The Oldie December 2023

32-PAGE OLDIE REVIEW OF BOOKS HUGO VICKERS EDWARD VIII’S LOST MEMOIR

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

December 2023 | £5.25 £4.13 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 433

Jilly Cooper on sex and football I love crying – Griff Rhys Jones on Hollywood weepies 60 years on – JFK by Lucinda Lambton Rise and fall of arty Hampstead – Peter York

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Football crazy: Jilly Cooper page 14

Features 14 Jilly Cooper on sex and soccer Harry Mount 17 In praise of mindlessness Martin Stephen 18 Going behind after the show Simon Williams 20 Hampstead’s artistic highs and lows Peter York 24 My dad was my headmaster Quentin Letts 26 Let’s hear it for weepy films Griff Rhys Jones 30 Nun with a rebel habit John McEntee 31 Death of the combover Dwight Garner 33 Sunglasses suit oldies Liz Hodgkinson 35 C S Lewis revisited Reverend Michael Coren 38 Why we fall for financial scams Neil Collins 41 Hoarder disorder Frances Wilson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 12 Olden Life: What were railway camping coaches? Bill Riley 12 Modern Life: What is leng?

Charlotte Metcalf

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About a boy: Quentin Letts page 24

36 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips 39 History David Horspool 43 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson 44 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 45 Country Mouse Giles Wood 46 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 49 School Days Sophia Waugh 50 Small World Jem Clarke 52 God Sister Teresa 52 Memorial Service: Alexander Cameron KC James Hughes-Onslow 53 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple 57 I Once Met… Gérard Depardieu Leo Dobbs 57 Memory Lane Caroline Crossley 58 Readers’ Letters 71 Commonplace Corner 71 Rant: Running Nancy Hogg 97 Crossword 99 Bridge Andrew Robson 99 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips eoldie@ Art editor Michael Hardaker subscri Supplements editor Jane Mays 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

Remembering JFK, 60 years on page 90

Books 60 Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward III, by Jane Tippett Hugo Vickers 61 Tackle! by Jilly Cooper Rachel Johnson 63 Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South-East (Pevsner Buildings of England), revised by Simon Bradley Christopher Howse 63 A Memoir of My Former Self: My Life in Writing, by Hilary Mantel Jasper Rees 65 Pru & Me: A Love Story, by Timothy West Roger Lewis 67 Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine,

by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts Alan Judd 63 Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint, by Peter Sarris Justin Warshaw 70 The Unlikely Duke, by Harry Beaufort Mary Killen

Arts 72 Film: Doctor Jekyll Harry Mount 73 Theatre: King Lear William Cook 73 Radio Valerie Grove 74 Television Frances Wilson Oldie subscriptions To order a print subscription, go to www.subscription.co.uk/oldie/offers, or email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF. Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £49.50; 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’.

75 Music Richard Osborne 76 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 77 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 79 Gardening David Wheeler 79 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 80 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 80 Restaurants James Pembroke 81 Drink Bill Knott 82 Sport Jim White 82 Motoring Alan Judd 84 Digital Life Matthew Webster 84 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 87 Bird of the Month: Short- eared owl John McEwen

Travel 88 John Lavery’s Dublin Harry Mount 90 Overlooked Britain: JFK Memorial, Surrey Lucinda Lambton 93 On the Road: Zoë Wanamaker Louise Flind 95 Taking a Walk: Windy Wigtown Patrick Barkham

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The Oldie December 2023 3

The Old Un’s Notes At the October Oldie Literary Lunch, we were lucky enough to host Sir Don McCullin, the world’s greatest war photographer.

Don was talking about his new book, Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor, published with a commentary by Barnaby Rogerson.

He says he now prefers landscape photography to war photography – and particularly loved photographing the great Roman ruins of Turkey.

He has covered conflicts from Israel to Cyprus to Northern Ireland to Vietnam.

But, he told the audience, ‘I’m 88 and I can hardly go up

the stairs without fear. The bathroom is terrible. I find the bathroom more dangerous than Vietnam.’

Many oldies will agree – flak jackets required in all bathrooms.

At Nigel Lawson’s memorial service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, his son Dominic recalled that Lawson, in his naval days, commanded a motor torpedo boat called Gay Charger.

What he did not add was that Gay Charger had a sister boat called Gay Bruiser, which sounds like a description of a Soho club

Among this month’s contributors Peter York (p20) invented the Sloane Ranger in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, written with Ann Barr. He is author of Dictators’ Homes and The Blue Riband: the Piccadilly Line.

Rachel Johnson (p61) is our Golden Oldies columnist. She edited The Lady and is author of Notting Hell, Shire Hell and A Diary of The Lady: My First Year as Editor.

Jasper Rees (p63) is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood. He wrote Bred of Heaven: One Man’s Quest to Reclaim his Welsh Roots and I Found My Horn.

Roger Lewis (p65) is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He wrote the bestseller Seasonal Suicide Notes and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

‘Bathroom more dangerous than Vietnam’ – Don McCullin

doorman. The Royal Navy couldn’t get away with such names for its boats today.

Calling all oldie birdwatchers! Have you ever felt spiritually close to a robin or a wren?

Now Yvette Brown reveals why, in a new, elegantly designed leaflet, Bird Signs.

If you’re born in January, you’re a robin; if in December, you’re a wren. Yvette says, ‘It would be a better world if we were all “more wren”.’

Rationalists regard such astrological assumptions as cobblers. But the Old Un has long found them surprisingly accurate.

For the first time in more than a century, a new stained-glass window has been installed in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

The window was designed by our greatest stained-glass

artist, John Reyntiens. The son of the great stained-glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, John made his first stained-glass window aged eight.

John Reyntiens has restored the glass in Big Ben’s clock dials, and made a window for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in Westminster Hall.

St Francis of Assisi window at Christ Church, Oxford The Oldie December 2023 5

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The new window depicts St Francis and the birds he preached to, evoking Christ Church’s gardens.

The Oxford window was made thanks to a generous donation from the barrister Marilyn Kennedy-McGregor.

She dedicated the window to her late husband, Dr Edward Burn (1922–2019) – a D-Day veteran, barrister and Official Student and Tutor in Law at Christ Church from 1955 until his retirement in 1990.

Teddy Burn was the author of Cheshire and Burn’s Modern Law of Real Property, the Bible of land law. In lectures at Oxford and the Inns of Court School of Law, he made land law strangely entertaining.

He recalled how the editor of his book had been frustrated at not being able to find a judicial reference for Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

And he remembered how, at the end of the war, he’d taken a long flight across Sumatra, using the only pilot available, a Japanese POW. Burn asked him where he had trained. The pilot replied, ‘Kamikaze.’

One reader was moved by the October issue, with the combination of Nicholas Shakespeare’s piece about Ian Fleming and Jonathan Meades’s celebration of Brutalist architecture.

It reminded the reader

'And HEY PRESTO – rabbit stew'

of the origins of Fleming’s villain Goldfinger. Fleming loathed Brutalist buildings, particularly those designed

by Ernő Goldfinger, a cardcarrying Communist.

When the latter threatened to sue, Fleming replied that he would put in an erratum slip and change the name throughout to Goldprick, giving the reason why. The name stayed as Goldfinger.

Andrew Percy, MP for Brigg and Goole, chairs the parliamentary committee that has been looking at the HS2 line.

He has had repeated clashes with go-ahead Timothy Mould KC, a Department for Transport barrister who likes to state distances in kilometres.

At a recent hearing, Percy demanded that this stop, bellowing, ‘All our road signs are in miles, Mr Mould!

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And I’m sure when you get into your car later, it will be in miles.’

Mould murmured, ‘I know, I know,’ but no doubt he will persist with his habit.

Whitehall is determined to propagate the use of kilometres.

‘My cat died this morning.

This is a legal nightmare.

There are nine wills!’

Oldies may want to do some weightlifting before buying their Christmas presents this year.

Few would want to return to the days of 1940s paperrationing, but there was a certain merit in the slimmer works it produced.

How many books now will slip easily into a coat pocket?

A slim briefcase, if packed with some of the larger new volumes on sale this Christmas, will look like a snake that has just swallowed a badger.

Joya Chatterji’s new history of 20th-century South Asia, Shadows at Noon, runs to 849 pages, while David Blackbourn’s Germany in the World is a mere 832.

Vorsprung durch Dicke – or ‘Progress through thickness’ – as they say in publishing.

Or ‘Don’t drop it on my foot,’ as Alan Partridge said to verbose writers.

Paul Routledge is the hack who got Her Majesty (and himself) into bother by telling the world what she thought about Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike. She apparently blamed Scargill for the strike when, in 1985, she said to Routledge, ‘It’s all down to one man, isn’t it?’

And now Yorkshire’s most illustrious journalist is to turn 80, on 11th December.

He wrote a biography of Peter Mandelson, which brought about Mandelson’s dismissal from Tony Blair’s Cabinet after he was revealed to have included inaccuracies in his mortgage application.

The Fleet Street veteran, who almost died several months ago, is still knocking out columns for the Mirror every week and says he has no intention of hanging up his pen just yet.

Several parts of north Herefordshire were hit by flooding after Storm Babet in October.

One area surprisingly unaffected was around the River Lugg at Kingsland, even though it has been prey to floods in recent years. It may not be entirely coincidental that this was where a local farmer, John

Price, took matters into his own hands and cleared his part of the riverbank rather than first gaining permission from officialdom.

Mr Price was prosecuted by the environmental authorities and sentenced to a year in prison. But local householders, dry in their homes, may have had reason to thank him.

‘Algebra teacher small talk’

From 16th to 19th November, the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate will be hit by a tsunami of knitters and stitchers.

‘I remember when all these fields were HS2’

The annual Knitting and Stitching Show at the Harrogate Convention Centre is a four-day event celebrating the world of crafting.

There are galleries, workshops and hundreds of exhibitors selling all things crafty. All human knitting life is there: button stalls, knitting patterns, patchwork quilts, embroidery silks.

A dream festival for oldies.

Harriet Harman, the longest-standing female MP (since 1982) and Mother of the House, is stepping down.

She comes from a long line of industrialist ancestors.

Her great-grandfather Arthur Chamberlain was the PM Neville Chamberlain’s uncle.

He also ran Kynoch, Britain’s second-largest

ammunition works. When he died in 1913, he left £143,588 (£13.5m today).

All this emerged when Harriet Harman’s first cousin, historian Lady Antonia Fraser, was shown family research by YourTour, a genealogy company.

Lady Antonia says, ‘I thoroughly enjoyed exploring a part of my own family history about which I knew surprisingly little.’

‘We ran out of the little umbrellas’

Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing 2023 How to enter Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism.

What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 57 of this issue).

Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place.

How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 23rd November 2023.

Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.

The Oldie December 2023 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

My brief encounter with Celia Johnson I love the wartime letters between the actress and her husband, Peter Fleming

I am writing this on a train. Another train.

I am on tour. In fact, I am on two tours. Simultaneously. With one tour, I am taking my one-man show (Gyles Brandreth Can’t Stop Talking) across the land, from Edinburgh to Eastbourne.

There’s no rhyme nor reason to where I go. I think my producer just sticks a pin randomly in the map.

With the other tour, I am flogging my latest book (Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait), from Ilkley to Belfast.

I love Ilkley. Alan Titchmarsh began his career in the municipal gardens there and it’s where I used to visit Gillian Baverstock for tea. She was Enid Blyton’s elder daughter and served what she called ‘a traditional Big Ears and Noddy tea’. We had jam tarts, cake and sandwiches.

I love Belfast, too. While there, I met former First Minister Arlene Foster. She gave me fish and chips and an early Christmas present: a jumper adorned with my own face done in appliqué.

On both tours, I am appearing in a varied assortment of theatres, some old and beautiful (the Buxton Opera House is an Edwardian gem built by Britain’s most revered theatre architect, Frank Matcham), some more modern and less inviting (the Charter Hall, Colchester, has the feel of a seen-better-days thousandseater sports centre).

Invariably the audiences are lovely, but it’s not a glamorous life. The dressing rooms are often bleak (light bulbs missing; toilet blocked; the kettle, if there is one, doesn’t work). And the Chinese or Indian restaurants you could rely on for a post-show meal when I started touring 50 years ago don’t seem to exist any more.

Performance done, my wife (who doubles as my roadie) and I trudge to our hotel (for preference a Premier Inn) and perch on the edge of our bed to eat the Pret a Manger sandwiches we bought at Euston, King’s Cross, or wherever we started the day.

The Premier Inn beds are comfortable.

Simon Williams, Celia Johnson & Lucy Fleming

In Harrogate, however, we stayed at a small B & B close to the theatre. I fell onto the bed and immediately rolled off. My wife lay down on her side and rolled off, too. To stay on board the bed, we had to lie in the middle of the mattress, clinging onto each other for dear life. It was our most intimate night in years.

I love a theatre with a heritage.

I had high hopes for the New Theatre, Cardiff, because I knew I’d be treading the boards once trod by Sarah Bernhardt, Anna Pavlova, and Laurel and Hardy.

(If only they’d appeared on the same bill!)

Alas, when I arrived, the stage crew could not play my music tracks for reasons I couldn’t fathom and they couldn’t explain. There was no singing or dancing in the show that night, and the microphone broke down twice. But I survived. Touring is about survival.

I suspect it always was.

Adelina Patti (1843-1919), the Spanishborn Italian soprano, loved South Wales so much she elected to live there.

At Craig Y Nos Castle in Powys, she built her own private theatre. One of the highest-paid divas of her day, she was famous for her pet parrot. Whenever an impresario called on Madame Patti to secure her services, she would enquire about the proposed fee.

Whatever sum the impresario mentioned, the parrot would immediately squawk, ‘Cash!’

On my one day off this month, I went to see somebody else’s show. You must catch it if ever it comes to a theatre near you.

Called Posting Letters to the Moon, it consists simply of edited highlights from the wartime correspondence between Brief Encounter star Celia Johnson and her writer-explorer husband, Peter Fleming, read by their actress daughter Lucy Fleming and her husband Simon Williams. The show is funny, touching, revealing, evocative, beautifully constructed and played with an easy charm that I found totally captivating.

I sent a text to Simon Williams to say as much and he rewarded me an anecdote that I could not believe I hadn’t heard before. Hellraiser Richard Harris spotted his friend Peter O’Toole sitting in the corner of a pub, not at all sober. Said Harris, ‘I thought you’d joined Alcoholics Anonymous.’ ‘I did,’ O’Toole replied. ‘I’m drinking under an assumed name.’

Three of my university contemporaries died this month. The one to whom I was closest was journalist, biographer and poker player Anthony Holden.

He ended his days in a de luxe apartment block offering pretty swish assisted living. When he arrived there, Tony was excited to learn that his next-door neighbour was Shirley Eaton.

Anticipating a late-life romance with the beautiful actress – best remembered as the Bond girl painted gold from head to toe in Goldfinger – every night before dinner Tony would park his wheelchair outside her front door and serenade her with a few bars of the movie’s memorable theme song. Eventually, after months of this remote courting, his neighbour’s door opened and he discovered this was a different Shirley Eaton.

Said Tony, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die.’

Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now The Oldie December 2023 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Memo to self: don’t tell Bernard Manning gags I can’t stop offending people. Am I losing my marbles?

matthew norman ‘Do you reckon,’ I enquired on a visit to my wife in bucolic Dorset, ‘that this is an early sign of frontal-lobe dementia?’

Rebecca, who underscored her high intelligence and flawless judgement by vacating the marital home 13 years ago, pondered this.

I had prefaced the question with a report, laden with gasps of disbelieving self-hatred and flashes of the face from the Munch painting, of a recent incident over dinner with a friend, his partner and the latter’s twentysomething daughter.

On hearing the word ‘pumpkin’ in the context of Halloween, I said, ‘That reminds me of a joke. But I can’t tell it.

That would be wildly inappropriate.’

The relief was unmistakable. Of course it was. You can’t tell vulgar jokes in decent company these days, least of all in the presence of civilised young people.

Any dunce knows that. You just can’t.

For reasons best devolved to a psychiatric conference, I mistook the palpable relief for a cue to continue.

‘Cinderella’s going to the ball,’ I intoned in the gravelly tones of a northern club comic not wholly unredolent of Bernard Manning.

‘The stepmother says, “You must be home by 12. If you’re not–” No, no, I’m stopping there.’

A second gale of relief, many rungs higher up the Beaufort scale from the first, blew across the table. No one on nodding terms with sanity could have misinterpreted the mood. ‘ “If you’re not back by midnight,” ’ I went on, ‘ ‘‘your fanny will turn into a pumpkin.” No, I’ve gone way too far already. I’m so sorry. I will now fall silent.’

So I did. For two or three seconds.

‘There she is at the ball, and she meets this fella. Ooh, a right handsome bastard. ‘ “What’s your name?” he says. ‘ “Cinderella. What’s yours?” ‘ “Prince Peter the Pumpkin-Eater.

What time do you have to be home?”

‘ “Not till dawn.” ’ Downcast eyes and cheeks blanched by the draining of blood (a cute contrast with mine, blushing electric crimson) greeted the punchline.

‘I don’t know how even to begin to apologise,’ I murmured. ‘I think it must be an illness.’

No one demurred at the time, though a week later Rebecca was unconvinced.

‘Why do you think it’s frontal-lobe dementia?’ she asked.

‘Because disinhibition on this scale is a classic symptom.’

‘Do you think I had frontal-lobe dementia when we had dinner with ******?’ she asked. That memorable night, a couple of decades ago, a friend mentioned a new girlfriend. When he named her, Rebecca let out an elongated ‘uuuuggggghhhhhh’ of disgust.

Her reaction was so spectacularly divorced from normality that she got away with it unscathed. It was like Basil Fawlty opening the biscuit tin to reveal the rat. The hotel inspector couldn’t compute that this had happened, and so let it pass.

But that was different. Rebecca hadn’t seen the juggernaut headlights from 500 yards away and knowingly driven into them. Hers was a purely reflex response, not a wilful act of social suicide.

She took the point. ‘OK, but you can’t have had frontal-lobe dementia when you were 16.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘The dwarf,’ she replied. ‘I’m talking about the dwarf.’

