it was pretty clear Britain had some experience of staging sports events. This was loudly pooh-poohed. One couple proudly revealed that, to avoid the shame, they’d booked two weeks abroad to coincide with the event. And while they were in Tuscany, they said, they would refuse to watch the telly or read the newspaper. 76 The Oldie February 2024

It was a decision they came to regret, from the moment Danny Boyle’s magnificent opening ceremony began. In these times of collective discomposure people now look back on it as a glorious moment of national pride – perhaps our last point of genuine togetherness. And it is worth remembering that. As we read gloating articles about how Paris won’t be up to it – how the unions are preparing strikes; how the Seine is so polluted that the swimming competitors risk permanent contamination; how local Airbnb prices have turned stratospheric – we should cast our minds back to the spring and early summer of 2012. In France already there’s a widespread insistence that their Games will wilt in comparison with ours – a nice irony, given how many of us were convinced ours was going to be a shambles. But the period leading up to a Games has absolutely no bearing on reality. I know of at least one couple who, having spent two weeks in Italy forlornly realising they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, could reassure those Parisians despairing about what lies ahead. So if I have one piece of advice for the next few months, it is this: don’t believe the Olympic Cassandras. The Paris Games are going to be magnificent.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD NOT-SO-SMART SCREENS We accept that it’s unsafe to use handheld mobile phones while driving and that we can be punished for it. Your eyes may be on the road but your mind is elsewhere. You can witness this on every city pavement, when other pedestrians, engrossed in hilarious or troubling exchanges, walk right into you, eyes wide open. They can see what’s before them but they’re not paying attention to it. But what if they can’t see, because their eyes as well as their minds are elsewhere? Wouldn’t that be even worse? Yet it’s what car manufacturers – including Volvo, of all people – are encouraging in their flight from buttons and switches to touch screens. The latest example is the new electric Volvo EX30. I haven’t yet seen, let alone driven, one but Autocar’s Matt Prior has reviewed it with refreshing and courageous honesty. He finds it ‘terrific to drive’, entertaining and strongly performing, with ‘levels of agility, grip, adjustability and engagement’ that few cars match. The interior is clean, light and roomy, with high-quality

materials and plenty of storage space. Plus, being a Volvo, it ticks all the safety boxes. But he concludes, ‘I cannot in any honesty recommend you buy this car.’ His reason is that Volvo ‘has gone touchscreen heavy’. There are a few physical switches – windows, door locks, indicators, wipers, gear shift, audio and cruise control – but for everything else you have to go into the touch screen and through menus. This includes fog lights (two menus away from the home screen), door mirrors, glove box, wiper sensitivity, climate control (different taps for temperature, circulation and demisting), audio selection, heated seats, driverassistance systems and so on and so on. All right, you can set it all up before you start – every time? – but you often want to change temperature, audio or whatever as you go along. If this can be done by switches, as on our ancient screenless Volvo XC60, muscle memory soon teaches you to do it without taking your eye off the road. But to have to peer your way through the home screen plus two menus to turn on the fog lights – presumably because it’s foggy and therefore all the more important to keep your eyes on the road – cannot be safe. It wouldn’t sound good as your reason for running into the car in front. Just as it’s illegal to be on your phone while looking at the road, it’s illegal not to be looking at the road at all. Why then do manufacturers – especially such safetyconscious manufacturers as Volvo, who gave us the seat belt and now limit their cars to 112mph – install equipment that encourages driving without due care and attention, as the charge sheet might have it? Because it’s cheaper is part of the answer; because they can is another. They probably think it’s smarter to have a screen, and in some ways screens are seriously helpful driving aids – when you’re navigating, for example. But because they require distracting fiddling when you’re on the move, they’re potentially lethal. Doubtless the engineers who design them make them work very well, but most of us don’t want to have to go through every setting we might conceivably want on a journey before we start. And requirements often change during the journey – according to weather, seating position etc. I’m not saying we should return to the Spartan simplicity of my old Defender cabin, in which you can operate everything by feel. But manufacturers should pay more attention to those – and they are many – who are neither car nor driving enthusiasts and who just want something safe, reliable, comfortable and simple.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Driverless road to the future I’m just back from a trip to San Francisco. It was for a suitably Oldie-style event, my uncle’s 100th birthday, not to be missed. As you might expect, digital life was not much in evidence at the party, but it was in control almost everywhere else. A smartphone is becoming a necessity for travel of almost any distance. When it all works, it’s painless and efficient. I wonder how long it will be before our passports are built into our phones? Surely that’s coming. However, in San Francisco the real evidence of digital advance was on the street, with the fascinating sight of the many driverless cars buzzing

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around. There were often passengers sitting in the back, and nobody in the front; even stranger, some of them were completely empty, like the Mary Celeste. I had not realised that things had gone this far. Most of them are taxis or robo-taxis, as the locals call them, run by a subsidiary of Google called Waymo. They’ve been allowed to charge for rides only since August. While dozens of firms have been given licences to test driverless cars, the only other big one is Cruise (owned by General Motors), but in October that had its licence revoked, following an accident in which a woman was dragged under one of its cars. They are not perfect – occasionally driving into wet cement, for example – and it seems that driverless cars find it more difficult than human drivers to understand hand signals from police, or to deal with pot-holes. They have also spawned a new sport for some human drivers: bullying the Waymo cars. That is, driving too close and causing them to stop or swerve. There have even been some attempts at robbing the passengers, while the car sits quietly, waiting for the robber’s car to move. No heroic black-cab driver leaping to your assistance here. Nonetheless, the technical achievement is impressive. The cars bristle with cameras and have a box on the roof that contains the magic equipment that makes it all work. They were navigating busy city streets and junctions pretty well and, of course, they