You can’t tell vulgar jokes in decent company now. Any dunce knows that

Of all the myriad misdeeds and grotesque faux pas that take turns in flashing to mind when I wake in anguish at 4.30am, not long before the grinning Cinders gets home, this is among the worst.

The recital of that joke, the latest addition to the roster, barely makes the top hundred. But the New Year’s Eve party of 1980 at my godparents’ house (mentioned on this page long ago, and reiterated here in another futile stab at expiation) is right up there jostling for a Champions League slot.

Efforts to chat up this enchanting little person were going well enough to raise hopes of pre-Auld Lang Syne intimacy when I leant suavely back on my chair – and tipped over my godmother’s most prized pot plant.

‘I have to fix this or she’ll kill me,’ I said. ‘I think the tools are in the garage.’

On reaching it, with the young woman in attendance, I picked up a garden hoe.

I saw the lights of the approaching juggernaut and trembled with terror at the prospect of impact. But it couldn’t be averted.

I put the implement over a shoulder, and sang ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.’ Perhaps understandably, the young woman looked horrified. I didn’t know what to say.

I did know exactly what not to say.

I said it. ‘I feel,’ I said, powerless to stifle it, ‘just like one of the Seven Dwarfs.’

‘So do I,’ she said, very quietly.

I didn’t stay long after that. Unlike Cinderella, I was home before midnight, unsmiling and celebrating the new year with nothing for company but the shamed resolution henceforth to be a more restrained linguist, if not necessarily a more cunning one.

Forty-three years on, on the cusp of turning 60, I think there is work to do yet.

The Oldie December 2023 11

what were railway camping coaches?

In the 1930s, rambling was popular – anything to get away from the city smoke and into the clean air of the countryside.

The LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) served most of the eastern side of the country. In 1933, it hit on the idea of converting ten elderly railway coaches, due for retirement, into holiday homes and siting them in quiet, country stations.

The scheme took off and was quickly followed in 1934 by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) and Great Western Railway (GWR). In 1935, the Southern Railway (SR) followed suit. By the end of the year, there were 215 railway camping coaches, as they became known, in 162 stations up and down the country, providing reasonably priced self-catering accommodation in rural locations.

Internally, three of the coach compartments became bedrooms with double bunks, while a living/dining area, kitchen and bathroom occupied the remainder of the space. Their being sited at remote railway stations also meant

what is leng?

He’s leng. She’s soooo leng. This ice cream is leng. That handbag is leng.

What on earth does ‘leng’ mean?

If you have regular contact with teenagers, you’ll know that ‘leng’ is a superlative term of the highest praise.

‘Leng’ can be applied to anything from an extremely sexually attractive person to a perfectly mixed cocktail or piece of fashionable clothing. The word is described in the Urban Dictionary as a ‘levelled-up version of peng’. ‘Peng’ used to be the popular word for attractive until superseded by ‘leng’, and the two can now be combined into ‘peng-a-leng’.

The origins of both words are disputed.

According to Reddit, some say it came from a Cantonese phrase meaning attractive but cheap. However, the Urban Dictionary confirms them as ‘roadman slang’ (roadman meaning the ultimate hard man). So it’s more likely their roots are

that owning a car was not necessary at a time when few families had one. By 1939, the number of camping coaches had grown to 439.

With the outbreak of war, the railway camping coaches were the least of the railway companies’ worries. With peace in 1945, the SR led a revival of the scheme and they began a new lease of life.

When, in 1952, nationalisation of the railways took place, many feared camping coaches would be literally shunted off into a siding and forgotten.

Not so. In fact, better-quality coaches – ex-Pullman stock – were made available and the scheme prospered.

Then came the Beeching Report. Most camping coaches had been located at peaceful backwater stations on littleused lines. Gradually, as these lines disappeared during ‘reorganisation’, so did the camping coaches.

Before Beeching, in the summer of 1952 my nature-loving parents took me and my siblings to stay at the camping coach at Bolton Abbey Station in Yorkshire.

What a marvellous holiday! The scenery was impressive and the weather perfect. We walked over the moors to

Beamsley Beacon, followed the River Wharfe up to and beyond the Strid, and explored the Valley of Desolation before returning to our lovely holiday home.

The following year, we took our camping-coach summer holiday in North Wales. Abergwyngregyn was a small station on the main line to Bangor and Holyhead (no trains on Sundays).

Now only the signal box remains. It rained every day. And I do mean rained.

So we sat in the camping coach and read, played cards and looked out through rain-streaked windows.

Today, camping coaches are being revived on several of the enthusiast-run railways, such as the North Somerset line at Blue Anchor; at Ravenglass on the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway on the edge of the Lake District; at Loch Awe in Scotland; and on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Many offer Pullman luxury and do not reflect the more basic style I recall from the 1950s, when the location was of more importance.

Still, for a nostalgic and atmospheric break, I thoroughly recommend a railway camping-coach holiday.

Bill Riley

in the word 'kushempeng’, Jamaican slang for high-quality marijuana.

The opposite to ‘leng’ is ‘butters’. A bad haircut, a runny nose, bad breath, dirt under your fingernails or simply being downright ugly elicits a look of disgust and a cry of ‘butters’.

Even worse than ‘butters’ is ‘meady’.

To call somebody ‘butters’ is an out-andout combative insult and worthy of retaliation. But ‘meady’ just means middle-of-the-road, not worth bothering with. In our day, we might have said ‘plain Jane’ to describe a ‘meady’ girl. But then we knew of many plain Janes (such as Jane Eyre) who were heroines beneath their misleading exteriors and went on to triumph.

Today, to be considered meady is to be considered not plain enough to be worthy of a second glance. Instead, the definition consigns you to a lifetime of invisibility, of being overlooked and disdained, swiped into oblivion on Tinder. No invitation onto Love Island for you. In this social-media age of high

visibility, when every ‘Like’ on your latest Instagram selfie is an addictive hit for the fragile ego, being considered meady is every teenager’s greatest fear.

If you’re leng, on the other hand, you’re a valuable commodity. Looks matter, and don’t for a minute think this is just about natural beauty – no, it’s about how you present yourself. A girl is prized for the effort she has made with her make-up and her outfit.

The qualities we once prized, such as a flawless, scrubbed complexion, would not begin to qualify as leng. By the same token, a boy turning up on a date with a fresh haircut, brushed teeth and wearing a pair of crease-free Dior trainers (worth well over £1,000) would be leng. No rumpled linen and scuffed leather shoes for this generation!

Don’t even consider telling a teenager, as our parents did, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ The cover is all, now that we’re in an age of being Instagram-ready – and that takes dedication and effort.

Charlotte Metcalf The Oldie December 2023 13

Jilly Cooper tells Harry Mount about sex, her football novel and her new friends, Alex Ferguson and Gareth Southgate

She shoots! She scores!

T

orrential rain is thudding down on Jilly Cooper’s enchanting house – her medieval chantry in Gloucestershire, aka Rutshire in her Rutshire Chronicles series of novels.

And we are giggling away about sex.

‘There’s not nearly as much sex as there was before,’ she says of Tackle!, her new novel about football. ‘The publishers thought there might be some more.’

Warming to the sex theme, Jilly says, ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it. Writers ought to write about what they know. I couldn’t go to football during the pandemic, when I was writing it. And, at 86, I don’t leap up and down any more.’

Jilly fans, don’t despair! There’s still 14 The Oldie December 2023

plenty of sex roiling away in Jilly’s tale of her hero Rupert Campbell-Black taking over an ailing local football team, Searston Rovers.

Campbell-Black is still the bestlooking man in England. His wife, Taggie, is being treated for cancer.

Enter the younger generation, in the form of their daughter, Bianca, and her ace striker boyfriend, Feral Jackson.

The rutting temperature is raised by a whole first XI of hunks and their sex-crazed WAGs. ‘Footballers must have lots of sex,’ says Jilly. But their lust is controlled by the management: ‘I noticed that there’s CCTV in their rooms. There’s a very tough regime. The bosses don’t like

them having sex the night before games. Still, footballers are so glamorous that everyone must want to go to bed with them.’

The sex scenes in the book are compelling because of her refusal to use the sort of euphemisms – ie ‘love pump’ – that make so much writing about sex laughable (thus the late Auberon Waugh’s institution of the Bad Sex Prize at Literary Review magazine). Jilly calls a spade a spade – and a testicle a testicle.

‘Testicle’s an awful word!’ she says, before embarking on a disquisition on new sexual terminology.

‘The bonus hole?’ she says, bursting out laughing. ‘There’s a limited amount of ways to do it, even with the bonus hole.

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Above and right: Jilly Cooper at her medieval chantry in Gloucestershire – aka Rutshire

‘That’s a vagina, isn’t it? Or is the bum the bonus hole? You must look it up. I thought that was absolutely hysterical.’

In fact, Jilly, a virtuoso of charming self-deprecation, knows exactly what it is.

She does her research meticulously, as she has ever since becoming a reporter for the Middlesex Independent in 1957, when she was 20. She covered football then. She says, ‘I was completely hopeless. One of my lines was “Oh, Brentford! How could you?”’

Her research for her hero Rupert Campbell-Black was impeccable, too. He is said to be based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen’s former husband, the designer Rupert Lycett Green and the late Earl of Suffolk.

Jilly says, ‘Middle-class Jill comes down to the Cotswolds in 1982. I knew Andrew already. He helped me with Riders. I met Micky [Suffolk] then. He was lovely and so funny and so naughty.

‘I was having lunch with the publisher George Weidenfeld and said, “I’m writing a book about the handsomest man in England.”

‘I looked over and there he was – David Beaufort [the late Duke of Beaufort]. He was funny, too.’

Talk of Andrew Parker Bowles leads on to talk of the Queen: ‘Isn’t Camilla lovely? She and Andrew got a brilliant, brilliant divorce. Adorable children. They all get on and share each other’s lives.’

Jilly was ‘heartbroken’ at the death of Elizabeth II. ‘She was lovely, wasn’t she?

Oh, the thought of everyone in Australia running off and leaving us.

‘I met her a few times. She asked me, “Do you write a bit?” I don’t think she read much.’

Sadly that golden generation of charming seducers is on the way out. She says, ‘That lot’s old enough not to give a stuff. It’s terrifying for the younger generation. You can’t put your hand anywhere now. All this cancelling is very frightening, isn’t it.’

‘Of course women want passes made at them. People come out of the woodwork from centuries back and say, “You leapt on me when I was 14 and you were 15.”

‘Do you think people are too tired to have sex now? They don’t seem to do it so much now. There aren’t any parties, are there?

‘Everybody was behaving horribly before. The upper classes have always behaved horribly. People were behaving quite badly round here. That was quite nice to observe.’

Tackle! is blissfully cancellation-free.

She says, ‘The only reference to MeToo is a cat called MewToo.’ Jilly came up with the idea for the book after sitting next to former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch. ‘He’s divine.

Charming. We had a giggly, drunken lunch and I thought it would be fun to write a book.’

In her self-deprecating way, she claims in the book’s acknowledgements not to understand the offside rule – then proceeds to give me the perfect dictionary definition.

She wasn’t brought up in a footballing Ferguson: ‘He’s divine.

Charming.

We had a giggly, drunken lunch and I thought it would be fun to write a book’

‘You can’t put your hand anywhere now. Of course women want passes made at them’ family. Her father played rugby for Cambridge and her late husband, the publisher Leo Cooper, played rugby for Radley: ‘He talked dismissively about “soccer schools”.’

And so Jilly gave herself a crash course in football. She talked to Alan Curbishley, a player and manager at West Ham. Arsenal and England legend Tony Adams and his wife, Poppy, are friends and Gloucestershire neighbours – ‘He sent me a bottle of Adam’s Apple – a sort of fruit juice. He’s just sweet!’

She met Howard Wilkinson, former Leeds manager, at St George’s Park, the national football centre in Staffordshire.

Michael Howard, the former Tory leader (‘I love him – he’s gorgeous’), took The Oldie December 2023 15

16 The Oldie December 2023

Gareth Southgate sent Jilly a signed England shirt when she finished Tackle!

My theory is that she has a fundamentally low opinion of herself, despite her enormous success – from her first novel, Emily (1975), to the ten-novel series the Rutshire Chronicles, which started with Riders (1985) and continued via Rivals (1988) and Polo (1991) to her most recent novel, Mount! (2016).

When I put my low self-esteem point to her, she agrees – but then again that might be her extremely good manners.

She has had her share of rough times.

Jilly says, ‘I got sacked from 22 jobs after leaving school, always coming sobbing home to my parents – and then got a job in publishing.’

Her big break came in 1969, when she sat next to Sunday Times Magazine editor Godfrey Smith at dinner. He was so amused by her disastrous tales of married life that he signed her up to a column which lasted from 1969 to 1982.

‘We got a bit pissed together and I told him what a lousy wife I was,’ she says. ‘I threw something red into the washing machine. And Leo said he was the only member of the team with a pink jockstrap.’

She was married to Leo Cooper from 1961 until his death from Parkinson’s in 2013.

With Leo Cooper. They were married from 1961 until his death in 2013

‘Parkinson’s is such a sod that you get to a stage where you say, “Please, God, do take him.” And then you feel terribly guilty. He died 20 years after he was diagnosed.’

They adopted two children, Felix, who works in property, and Emily, a make-up artist. They both live nearby.

In Tackle!, the Campbell-Blacks have an adopted daughter.

‘Adoption brought me so much happiness,’ she says. ‘It’s much more difficult to adopt now. Social services investigate whether the background is suitable. So you come out and you don’t have a family at all. Can you imagine not having a family?’

Her marriage withstood the 1990 revelation of Leo Cooper’s affair.

‘Of course I’ve forgiven him,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t that good myself. I did because I loved him. And it was OK. But it was awful.’

In her desire to lift spirits, Jilly can’t let the conversation remain gloomy for long, adding, ‘What was so lovely was that I went down to seven and a half stone. I was so thin. It was a good diet.’

She sympathised, too, with Leo’s position as a successful publisher married to a mega-successful wife.

‘Poor Leo was at the Hatchards party and Elizabeth Jane Howard said to him, “How do you feel being Mr Jilly Cooper?”

‘He was very macho. It’s quite difficult for WAGs, too – everyone rushing off with your husband, no one coming to see you. It’s good to have an equality of attention.’

And then, in 1999, Jilly was in the Ladbroke Grove train crash that killed 31 people.

‘I remember thinking, “I’m alive.” It was absolutely amazing. This ghastly thing happening. That moment when you suddenly think you are alive. I was desperate to get to a phone to tell Leo and the children and say I was alive.

‘I’ve had a very lucky life.’

But then again that might just be Jilly’s glass-half-full attitude. She even manages to put an optimistic spin on the day she left the only manuscript of Rivals on a bus, which meant she had to rewrite the whole thing.

She says, ‘I always have a fantasy about a West Indian bus conductor releasing the book years later. The book was better when I rewrote it. I’ve always been lucky – touching wood.’

Jilly Cooper’s Tackle! (Bantam, £22) is out now. See page 61 for Rachel Johnson’s review

ADRIAN SHERRATT / ALAMY

her to Anfield, where she met ‘the revered Steven Gerrard’.

Her new friend is the England manager, Gareth Southgate. A framed shirt from him is in her sitting room, signed with the words ‘Dear Jilly, Congratulations on finishing Tackle!

Happy birthday.

Best wishes, Gareth Southgate’.

Jilly was gripped by the footballing life: ‘It’s such a ruthless world. The first thing you do as a manager is decide who you’re going to ask to your leaving party.

‘Then you have players like poor Harry Maguire, with people ganging up on you.’

It’s completely different from the world of horses that Jilly knows so well.

She says, ‘I remember Peter Robeson, the showjumper, when it was at its height, saying that the FA took him out to lunch to ask, “How do we make football nearly as popular as showjumping?”

‘Football is different because it’s a team. Racing is a team within the yard but not at the racecourse. In football, you’ve got to fight the opposition rather than each other.’

All the research for Tackle!, along with the pandemic, meant it has been seven years since her last book. She also had to do 15 months of rewrites. On top of all that, her adored greyhound Bluebell – who appears in pictures all over the house – died. She recalls, ‘I said to myself, “I’m not going to get another dog till I’ve finished my book.”’

And now she’s going to get another greyhound.

Jilly says she forgets things – but she is razor-sharp in our time together. ‘Quite often I can do a crossword in the morning that I couldn’t do the night before.’

In fact, ‘darling Penelope Keith’ told her, ‘It’s not that you’re forgetful; it’s that your brain’s full.’

Despite selling millions of books since her first, How to Stay Married, in 1969, Jilly remains ego-free.

She keeps on breaking off from answering my questions to ask me questions, particularly about Jeremy Lewis, the late Oldie deputy editor, with whom she worked at Collins, the publishing company.

Joy of losing your mind Forget mindfulness – children should be taught mindlessness and how to do nothing in particular. By ex-headmaster Martin Stephen

IMAGEBROKER.COM GMBH & CO. KG / ALAMY

I

was introduced to the joys of mindfulness long before most people of my generation.

My knowledge wasn’t driven by a belief that holistic meditation would end the war in Ukraine, but by my Australian daughter-in-law, a psychotherapist. She discovered mindfulness long before most of the world knew how to spell it.

My normal state of mind is, to stop myself living in the past, one of living instead in a future that will never happen.

Mindfulness’s mantra, ‘Live in the moment’, seemed attractive. I’ve been declared dead once, and on two occasions have been told I had illnesses that would probably kill me.

So the present – 50 years of happy marriage, three great children and five even greater grandchildren, enough money to live on, a nice house etc – seemed a good place to be.

All well and good. But the more I tried to anchor myself in the present, the more I realised that where we all are now hasn’t appeared from nowhere.

It’s been built by the past, and in particular by our childhood. Our present moment is the result of our past. So I’d like to propose a new philosophy.

Mindlessness. Where did the idea come from? My 13-year-old grandson was complaining about making a journey he didn’t want to go on.

‘What else would you be doing?’ I asked, in typical adult manner, and assuming every minute had to be used usefully.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Stuff.’

Stuff.

Stuff is doing nothing in particular.

When I was a headmaster in Manchester, I became used to the flocks of teenagers in the Arndale Centre on Saturday mornings, roving in and out like a tide ebbing and flowing from a meaningless beach.

Yet was it meaningless? As a young child, I was lucky enough to be able to spend holidays on my cousin’s farm in Scotland. Below their house was a small burn. I spent hours by that burn,

Don’t do something – just sit there! Parisian children at leisure

throwing stones at a rock that stuck out from the dark water. It was mindless.

And it was marvellous.

I don’t know – or I can’t quantify – what was happening in my mind during those hours, But somehow I know that what was happening then made the moment I live in now.

I think we’ve forgotten the importance, particularly for children and adolescents, of doing nothing very much.

Our culture states that if you’re not doing something, you’re doing nothing worthwhile.

Yet our brains are like batteries. For every hour they spend powering us up, they need downtime, to recharge.

Here’s another example of the usefulness of mindlessness. I graduated and did my PhD in English literature.

The result is that I can’t read a book or see a film without analysing it. Once born inside your head, the critic never leaves it – except in the case of things that are so vapid and empty that there’s nothing to criticise, or even think about.

Hence my addiction to rubbish science fiction. I love it because it doesn’t make me think.

I’ve published 23 books, many of them on English literature. Those books

were the result of my mind working to its maximum capacity. Yet they were also the result of my sporadically giving my mind a timeout.

Sometimes I give my brain the rest it needs by doing nothing. Other times I give it what it needs by devouring rubbish sci-fi, or even playing Halo on my Xbox, sad though that sounds.

The trouble with mindlessness is that it’s a double-edged sword. There’s the mindlessness of doing nothing in particular, yet also the mindlessness of the soccer hooligan, when people have stopped thinking when they should have been thinking a lot harder.

So maybe mindlessness is the wrong word for what we need to bring back to our concept of what’s good for our young people. Instead of blasting Mozart into one ear and private maths tuition into the other, and filling our children’s lives with activities, we need another approach.

Let’s just leave our children every now and again to do nothing. Let’s even recognise being bored as a key part of growing up.

Martin Stephen was High Master of St Paul’s School, London The Oldie December 2023 17

‘You’ve done it again!’

G

oing to the theatre is simple enough. Going backstage afterwards to visit one of the cast is a minefield.

In his dressing room, you’ll catch the actor with his trousers down, literally and metaphorically. Out of your mouth will flow a torrent of random adjectives.

Some of them will get caught on auto-repeat, ‘So, so intriguing ... really intriguing.

Just, you know – intriguing.’

You can’t stop yourself gushing – of course, you weren’t ‘overwhelmed’; quite the opposite.

Actors are taught always to favour verbs and nouns, but secretly they prefer adjectives. (I once found an actor googling the word ‘mediocre’ to check it didn’t mean what it said in the local paper.)

With the sweat still on his brow from the curtain call, the actor is in a postcoital state. This is not the time for honesty. He doesn’t want questions, either: ‘Who made you do that little jump?’ All he really wants is ‘Darling, you were wonderful!’

It’s best to avoid raving about his co-star, who might be upstaging him or sleeping with her/him – or both. Don’t tell an actor he was great in Act II – or he’ll get paranoid about Act I. Mealy-mouthed fellow actors may damn him with faint praise: ‘You made a good fist of it, mate,’ or ‘I think you got away with it.’ Others may infer they turned down the part.

Superstars are generally magnanimous when visiting lesser thesps backstage, their disposition always sweetened by a knighthood or an Oscar. So there’ll be bear hugs and, ‘A-maz-ing, darling!’

What the actor dreads most is the director revisiting his production to ‘take out the improvements’. Actors often need reminding of the aphorism ‘Less is more’.

Or, as a young movie star was told, ‘Don’t just do something. Stand there.’

I once heard a director telling an 18 The Oldie December 2023

Douglas Fairbanks Jr, 1939. Right: Noël Coward, 1964

actor, ‘Acting is not like justice, dear – it doesn’t have to be seen to be done.’

Noël Coward’s entourage was always eager to see how he’d dodge the truth backstage with his ambiguous exclamations: ‘My darling! You’ve done it again!’ Or, breathlessly, arms open wide: ‘What – about – you!’

When I took my seven-year-old son backstage to meet Douglas Fairbanks Jr after a matinée, he told him, ‘I thought you were jolly good.’

The great star thanked him, and my son went on, ‘Daddy told me to say so.’

The dressing room is the actor’s decompression chamber. Once he’s taken the curtain call, his mind will be on supper at the Ivy. As he takes off his make-up, his toupee, codpiece and corset, real life will slowly resurface: the trouble with his agent/wife/girlfriend/ personal trainer/ tabloids/ haemorrhoids/ bookmaker/ orthodontist.

He may pause for a moment to consider if the catch in his voice in the death scene really worked, or if he overegged one of his throwaway lines.

He’s given his ‘all’ (twice on matinée days) and then, on the Tannoy, he hears the announcement that he has guests.

His heart sinks; the day’s work isn’t over.

‘We thought we’d just pop round,’ they gush, as he wonders who the hell they are. Out of their natural habitat and in their best clobber, they could be

anybody; a cousin, a dog-groomer, a proctologist … an assassin. Does he owe them money, perhaps, or has he slept with one of them once by mistake?

People say they never forget a face, but God knows it’s easily done.

He wills the visitors not to sit down.

They inspect his dressing table, the first-night cards, the throat pastilles, the moustache pinned on its block, the picture of him with Ian McKellen...

He’ll be thinking of his supper drying out in the oven at home.

As he tries to put his trousers on, they’ll ask, ‘Is that real Champagne you drink?’ ‘How do you learn your lines?’ And, worst of all, ‘Our daughter wants to go on the stage – any tips?’

Oh, Mrs Worthington – DON’T. I’m often visited backstage by old school friends, bloated from 30 years in Canary Wharf; tyrants that I fagged for in the dark ages.

They waddle in, cocking a snook at the wine on offer. ‘Chardonnay, Williams?’

They don’t mention your performance. ‘I bet you make a pretty packet, eh? Ten K a week plus ice and a slice?’

The most comforting words I’ve ever had backstage before a performance came from the adorable Marcia Warren.

She poked her head round my dressing-room door on a first night and said, ‘Darling, just remember there are over a hundred million people in China who’ve no idea you’re doing this play.’

The backstage comment that lives for ever in my mind came from an old family friend, Laurence Olivier. He came backstage after the last matinée of an old comedy – and we were all giving it plenty.

Leaning on my dressing-room door, he cocked his head and said in that quiet, sly voice he liked to use, ‘It’s always interesting, isn’t it, dear boy, to see how little we need to do?’ Enough said.

Simon Williams played James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs

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Going backstage? Actor Simon Williams advises you what to say to the stars – whatever you thought of the show

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The The The Oldie Oldie Oldie December October Month 2023 2016 33 19

n-

Peter York’s family have lived in London’s most charming corner for a century. He has watched the bankers come and the artists go

Rise and fall of arty Hampstead

M

y involvement with Hampstead started in the 1890s.

My grandmother Lizzie Whittington, a London girl, and a talented pianist, ended up in a deeply unhappy marriage in South Africa.

She hated South Africa, not because of any awakening sensitivity about race but because it wasn’t a patch on London or Paris. She negotiated a life where she could go back to get the children brought up in England; my grandfather sort of commuted. Two of her daughters were then remorselessly drilled in classical music as the core of a future string quartet – violin and viola – and later went off to London to study. And, inevitably, unstoppably, they migrated to Hampstead.

Hampstead in the late 1930s was the obvious place for young classical-music students who wanted to do the new things – play new work from new composers such as Elisabeth Lutyens, play difficult music from memory, go to music camp and meet Benjamin Britten.

England – accused of being ‘a land without music’ by the German critic Oscar Schmitz in 1904 – had been the recent beneficiary of a large group of German and Austrian composers and musicians, many of them leftists and many of them Jewish, who came to Britain as refugees from the Nazis – and ended up in Hampstead.

They came along with a rich tide of writers, architects and painters (plus Sigmund Freud who spent his last year in Maresfield Gardens, where the Freud Museum is now).

My mother followed her sisters later – and returned after leaving and getting married. My grandmother rented a house nearby – 1830s, four square and long since demolished – to keep an eye on the girls. Eventually they all piled into one road in Hampstead.

Fifty per cent of what they always say about Hampstead was true then. It really was chock-full of a certain kind of mostly 20 The Oldie December 2023

– not only – leftish intelligentsia, attracted by the 19th-century history of Hampstead artists of all kinds. The familiar keystones are Keats (1795-1821), commemorated by Keats Grove – and Constable (1776-1837), whose big grave is in the churchyard of Hampstead Parish Church.

The 50-per-cent lie is to suggest that those people still live there, or that they were all stinking rich when they did.

Hampstead lured the aesthetic crowd because of its 17th- and 18th-century houses, built when the place was a spa, rich in supposedly health-giving, ironrich chalybeate waters. Thus the Flask pub and the Wells Tavern on Well Walk.

What’s more, those houses survived because Hampstead was so difficult to get

to. With its steep hill and winding streets, the trams couldn’t get there. The Tube didn’t arrive till 1907.

It’s true that this absurdly charming area had become distinctly richer in the later-19th century, as pleasant houses – not wholly unlike the kind you find in Wimbledon or Richmond, but with more Arts and Crafts fribbles – were built for successful bourgeois and the occasional serious plutocrat such as Lord Leverhulme or the Beechams.

By the thirties – post-recession, post the motorised flight into the Home Counties – many of those nice big houses were being divided into flats. A lot of Hampstead was – and remained until well after the war – affordable for

Sigmund Freud’s home, Maresfield Gardens. Far right: Keats House. Right: Constable lived at 40 Well Walk. Below: Ford Madox Brown, Hampstead from my Window, 1857

ARTEPICS; LOOP IMAGES LTD; ANDREW SPARKES; GUY BELL / ALAMY

people with what Vogue called ‘more dash than cash’.

These included the marvellous singer Kathleen Ferrier, a Frognal resident and a friend of my musical aunts. Her extraordinary contralto voice took her, via radio and records, to a much wider audience than just the classical concert hall. Some design-conscious friends live in her Edwardian mansion flat now.

And, clustered around the two wards

that made up what most people thought of as Hampstead, there were other nice places with big flats in big Victorian houses – places like Belsize Park and ‘West Hampstead’. They also suffered with the cruel disadvantage – now mainly forgotten – of being NW6 rather than Hampstead’s NW3.

Thus the story of the young Evelyn Waugh walking from his parents’ pleasant bourgeois house in North End Road NW11 to a post box up the hill with an NW3 postmark. Hampstead Garden Suburb N2 was pretty wonderful too, with roads and squares designed by Lutyens around 1910.

All that was before the Thatcher property boom. It was the time when if you saw someone in Hampstead who looked like Michael Foot, it was Michael Foot.

In the ’80s and after, money went back into Hampstead and its satellites, and many of those big houses were banged back into single occupation. The first waves of the ’30s intelligentsia died off and their children moved to anywhere from Shoreditch to Stoke Newington, via Primrose Hill and Canonbury.

What exactly is a ‘North London townhouse’? How is it different from a South London or a West London one?

Was ex-PM Liz Truss, no stranger to dated clichés, referring to distinctive architecture or to relative property prices when she talked about people who ‘take taxis from North London townhouses to the BBC studios’ to defend the status quo?

No, she was repeating the ancient notion that those houses all contained lefties.

These were the kind of lefties whom the Spectator might have described as the Metropolitan Liberal Elite, people who did ‘virtue signalling’ (invented in the Spectator by James Bartholomew in 2015).

What exactly was she getting at? By the late ’90s, more precise commentators

who actually knew the area were saying that those lefties were leaving Hampstead in favour of people who could afford to live there.

Hampstead is delicious in a way that Americans tend to call ‘quirky’.

The combination of singular topography – hilliness, which can give its occupants the impression they’re above other Londoners, especially from Parliament Hill; and a general boskiness – is lovely.

It’s extraordinarily green, with large gardens – which sometimes meet at right angles behind houses, to give an impression of fields behind.

And all of it leads, at the top of Heath Street, to the Heath itself – 790 acres of wild greenness. There are narrow lanes, with singular names, everywhere off the main streets. There are flights of stone steps leading to attractive terraces above.

And there are cobbles all over the place.

Anthony Blanche in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) said that the besetting British blight was charm.

Charm makes you lazy because you don’t have to work hard to capture people. And charm eventually leaves people irritated – at the very least – when they feel you haven’t delivered on it.

Hampstead has charm in bucketloads.

There are lots of blue plaques and lots of history, most of it – not all – a story of art and artists and later the intelligentsia.

The Hampstead Museum’s booklet – ‘Where they lived in Hampstead’ lists them, from Dame Peggy Ashcroft (Frognal from the ’50s to the ’80s) to Sir Henry Wood, inventor of the Proms, in Elsworthy Road; via Cecil Beaton, Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth Clark, Jerome K Jerome, George Orwell and, as you’d expect, the socialist writers Beatrice and Sidney Webb (in Netherhall Gardens).

The housing stock stretches from the late-17th century – lovely Fenton House (1686), gent’s res, is now a National Trust property, home to a collection of antique musical instruments – through The Oldie December 2023 21

22 The Oldie December 2023

The Isokon Flats, Lawn Road (1934), where Agatha Christie (below) lived, 1941-47

leader Hugh Gaitskell (Frognal). And Edith Sitwell (Keats Grove).

There’s never been such a concentration of ‘artigentsia’ in one place at one time in this century. It was more even than in early Bloomsbury.

By the millennium, commentators were saying that people in the clever, new, highly-paid ‘service industries’ – from City money men to pioneering IT entrepreneurs – were taking over; people who might be socially liberal but were economically very dry.

Hampstead’s charm has failed to deliver in the 21st century. As it’s got richer, it’s become decidedly less hot artistically.

Back in the ’50s and ’60s, right-wing humorists in national newspapers – their doyen was Peter Simple (actually Michael Wharton) in the Telegraph – dreamt up the everlasting folk tale that not only was everyone in Hampstead filthy rich, but the richest amongst them were the socialists. His hugely rich creation Mrs Dutt-Pauker is doing

Fenton House (1686), now National Trust

everything to be modishly lefty (not unlike what’s called virtue-signalling now). Peter Simple suggested that the East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht had been her lover and that she had a Maoist grandchild!

But the real leftists one knew in Hampstead in their nice big untidy flats, badly converted out of big old houses, weren’t usually rich and weren’t hypocritical.

The leftish Jewish refugee intelligentsia who’d had to leave Berlin or Vienna were running for their lives.

We had Jewish friends and neighbours, particularly from music land – the culture celebrated in the Royal Academy of Music’s recent exhibition about postwar refugee musical culture around the Finchley Road.

Two of my best friends at my Hampstead school (progressive co-ed) were half-Jewish and completely secular.

I remember some Home Counties cousins visiting and saying something a bit sarky about people whose names ended in ‘Berg’ or ‘Stein’ (nobody would do that today). I remember thinking surely everyone knows people with those names – but on the Sussex/Hampshire borders they probably didn’t.

In our road, there was a large and hideous house (1874) with a ballroom and a plaque to owner Sir Joseph Beecham, Bt, of the immensely rich Beecham patent-medicine family and father of Sir Thomas Beecham the conductor. It had been bought in 1921 by Aslef, the train drivers’ union.

It also housed Tribune, the socialist quarterly magazine, which meant you saw Michael Foot at book-signings there.

Nothing is too good for the people!

This century, it’s been converted into a block of ‘luxury flats’ and the plaque has disappeared. That’s 21st-century Hampstead for you.

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established 18th-century and early-19thcentury terraces in the old Hampstead Village core.

The finest of them is Church Row (1720s), leading to Hampstead Parish Church (1747), where all those relations of mine were dispatched – and I will be, too.

Round this, there’s a ring of large later Victorian houses and then, on the lower slopes, mansion blocks from the next round of building.

There isn’t much that’s later than Edwardian – just a few rows of rather nice ’30s mock-Georgian villas. It’s all low-rise and there are no Forsytean cream stucco cliffs like Kensington’s.

There’s very little that seems designed to be impressive or oppressive.

But Hampstead does have individual early Modernist houses by European masters who’d settled there. There was one small Modernist house on our road (13 Arkwright Road, 1939, designers Harding and Samuel, members of the radical Tecton Group founded by Lubetkin) and a big one built for himself on Willow Road in 1939 by Ernő Goldfinger – designer of the loved and hated Trellick Tower (1972) in North Kensington.

You found those Modernist houses and small blocks only in Hampstead and Highgate – and not in Wimbledon or Richmond – because of the local artistic tribes and especially because of the refugees.

The singular Isokon block of small flats in Lawn Road (1934), designed by Wells Coates, housed Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy; architects Egon Riss and Arthur Korn; Agatha Christie (between 1941 and 1947) and her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan; art historian Adrian Stokes; and author Nicholas Monsarrat.

In Circles and Squares: The Lives of the Hampstead Modernists, Caroline Maclean describes the riveting betweenwars interlinked relationships of Henry Moore, his wife Irina Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and his wife Winifred, all played out in a few roads in Hampstead and Belsize Park.

Look up any 20th-century artists, writers, actors and politicians you’ve admired and you’ll often find they’ve lived in Hampstead. Ian Fleming (Pitt House, North End Avenue) and John le Carré/ David Cornwell (Gainsborough Gardens) did, and so did the ‘lost’ Labour

Prepped for life Quentin Letts grew up in a boarding school where his father was headmaster. Fifty years on, it still shapes his character

G

ordon Brown is a son of the manse. John Major’s dad was a circus performer who sold garden gnomes. My own father, R F B ‘Dick’ Letts, was a prepschool headmaster at Oakley Hall, Cirencester, from 1962 to 1992.

Having a boarding school for one’s home was odd but never dull. We lived with over 100 children and staff. Privacy was rare. One afternoon in my teens, I was taking a bath and a visiting clergyman wandered in. He stayed for a long, amiable chat while my bath water slowly cooled.

Family evenings could be interrupted by a knock on the drawing-room door and a dormitory prefect saying, ‘Willoughby’s been sick!’ or an under-matron complaining that Kaminski simply would not stop talking after lights out.