don’t get sleepy or drunk or suffer from road rage. I would have tried one, but there is a massive queue for access to the service. A friend who uses them described the journey as ‘unremarkable’, which I suppose is reassuring. One of the concerns is that as they are so new, there is not yet any proper set of safety regulations. Only four cities in the USA have approved their use, and that will have to change if the companies involved are ever to make a profit, especially given the gigantic amount that has already been spent on research and development. I imagine that will finally determine their future: if they can’t make money, they won’t take off. Our government already allows driverless cars to be tested on public roads if there is a human on board to take over if necessary. This is obviously unattractive to the operator; if they must provide a driver, why are they going to bother to pay for all the self-driving gubbins? There is also a vague plan to allow driverless cars in the UK by 2025. We’ll see. Would I use one? My own car has the capacity to parallel-park on its own, but I have never had the nerve to try it. So I wonder if I would be brave enough to use a driverless car; there seems to be so much to go wrong. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have to listen to the driver’s political views. For that reason alone, I might give them a go.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Tax-free present for your daughter Saving for a pension is all very well but, for the average Oldie-reader, it’s something you already know all about or it’s too late to start now. More likely, an employer has been incentivised by the government to get you into a scheme, and you can see why. The more you have in your pension when you stop working, the less likely you are to be a burden on the state in your dotage. 78 The Oldie February 2024

Had you been paying attention (you weren’t), you might have heard the Chancellor mention ISAs in last month’s Autumn Statement. He made some technical changes which need not concern us here – yet few understand how attractive these savings instruments are to anyone who can afford to take a long view, especially as the burden of income tax is becoming progressively more painful.

The plain-vanilla Individual Savings Account allows you to put up to £20,000 each financial year into an ISA. The money comes out of your taxed income but, once in the ISA, it’s beyond the taxman’s maw. Dividends and capital gains alike are tax-free, whether they stay in the ISA or are taken out and spent. There’s more. The ISA is designed as a wrapper for a share portfolio but, unlike with a pension pot, you can get at the

capital at any time. You can take as much out of your ISA as you like and, provided you put the cash back in before the end of the tax year, you can still add up to that year’s £20,000 without penalty. Say you have an ISA portfolio worth £100,000, and a daughter who wants £30,000 to help her buy a flat. You sell some of your portfolio and take the cash out. Put (up to) the same amount back into the ISA before the next 5th April, and you can still also add £20K to the pot.

Incidentally, while £100,000 sounds a lot, it is less than five years’ maximum subscriptions, assuming your shares have gone up and have paid dividends. Withdrawing your own money this way is far cheaper than borrowing from the bank. If you fail to find the money to put back before the 5th April doomsday, the only downside is that you will have lost part of a valuable tax shelter. On the upside, you may have a happy daughter.

The glories of Baroque and ancient southern Sicily

Webwatch Doodle.com An online tool for organising meetings with groups – if you can persuade them to use it. webcamtaxi. Monday 17th June com – Syracuse Live Depart 10.30am for webcams guidedaround tour of from Ortygia, including the world.

with Charlie Hall 13th to 20th June 2024 Fans of Inspector Montalbano will be familiar with the beautiful backdrop to the TV series. This is your chance to explore this extraordinary region with Charlie Hall, the director of the highly regarded John Hall Venice Course, which was started by his father in 1965. We will be based in exquisite Ragusa, where we have taken all 14 rooms at the Relais Antica Badia (www. relaisanticabadia.com), a beautifully restored palazzo – located in front of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista – which has a small spa and roof terrace. We will be dining in tried and tested restaurants where we will feast on Sicily’s rich gastronomy.

Thursday 13th June – Arrival

Tuesday 18th June – Villa Romana del Casale and Caltagirone

7.15am Depart Gatwick on BA 26101; 11.30am arrive Catania. Transfer to Relais Antica Badia in time for late lunch. Strolling tour of the town followed by welcome talk by Charlie Hall; dinner at the hotel.

Arguably the greatest collection of mosaics in Europe, including the bikini girls, covering 3,500 square metres. Lunch at Ristorante Coria, in the ceramics town of Caltagirone.

Friday 14th June – Palazzolo Acreide and Akrai

FRANK BIENEWALD/LIGHTROCKET / GETTY IMAGES

the duomo, which is built around a Greek temple. Lunch at Regina Lucia; afternoon at the Parco Archeologico della Neapolis, home to the 5th-century-BC amphitheatre. Dinner in Ragusa.

Depart at 9.30am for a morning tour of the archaeological park of Akrai, followed by lunch at Ristorante Andrea in nearby Palazzolo Acreide. Evening wine-tasting and dinner at Acqua e Vino in Vittoria.

Saturday 15th June – Cava d’Ispica and Parco della Forza The Cava d’Ispica is one of the greatest naturalistic archaeological curiosities of

Top: Ragusa. Above: floor mosaic in the Bikini Girls' Hall, 4th-century Villa Romana del Casale

Sicily: a deep gorge, honeycombed with prehistoric tombs, which is also ideal for birdwatchers. Lunch in Ispica followed by a visit to Santa Maria Maggiore, a national monument famous for its loggia. Dinner in Ragusa.