Seconds later, we’d hear Kaminski being given three of the best before Father, with a sighing ‘Now where was I?’, returned to his supper tray of baked eggs and Birds Eye strawberry mousse.

His canes were kept in the same wooden chest as the Christmas wrapping paper.

From infancy, I was reared to the toll of the great school bell, summoning pupils off the playing fields for high tea.

The boys used to push me round in my pram and later let me join them on the big wooden seesaw in Chapel Yard. No one had as many big brothers as I. The school secretary, chain-smoking Miss Catton, was my adored godmother.

I would sit at a roll-top desk alongside ‘Cat-Cat’ and pretend to be her assistant, cranking out exam papers on the Roneo machine and reading confidential school reports. No wonder I became a newspaper diarist.

For lunch, I sometimes joined the gardeners – Morse, Scotford, his son John and wizened, nut-brown Micky Moss, who said three words a day – in the potting sheds. Aged five, I listened rapt as, in their slow Gloucestershire burrs, they discussed the issues of the day, chewed their baps and smoked roll-ups. God knows what they thought of me, but I worshipped them.

I can still summon the heady mix of geranium leaf, wet spade and Golden 24 The Oldie December 2023

Virginia as we sat there on upturned wooden Schweppes crates while rain fell lightly on the patch of grass outside, where the Muscovy ducks had a run and a discarded bath collected water.

It’s all long gone, flattened for a housing development.

As young children, we often think our fathers are big and powerful.

When mine entered a dining room of 100 bawling children, everyone hushed.

He’d take chapel services in his academic gown and we all stood for his billowing arrival.

Letts Minimus, front row right

I was scared of him in those days, though I later loved him for the shy, slightly autistic personality under that magisterial mask. His own father had been headmaster before him.

Father was terrified of the more glamorous and pushy school mums.

When ‘Sambo’ Brown’s mother motored up the drive in her Jaguar Mark 2, he would jump on his rickety Swift bicycle and pedal for Top Field, claiming he had an urgent cricket net to take. My own mother, outward-going and as capable as Sibyl Fawlty, basically ran the place.

Horace Walpole’s locusts occasionally escaped. Smiling Horace, a retired submarine commander, taught science.

The rugby-playing husband of a pretty new French mistress caught her in flagrante with the hairy beanpole who taught geography. Boys watched agog as a mattress was hurled out of a topfloor window.

One afternoon, my father made the regional news after grappling on the touchline with some visiting team’s parent who was being unsporting during a 1st XV match.

His occasional explosions of exasperation at morning roll-call would reverberate through the house, a crenellated mid-Victorian hall with roaring fireplaces. The back stairs became worn by generations of thudding feet. Children ran everywhere despite my father’s yelling, ‘Gently bentley, boy!’

The constant company has made me, in later life, sociable but always longing to be on my own.

The house was an advent calendar of noises: There Is a Tavern in the Town being sung by eight-year-olds in the library with Mr Noble on the grand piano; Commander Baird-Smith earning yelps of laughter during his English lessons in Big School; Eric the handyman’s fruity whistling as he repaired another door that had been swung off its hinges; and, from the chapel, a wheezing and whirring as my imperious grandmother did battle with the harmonium, practising for Sunday matins.

My mother’s galley kitchen had a sliding door that opened on to Big Dorm. The halfstarved occupants would lick the sole bonne femme dish after she’d cooked for a public-school headmaster from whom my father was trying to extract scholarships.

Every evening, the older boys would crowd into our drawing-room in their dressing-gowns, smelling of Vosene, to watch telly. Corridors shimmered with boiled cabbage and chalk dust and a pong of distant urinals.

In the holidays, a local chap, Mr Bennett, arrived to paint walls the boys had left grubby with their sticky hands and muddy shoes.

Mr Bennett had a dirty, gurgling laugh. He liked my mother. It was like being backstage during an am-dram opera. Somehow my darling parents kept it all going, despite constant threats of abolition from socialist ministers and the nightmare of Opec inflation.

Another world. Almost another life.

It’s crying time Ever since he was a teenager, Griff Rhys Jones has loved films that make him weep. He picks his favourites

I

was about 13, on a sofa in front of the television on a wet Saturday afternoon. I was carelessly able to do that once – sigh.

I was watching a black-and-white film. Or maybe the TV was black-andwhite – probably.

It was a story about a nanny caring for children all her life and then having to say farewell to the little treasures. Poor nanny. She ends up all alone, pathetically sad and abandoned – except that, in the final scene, all the children she has ever nannied, dozens of them, come thronging to her lonely room and hug her and tell her how much they all love her.

Gawd. Cheap. Predictable. I absolutely adored it.

I was left a snotty, emotional, teenage wreck by its trite sentimentality.

So … I am always searching for the teariest tear-jerker of them all. Except in books. Those that are my preferred reading these days – Max Hastings and Antony Beevor – are too militaryhistorian, stiff-upper-lip for tears.

People who talk about a ‘stiff upper

lip’ have obviously never cried at anything, have they? It’s the bottom lip that starts to go silly.

Poetry does it. Ben Jonson: ‘Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.’

On My First Sonne (1603) Jonson’s son died, aged seven, of the plague. You have to read the whole thing aloud slowly to get the pathetic honesty of it. I can’t do that, not aloud, and not slowly, without blinking a lot, because it’s

his beloved eldest son who died so young, and here is hard-nosed, cynical Ben reproving himself – for giving in to despair.

Oh, dearie me.

Without that tinge of hopeless self-recrimination, that key and wholly recognisable self-knowledge, we wouldn’t respond at all.

So – Little Nell, nope. Bambi? Who cares? We crave the disastrous melancholy state of a survivor in an empty, careless universe.

I am totally responsive to sentimental manipulation. Gladys Knight always delivers. ‘He’s leaving … on that midnight train to Georgia.’ Even with the Pips gormlessly crooning ‘going back to find’, it pricks me up. ‘I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.’

Yes! I feel the throat constricting. The bottom lip twitching. Bliss. Real soul.

Or Dolly Parton. ‘Ah … ah ah, … will always love yoo… ooo … ooo.’ Think of poor, sheep-faced Porter Wagoner. He had been Dolly’s feller, her mentor, her good ole boy – her sheep, in fact.

Left: Captains Courageous (1937) Below: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

26 The Oldie December 2023

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Left: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) Above: The Champ (1931)

And now she was off to invent Dollywood without him – so she sat down and wrote this cracker. Let the heartache begin.

You can find lists of musical weepies on Spotify – feeble, wholly blank, modern dirges. You can’t cry at a synthesiser. Try George Jones’s He Stopped Loving Her Today. It’s masterful.

I’m looking for the very opposite of objective Brechtian, alienated disdain.

An utter surrender. In films, I want that sudden surge of music; oh yes, a momentary hesitation, the absolute honesty of a straight face, the very lack of any complicated dialogue, often after hours of the most elaborate schematic plotting, obviously, and then, yes, yes, hit me with it. I need to breathe, I have to gulp and the tears come, uncontrollably; at least, I jolly well hope so.

In Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Joan Fontaine is peerless. She is just so sweet. In need of my personal help, if that were remotely possible. Let the teardrops roll.

Try The Champ (1931) – the Jackie Cooper original. (Not the Jon Voight one.) When the kid tries to revive Wallace Beery – oh, dear me. Or Freddie Bartholomew crying over Spencer Tracey’s bizarre Portuguese accent in Captains Courageous (1937).

The hard-bitten mud-slingers – the critics – may think it’s easy. But, like wild, uncontrollable laughter, true weepies are an art form.

We brutes crave raw carrots: proper

emotion. We can’t cry over human beings – but when my dog died, oh dear, I stood in the hallway and thought of him waiting for his walk and broke down. Cadbury was loyal and loving and really, really stupid, as only Labrador dogs can be. Being guileless, or at least hopeless at doing guile, is key. I’m told that Marley & Me provides authentic, lachrymose doggy collapse.

It’s on my still-to-weep list.

Don’t miss The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). An all-time top caterwaul.

Homer has come back from the war and he has no arms left. They didn’t have CGI, and so they used a real wardisabled veteran called Harold Russell.

He can act, but not too well. It is even more credible.

This stalwart man just shows his girlfriend how bad he is at getting ready for bed and she gazes at him and tells him it doesn’t matter because she loves him so much … and oh my goodness, I’m off again just thinking about it.

Mind you, I came out at the first interval of a La Bohème at the ENO a while back, sputtering and dabbing away

Like wild, uncontrollable laughter, true weepies are an art form

with my drink napkin, and people stirred their ice cubes in embarrassment. They were critics, you see. Waiting for Harrison Birtwhistle or something.

Thank God it was dark in the theatre.

I must stop going with these hard-boiled lozenges. I need more easily moved companions.

We romantics are disappointed idealists. Real life falls far short of the ecstasy of total abandonment. When I directed a production of Twelfth Night, I invited the cast to tell me their stories of infatuation. That moment when they simply wanted to repeat somebody’s name, or just see them, tremble at their perfection, or stand outside their house for a few hours – but none of them knew what the hell I was talking about.

We were doomed. We were doomed because of my hopeless direction, to be honest, but you have to understand ‘feeling’ for universal sympathetic pain, as Shakespeare did. ‘What all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?’ (Macduff after Macbeth has killed his wife and children.) Gad. Or pathos. ‘Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.’ (King Lear.)

Surely the most effective withers-wringer in literature.

But I have endured highly-rated productions that seemed to think these were bad smells, or jokes. The Swan of Avon was trying to make you cry and he should succeed, you callous bastards.

We need to start a national register of reliable bawlers. It’s long overdue.

The Oldie December 2023 27

Nun’s rebel habit

W

e live in an age of Hibernian popularity with the likes of Graham Norton and Dara Ó Briain helping to create a green-tinged feelgood factor.

It is easy to forget that in the seventies and eighties it was not only unfashionable but often unpleasant to be Irish in Britain. The IRA campaign of murder and bombing meant lowered voices and anxiety for innocent Irish communities.

Emigrants making a major contribution to their adopted country were frequently treated as fifth columnists, wrongly believed to be sharing the sympathies and aims of the IRA. I was the London correspondent of the Dublin-based Irish Press from 1975 to 1987 and witnessed this unhappy period in Anglo-Irish relations.

From my tiny office in Fleet Street’s Chronicle House, directly opposite the Daily Telegraph, I reported on the IRA atrocities, the court cases and the harassment and shunning of many of my fellow countrymen and women.

Throughout this period, a remarkable figure on the scene was Sister Sarah Clarke (1919-2002). She made it her life’s mission to help hundreds of Irish prisoners, guilty or blameless, who crowded Britain’s jails during the conflict.

Bespectacled, softly spoken and wearing the habit of the posh La Sainte Union order, Sister Sarah directed her operations from her Highgate convent.

She was the unsung heroine of the long and difficult campaign to clear the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven – the notorious miscarriages of justice that sullied the British system of criminal justice.

The introduction in 1974 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the waves of arrests orchestrated by Special 30 The Oldie December 2023

Branch created an atmosphere of fear in the Irish community.

Sister Sarah devoted herself to arranging legal representation, visiting prisons and ferrying confused and traumatised relatives from Ireland between airports and jails.

Born in rural Galway, where her parents ran a pub, she became politicised in 1970, when, aged 51, she attended her first protest meeting about the effects of the Northern Irish conflict. She was granted permission from her order to join the civil-rights movement, then agitating against discrimination by the Unionist government in Northern Ireland.

As the Troubles escalated, Sister Sarah became the focal point for families of those arrested. Whether they were innocent or guilty, she made no distinction, quoting Christ: ‘I was sick and in prison and you visited me.’

Clockwise from left: The IRA’s Gerard Tuite; Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four is freed, 1989; Sister Sarah Clarke

She became an Establishment nuisance.

After Belfast sisters Marian and Dolours Price were convicted of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, they went on hunger strike, demanding a move to a Northern Irish prison.

As their health deteriorated, Lords Longford and Brockway persuaded them to stop the hunger strike. But no sooner had they agreed to take nourishment than Sister Sarah appeared at their bedsides and they reversed their decision.

‘Every time that nun gets in, they go back on hunger strike,’ wailed Lord Longford.

The Home Office ultimately banned Sister Sarah from access to Category A prisoners.

She also befriended IRA bomber Gerard Tuite, on remand in Brixton Prison until his escape in December 1980. His escape was a political emergency, leading Scotland Yard to issue 16,500 posters of his photograph, under the heading ‘TERRORIST ALERT –THIS MAN MUST BE CAUGHT’ (pictured).

Months later, Sister Sarah telephoned me. ‘Great news, Mr McEntee,’ she trilled. ‘Gerry is at home in Mountnugent.’

I gulped – not at the mention of Tuite’s hometown in my native County Cavan, but because I knew the Irish Press telephones were tapped by Scotland Yard. For the rest of her life, Sister Sarah campaigned to have other convictions overturned. Though in failing health, she succeeded. The Guildford Four were released in 1989 and the Maguire Seven had their convictions quashed in 1991, a ruling assisted by her campaigns.

On 9th February 2005, PM Tony Blair issued an apology, saying, ‘They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated.’

It was total vindication for Sister Sarah, widely viewed as an Irish Republican crank. Sadly she was not around to witness Blair’s exoneration.

She died in 2002, saying on her deathbed, ‘I must go up the hill now and meet my mother.

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During the Troubles, a soft-spoken Galway nun fought to overturn wrongful convictions. By John McEntee

RIP the combover For decades, baldies made a sweeping statement with magnificent combovers. Now they’ve got the chop. By Dwight Garner

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

T

here’s no sugarcoating the awfulness of going bald, especially when you’re young.

I lost my hair – first slowly, then all at once – when I was in my late twenties. I had it worse than most, but better than some. I’ve had decades to get used to seeing my fivehead in the mirror.

At this point, I probably wouldn’t take my hair back even if I could. I have what people tell me is ‘a look’. I would describe this look as ‘prop-scarred manatee in expensive eyewear’.

For anyone growing up, as I did, in the 1960s and ’70s, there were, for sure, bald icons: Telly Savalas, Yul Brynner and Isaac Hayes on the cover of Hot Buttered Soul.

Then there was the Hollywood talent agent Swifty Lazar, famous for his Oscar-night parties. In The Vanity Fair Diaries, Tina Brown observed that the back of Lazar’s head resembled ‘crinkled foreskin’.

I like reading about the time the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, in 1970, that peak hippie moment. Thompson shaved his head so that he could refer to the right-wing candidate, in debates, as ‘my long-haired opponent’.

In general, though, bald was not a look to aspire to. It was unsexy. Men kept their hair puffy on the back and sides, and it looked awful, like half an expedient doughnut.

This style made even great sports stars, NBA heroes, absolute studs resemble dentists. No kid wanted that poster on their wall. My father was among the many men who parted their hair on the side and combed long strands across the balding part. He made it look pretty good.

A pox on toupees. One reason I love John D MacDonald’s thrillers so much is that his hero, Travis McGee, gets so much delight out of snatching the FAKE HAIR off bad guys.

Things got better for the balding man in the 1990s. The buzzed look arrived.

Andre Agassi, who shaved his head in 1995, is often given credit for ushering this new world into being.

Agassi went from looking like a poodle, to a poodle in a hat (a poodle in chemo), to ideally bald, almost overnight.

He looked fantastic. He was free, reborn.

Gregor Fisher in the Hamlet ad

Late, great Bobby Charlton (1937-2023)

I am an American, not a Brit, but I have read that when Neil Kinnock shaved off his combover, it was a breakthrough moment, of sorts, on your shores for the bald guy.

Now there are proudly head-shaven men, young and old, wherever you look.

This look is so ‘in’ that I have a friend, a well-known journalist, who shaves his lustrous skull even though he has a full head of hair. He thinks he looks better this way, and he may be right.

I’m happy for these guys, all of them.

But also they make me uncomfortable. I always fear one of them is about to head-butt me, like Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup. The late, great Bobby Charlton, King of the British combover (just ahead of Gregor Fisher in the Hamlet ad, failing to pull off a flattering picture in a photo booth with his combover), never produced that intimidating effect.

There are so many proud baldies now that we’ve lost the artful combover, or the absent-minded flop.

Do watch the excellent recent documentary Turn Every Page, about the biographer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023).

Gottlieb was a legend in publishing circles. He’s a legend to me, also, because he kept his combover looking fine for decades. It was superb: casual, offhanded, intellectual, shabby chic. I would kill for Gottlieb’s combover, but I don’t quite have the head, or the hair, to pull it off.

I am not in favor of all combovers – certainly not Donald Trump’s. It is the flying camel, the double axel, the triple toe loop and the death spiral of combovers, all at the same time.

When I’m watching television or films from the ’70s, or thereabouts, though, I see many balding men who I’m glad never went for the buzzed look. Dick Cavett was among them. He would have looked beady, interviewing John Lennon, Norman Mailer or Joni Mitchell, with a shaved head. Then there is Woody Allen, whose balding yet anarchic mop reflected the anarchic mood of his early films.

I am a terrific fan of literary combovers of bygone days, the shag of yore. Owners included my friend the man of letters Nicholas Delbanco, who is now in his eighties.

He has written many wise and elegant books, and he taught a generation of major writers, including Bret Easton Ellis, at Vermont’s Bennington College.

When he was young, Nick dated Carly Simon. The song You’re So Vain, she has said, is in part about him.

For a few years, Nick also possessed perhaps the most seductive combover of the second half of the 20th century. It’s fun to kid him about it now, but no wonder Carly fell for him. Other owners of literary combovers included Anthony Burgess, James Dickey and Pat Conroy.

The swirls of hair kept their brains cool.

All it will take is one brave bald celebrity to bring the ideal combover, the artful flop, back. Prince William, the Dalai Lama and Jude Law, are you in?

The Oldie December 2023 31

Shady oldies When Liz Hodgkinson’s ex-husband started wearing sunglasses at the age of 79, he became a babe magnet

EVERSUMMER; COLAIMAGES / ALAMY

M

y ex-husband reckons that for most of his life, he has been pretty much invisible to other people, and that as he has got older, this invisibility has increased.

But, just lately, he has been getting sideways approving looks from passersby, even at nearly 80. It seems they are wondering whether he is some kind of celebrity, as they often give him a second or even third, glance.

Why? Because when out and about these days, he often wears sunglasses.