Sunday 16th June – Modica and seaside lunch Tour of lovely Modica followed by lunch at Da Carmelo at Marina di Ragusa. Dinner in Ragusa.

Wednesday 19th June – Noto Depart for a guided tour of Noto, the greatest Baroque town in Sicily. Lunch at Trattoria Crocifisso, followed by ice creams at the renowned family-run Caffè Sicilia, the best in Sicily, and a walk at the nearby coastal nature reserve. Dinner at the hotel.

Thursday 20th June – head for home Depart at 8.30am to catch the 12.20 BA flight, which lands at Gatwick at 2.35pm.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £2,795 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £200. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st March 2024.

The Oldie February 2024 79

The Bittern

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The bittern (Botaurus stellaris) is an extremely frustrating bird to study. So said David Lodge in his talk on the bitterns at Stodmarsh, Kent: ‘Sometimes, I have come home. The first words to wife: “Bugger the bitterns!”’ The most recent (2022) UK ‘booming’ male count was 228 individuals. It is the ‘booming’ mating call that makes the bittern an avian celebrity. The boom explains its Latin name: bos/ox and taurus/bull. Boatum tauri means a bull’s bellow. Today it is invariably compared to a foghorn; in Suffolk, a ship’s foghorn became a ‘sea bittern’. Stellaris/starry refers to its plumage, myriad black speckles on a honeyed ground. The elegance of their breeding plumage made them victims of the 19th-century fashion industry. Their resident number is boosted to 1,000 by winter migrants. News of this brown, chunky heron will attract a crowd – as I experienced one winter dusk on Hampstead Heath, where the barely visible brown curiosity attracted a throng of gear-laden twitchers. Its famed elusiveness reaches an apogee when, threatened, it imitates a reed by pointing its head vertically, elongating its body to sway with the breeze. This column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, startled one into instant camouflage mode on a path, but it flew away before she could photograph it. The collective noun is a sedge (of bitterns). The bird’s life is spent on reed margins or in the depths of reed beds. Before farming drained its marshland habitat, the bittern was common enough, but by 1886 it was extinct in the UK. Marshland nature reserves, notably in East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, have created a spreading resident population. Stodmarsh has been a National Nature Reserve since 1968. Its present 620 acres make it the largest reedbed in south-east England.

David Lodge has lived in the area for 70 years and first suspected there were resident bitterns in 1968. Bitterns are polygamous. The male mates with up to five females. Today’s half-dozen Stodmarsh boomers tune up in February and can be heard, day and night, until midsummer. Never having heard the boom, I went in May. Lodge has heard one carry at least three miles. In his ‘Stod expert’ company, three booms were heard, so faint they were well described as the sound produced from blowing gently into the neck of an empty bottle.

The Oldie’s Penny Phillips has heard a resounding boom even in London at the Wetlands Centre in Barnes. I live in hope. The title of Lodge’s talk is Me and My Obsession – by David and Birty. Birty turns out to be an uncased, stuffed bittern, employed by Lodge as a visual aid when he gives bittern talks. To give an audience an impression of its elusiveness, photographs of Birty are shown in a variety of unlikely habitats, including the bar of Lodge’s local, the Red Lion. My thanks to David Lodge The Oldie February 2024 81

Travel Ripping yarn Harry Mount nearly died in a riptide off the Pembrokeshire coast, where he’s been swimming for 50 years

or 50 years, ever since I was a baby, I’ve been paddling and swimming by the glorious beaches of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales. I smugly thought I knew those beaches – and the sea – like the back of my hand. Until, in summer 2022, I came the closest I’ve ever come to dying – through sheer stupidity and crazed risk-taking. It was a dazzling sunny day. The sea was a bit choppy at Freshwater West, a shimmering stretch of golden sand. The waves are often high – that’s why the Welsh National Surfing Championships are held here. It’s also why, ever since I was a child, Fresh West, as it’s nicknamed, has been renowned for strong currents and offshore swells. But I thought I knew better about those dangers, as over the decades I regularly charged into the soaring waves. A few years ago, a lifeguard bravely plunged into the surf to save me on Fresh West, when actually I was perfectly safe. This time, though, I wasn’t. On this nearly fatal occasion, I started off swimming in the shallows and then decided to head into deep water. The sea ahead of me was full of wave-hungry surfers. So – big mistake – I swam away from them to a calm bit of water, where there were hardly any waves at all. In fact, I was making my way directly towards a deadly riptide. A riptide is a lethal current running away from the shore, caused by the tide pulling the

82 The Oldie February 2024

Freshwater West, Pembrokeshire – the riptides are hidden in calm-looking water

water out to sea. The outgoing riptides are so powerful that they can cancel out the incoming waves – that’s why the water I was now swimming in looked deceptively calm. I started a gentle breaststroke out to sea. After a few minutes, still unworried, I thought I’d gone a little too far out and so turned round to head back.

Slowly I noticed I wasn’t moving back to shore but was still being taken out to sea. I changed from a gentle breaststroke to a gentle front crawl. Still I was moving backwards. I ratcheted my crawl up to furious pace. I’m not a great swimmer but I’m perfectly good. Last year, I did a triathlon at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire,

PHILLIP ROBERTS / ALAMY

involving a 750-metre swim. It went fine – and I’d done my training on this very beach. I was now in full panic mode. I did desperate bursts of front crawl, to no avail. I was moving further out to sea – by now, people on the beach were tiny dots. The other stupid thing was that I knew what to do in a riptide. I’d never been in one before but I’d read you should swim across it, parallel to the beach, until you hit the waves that bring you back to land. Riptides aren’t very wide – so you can soon swim out of them. The alternative advice is to relax and let the rip take you out to sea until it has died out. Then you swim parallel to shore, away from the rip and back into land. But I was now in such a nervous state that I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t connect what was happening to me with what I’d read about riptides. All my energy had gone. I was convinced I was going to die here – just as Dobby the house elf does in the film of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Dobby’s death was filmed on Freshwater West. Harry Potter fans still leave stones (and socks, treasured by Dobby) on a cairn in the dunes. Some people accept death’s arrival. I felt an overwhelming longing to live, but the urge didn’t produce any more energy. I trod water, still drifting out to sea. I looked to my right, to see, far away, a surfer among the waves. I shouted out to him and waved. But the waves were too

All my energy had gone. I was convinced I was going to drown loud. He couldn’t hear me, and he was looking out to sea in search of the perfect breaker – not in my direction. The despair deepened. I turned to my left and, there, just as far away as the surfer, was a man in a kayak. ‘Excuse me!’ I shouted – the most English last words anyone’s ever said. He couldn’t hear me either, but the prow of his kayak was pointing in my direction, as was his face. I still didn’t know whether he could see me waving. But, slowly, slowly, the outline of the kayak expanded. It must be coming towards me! He paddled away from the waves and entered the flat section of the riptide. How skilfully he opposed the current taking him out to sea, whirring his paddle without panic. As he approached, he said in a calm, understated way, in a Midlands accent, ‘Not to worry. Grab hold of the rope at the back of the boat. I’ll take you out of the rip. Then we’ll hit the waves and they’ll take us onto the beach.’ ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I shouted over the waves. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Noel,’ he said, as he did what I should have done – head, parallel to the beach, towards the choppy bit of the sea away from the flat riptide waters. ‘Watch out. When you hit the waves, you’ll move faster than the kayak and you might bump against it.’ I did bump my shoulder against the kayak as we hit the waves – but even with that harmless little collision, it was pure joy to be moving towards the shore. At that moment, another man in a kayak paddled over. ‘I’ll take over, shall I?’ he said to Noel in the local Pembrokeshire accent. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I repeated. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it – that’s what we’re here to do.’ What extraordinary strength, skill and calm Jack and Noel showed. Jack dropped me off on the beach, as I kept on thanking him. He waved away my thanks and headed back out to sea. There on the beach was Noel, carrying the kayak on his shoulder, with his wife. ‘Noel, you saved my life,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you? Can I buy you a drink?’ ‘Oh, it was nothing really,’ he said. I cross-questioned him about the local riptides. Fresh West is so big, he said,

that a huge volume of water pours in and a huge volume pours out. It’s inevitable that some of that water moves out at a quicker rate over the uneven sands below, creating the riptides. ‘You were a long way out,’ his wife said. ‘I thought you were a seal.’ With a cheerful goodbye, my hero and his wife walked off. I sat on the sand, exhausted but elated, still overwhelmed by how close I’d come to death. I was the lucky one. Only a week later, Hywel Morgan from Cardigan, 47, died in Pembrokeshire, at Poppit Sands, rescuing two children from a rip current. Three weeks after that, Zac Thompson, 11, from Pembroke Dock, was drowned at West Angle Bay Harry at Manorbier – only three Castle, Pembs, 1975 miles from Freshwater West. Oh how tempting the water is when the temperature rises. But oh how dangerous that water can be, too, particularly on the British coast. Also in Pembrokeshire in 2022, at Solva, there was a meteotsunami – a huge, tsunami-like wave – when the water suddenly rushed out to sea, owing, it’s thought, to changes in atmospheric pressure. Lockdown meant more people holidayed at home. And so, in 2021, authorities reported an increase in the numbers swimming in rivers, lakes and the sea – and a rise in water-related deaths. Accidental drowning deaths in 2021 were at their maximum for five years, numbering 277, according to the National Water Safety Forum. Of those accidental fatalities, 83 per cent were male. I’m afraid I’m typical of male swimmers – taking more risks than wiser female swimmers. Youth, too, is a factor. Men aged 30 to 39 were the highest group for accidental fatalities last year. I’m 52, but middle age hadn’t curbed my enthusiasm for rules-free, risky swimming – until now. That risk-taking approach led to my accident. I was happily swimming in the shallows but thought it was pathetic – so I swam out to sea and nearly died. I’m returning to Pembrokeshire this summer and I will swim in the sea – but I’ll never go out of my depth again. The Oldie February 2024 83

Overlooked Britain

Bonnie Prince Charlie’s last stand lucinda lambton Swarkestone Hall Pavilion has witnessed bull-baiting, a Jacobite army – and the Rolling Stones

Swarkestone Hall Pavilion in Derbyshire is an architectural mystery and a half. It has a grand presence all by itself in the middle of a country field. Sombre yet majestic, with its own walled enclosure – what in heaven’s name was it used for? It was built between 1630 and 1632, and its roles have been many and 84 The Oldie February 2024

various. There is evidence for payment for its being a ‘bowle alley house’ with a bowling green – created to the tune of £111 12s 4d. A most plausible consideration is that it was a grandstand for viewing the coursing of deer, as there is a large room with a fireplace, which suggests the creation of comfort for the spectators.