This is not out of any kind of vanity, but because he has been advised to wear them following a successful cataract operation, to cut out glare and reduce eyestrain. Previously, he needed strong prescription specs, which meant he could not wear sunglasses, apart from nerdy clip-on ones.

Now, for the first time ever, he is turning heads. Even I, who have known him since we were teenagers, am pulled up sharp by his new and uncharacteristically stylish appearance.

He too is astonished at the difference the shades have made, and several women have said to me, ‘I can see what you saw in your exhusband. He is such a goodlooking man!’

Although sunglasses have a long history, going back around 2,000 years, they were first considered stylish when worn by military pilots during the Second World War to protect their eyes from UV rays in the sky. They became known as aviator sunglasses and were subsequently worn by ordinary men who wanted to cut a dash, as they were associated with courage and daring.

Sunglasses were given an extra dose of cool when Hollywood star Steve McQueen made

Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. Below: Anna Wintour

them part of his image. He had a huge collection; one pair alone sold for over $70,000 at auction after his death.

Today, celebrities Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton and Tom Ford continue the cool sunglasses look, as do younger stars such as Timothée Chalamet.

Women find sunglasses on men sexy, as they impart a sense of mystery and intrigue and make a man seem more handsome.

They deliver symmetry to a male face and give it a firmer-jawed look.

Sunglasses are intimately connected with glamour and sexiness; the many styles of designer shades now available imply a genial, slightly enigmatic and perhaps ultimately unknowable personality.

They are also connected with wickedness. Two Bond villains, Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill (1989) and Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace (2008), were always wearing expensive sunglasses. The film producers knew that the right sunglasses for the character – black Ray-Ban Wayfarers for Sanchez, and Cutler and Gross Brown Stripe for Greene – would instantly convey the required villainous allure.

There is even a scholarly book, Cool Shades by Vanessa Brown, which explores the history and meaning of sunglasses and explains how and why they became an enduring fashion item.

Women have used sunglasses to add a touch of mystique and exoticism. It is unusual to see Vogue editor Anna Wintour without her trademark sunglasses, even indoors and in the dark.

Somehow, though, women in sunglasses don’t deliver the extra aura that hangs round a man in shades.

The paradox is that if you want to make yourself appear more captivating and visible, all you have to do is hide behind a pair of sunglasses.

The Oldie December 2023 33

‘NOW you tell me you don’t want kids?’

34 The Oldie December 2023

The Sage of Narnia Sixty years ago, C S Lewis’s death was eclipsed by JFK’s assassination.

Today, his influence is as strong as ever. By Rev Michael Coren

C

S Lewis died 60 years ago, on 22nd November 1963 – the same day Aldous Huxley died of cancer and President Kennedy was assassinated. The death of arguably the greatest Christian communicator of the 20th century was overshadowed by the murder of a world leader. Many people were even unaware that Lewis had died.

Six decades later, Huxley is quoted more than read, and John F Kennedy’s vision of liberal America seems as distant as the Gettysburg address.

But Lewis is more popular than ever, his books sell all over the world in countless languages, and films are made about his life and his books. There’s yet another movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the works.

There have been numerous attempts to discredit or dismantle the author of the Narnia stories, Miracles, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters and many other books that have changed countless lives – but it never works. He still speaks so clearly, and so convincingly, especially in this cynical age where condescension towards Christianity is considered a fashion statement.

Lewis experienced that in his own lifetime. In his 1952 book, Mere Christianity, he wrote, ‘There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps.

‘The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold etc) is, of course, a mere symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.’

Born in Belfast in 1898, Lewis moved from atheism to deism, and eventually to Anglican Christianity in his early 30s. It was an emotional as well as an intellectual conversion. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has

risen,’ he would write after his conversion. ‘Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’

As an Oxford professor, he was highly regarded for his academic writing but disliked by many of his colleagues for his combination of faith, popularity on the radio with his Christian broadcasts, and literary success, especially as a children’s author. (No change there!)

It’s partly why in 1954 he accepted the chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Lewis’s friend and secretary, Walter Hooper, once told me, ‘He felt as if some of Oxford society was jealous of him, some embarrassed, and some downright hateful.’

He did have Oxford friends, however, and was a central part of the Inklings, a mostly Christian reading, discussion, and drinking club – at the Eagle and Child (aka the Bird and Baby, sadly closed at the moment) and the Lamb and Flag (just reopened) in Oxford. J R R Tolkien was one of the members.

It was a male gathering, and Lewis – and his friends – always assumed he’d remain unmarried. Then came joy – Joy Davidman, in fact, an American, Jewish, divorced, ex-Communist, about as unlikely a companion as could be conceived of.

They fell in love, and while

Literary lion: C S Lewis (1898-1963)

the play and especially two films about their relationship, Shadowlands, may have overly romanticised the story, it was certainly an extraordinary and profoundly touching partnership.

They met in 1952 and married four years later, mainly so that Joy could be granted a visa so as to continue to live in Britain with her two sons.

Whatever the reason, an authentic love developed, and when Joy died in 1960, Lewis was a broken man. He wrote in A Grief Observed, still one of the finest books about loss I’ve ever read, ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.’

He turned down a CBE because he thought it ‘too political’, gave most of his book royalties away to charity, rejected several offers of ordination and when one of Joy’s sons reverted to Judaism, did all he could to help the boy in his faith.

In other words, he wasn’t a typical evangelist, then or now. But that doesn’t fully explain the constant popularity. He had an outstanding intellect, he wrote beautifully and his grasp of imagery and argument was pristine.

Walter Hooper said, ‘He told me once that he wrote to communicate, and that if ever he forgot that or lost the ability to do so he would simply give up writing. He received so many letters from people who said they had found faith or answers because of what he’s said or written, and it delighted him.

He never became tired of it.

Delighted him.’

I was read the Narnia stories at school when I was seven. Fifty-three years later, I became an Anglican priest. The influence of C S Lewis?

I certainly wouldn’t discount it.

Reverend Michael Coren is an Anglican vicar in Ontario The Oldie December 2023 35

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

Want to get ahead? Get a headscarf Everyone used to wear them – now they’re making a comeback Whatever happened to the classic silk headscarf? Ubiquitous for decades, headscarves have lately been lying dormant. Now we are poised for a comeback of sorts.

Investors, priced out of the iconic handbag market (the Birkin, the Fendi Baguette etcetera), are stocking up.

Sotheby’s online Handbags and Accessories emporium and Xupes – the vintage store popularised by Channel 4’s documentary Second Hand for Fifty Grand – report brisk business.

Cash in the attic for Oldie-readers? As long as you have been organised enough to have stored them correctly – neatly folded between sheets of tissue to prevent any colour transfer, only ever professionally cleaned and most valuable if they have been kept in their original boxes.

The Xupes collection of ‘pre-loved’ scarves ranges in price from £199 to £799. You can view these in the Xupes online store. Xupes has also facilitated sales in the thousands for rare designs and materials, such as the Hermès Marble Silk or the beaded Tigre Royal.

Pioneered by Hermès in 1937, the fashion was popularised by Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy and Princess Grace of Monaco, famously papped using her Hermès scarf as a sling for her injured arm at a 1959 yacht party in Monaco.

The look went mainstream and, as can be seen in the BBC miniseries Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, became almost a uniform for 1970s Belfast housewives.

Sloane Rangers could be identified by the ‘Knightsbridge knot’. They liked to knot the scarves on their chins so that they wobbled while they talked.

Of course, for our dear late monarch, the look never went out of fashion. Queen Elizabeth was the last of the stalwarts, reliably wearing a headscarf at outdoor sporting occasions but, apart from the occasional tribute appearance in one by the Princess Royal, conventional headscarfwearing seems to be a thing of the past.

36 The Oldie December 2023

Xupes director Reece Morgan tipped me off that headscarves are currently being worn by the young – although not always on the head. I looked at Instagram to see that uber-cool influencers such as American Julia Berolzheimer – one of the first fashion bloggers; she started Gal Meets Glam in 2011 – repurpose them as a type of silken shield or breastplate, tied at the neck and around the waist and worn without a bra, of course, as goddesses don’t require bras.

Then there is French fashion blogger Katya Gousset – who wears them insouciantly around her flawless juvenile neck and sometimes, to double as jewellery, as tighly-wound coils or ‘scrarflaces’.

The trend has expanded to include males as well, with popular figures such as rapper A$AP Rocky regularly sporting headscarves, often from Gucci.

But why do they cost so much new, let alone second-hand?

‘It’s because Hermès scarves are typically designed by freelance artists, who regularly collaborate with the brand,’ says Reece Morgan. ‘These artists often sign their work and give each design a unique title, similar to pieces found in art galleries. Some of our clients even frame and display their scarves!

‘The designs range from equestrian to military, nautical, storytelling, symbolic and wildlife. Occasionally, Hermès commissions established contemporary artists to design editions.

‘Certain designs, especially limitededition ones, increase in value over time.

While some popular Hermès scarves are re-released, others are offered only once, making them rare and subsequently increasing their value significantly.’

I had no idea that the creation of

Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963)

a single Hermès silk scarf requires 18 months.

Reece Morgan clarifies, explaining, ‘Each scarf is handdesigned, screenprinted and silk-screened manually. The production process for a single scarf can take up to six months, considering an average Hermès scarf contains about 27 colours. Around 750 hours are dedicated to engraving the printing screens, with each colour requiring a separate screen.

‘Furthermore, prior to the development of screens, new colours and combinations are tested for their final impact, including how specific colours appear on different fabric compositions.

Hence, the more colours a scarf exhibits, the higher its value.

‘Additionally, Hermès scarves have hand-rolled, hand-stitched hems, and the silk for a single scarf comes from 250 mulberry-moth cocoons.’

As I stare nostalgically at the images of 1970s Belfast in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, I spot that Belfast headscarves were often securing headfuls of hair-rollers in place and the bulk underneath improved the look. Big heads on a body are more flattering. The problem with the headscarf is that it reduces the size of the head.

And this may be the real reason why this incredibly practical garment (‘Caroline always has a drawerful of headscarves’ – The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook) may now be living in your attic – and translatable into cash.

Don’t bank on it Why do we fall for get-rich-quick schemes that are too good to be true?

Because we have a terrible fear of missing out, says Neil Collins

38 The Oldie December 2023

called FTX. This allowed coins to be traded by the smart investors without the tedious business of converting the proceeds to dollars.

Conveniently, it stored your crypto tokens, promising to back each dollar’s worth with a real dollar deposit.

He also set up a firm called Alameda Research, which itself could trade on FTX. Like other crypto exchanges, FTX created its own digital token, and essentially allowed Alameda to borrow the dollars that FTX was holding for its clients in return for depositing its own tokens. By the time the scam was fully uncovered, it appeared that FTX had only $900 million in real assets, and a stonking $9 billion of liabilities.

This vast shortfall helped explain how FTX had managed to spray billions at adverts at the Superbowl, donations to Democrat politicians, celebrity endorsements, high living and anything that took Sam’s fancy.

Even so, the amount he and his cronies got through must be a world record, especially since he doesn’t seem to have a pot of gold stashed somewhere out of range of the US authorities. He’s just been convicted of fraud.

Then there was Bernie Madoff. He founded a fund-management business which showed consistent returns to investors. They spread the word, and the money flowed in. Investors were discouraged from

Clockwise from left: Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried

cashing in with warnings that they might not be allowed to reinvest, and FOMO did its usual work.

In fact, there was no investing going on. The consistent returns were generated

by Bernie pretending that he had bought a share on Monday that ended the week higher. He ran this remarkable makebelieve machine for over 20 years. When he finally admitted to the fraud, the paper value of the ‘portfolios’ was $65 billion.

Collective suspension of disbelief is endemic to stock markets. The South Sea Bubble of 1720 is the classic example, and the mad dash for internet stocks at the turn of this century saw investors throwing out solid (boring) shares to get aboard. We would rather not be reminded of Baltimore Technologies, Dimension Data or Colt Communications – all three were FTSE 100 index stocks before they disappeared as fast as they had arrived.

You have probably heard of Arm Holdings, Britain’s leading chipmaker, whose owners were desperate for a stock-market listing. Despite the entreaties of Rishi Sunak, the vendors went to New York. By restricting the number of shares being sold, the owners managed to pitch the offer at $51 a share, valuing Arm at $52 billion. Whether it was the $82m in fees paid to the 28 banks supporting the offer or just plain old FOMO, the price jumped on day one and then fell over – down to $48 last week.

A current example of credulous investors is Hipgnosis, set up to exploit the gold in them thar old pop songs. As any oldie could tell you, these songs never die, and they definitely do Not Fade Away. The composers are selling the rights, some for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the likes of Hipgnosis are buying them.

It looks as though it will end in tears because, in truth, it is almost impossible to find a formula to value them.

But it’s a fashionable new asset class – and wouldn’t you like to have a few, perhaps to add to those disastrous nonfungible tokens you bought last year.

Neil Collins was City Editor of the Daily Telegraph

UPI / ALAMY

L

ook, I know you are far too clever to jump on every passing investment bandwagon, but you will, you know.

We all do. The fear of missing out (FOMO) runs through our psyche. If only I had bought Amazon when it seemed like a daring idea and some clever people had noticed. If only I had decided that Apple shares were so cheap that I must have been missing something. So of course I was wide open to the Next Big Thing.

It’s a comfort that even the smartest make investment howlers. It is unlikely that George Shultz, Larry Ellison, Henry Kissinger or Rupert Murdoch understood the scientific theory behind Theranos, the magical blood-testing machine that turned out to be no such thing.

But the clever, rich people were in there, and each assumed that someone else had done the hard work. So they ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars to get aboard a promise of tests from a single drop of blood. Could so many clever people be wrong? Well, yes. The process didn’t work, and the company was a fraud.

It probably helped that Theranos was run by a striking and charismatic blonde called Elizabeth Holmes. Investors’ willing suspension of disbelief owed much to her charms. It also owed much to her determination to set lawyers on anyone asking awkward questions.

It took the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Carreyrou and his brilliant book, Bad Blood, to start the process that eventually sent her to prison.

This brings us to a mop-haired youngster by the unlikely name of Sam Bankman-Fried.

Photogenic in a different way from Ms Holmes, Sam looks like a lovable scamp.

But, in the frenzy over bitcoin, he saw that the real money was to be made by running an exchange for crypto tokens such as bitcoin, which he

History

Britain’s sporting life My new book tells our island story through football, cricket and boxing

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

david horspool

social activities, from music to ‘And if you know your history’ novel-writing. sounds like the sort of thing Is that because there is more a politician might say, or a to say about those other pub bore. activities? Isn’t sport a bit, well, To hear several thousand basic? Aficionados of terrace people say those words chants will know that the line together, you would need to that follows ‘And if you know be at the football. your history’ in ‘It’s a grand old Fans as far apart as team’ is ‘It’s enough to make Glasgow, Liverpool and your heart go woarrr!’

London can be heard singing It’s hardly the Algonquin them (after a fashion) in the The Kop, Anfield chant that Celtic, Everton Round Table. and Tottenham Hotspur all claim as their But condescension is never a good own, ‘It’s a grand old team to play for’. look for a historian. You don’t have to When over the past few years I have reach for Russian abstraction to argue told people that I’m writing a book about that the place of sport in British life is sport and British history, the reactions unusually, and in some cases uniquely, have been mixed. Most are in no doubt deep-rooted, and has all sorts of that the subject is popular, but is it unexpected ramifications. serious? Previously I’ve written about the Sport can help reframe historical doings of kings, generals and statesmen, questions and offer new answers and and popular and aristocratic uprisings. insights. I realised early on in my reading How can sport match up to that? that I didn’t want to write the narrative The way I see it, sport and history are history of various British sports – and natural bedfellows, as those on the terraces repeatedly get bogged down in the at Goodison or Parkhead already know. amateur and professional question, Commentators know it too, constantly for example, which has bedevilled so referring to historical precedent. Harry many sports.

Kane’s latest England scoring exploit, for I decided instead to look at our example, is significant only because he sporting history from the other side, and surpassed Bobby Charlton (again). to see whether different sports were Cricket also revels in statistical anomalies particularly well suited to answering and comparisons across the ages. different historical questions.

Sport may demand that its players It is well known that, during the 19th focus on the present, but what they do and 20th centuries, the British class takes on a deeper resonance when put in structure changed, apparently loosened historical context. by the industrial revolution, urbanisation If lovers of sport are natural historians, and growing political participation. the historical profession hasn’t always Cricket has sometimes been used to returned the compliment. In recent years, endorse that view. The social historian a thriving specialism in sports history has G M Trevelyan wrote that had the French established itself, complete with scholarly nobility ‘been capable of playing cricket journals, conferences and courses. with their peasants, their châteaux would But, as with all specialists, academic never have been burnt’. On this argument, sports historians tend mostly to speak to cricket, the game played by batting aristos one another. In mainstream history, sport and brawny blacksmiths on Hambledon can still seem a poor relation, given far Green, helped make Britain the exception less attention than ‘higher’ cultural and to the revolutionary European rule.

Perhaps, but the instincts of cricket’s administrators were mainly focused on keeping the classes apart, not smoothing over distinctions. The maintenance of the gentleman and player divide into the 1960s reflected that. But this polite fiction (mightily abused by the likes of W G Grace) distorted existing class relations, while selling itself as the most English of venerable traditions.

The way that players, spectators and administrators battled or accommodated each other over class in cricket gives us a unique insight into that historical story.

Similar stories apply to other sports and historical themes. Take race, ethnicity and boxing. One of the pioneers of bare-knuckle boxing in Britain – a sport that writers such as Pierce Egan saw as peculiarly and commendably British – was Daniel Mendoza, a Sephardic Jew from London’s East End. He was the seed of an extraordinary Jewish boxing legacy, a world of packed halls, champions and match-makers that lasted right up to Frank Bruno’s promoter Mickey Duff, born Monek Prager to a Polish Hasidic family who came to England in 1937.

Black fighters, too, have a long history in Britain, going back to the African American Tom Molineaux, who challenged the white British champion Tom Cribb in 1810.

So did boxing offer a way to bridge racial divides? Perhaps, but it also brought out racism, including the introduction in the 1920s of racially discriminatory rules that were studiously avoided in other parts of British society.