The walled enclosure – according to Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in his Derbyshire volume of The Buildings of England – stands in the large field known as ‘The Cuttle’, used for the vile sports of bulland bear-baiting. The wall surrounding the arena was probably created as a theatrical arena in which to slay deer. Another suggestion is that there

UK CITY IMAGES / ALAMY

Swarkestone Hall Pavilion (1632), thought to have been designed by John Smythson

Above: the bathroom in one of the turrets Right: Bonnie Prince Charlie Watts and the Stones on the Hot Rocks cover, 1971

HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD; JOHN MORRIS / ALAMY

was even jousting enjoyed within the walls. It has been known as the Swarkestone Stand, the Grandstand and the Summerhouse. But whatever went on, we have a rare and exquisite survival. It is a little architectural masterpiece built in finest ashlar sandstone, which had been quarried nearby. It is thought to have been built by local mason Richard Shepherd. A less distinguished gritstone rubble made up the rest. Most interestingly, it is thought to have been designed by John Smythson (1570-1634), one of England’s first ‘architects’ or rather ‘architectures’, as those who were employed to design buildings were called. John was the son of the great Robert Smythson (1535-1614), who created such wondrous buildings as Longleat and Hardwick Hall. Like father, like son. As well as the Swarkestone Grandstand, John built Bolsover Castle near Chesterfield in Derbyshire.

With its lead cupolas topped with ball finials, as well as its castellations and Gothicarched loggia, Swarkestone is a rare little building. As an extra and distinguished bonus, its frontage displays the arms of local grandees Sir John Harpur and his wife Catherine, married in 1632. The pavilion may well have been built to celebrate the wedding. Exciting to say, 113 years after it was built, this little beacon of Jacobean beauty witnessed some of the last gasps of the Jacobite rebellion. Only yards away stands Swarkestone Bridge (at three quarters of a mile long, the longest stone bridge in England – and very beautiful it is, too). Here, in 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, during his last attempt to march south to regain the English crown, turned back to Scotland, into the jaws of defeat at Culloden.

Above: Swarkestone Bridge, by Charles George Harper, 1892. Right: Bonnie Prince Charlie, Derby

Here, in 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie turned back to Scotland Swarkestone Hall Pavilion was sold to the Landmark Trust in 1985. It was then in a ruinous state with no roof, floors or windows. Now it has undergone an exemplary restoration, which, joy of joys, has made it possible for it to be enjoyed by one and all. In the Trust’s handbook, we read that the one disadvantage of staying there has been turned into a considerable advantage: ‘The bathroom is in the top of one of the turrets … and to reach it you must cross the open roof – an unlookedfor opportunity to study the sky at night.’ Swarkestone had already hit the jackpot of fame: the Rolling Stones chose it as the most exhilarating backdrop for their first compilation album, Hot Rocks 1964-1971. Some rather unappealing photographs survive of the occasion, with the Stones looking fiendishly out of place amidst such interesting beauty. The Landmark Trust, on the other hand, has triumphed with the excellent interior. And now, thanks to the Trust, you too can revel in the splendour of staying here. The Oldie February 2024 85

On the Road

Literary lion Comedian David Baddiel talks to Louise Flind about his New York birthplace, Mumbles holidays and his beloved football anthem

What’s your favourite destination? New York, which is where I was born – not the trendy part of New York, but upstate, in Troy. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? We didn’t go anywhere apart from Swansea – my dad was from Swansea and so our summer holidays were invariably staying either with his parents or in a B&B. I had three brothers and we’d go to the beach, and see my parents’ friends who owned a caravan in the Mumbles. I did enjoy it because I liked being with my brothers. I was also in a Jewish youth group called Habonim, and I would go camping with them and my brothers, in places like Shrewsbury. Did you read a lot as a child? I read Richmal Crompton and Roald Dahl. My mum foisted Billy Bunter books on me, and she enrolled me in a society called the Old Boys’ Book Club, where we talked about these books. I was 11 and everyone else was 70, and I would just sit there, thinking any minute now there will be tea and jam tarts. Did you always want to be a performer? I was very interested in words and writing short stories. And then, at my secondary school, there was a sketch show that the sixth form did, and it was rubbish. I changed it from gentle songs about life at the school to really quite vicious sketches about teachers we all hated and that absolutely stormed it. It’s still one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever got, showing the incredibly unpleasant librarian having sex with the library assistant, a blow-up doll. I was quite cool afterwards and that made me 86 The Oldie February 2024

think, I should probably do this. Where did you meet Frank Skinner? At the Comedy Store. He was sort of a newish comedian. Medical students shouted, ‘I remember you from medical school.’ And Frank said, ‘Yeah, you were the one in the jar.’ Later on, we were at a club called Jongleurs. It was the 1990 World Cup and Ireland were playing Egypt. Ireland had done quite well by playing very negative football. I was complaining about that and Frank disagreed with me and we had quite a big argument about the beautiful game. I met him a couple of times more – and then, in the early ’90s, Frank split up from his wife. So I offered him a room because my brother had just left. Six years later, we were still sharing a flat. What was your first big break? There were two breaks; I was compèring in the Comedy Store and writing for the radio. I met Rob Newman, and we wrote a show for Patrick Marber for Radio 4. And then the BBC asked us to do our show on Radio 1 – and that was The Mary Whitehouse Experience. The bigger break was in 1990 when that got taken to TV, and that led to me and Rob being the first comedians to play Wembley Arena. What do you see yourself as now? I like doing documentaries because it allows me to put together something of an intellectual essay on TV. I’m still doing stand-up, because Sky Arts have asked to record the last three shows. My main love now is probably writing.

How did Three Lions come about? Frank and I were doing a show on TV called Fantasy Football League, and Ian Brodie of the Lightning Seeds had been asked to do the England song. He asked me and Frank to write the lyrics and, rather cheekily, we said, ‘Can we sing it as well?’ What gave you the idea for your book The Parent Agency? My son, when he was eight (he’s now 19), said, ‘Why doesn’t Harry Potter run away from the Dursleys’ – the horrible family he has to live with when he’s not at Hogwarts – ‘and try to find some better parents?’ That gave me the idea for The Parent Agency, which is a world in which children can choose their own parents. Do you prefer writing adult or children’s books? I like writing non-fiction for adults. The books are quite short. The God Desire and Jews Don’t Count are polemical essay books. And I love writing children’s books and I get a lovely response from children and they’re very honest. What are you most proud of? The first time Three Lions was sung at Wembley. Where did you go on your honeymoon? We got married on the spur of the moment in Reno, and spent the night near Lake Tahoe.

The Parent Agency by David Baddiel (HarperCollins) is published on 15th February

DAVID LEVENSON / GETTY

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? Sleep supplements, blindfolds and earplugs, as I sleep badly. And two laptops, one on stage and one for work when I’m waiting to go on stage.

Genius crossword 435 EL SERENO 5 clues share a missing definition (6 if you include 11 Across) Across Down 1 Work on short revolution 1 Rough and cold, like some beers (6) before the end of hostilities (7) 2 Creeps write quickly, sending 5 Takes a risk on popular lists first to last (6) (7) 3 A poor plan developed to 9 South American in fine area include volume purchase for port (5) subject to satisfaction (2,8) 10 The essence of being 4 Source of value in only answer (5) bloodsuckers welcoming 5 Life a nun suffered, infected by fresh offer (4,5) unknown complaint (9) 11 After reconstruction, supply 6 English newspaper supporting home for 1 across (10) Germany - that’s handy (4) 12 Olympian queen in the 7 Church crib oddly missing of raw? (4) course after setting up (8) 14 Usual good game of golf gives 8 Custodians or cooks packing a area for agreement (6,6) case of red (8) 18 Demands from audience 13 Coils developed in Somerset caught everybody in the town devoted to fun (10) end (7,5) 15 Male worker, one with heart (9) 21 Tidy profit across 16 Growth of hypocrisy and end of America (4) faith in Australia (8) 22 On a trip with coach – 17 The spirit of revised Magna that’s educational! (4,6) Carta? No thanks! (8) 25 Manufacturer of Thetford 19 Spike Milligan perhaps keeps in bits? (5,4) recalling missing contents (6) 26 Back in London, a growing 20 Political platforms could be music producer (5) jokes if changing sides (6) 27 Stash seen in corner of 23 Elements of philosophy Draco Mediterranean island (7) manifests (5) 28 Rave about North America 24 Close to evacuating remote farm being the gateway to hell (7) building (4)

12 13 14

24 25

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 7th February 2024. 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 435 1

Across 1 Ornamental tray (6) 4 Threshold; opportunity (4) 9 Waste time (5) 10 Burdensome (7) 11 Hoofing! (7) 12 Form of quartz (5) 13 Exhausted (5) 15 Clever, adroit (5) 20 Ground ready for planting (5) 22 Nominal (7) 24 End marriage (7) 25 Oneness (5) 26 Baby of litter (4) 27 Inadequate (portion) (6)

Genius 433 solution Down 1 Number puzzle (6) 2 Pale purple (5) 3 Nile say (anag)(7) 5 The Alpha and the ___ (5) 6 Severe reprimand often read? (4,3) 7 More than misty (5) 8 Lopsided (5) 14 Song and dance, unnecessary fuss (7) 16 Enter uninvited (7) 17 Research (5) 18 Different (5) 19 Knitwear pattern (Scots) (6) 21 Long-legged wader (5) 23 Prone, fibbing (5)

R A H

L J

A A

B V

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A S

H T

A N R 22

Y M E A

I M

C O

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S E

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A D R

S E

H H

N O

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R Q U

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Winner: Ken Harkness, Cockermouth, Cumbria Runners-up: Ann Radcliffe, Buxton, Derbyshire; Joe Cushnan, Worksop, Nottinghamshire

Moron 433 answers: Across: 7 Butter, 8 Knolls (Buttonholes), 10 Explain, 11 Tiara, 12 Sell, 13 Llama, 17 Fudge, 18 Amen, 22 Sacks, 23 Upholds, 24 Onward, 25 Tundra. Down: 1 Obverse, 2 Stipple, 3 Relax, 4 Anatomy, 5 Bleak, 6 Essay, 9 Analogous, 14 Bursary, 15 Implode, 16 Unusual, 19 Ascot, 20 Scowl, 21 Ghoul The Oldie February 2024 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO Winter may be upon us, but optimism is the order of the day on this month’s deal – from the US Vanderbilt Knockout Trophy last year in New Orleans. You reach six hearts after a cultured auction and West leads a passive trump. You beat East’s nine with the ten, cross to the queen and return to your ace, East discarding a club. Dealer South Neither Vulnerable North ♠ A96 ♥ Q65 ♦ AK75 ♣ 10 7 3

West ♠ KJ853 ♥ J84 ♦ 986 ♣ J9

South ♠ Q 10 7 ♥ A K 10 7 2 ♦ J4 ♣ AK5

East ♠ 42 ♥ 93 ♦ Q 10 3 2 ♣ Q8642

The bidding South 1♥ 2NT (2) 4 ♣ (4) 4 ♥ (6) 6♥

West 1 ♠ (1) Pass Pass Pass end

North 2♦ 3 ♥ (3) 4 ♦ (5) 4 ♠ (7)

East Pass Pass Pass Pass

1. Very skimpy indeed (I would pass). 2. 15-19 and forcing to game, facing a two-over-one response. 3. Showing his delayed (threecard) support. 4. Control bid, guaranteeing a fifth heart. 5. Control bids. 6. Signing off, worried about spades. 7. Concern about spades alleviated.