Knowing sporting history means understanding British history more deeply. It may not make your heart go ‘woarrr’, but your mind is certainly expanded.

David Horspool’s More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain (John Murray, £25) is out now The Oldie December 2023 39

Hoarder disorder For 58 years, Muriel Spark never threw anything away. And now Frances Wilson, her biographer, has to wade through her hairdresser’s bills

PAINTERS / ALAMY; MURIEL SPARK’S DESK: : ALAN TAYLOR ©

D

o you suffer from Plyushkin’s disorder? Statistics suggest that five per cent of us do, but my guess is it’s more.

Stepan Plyushkin is a character in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, who saves everything he finds. He is, in other words, a hoarder, who invests his emotions in the stuff other people throw away.

Hoard is from Anglo-Saxon hord, meaning treasure, and hurdis, meaning fence; hoarding is both an accumulation of clutter and a defence against its overflow. The etymology perfectly catches the condition: hoarders like to organise their chaos.

I know a hoarder of yoghurt cartons, a lifetime’s supply washed and stacked away; a hoarder of newspapers, bundled up and categorised by month and year; a hoarder of hotel shampoos and slippers, unopened and kept in the airing cupboard; and a good many hoarders of money (formally known as misers), who lock their treasure up and watch it grow.

Even when my mother no longer had a video-cassette recorder, she held on to her hundreds of videotapes containing thousands of hours of television, the contents of each one catalogued in a notebook. My father, meanwhile, hoards cough medicine, his collection of Benylin going back 60 years.

Most of the hoarders I know come from literature. Remember Krook, in Bleak House, who spontaneously combusts in his rag and bone shop?

‘All’s fish that comes into my net,’ he says, sitting among his landfill, which contains the document needed to resolve the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

Sherlock Holmes had his own ‘horror of destroying documents’ – so every corner of 221B Baker Street ‘was stacked with bundles of manuscript’.

Thomas De Quincey, about whom I wrote a biography, kept so many books that he was eventually, as he put it, ‘snowed up’ and could no longer enter his lodgings, at which point he simply locked the door and moved elsewhere. At the time of his death, De Quincey owed rent on six snowed-up rooms.

Krook, the hoarder in Bleak House. Right: Muriel Spark’s desk at her Tuscany home

It irritates me no end that I didn’t make more of this at the time. If I could rewrite the book, I would see his hoarding as the clue to his entire character.

I’m writing a life of Muriel Spark, who describes herself on the first page of her memoir, Curriculum Vitae, as a hoarder.

I can vouch for that. From 1948 until her death in 2006, she never threw a piece of paper away. Her hoard, like that of other writers, is seen not as a result of pathological inability to let things go, but as a treasure trove of intellectual source material.

When writers snow themselves up, it’s called keeping an archive. Spark’s archive is now divided between the National Library of Scotland, which has 150 feet of her personal papers, and the McFarlin Library in the University of Tulsa – where I am now – which stores 45 feet of her literary manuscripts.

The 195 feet of paper she sold to these institutions is equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-size swimming pool, and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777.

Compare this with the collected works of Spark – 22 novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of poems, a memoir and three critical studies – which take up 14 inches of shelf space in my study.

To write the 20th century’s most economical novels (a book by Spark

rarely exceeds 200 pages) required a titanic overflow, which she boxed and catalogued herself, adding Post-it notes and marginalia as a guide for biographers (‘This is rubbish’; ‘I think this is by me’).

Spark had little doubt that we would spend months, miles from home, turning over her hairdressing receipts and letters from the Inland Revenue, comparing one identical set of proofs with another.

What exactly, I ask myself, am I looking for?

Spark’s archive tells us everything and nothing.

Because she was spooky, I assume that she’s watching me, making sure I don’t scribble on the pages. And, because she was mischievous, I assume she buried in these papers some vital clue to the meaning of her life and work.

It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, which is, of course, part of her joke. In Spark’s first short story, The Portobello Road, a girl called Needle, murdered in a haystack, haunts her killer. In a later story, The Executor, written in the year Spark sold her archive to Tulsa, a deceased writer’s niece forges the end of his unfinished novel and is punished by her uncle’s ghost.

It’s discomfiting to think that Dante would have put Spark, along with my parents, in the fourth circle of hell, which he reserved for ‘hoarders and wasters’.

But then who would ’scape whipping?

I pride myself on putting every scrap of paper into the recycling bin – but because, like everyone else, I live largely online, I have hardly any paper anyway.

My own hoard of letters and literary ephemera is kept in ‘the cloud’, that infinite self-storage container which has made Plyushkins of us all.

Frances Wilson is writing a biography of Muriel Spark The Oldie December 2023 41

Oldie Man of Letters

Hail St Mary’s, full of grace

HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD / ALAMY

The Church of England wants to demolish a vital London church a n wilson Growing old, one loses one’s capacity to be shocked. But lately I have been shocked by the senior clergy in our neck of the woods.

Somers Town is just north of the British Library and Euston Station. It has always been a deprived neighbourhood.

It was from here that the infant Dickens set out on his long walk to the Blacking Warehouse in Hungerford Old Stairs.

Here, in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, ‘Father Hilary Cherwell … restores faith in the church’ by his building sanitary housing for his parishioners.

When he arrived as a curate after WWI, Father Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) – the original of Father Hilary; and nephew of the great admiral – found families squeezed into rat-infested lodgings with no sanitation. He rehoused thousands of people, not by getting state aid, but by appealing to rich friends: ‘In the name of the babe of Bethlehem, will you help this church build new homes?’

His name still lives – as does his vision. The St Pancras Housing Association, which he founded in 1924, was eventually taken over by the London County Council. But not before the idea of ‘social housing’ had spread to boroughs all over the UK. One of his famous sayings was ‘Housing is not enough.’ People need nursery schools, affordable furniture, children’s holidays and decent pubs, where the clientele can’t spend their entire weekly wage on booze. All this, and more, Jellicoe supplied, wearing himself out and dying by the age of 36.

St Mary’s kept alive his tradition of humane Anglican Catholicism – running a good school, supplying help to the waifs and strays who haunt that lonely, railway-terminusy part of London, providing space for rough sleepers, rescuing junkies etc etc. The present vicar, Father Paschal, is much loved.

Like most 19th-century buildings,

Beacon of hope: St Mary’s, Somers Town, built by the Inwoods in 1826

St Mary’s needs repairs. It began its life being mocked. Only ten years after it was consecrated in 1826, A W N Pugin, in Contrasts (1836), was lampooning the architects (William Inwood and son Henry) for their experiment with a ‘Gothic’ style. He described the front as ‘ludicrous … with doors so high that giants may get through’.

But what he was not to know was that giants did get through. Giants like Jellicoe, and giants like the congregation of today, which has received a severe battering by the march of events.

HS2 has helped to gut much of the parish. People have been forced to move house. The level of poverty is high.

St Mary’s feels like the beating heart of this poor area, and you might have thought that the Church of England would cherish it.

I began by suggesting I’m not easily shocked. On 22nd October, I sat in the church to witness the Archdeacon of Hampstead telling the people of Somers Town that unless they could find £1.7 million to repair the place, he was going to start the process of demolition.

He did not suggest by one syllable that he would stand by this community in its hour of need, or help them to raise the money needed for repairs.

At the Q and A session, he asked each questioner their name but, replying, invariably got their name wrong – which seemed revealing.

Neither he nor the other ecclesiastical bureaucrats had given any warning at all to the vicar or the churchwardens. He has followed this up with an email, giving them an impossibly short time to get their act together and resist.

The letter lets slip that he had in fact already started the process of applying to demolish the church well over a month before his visitation.

Of course, the churchwardens, highly intelligent and motivated women, are going to fight this every inch of the way.

They have already got the Victorian Society on the case, and the excellent Griff Rhys Jones, President, has said the diocesan decision is ‘extraordinary’.

An appeal for money will be launched, though it will be impossible to find the sums demanded by the archdeacon by Christmas, as his letter half-seems to demand.

The Church bureaucrats want to demolish a place that has been sacred to this community for 200 years and put up a block of flats. Any humane person would see a place where generations of human lives have experienced grief, loss, poverty, joy; a place where the poor have been treated with dignity and respect.

The Church – ye gods, the Church!

– sees the chance to rid itself of a problem, and to make a nice little earner.

One should not be shocked, but I am.

I am never going to use the phrase ‘dear old C of E’ again. Galsworthy saw this place as restoring faith in the Church, and it still is, if only the Philistines in charge of the diocese would allow the people of Somers Town to do so.

The Oldie December 2023 43

Thirty years of idling?

It’s hard work tom hodgkinson

I was quite a young mouse. It was in the early nineties.

I was lying in bed one morning, staring at the ceiling, and decided I’d like to start a magazine. It would be called the Idler and would celebrate the fine art of doing nothing, which I took to be an undervalued element of a life well lived.

To make this idea happen, though, I had to get out of bed and engage in purposeful activity, going against my own magazine’s philosophy.

There were plenty of historical figures who combined idling with creative work.

My hero, Dr Johnson, stayed in bed till lunchtime every day and complained about his own sluggishness and indolence. Yet he compiled a dictionary and wrote countless poems and essays, while managing to go travelling with Boswell and drinking in the taverns with Joshua Reynolds.

John Lennon, too, was a naturally lazy person, as his songs I’m Only Sleeping, and Watching the Wheels attest. But he was enormously productive. Socrates did very little bar argue with people in the market-place, and he became the most influential philosopher ever.

But I couldn’t produce a magazine alone. So I asked my very capable friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney if he would help me.

He was a graphic designer (among his other talents) and owned an Apple Mac computer. He had art-directed magazines, both student publications and the short-lived Modern Review, which was launched in 1992.

The nineties was a lively time for new magazines. The Oldie was launched by Richard Ingrams in 1992. Loaded’s first issue appeared in 1994. Dazed and Confused was another one (still going), plus there was Rowan Pelling’s Erotic Review, and small titles such as Herb Garden, Blow, Sleaze Nation, Boy’s Own and Cheap Date.

44 The Oldie December 2023

You may say I’m a dreamer: King of the Idlers, John Lennon, at his 1969 bed-in

In 1991, publisher John Brown, who was making a fortune with Viz, took on Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena. Then in the later nineties The Chap started appearing.

Running a small magazine is like being in a band. There are three or four of you, you argue, you struggle financially, and you compete with other magazines. But it’s all fun and creative – and it’s essentially generous, in that you’re contributing something to the world that will, you hope, improve someone’s life somewhere.

Gavin and I had ideas that didn’t get very far. We went to see John Brown with a notion for a Vogue of Sex magazine. He let us give our pitch and then said, ‘I’m very interested in sex. It’s a great subject, but I’d rather stick my head in a bucket of dog shit

for a year than go anywhere near your proposal.’

To publish issue one of the Idler, we raised £800 by selling lifetime subscriptions to friends and family. We printed 1,000 copies and I cycled round town, dropping them off at record shops such as Rough Trade. We made T-shirts and threw parties. It was a sort of clwub.

We became quite fashionable in the nineties. Members of Blur would be at our parties. Friends star David Schwimmer once appeared. My pal Keith Allen had met him in the Groucho Club and brought him along. And we were attacked in Private Eye – a sure sign you’ve made it.

Somehow or other – despite going in and out of style – we’ve managed to keep the magazine going for 30 years.

We’ve been lucky with our patrons, I suppose. In the nineties, the Guardian helped us with the business side of producing a small magazine. They then employed us to help them develop new sections for the paper. Alan Rusbridger was editor at the time.

We were also given a lucrative gig, producing a magazine for Sony Playstation. Later we turned into a twice-yearly book and were published by Random House.

Things have got very dicey at times.

I’ve remortgaged our house to raise money. In 2012, our accountant said we were on the verge of going bankrupt.

At this point, Mrs Mouse and I (my mate Gavin having left to write The Cloudspotter’s Guide, a bestseller) were running a real-life bookshop and event venue, the Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment. That really was hard work. And it nearly ruined us financially.

We struggled along, living on air. In 2016, we closed our shop. I traipsed the streets with my laptop and raised money from investors. Mrs Mouse and I set about relaunching the magazine. Our friends at the distinguished Oldie magazine, by now a very successful business – unlike us –generously taught us their publishing techniques.

Following their advice, we’ve now built up a profitable enterprise. My nest may not be luxurious, but it is comfortable, and I do not worry about the morrow.

So I am a lucky mouse indeed, to be waking up each day and doing enjoyable work of my own choosing. I hope to keep going for another 30 years.

Thirty Years of the Idler: A Visual History by Tom Hodgkinson and Alice Smith is available from idler.co.uk

ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY

Town Mouse

Country Mouse

Welcome to my cottage – aka the Bates Motel giles wood

Quite why my wife gets up so early is a mystery. Is it to avoid me?

It’s not as if she’s milking cows or churning butter, even as the master hulks heavily in his sack.

‘Admin’ is her reason. From dawn till dusk, she’s on the phone checking that providers – in the forms of service and utility companies – aren’t taking us for a ride.

Brisk of tongue, the wife is unafraid to call out frauds – no doubt a lingering trace memory of her Ulster childhood, when her mother made her stand by a window to count the number of sacks the coalman was unloading into the coal house, ‘in case he keeps one for himself’.

She was also made to follow the window-cleaner, perched on a ladder outside, from window to window inside – ‘So you can point out any smears he has missed.’

As a result, in adult life, she is hardwired to assume criminality or incompetence when dealing with service-providers.

I have handed over the entire admin portfolio for the cottage to Mary for two reasons – the first is a sensible division of labour. It is a straight swap. She does all the admin and I do the cooking, driving, dustbin and drain duties.

The second is that, given my own lack of computer skills, it seemed a logical step.

The world has moved on since the days when I paid my own bills during my tenure of a cottage in the flat, unassuming countryside of Essex. Back in the eighties, it was enough of a challenge for me to pay Eastern Electricity, Anglian Water and British Telecom. Although I resented the council-tax bill from Babergh District Council, not once did I contest it. I thought the powers that be were unassailable!

In those days before privatisation, I lived in a world where services and utilities didn’t behave like Tenerife

timeshare touts. The customer didn’t have to search for better ‘deals’ themselves.

Was Mrs Thatcher to blame for turning our country into a Poundland version of the Wild West?

Last week, Mary dealt with Hastings Direct over our car insurance. Why, oh why, had it gone up from £400 to £700, during a year in which no claims had been made? ‘All car insurance has gone up,’ the operative informed her.

For two days, she was pacing the cottage, listening to recorded messages telling her how important her call was to the various companies she was trying to reach. When she rang Hastings Direct back to say she was cancelling the policy, since NFU were prepared to charge £400 for the same service, guess what the operative replied?

‘We’ll match NFU’s offer of £400.’

‘Unfortunately,’ retorted Mary, ‘I’ve been so frustrated at having to wait 40 minutes before I can speak to you, I’ve now formed a psychological association between Hastings Direct and irritation and I wouldn’t want to see your name on any paperwork again.’

To his credit, in response the operative at Hastings Direct burst out laughing.

Today, it was the turn of an online subscription to a major broadsheet.

They said, ‘To renew your subscription, you don’t need to do anything. We will take the sum by direct debit.’

‘What does the fly come with?’

Mary hit the warpath. After a long telephone wait, she got through to an English-speaking human. ‘Can you explain why it has gone up from £189 per year to £297?’ His response?

‘How does £139 sound to you?’

So I suppose the savings are worth it, but the interactions are physically demanding.

This week, she upgraded her mobile telephone. She visited the Vodafone shop in the High Street to be sure of dealing with a human being. After 30 minutes or more with a young expert, she left the premises with new mobile in her bag.

The next day, the contract was emailed to her. But why was someone else’s address on the contract instead of our own? We may never know because, after 90 minutes talking to Vodafone on something called Livechat, she is still none the wiser.

Oh for the days when bills were paid by the master of the house and his secretary on the first Monday of the month. But those were the days before we all began to swim in a sea of chemical soup and men turned into women and vice versa.

No surprise to learn that cortisol – the response to stress – triggers the release of testosterone in women forced to spend their days confronting cohorts of online spivs, instead of leaving it to hairy-chested John Wayne types to mete out punishments to the crooks.

I am not entirely heartless and would like to turn my wife’s frown upside down, but her stress seems to have worsened her condition of misophonia.

The least irritation – like me eating an apple beside her in an easy chair – can trigger a disproportionate reaction.

Yawning or violent sneezing will make her lash out. What she really dislikes is my calling her to the dinner table from the bottom of the stairs in a high falsetto voice that would make Anthony Perkins’s dead mother wince.

Yet, with so much going on in the cottage and Mary always on the telephone to shysters, I’m afraid the Bates Motel method is the only guaranteed way of cutting through the cottage cacophony.

‘The soup’

The Oldie December 2023 45

Postcards from the Edge

True romance? Waiting for a landline call

I recall nostalgically how London – and Paris – numbers indicated topography: MAY(fair) KEN(sington), HOL(born) – and ELY(sées), TRO(cadéro), PAS(sy).

In France, phones had an extra earpiece, so a two-way phone call could include a third party (or even a fourth).

How much of our youth we seemed to spend waiting by the phone! Waiting for that yearned-for call from some longforgotten crush. Until the introduction of the answering machine, you had to stay at home if you hoped for some return call – poor, aspiring thespians, always awaiting that audition callback!

And then, how long we spent gossiping on the phone, while parents worried about the ensuing bill.

Sometimes it was hard to get an interlocutor off the phone. ​Then, when emails arrived, it was nice to find a less intrusive form of communication, which you could employ at any time of day or night. And along came the mobile phone, becoming the necessary accessory of everyday life – with its facility of texting, which the young much prefer to speaking.

46 The Oldie December 2023

​Parents thought they could keep track of their offspring via the mobile. But it seems that more than half young people won’t take the call when caller ID reveals Pater or Mater.

They go back onto their natural medium – Snapchat and WhatsApp – instead. ​ Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, died 20 years ago on 30th November 2003, aged 97.

To honour her memory, the Rising Sun, a gastropub in Kingsdown, Deal, last month put up an attractive plaque – a fish symbol made from beach glass

Queen of the Waves: Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the Channel, 1926

and shells – with a dedicated inscription to ‘Gertie’.

Ederle beat the fastest man’s existing record when she crossed the Channel in 1926, arriving on the rocky beach at Kingsdown. She was 20.

The pub’s landlords, Dan and Toni, are hoping to make a bigger splash for Gertie’s centenary in 2026, with a tribute to all the Channel swimmers since.

The swimming ace, who was American-born, remained single and dedicated her later life to teaching deaf children. Dan hopes over the next year or so to find some of her collateral descendants.

I love Japanese movies. Perfect Days, to be released just before Christmas, is compelling.

The story follows a sanitary worker whose job is cleaning public toilets, and the film displays some of the architectural charm of Japanese loos – and their fastidiousness. (It’s directed by the German Wim Wenders, but the script and cast are Japanese.)

Public loos are a desperately important facility – as some of us oldies well know – and the Japanese have much to teach us in design and ubiquity. Tokyo has 53 public lavatories for every 100,000 residents; London has 14. ​George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, might have, regrettably, been a fan of Stalin but, on the plus side, he was a vigorous campaigner for the public convenience. GBS especially advocated the right of women to ‘spend a penny’ when in a public place. ​The loo question has recently turned into an overheated debate about whether loos should be ‘gender-neutral’ – perhaps there should just be a choice for the user.

Primarily, there should be publictoilet availability and, ideally, like the Japanese models, they should be clean and constructed aesthetically.

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny spent huge chunks of her youth yearning for her crush to ring

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Greta Thunberg generation loves to litter In general, schoolchildren are litterbugs.

Some of them even enjoy the habit. I’ve been sitting marking in my classroom, or even teaching a class, and seen cheese strings hurled through an open window or half-eaten sandwiches tossed through my doorway.

While I understand anyone’s desire to throw away cheese strings, I don’t see why I should be on the receiving end.

While those food-throwers are in the minority, children’s lack of interest in their surroundings is shocking, especially from a generation that is meant to be so environmentally aware. They’ll ask why they can’t take days off school like Greta Thunberg to protest about the way the world is being treated. But they can’t make the link between single-use plastics left on the playing field and the world being destroyed through our using too much oil.

At my last school, the assistant head had what seemed like a brilliant idea. One afternoon, the whole school was issued with black bags and sent out to litter-pick. Each year group was assigned a different area and for an hour we filled our rubbish bags.

At the time, it seemed like a good wheeze and even quite fun – but the next day the trouble started.

Mothers rang the school complaining.

Their little darlings had never dropped a piece of litter and it was insanitary and unfair that they were being asked to help clear up other people’s rubbish.

The school had to apologise and the experiment was not repeated. Never mind that the grounds looked better than they ever had, and that the exercise had succeeded in making the children more aware.

When I moved to this school, I noticed how much better kept it was than the previous – officially smarter – school.

Whether this was because we had better site staff or better children was hard to know.

At that point, I even heard one child say to another, ‘If you want to drop litter, leave and go to X School.’ The other school may have had better results, but we had a tidier campus, and they were proud of that.

Our results are now excellent, but our litter has increased. It is so bad that gulls make the 16-mile journey from the sea to

do their own sort of litter-picking. The children shriek as the birds dive-bomb them for their sandwiches – but, once again, do not make the connection.

And we cannot now ask the children to litter-pick because they are so gently raised; instead we can insist that the staff do the job.

Our first day back in September is the day of important announcements. One of the key ones this year caused an embarrassingly loud guffaw from me.

The assistant head solemnly stood in front of the school with 100 litter-picking sticks. We were each to take one, and we were all to litter-pick when on duty. The children can watch us pick up their crisp packets in front of their very eyes.

The laugh is on them. I can’t tell you the job satisfaction gained from clearing a field of rubbish. The competition with myself to see how many objects I can pick up in one go entertains me for the whole, rainy 20 minutes of my break duty.

What’s more, the school site is vastly more appealing. I’m sure it will, in some way, help improve exam results even further.

Literary Lunch

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The Oldie December 2023 49

Small World When a £20 note appeared out of nowhere, things were looking up – briefly jem clarke

I found £20 in the fold of my old wallet.

It felt as if God was buying me breakfast. But I was then plunged into existential despair. If He did buy me breakfast, He must hate me, given what He provided.

It came in the form of a misbegotten, flattened disc of bread, stuffed full of half-eaten breakfast fare. It boasted of being an Ultimate Brunch Bun but it was more a Penultimate – or Never Again – Brunch Bun. It was so cold the scrambled eggs were wearing scarves.

I spent what remained of the ‘lucky’ note to buy my parents a scratchcard. My good deed went unpunished for barely a minute.

Father took to his magnifying glass to read the back of the card for ‘the instructions’. Coming instead across the legalese, he grumbled, ‘It makes no sense. Why does it matter if I’m in the Isle of Man?’ Mother woke from a morphine-soaked slumber in a far-off chair and shouted through the door, ‘We’re not in the Isle of the Man. If that’s a test to get me committed, you’ll have to try harder.’

Father persevered, but each sentence added to his perplexity: ‘You’ve got to scratch the numbers off – but only your numbers from the numbers, not their numbers, and if your numbers make a horizontal axis, you win that prize.’

Mum looked increasingly anxious and yelled, ‘We don’t want a horizontal axis.

We’ve got nowhere to put it. The attic’s a bread-maker museum and the garage is some sort of nut factory.’

The whole house was a nut factory.

Dada cried, ‘It’s a poor lot, this. The lottery has the money and yet we’re the ones doing all the work! How can this be right?’

Mother joined in: ‘I preferred it in the nineties when Dale Winton would appear on television and just tell you if you’d won.’

50 The Oldie December 2023

The next day, I decided to get myself tested for ADHD. The only test-provider lived nowhere near my nonsense northern town, where most of the population get themselves tested for it free of charge, when in custody.

Mother explained the health postcode lottery so much better than Radio 4’s Moneybox: ‘Rich fools pay more than poor fools. That’s why Harley Street’s not in South Shields.’

In an obscure village, two towns over, I felt like a 1600s man gone to the wise woman who lives in a derelict farmhouse a day’s ride from the main population centre.

When I got there, a very lovely lady with open palms and the centred presence of a local weather presenter asked me, ‘What made you want to be checked for ADHD?’ I explained about my crisis, caused by poor-quality breakfasts, impossibly complex scratchcards and a mother who would love to frame any brain-disorder certificate awarded to me.

‘Oh,’ she said.

Her ‘oh’ had an unscripted quality – the sort of ‘oh’ the local weather presenter employs when the whole of Humberside disappears from behind her, to be replaced by endless blue.

‘Most of our clients normally list a set of symptoms, or else explain that an element of their behaviour has become problematic – such as arriving late for appointments.’

‘Can I say in my defence that’s not ADHD?’ I said. ‘That’s Stagecoach buses.

Please don’t go misdiagnosing people just because you’ve chosen to put your Dr Feelgood tent up in an out-of-the-way hamlet full of rural hicks.’

I had just pulled off a weekend marathon, watching all six years of the BBC’s mid-’80s boat-and-business faux soap, Howards’ Way. She said that suggested my ability to concentrate was impeccable. I didn’t have A, D, H or D. Returning home in triumph, I could not crow for long. It transpired that the old wallet I had found the £20 in was the ‘window-cleaner wallet’. It’s normally squeezed behind the memorial fish tank to pay ad-hoc tradespersons. It had recently been flung at a passing district nurse by a juiced-up Mother, after the nurse rashly recommended a stairlift.

So there is a God – and he was punishing me for pilfering. Mind you, if he is all-seeing, you’d think after watching me watching Tom Howard’s family for 72 hours-plus, he’d give me a break. I’ve suffered enough over the past month.

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…

sister teresa

Blessed are the wine-makers ‘What a way to run a railroad.’ So began a lecture by a visiting Biblical scholar at our monastery.

It was on the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which the landowner pays the same wage to those who arrive at the eleventh hour as to those who have toiled all day (Matthew 20:1-16).

The first ten verses are hardly a story at all, and then in verse 11 there is the bombshell: unfair wages. It is a very odd story. Nonetheless, it is firmly rooted in the ordinariness of the Palestinian countryside of 2,000 years ago. In the intervening years, the parable has continued to be a source of controversy and seldom fails to provoke outrage.

What is vital, in the sense of being life-giving, is the generosity of the owner of the vineyard, who stands for God. Such liberality has always been regarded as preposterous, and perhaps never more so than in our own times.

Although a sense of entitlement is as old as the hills, I have lately been struck by how prevalent it is now. It is very often out of place.

So is grumbling. It is the way in which he acts. worth noting the courtesy This should be a source of the landowner, who calls of comfort to us: we are one of the grumblers the recipients of his ‘friend’, contrasting with infinite compassion. the boorishness of the If the landowner is God, early workers. It is easy to the vineyard becomes his side with them. Gathering kingdom. If we grasp that grapes sounds romantic, the kingdom of God exists but is in practice in the here and now, we backbreaking work: hot, should be only too grateful dusty and apparently that we are here and interminable. working here.

In vino veritas There is also the hazard The 17th-century of laceration, as the vine leaves hide the nonconformist clergyman and stems of the bunches of grapes and peacemaker Richard Baxter expresses fingers get in the way of the knife. this admirably in his hymn Lord, it This is not a parable directed at belongs not to my care: regulations for labour relations, working conditions or considerations about If life be long, I will be glad minimum wages – though it does no That I may long obey; harm to think of such things.

If short, yet why should I be sad Its objective is to encourage us to try To soar to endless day? to understand God in terms of his infinite This level of contentment and goodness and mercy. acceptance is a very long way from a It also reminds us very forcefully sense of entitlement. that God is not answerable to us for

Memorial Service Alexander Cameron, one of Britain’s leading KCs at the criminal bar and the elder brother of David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, was remembered at a thanksgiving service at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea.

The first address was

by Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell, who was at Eton with him. Alex Cameron played the lead in school plays and at Bristol University, and could well have become a professional actor.

Wilmot-Sitwell said, ‘Tania, David and Clare [his siblings] always turned to Alex on many of the big decisions.

52 The Oldie December 2023

‘Only Dave and the Downing Street cat know how many times Big Al sneaked in the tradesman’s entrance for the sort of gloves-off honesty and sanity check that only an older sibling can give.

‘In his 20s, Alex developed an unlikely love of bullfighting and was, to my knowledge, the only non-Spanishspeaking subscriber to the bullfighting magazine Aplausos. On an early trip to the bullfights of southern Spain, and probably after too much to drink, Al fixed me with his determined stare and confided that he was thinking of giving it all up to pursue a bullfighting career.

‘Luckily for his wife, Sarah, and children, Imo and Gus, and for the world of criminal law, he saw sense, on sobering up.’

Clare Montgomery KC, a close colleague, said, ‘Alex was a once-in-ageneration talent in an intensely meritocratic profession.

‘Alex was much in demand. Stalwarts of the Conservative Party, in the form of Lord Archer and Jonathan Aitken, chose him, not because of his brother but because he was such a fantastic brief.’

Cameron’s elder sister, Tania Brookes, read from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: ‘He was a true, a perfect gentle-knight.’

Hymns included Who Would True Valour See and I Vow to Thee, My Country.

The choir sang Climb Ev’ry Mountain.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

LORENZA PHOTOGRAPHY / ALAMY

Alexander Cameron KC, 1963-2023

The Doctor’s Surgery

Addiction isn’t a disease

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY

It has a physiological aspect – but don’t compare it to Parkinson’s dr theodore dalrymple Matthew Perry was famous for two things: first as a comic actor in Friends and latterly as a man who was addicted to drink and drugs.

He had, as the current-day cant phrase has it, ‘opened up’ about the latter in a memoir published last year. Famous people these days are always ‘opening up’ about something or other, as if they were tins of sardines.

In 2013, poor Mr Perry had a discussion on Newsnight with Peter Hitchens about the nature of addiction.

Unlike Mr Hitchens, he held that addiction was a bona-fide disease, one of his arguments being that the American Medical Association has classified it as such for nearly 50 years.

When one considers the chequered history of medicine, this is not much of an argument.

All kinds of things held by the profession to be true for far longer than 50 years have turned out not to be so; indeed have turned out to be absurd – which everyone could see, once they had been exposed as such.

Whether drugs or alcohol played any part in Mr Perry’s death has yet to be determined, but it is important to keep addiction itself separate in the mind from the medical consequences of addiction, which are many and serious. Playing football is not in itself a disease because people are apt to injure themselves playing it.

Certain addictions can creep up on people unawares, however. Those who take sleeping tablets regularly for too long, for example, may find themselves unable to sleep without them.

The addictive potential of benzodiazepine drugs (such as Valium and Ativan) were long underestimated both by doctor and patient. It takes much practice to become truly addicted to alcohol.

But none of this means that addiction is in itself a disease, and there are some

Death of a Friend: Matthew Perry (1969-2023)

addictions – for example to heroin – that require determination to acquire.

Most injecting heroin addicts take the drug intermittently for quite a time before becoming addicted.

They have to learn how to inject it into their veins. They have to overcome their inhibitions about doing so (not many people find it delightful to stick needles into themselves). They have to learn to disregard the unpleasant initial side effects. They have to learn where to obtain the heroin and how to prepare it.

They are not ignorant or naïve about the addictive properties of heroin, which they know about. Addiction does not creep up on them unawares. On the contrary, it would be less inaccurate to say that they did not care whether or not they were addicted; or even that they desired to be addicted.

There is, after all, often a foolish romantic cachet (as well as agony) to being addicted. To some, it suggests hidden depths in a character.

Nor is it the case that people cannot dis-addict themselves without medical assistance. Scores of thousands of

American soldiers in Vietnam addicted themselves to heroin during their tours of duty there. But, shortly after their return to America, no greater proportion of them took heroin than did of soldiers who were waiting to go to Vietnam but never did so because the war ended.

This suggests that addiction is a choice, not a fatality.

Withdrawal from drugs is a real and sometimes dangerous phenomenon, of course. For example, delirium tremens, a potential consequence of abrupt cessation of drinking by very heavy drinkers, has a high mortality without treatment. I have occasionally seen similar symptoms in benzodiazepine addicts who have withdrawn too abruptly, and certainly such patients, like alcoholics, can suffer epileptic fits.

Contrary to popular myth, withdrawal from heroin is much less dangerous.

To regard addiction – though it undoubtedly has a physiological component – as straightforwardly a disease such as, say, Parkinson’s disease, is erroneous and often self-serving, and misses many of its most salient features.

The Oldie December 2023 53

Review of Books Winter Round-Up of the Reviews in the National Press

Lucy Lethbridge laments the end of the office romance Freedom of thought under attack? By Michael Barber Stephanie Cross on the best novels of the year Biography History Arts Sport Nature Winter 2023 | www.theoldie.co.uk

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Freedom to think Review of Books Issue 66 Winter 2023 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and ElizabethTaylor

by Roger Lewis The Secret Life of John le Carre

by Adam Sisman 2SAS: Bill Stirling and the Forgotten Special Forces Unit of World War II

by Gavin Mortimer The Letters of Gustave Flaubert edited and translated

by Francis Steegmuller Emperor of Rome

by Mary Beard

Books are amazing, born of years of research and scholarship or from the creative minds of novelists. We can derive hours of enjoyment, instruction and inspiration, all for the price of a reasonably decent bottle of wine – or two.

This season is no exception, with a wealth of books on offer – more than 85 in this issue alone –and a number of authors are turning their minds to the question of how we think and who – or what – might be thinking for us.

On page 27, Nigel Summerley considers a cache of new books on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity.

While, on page 18, Michael Barber assesses titles on freedom of thought and ponders how alarmed we should be by assaults upon it.

One eminent professor of psychology even suggests we should ‘insist on legal precautions to protect our minds,because, thanks to ‘behaviour-reading technologies’, companies are able to ‘see into our souls’ and know us better than we know ourselves.’

But as long as there are books to engage us, we can strive to preserve our freedom to think. And to be astonished. In Emily Bearn’s delightful round-up of children’s books, we learn that: ‘If you formed all your DNA into a single strand, it would reach 10 billion miles across the solar system, to Pluto and beyond …

You are, in the most literal sense, cosmic!’

So, with this extraordinary fact in mind, we at The Oldie wish you all a cosmically happy Christmas and a book-filled and free-thinking New Year.

Jane Mays

4 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

17 CHINA 18 FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

By Michael Barber

Great Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire

by Michael Palin The Fraud

by Zadie Smith The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943

by James Holland Modern Buildings in London

by Ian Nairn

8 POLITICS AND SOCIETY 11 LANGUAGE 12 HISTORY

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Agincourt

by Michael Livingston Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial Panel: Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Jane Mays, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Jane Mays Design: Lawrence Bogle Cover: Bob Wilson Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Helen Hawkins, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim For advertising enquiries call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, e-mail: editorial@theoldie.co.uk

20 NATURE&COUNTRY 22 FOOD 24 FICTION

Stephanie Cross picks her novels of 2023

26 FASHION & SPORT 27 TECHNOLOGY Nigel Summerley on AI

16 ARTS & MUSIC

28

OFFICE LIFE

The way it was by Lucy Lethbridge

30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS

By Emily Bearn

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 3

Biography & memoir

RUSKIN PARK

SYLVIA, ME AND THE BBC

RORY CELLAN-JONES September, 320pp, £18.99

A cache of letters in a stockings box was the trigger for this much-praised memoir by the BBC’s former technology correspondent, who retired in 2021 when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a genetic inheritance from the father he didn’t meet until he was 23.

Cellan-Jones found the box at the one-bedroom council flat he and his older half-brother had shared with their late mother Sylvia Rich, a BBC studio manager. Inside were all the letters she had received, plus carbon copies of ones she had sent, throughout her life. Her son left them unread for some 20 years. Then he finally learned the truth about his father.

Jim Cellan-Jones had been a BBC trainee assigned to Sylvia, 17 years his senior, in the 1950s. Their affair led to her pregnancy, at a time when single motherhood was taboo. Cellan-Jones claimed his career suffered because of the affair. In fact, he became the director of The Forsyte Saga,while Sylvia, despite managing to juggle her BBC job and single motherhood, was never promoted.