You know West began with (at least) five spades and three hearts. East’s easy club discard suggests a five-card suit. East appears to be two-two-four-five (in ranking order): you are actually in great shape! Cross to the ace of diamonds and lead a spade to the ten. West wins the knave and exits with (say) a diamond. You win dummy’s king, ruff a diamond (now only East guards diamonds) and cash your last heart, discarding a club from dummy. You lead and pass the queen of spades, cross to the ace and, hey presto, East is squeezed in the minors. If East discards a diamond, dummy’s fourth diamond is promoted. East will likely discard a club (down to a doubleton), but you score the last three tricks with your ace, king and lowly five of clubs. Slam made. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 301 you were invited to write a poem called The Cold. I was quite chilly by the time I had waded through the drifts of entries. Rhona Taylor wanted ‘ice-cold – but nice cold, like in Alex!’ Martin Elster wrote in the voice of the tufted titmouse, crying Peterpeter-peter in the cold. Basil RansomeDavies’s narrator celebrated his Uncle Jim, who always fed a cold and always had one: ‘Jim’s cold meant cash was running low/ While fattening up our Jim./ He was a parasite, and so/ The family murdered him.’ Commiserations to them and to Robert Salamon, Christine Acres, Ted Lane, Alastair Carmichael, Mike Morrison and Dorothy Pope, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Frank McDonald. Cold moved around us, kissing hands and cheeks, Icing our playground so that we could slide. It greeted our morning windows with designs And as we laughed through snow, it was our guide, Turning our breath to smoke, crusting our gloves. It seemed to give our hearts a warm glow, For when on winter mornings we looked out Enchantment saw that it had fashioned snow. Bottles of milk, our little classroom gifts, For our amusement it would wrap in ice. It never injured us, this roughish friend, But let us build some snowy edifice. Cold is contemptuous now of stumbling steps. It blackens pavement ice to make us fall. When winter mornings shiver, snowflakes sneer And we’re in peril when ice hangs by the wall. Frank McDonald Warm body in my bed So snug, enticing, come close And hug me to your breast. Let me draw on your warmth And love. Get away from me, you Are late and icy cold, your Fingers are like frost. Get off now, keep over to Your side. William Wood

We’re into the months with the shortest days; Dingy afternoon, three o’clock, grass wet And a ragged ring of milk-white fungi Raising fairy cups for the early dew. A hose left tangled on the wilded lawn Waits to be neatly coiled and put away In the nearby shed; I grip its snaky Neck, hands heaving to a hosepipe shanty. Fifty metres of green plastic – not much, But I’m wearing no jacket, the wrong shoes; The chill starts from the feet, creeps up and up Until I’m no longer cool, just plain cold. David Thompson We wake to dazzling light, snow-mantled scene, Blue morning-glory sky, exultant sun. Burrowed and snug at home, we stare amazed. No milk for tea? Well no, the low-slung float Will never brave the snow, or boldly go Humming and clanking down our lane today. No cars. No sound. But then a steady purr, And through the sparkling drifts, with trenchant growl, White-capped and snowy-eyebrowed, solid, square, Comes Land Rover, Defender of the crates! High on the spattered frame a door swings wide: Milkman in oilskins, bottles held aloft! We bring him in, revive his icy hands – A melting snowman, dripping icicles. The kettle’s boiled. Now give the man some tea. Does he take milk? That’s good: it’s just arrived! Erika Fairhead COMPETITION No 303 Wishes can come in threes, or singly at wells, or they can be sent to others. Please write a poem called Best Wishes. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 303’, by Thursday 8th February. The Oldie February 2024 91

Taking a Walk

Wordsworth Country – in Dorset patrick barkham

The nature writer Mike McCarthy knows how to sell a walk. ‘What you’re going to see is a geological frontier,’ he proclaimed, as we motored through the holloways of west Dorset. ‘It’s quite a rare thing.’ We parked at a desolate crossroads high on the downs, close to our destination, Eggardon Hill. It felt as though we had driven miles from Bridport and the coast – but these lanes are tricksy: they slow and lengthen time. So, to my surprise, when we set off walking westwards, there were views of a patchwork of rolling green fields and copses – and also an expanse of platinum on the horizon: the sea. The stormy Atlantic air had the effect of putting on a new pair of glasses. It rendered everything crisp and deceptively close. First, there was the flat top of Golden Cap, followed by flashes of the east Devon coast. And then there was a low grey arm stretching south on the far side of Lyme Bay to Start Point, more than 50 miles away. A sheet of grey rain swept up the valley towards us. A fragment of rainbow appeared in the ever-changing westerly sky. ‘Great place for ravens,’ said Mike, leading the charge into the incoming rain. Mike is a recent arrival in Dorset and an evangelist for the county. It has no motorways or cathedrals, but plenty of monumental places of worship on its hills, cliffs and ancient forts. Here was one, hewn by Iron Age tools from this great chalk hill. The banks were so vertiginous that we couldn’t see the fields below us, but beyond was that expansive, westward view. Mike pointed. ‘You know what that is?’ he said. ‘That is the West Country. It begins here.’ He delved into his bag and pulled out ‘the ten-mile map’, the British Geological Survey chart, with its rainbow colours marking the varied strata of Britain. We were standing on the southwestern tip of a band of iridescent green – chalk – running from Yorkshire through Lincolnshire and Norfolk, 92 The Oldie February 2024

Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, into the Chilterns and through Wiltshire before ending, abruptly, here, on Eggardon Hill. Behind our backs were these 300 miles of chalk. Before us lay the igneous rocks of the West Country, the much older granites and the valleys and vales of greensand, known locally as fox mould. Deep west Dorset is easily overlooked. This is where William and Dorothy Wordsworth first took to the country, when they rented Racedown Lodge. Wordsworth strode up Pilsdon Pen, a flat-topped hill on our horizon, for inspiration. The hero of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male also went to ground here, quite literally, trusting these sunken lanes to keep him safe. More recently, it has been the heartland of the brilliant country writer and sixties broadcaster Kenneth Allsop and nature writer Brian Jackman. Jackman calls the ten miles around the Three Horseshoes pub in Powerstock the ‘magic circle’ because this area has ‘everything’: ancient woodlands,

orchid-rich meadows, sunken lanes filled with flowers in spring; abundance, tranquillity, beauty. We were the only people out on such a blowy winter’s day, but we were not the only ones enjoying it. Dancing in the gale off the edge of the hill, at eye-level, were 14 ravens. Their collective noun, an unkindness, does these birds a grave disservice. They were playing in the wind, rising up and turning on their backs like stunt planes at an air show, croaking with delight – a rave of ravens, rather than anything more dastardly. Reluctantly, we eventually left the ravens to it, turned away from the view – and the West Country. We allowed the wind to push us back to the car, past a hulking Highland cow and a row of hawthorns hunched against the gale, their leaves long gone but still holding thousands of crimson haws. Park at SY547945 (what3words: bitter aced tinted). Take footpath west onto Eggardon Hill and circle the fort for an easy stroll. Longer circular walks available!

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

I have just downsized from London into a rural area. It’s been a real trauma, giving up so many treasures, memories and possessions. But I’ve done it – and the first thing I did, once I’d got sorted out, was to ask my near neighbour to drinks. He seemed to be perfectly nice when he arrived (though he stayed a bit too long), but since then he has been positively pestering me. He rings up twice a day, often knocks on the door uninvited, brings me flowers and keeps asking if he can do anything for me – mow the lawn, do my shopping. I have explained I’m perfectly capable of doing everything myself. He has now started writing rather embarrassing poems which he puts through the door. What can I do? I’m starting to feel very pressurised – it’s almost like having a stalker. Jane F, Herefordshire

First you must ring on his bell and make it quite clear you’re ‘spoken for’, as they used to say, and that you’re very private. Put your cards on the table. Or get a male friend to come over, ring this man’s bell and explain that you are a couple and that he fears this man might have got the wrong impression. A daughter or a son – or, indeed, anyone pretending to be a daughter or a son – could do something similar. It could be that he’s got the wrong idea and thinks you’re gagging for an intimate relationship, or he might be

suffering from dementia, in which case there’s not much you can do except beard anyone who comes to visit him and ask them to explain the situation to him. Or simply return the poems and don’t answer the bell or the phone when he rings. Ask the local vicar’s advice – this man may have a reputation yet be harmless. But if the worst comes to the worst, you should inform the police.

Irritable sister syndrome

My sister suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and is always complaining about it. She expects us to run around all the time for her, and endlessly brings her condition up in conversation, making it an excuse for doing nothing. She is under the doctor and has seen a gastroenterologist – both of whom say there is very little to be done. I have suggested, many times, that she try homeopathy or acupuncture, which have worked wonders for me, but she rejects them scornfully as quack medicine. I can’t help feeling unsympathetic. If only she were willing to give them a try! What can I do? Petra, Suffolk

Nothing. Her conviction that these ‘quack’ therapies won’t work is as strong and embedded as yours that they do. And there is a lot of evidence that it is the placebo effect of any therapy, conventional or otherwise, that is the most important part of the cure. I know myself how maddening it is when friends try to get me to their favourite osteopath or crystal therapist, but

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nothing they say can convince me. Stop trying, and just accept that her mindset is different from yours.

He won’t leave his wife

I have been having an affair with a married man for 15 years and he has always promised he will leave his wife and marry me when his children have left home. But now both his children have flown the nest – one is married – and nothing seems to happen. He often says how unhappy he is with his wife, but I’m starting to wonder if they will ever split up. What do you think? Should I send his wife a letter telling her all about us? Do you think that would work? Name and address supplied

Never even be tempted to write such a letter! The most likely outcome is that he would somehow patch things up with his wife and never want to speak to you again. It seems to me that your best bet is to acknowledge that he’s never, for one reason or another, going to leave. And simply come to terms with the fact that you have a lovely married lover who is also a weak and frightened one. Things could be worse. You could have no one. If you want to give him an ultimatum, threaten to drop him permanently if he doesn’t leave. Then you’ll really know where he feels more comfortable. But if I were you, I wouldn’t put it to the test.

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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Neighbour from Hell