In theTimes, Ysenda Maxtone Graham had unreserved praise for the book, a ‘highly evocative, unpretentious memoir’, ‘a small-scale BBC drama in itself’. It was also a ‘Larkinesque’ portrait of a woman’s

A poignant story of life ‘before sex began’ in 1963 4 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

Sylvia: dirty weekends and fish fingers

descent into depression and nostalgia, from passionate dirty weekends to coming home exhausted to prepare her son’s fish fingers for tea.

For Tim Adams in the Guardian, too, it was a ‘heartfelt, gripping book’ that evolved into ‘a poignant social history of Britain in the war years and after’, as well as ‘a little epistolary account of the desperation and status of “liberated” single mothers’ before (Larkin again) sex began in 1963.

BEFORE THE LIGHT FADES NATASHA WALTER Virago, 256pp, £18.99

Natasha Walter is a writer and human rights activist, and this ‘deeply passionate and humane memoir’, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Financial Times, centres on Walter’s 75-year-old mother, Ruth.

In December 2017, she ordered a drug on the internet, ‘arranged her affairs, wrote farewell letters, got into bed and ended her life. She had not been depressed; she had simply decided, having noticed small memory lapses, that it was time to go,’ explained Lucy Atkins in the Sunday Times.

‘Natasha was overwhelmed with shock and grief,’ wrote Blake Morrison in the Guardian. He went on: ‘The only cure lay in listening to Ruth — in getting to know her as she really was and in understanding why her suicide note asked “Please be happy for me. It is a logical, positive decision.”’

Ruth had been a young activist too, an idealist who became a member of the Committee of 100, a 1960s mass movement of civil disobedience against British government policy on

nuclear weapons; she had met her husband on a ban the bomb march.

‘But the premise of the book,’ Morrison went on to explain, ‘is a failure in understanding, and anyone who has lost a parent will recognise the shame and regret. It wasn’t just that Natasha underestimated her mother. She also underestimated her grandparents, Eva and Georg, German Jewish refugees whose experiences in 1930s Berlin had a huge impact on Ruth.’

Atkins concluded: ‘Until she died Ruth was fit and active, a climate campaigner. Walter tried everything to cope with grief, but the only thing that has worked is more activism. In a police cell, having been arrested at an Extinction Rebellion protest, Walter realises that activism “looks like hope”.

This rigorous, journalistic examination of an activist lineage is a powerful reminder — at a time when political protest often boils down to a tweet — that our actions really do matter.’

ELON MUSK WALTER ISAACSON Simon and Schuster UK, 688pp, £28

‘Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,’ writes Walter Isaacson in this biography of the richest man in the world, who created electric car manufacturer Tesla, bought Twitter, and wants to colonise Mars.

‘Isaacson’s accounts of rolling crises over rocket engines and car designs are vivid and pacy, and his analysis of his subject’s personality is a persuasive mixture of alarm and deep admiration,’ wrote Steven Poole in the Daily Telegraph.

However, ‘Isaacson, best known

Elon Musk: a risk-seeking man-child?

Biography & memoir for his 2011 biography of another controversial tech entrepreneur, Apple’s Steve Jobs, will win no prizes for his prose. Of Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, he writes that ‘with flowing hair and a mysterious smile, she managed to be radiant and sultry at the same time’.

Observer reviewer John Naughton found that ‘Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both. And yet at least some of his employees also see him as an inspirational figure.’

For Rana Faroohar in the Financial Times ‘Isaacson positions Musk, who grew up in South Africa with an emotionally abusive father and a masochistic mother, as being a traumatised, Asperger-y guy who turned his pain into entrepreneurial drive.’

But while the book is probably as entertaining as any celebrity business bio could be, it is not in any way a book of ideas. Instead, it is ‘an enthusiastic tale about a personality, not a meditation on the meaning of that personality’s work’.

OH MIRIAM! MIRIAM MARGOLYES John Murray, 323pp,£25

It’s fair to say self-defined ‘national trinket’ Miriam Margoyles is critical Marmite. According to the blurbs on her second volume of memoirs, some in fluorescent pink, the actress and chat-show-guest embarrasser is‘wonderful’ (Stephen Fry), ‘a riotous joy’ (Daily Telegraph),‘gloriously larger than life’ (Observer). Other views were available.

Rhik Samadder in the Guardian largely welcomed her ‘almost heroic’ unruly humour and her showbiz tittle-tattle, though found the sections on her early years with her Belarusian emigré family and her adolescence in Oxford the freshest. He enjoyed her attacks on Boris and the Bullingdon Club and said the book demonstrated ‘the loose-cannon plain talk that has endeared her to millions, while pushing back against her caricature’.

He also applauded her refusal to be clubbable by queer activists: ‘I just

Margolyes: an absence of restraint

don’t think we need to be separated.’.

In the Times,on the other hand, Roger Lewis delivered a stern reproach to Margolyes, answering her ‘What’s the harm?’ if she swore or exposed herself, with: ‘ I’d say the absence of taste and restraint is jarring and slightly deranged.’

Her breast-baring gets a chapter of its own, detailing her lifelong habit of pulling up her shirt to reveal her bra-less beauties, once shocking Martin Scorsese with her ‘Victoria Falls of mammarial magnificence’.

Not to be outdone, Lewis had huge fun of his own with her breasts, (quoting from her Blackadder role), ‘devil’s dumplings’ weighty enough to knock out a BBC microphone, or even herself while running for a bus.

Yet it’s clear he saw her as an unpleasant show-off who craves an audience, ‘anyone from dog owners to old people “and cripples”. Basically, anyone who can’t run away’.

The book was a ‘rambling, egocentric rant’ whose ‘evident wish to appear idiosyncratic is wearisome’, and whoever persuaded her to concoct this second volume should be ashamed.

FATHER AND SON JONATHAN RABAN Picador, 332pp, £16.99

The title of the late Jonathan Raban’s last book evokes Edmund Gosse’s classic of the same name, though the text never refers to it. One chapter was left unfinished at Raban’s death in January, and what remains is essentially two books,‘artfully braided’according to Sara Wheeler in the Spectator, both about homecoming: Raban’s from a rehab ward in Seattle, where a stroke had

confined him in 2009; and his father Peter’s return from the Second World War, hastened by the mental breakdown of his wife, to whom he had sent often passionate letters while away. Wheeler found the book rambled but forgave Raban given ‘his acute description of the foibles and failures of being human’.

The meld of these two stories was not so successful for Anthony Quinn in the Observer, who found they ‘don’t really comment on each other’; a vital middle section—what Raban’s vicar father thought of his agnostic, three times divorced son—was missing. But its prose was still distinctive. Despite his American vocabulary (he moved to Seattle in 1990), his temperament, Quinn found, was ‘defiantly of the old country—exacting, proud, somewhat pedantic’.

He stressed that the book was a portrait of Raban Senior, not a judgment of him, though he was a complicated parent to depict: an anti-semite and a snob who believed in people knowing their place, yet also a brave man who had a‘ good war’.

In the New York Times, Dwight Garner compared the book’s structure to a stack of mozzarella and tomato, in which the illness memoir was superior, relying on first-hand experience.

But he too felt Raban didn’t find ‘the links between father and son that would suggest a continuity of soul between them’. Raban’s‘ lively and bittersweet’ account was, however,‘the most companionable first-person stroke memoir’ he had read, a description used by Raban of My Year Off, by his fellow strokesufferer Robert McCrum.

HANIF KUREISHI WRITING THE SELF

RUVANI RANASINHA Manchester UP, 944pp, £30

This biography of the British-Asian author Hanif Kureishi was finished just before Kureishi collapsed in Rome last year.

He subsequently spent six months in hospital, unable to move arms or legs and is now being treated in a neurological ward in London. So his biographer, Ruvani Ranasinha, an academic at Kings’ College, was able to address this pivotal event only in a one-page postscript.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 5

Biography & memoir Neither could she make use of the vivid journal Kureishi has, with the help of his son Carlo, maintained for his 81,000 Twitter followers. Among them was a characteristic tweet about sensitivity readers which was reported approvingly by the Daily Mail: ‘I don’t want to live in an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves for fear of offending someone or other.

‘It is the work of great writers to turn the world upside down, to present opinions which go against the prevailing trends. It is not our job to please but to challenge, to make us think differently about our bodies our sexuality, politics and normativity.’

In the Sunday Times, David Sexton reviewed ‘this vast academic biography’, noting its plethora of ‘indignant exclamation marks’ about its subject’s attitudes to women. But he reflected that Kureishi’s recent

Kureishi: a world turned upside-down

labours have fully confirmed Ranasinha’s thesis that he has always needed ‘to keep writing the self as an act of relentless self-renewal.’

Ranasinha draws heavily on Kureishi’s ‘phenomenally egotistical teenage (and later) diaries. Faced with difficulties at home, he wrote in 1970: ‘No one else matters a bollock.

Everything is focussed on my writing and that is my life.’ In 1973: ‘I want to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.’ In 1974: ‘Of this century there are 3 masters only: Proust, Joyce, Kureishi.’

SELECTED LETTERS OF WILFRED OWEN Ed. JANE POTTER OUP, 464pp, £25

Wilfred Owen was one of the leading poets of the first world war who was killed in action at the age of 25 a week before the war’s end. In his review for the Spectator, Daniel Swift explained 6 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

that in a 1967 edition of his letters, edited by Wilfred’s brother Harold and John Bell, Harold admitted in his preface that he had taken the decision years earlier to censor the letters by painting over them in thick lines of India ink, and now he couldn’t work out what he had crossed out. ‘The intention was to remove trivial passages of domestic news,’ he claimed.

A further, select edition was published in 1985, edited by Bell, cutting the majority of Owen’s teenage letters but restoring where possible some of the redactions.

Jane Potter, Reader in Arts at Oxford Brookes University and a trustee of the Wilfred Owen Literary Estate, and author of Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (2014), follows this in the new edition, with accompanying notes and a new introduction.

In that, Potter writes that in order to understand the man, the soldier and the war poet, Owen’s letters are crucial — ‘for they reveal his developing literary powers and provide the raw material for his famous poetry. His correspondence chronicles his “journey from obscurity” to “poet’s poet”.’

She thought that Owen’s sense of humour was perhaps the ‘most surprising aspect of the letters’ — he could be ‘wickedly funny, something that belies the more sombre image of the “poet of Pity” we have come to know...’

Swift concluded: ‘Owen’s letters – written to his mother, censored by his brother – are childlike and often banal, but ultimately they are a deeply moving supplement to his poems.

Together, they insist upon a distinctively modern lesson: that the real story of war is not about weapons or strategy but lies in human transformation and victimhood.’

PURE WIT

THE REVOLUTIONARY LIFE OF MARGARET CAVENDISH

FRANCESCA PEACOCK Head of Zeus, 384pp, £27.99

A controversial and attentionseeking celebrity in Restoration London, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was also a feminist, a philosopher, and a poet.

She was later nicknamed ‘Mad Madge’ by a Victorian

Mad Madge: an unfairly dubbed Duchess

commentator. Cavendish ‘has been seen as that most tiresome of types, a “character”,’ wrote Lucy HughesHallett in the Spectator. ‘But Francesca Peacock makes a persuasive case for her being, as well, an author whose work is as illuminating as it is unconventional...

Her satirical fantasy novel The Blazing World has been described as the first work of science fiction...

Margaret is always the star of the show, but Peacock gives her a backing troupe of other female writers of the period, other childless women and other wives for whom marriage, however comfortable or loving, was oppressively unequal.’

In the Times, Emma Duncan thought Peacock’s ‘enjoyable book is enriched by accounts of other women who lived remarkably in those remarkable times. The book does not, however, make any powerful new points about Margaret Cavendish, a woman whose career and eccentricities were already as well-known as they deserve to be.

‘A good biography of her, Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker, was written 20 years ago. It is not clear that she needed another.’

Daniel Brooks, in the Daily Telegraph, disagreed. ‘Peacock’s artful prose makes this a delightful read and Cavendish, as both intellectual and celebrity, is the perfect subject. It’s about time that someone takes up the cause of Cavendish, too often maligned for her eccentricities and aristocratic links... Despite all this she has been misunderstood, looked down on, consciously excluded for far too long.

Now, 400 years after her birth, in a world more-than-comfortable with celebrity, her time may have come.’

Politics & society

Stewart: ‘superby readable and blisteringly frank’

POLITICS ON THE EDGE RORY STEWART Jonathan Cape, 464pp, £22

This memoir by the maverick Old Etonian who failed in his bid for the Tory leadership covers his nine years as a Conservative MP and is ‘filled with similarly grim and darkly amusing episodes,’ wrote Luke Harding in the Observer. ‘It is an excoriating account of a dysfunctional governing system.

At every level – backbench MP, senior minister, permanent secretary – Stewart finds shallowness where there should be depth, vapidity instead of seriousness. His book is a brilliant insider portrait of a nation in decline, penned by an exasperated modern Boswell.’ Harding found it a ‘superbly readable’ book, and also one of ‘blistering frankness’.

Rory Stewart is an ‘exasperated modern Boswell’ Former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson, in his review for the Guardian, noted that Stewart was expelled from the Conservative Party ‘along with Churchill’s grandson, two ex-chancellors and six other former cabinet ministers. It’s tempting to say that he wasted 10 years trapped in the party politics he abhors. But this book is a vital work of documentation: Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess.

We should be grateful it was written.’

First and foremost, wrote Michael 8 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

Deacon in the Daily Telegraph, Stewart’s book is ‘a story of frustration, bordering on despair. Its overwhelming theme is how soul-sappingly difficult it is, in modern politics, to get anything done – not just as a backbench MP, but as a minister. At every turn, ideas are thwarted, diluted or ditched, whether because of cuts, in-fighting, civil service intransigence, or rank ineptitude... By the time he launches his bid for No 10, he sounds so miserably disillusioned it’s a wonder he found the energy to sign his nomination papers... Stewart is unsparingly critical of himself, too, and well aware of his own eccentricities.’

A book ‘full of fascination, wrote Lord Hennessy in his review for politicshome.com, ‘but, ultimately it’s a study in pain – the scarring effect of disillusion’.

THE 1922 COMMITTEE PHILIP NORTON Manchester UP, 208pp, £20

It was formed not in 1922, when Lloyd George’s coalition government was brought down by a rebellion of Tory backbenchers, but in early 1923 by a handful of the new intake of Tory MPs, some 20 to start with.

Conservative peer Philip Norton, also a professor of politics at the University of Hull and a constitutional expert, has produced ‘a wonderfully clear and authoritative account of a central, but little studied, element of the Conservative Party,’ wrote Lord Lexden, a fellow Conservative peer,

in the House Magazine. ‘After a century of having its origins misrepresented, the 1922 Committee today faces a new danger: that it will be seen primarily as an assassination bureau’, whereas ‘in reality only a fraction of the committee’s time has ever been devoted to such high drama. Norton’s ‘meticulous study... reveals for the first time the full story of how this rather mysterious body operates.’

Simon Heffer’s review, in the Daily Telegraph, explained that the 1922 Committee was ‘for much of its existence... an opportunity for MPs to sound off in private among co-religionists, whether about grievances against the leadership, or against fellow Members harming party unity; but a whip was invited, and sometimes ministers, and messages were conveyed about matters of possible discontent’.

The 1922 Committee first grew teeth in 1974 when Ted Heath was ousted from the Tory leadership, but ‘it was not until the 13 years of opposition after the 1997 Blair landslide that the ’22’s claws really came out... David Cameron, when leader, saw all who disagreed with him or questioned him as enemies to be neutralised, and tried to make the ’22 allow ministers to join, mainly so they could use their influence to prevent critics of his being elected.

His plan backfired badly.’ Norton’s book ‘exhibits impeccable scholarship and a degree of charm’.

CODE OF CONDUCT WHY WE NEED TO FIX PARLIAMENT – AND HOW TO DO IT

CHRIS BRYANT Bloomsbury, 240pp, £14.99

The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon got his review copy of Chris Bryant’s book about parliamentary sleaze two months ahead of publication. In those two months alone, he wrote, there was so much evidence of scandal and misconduct that the

Parliamentary ‘monkeys’ confront evil

Politics & society book was ‘both blisteringly topical and quickly out of date’.

Nevertheless, he thought, ‘we still need ideas on how to clear up sleaze in general’, and Bryant – a Labour MP of two decades, historian of Parliament, chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee and dedicated Erskine May nerd – is well placed to offer them.

His book is, further, amiably written and well leavened with amusing anecdotes. That said, its proposals (downsizing the upper chamber, banning most second jobs for MPs, placing cameras in division lobbies to make sure the whips behave, and, er, raising the quorum for certain meetinsg from five to eight, ‘aren’t earth-shatteringly radical, and some sound like fiddling at the edges’ Still, maybe the problem isn’t the system anyway, but the personnel: ‘We may endlessly moan that the Commons is crawling with liars and rogues. But the truth is, we’re the mugs who put them there.’

Isabel Hardman, in the Guardian, was able to forgive Bryant’s pedantry and pomposity: ‘that it’s so easy to dismiss these complaints as pompous […] shows how casual we have all become about the state of our democracy over the past few decades’. Plus, she says, Bryant ‘has an amusing story about Tony Blair telling him he still hasn’t made the cabinet at a reshuffle because Bryant is still in his 20s. ‘“I’m 43, Tony,’ I replied.” ’

TURNING POINTS

BY STEVE RICHARDS Macmillan, 416pp, £22

It was only after the end of the Second World War, wrote a wistful Richard Vinen in the Literary Review that ‘history no longer felt like a Sunday drive through the Home Counties in a Bentley. It was more like a session on the dodgem cars at a fairground – lots of hard bumps and the uncomfortable sense that we were making ourselves look ridiculous.’

The political commentator Steve Richards’s book about our postwar history takes its cue from that, looking at decisive moments rather than gradual social or administrative or technological changes.

He has picked out, Vinen reports,

ten: ‘three elections (those of 1945, 1979 and 1997), two wars (the Suez Crisis and the Iraq War), two economic crises (one produced by the oil price rise of the 1970s, the other an extended period of instability stretching from the financial crash of 2008 to the Covid pandemic), one social reform (the Abortion Act of 1967) and two more recent episodes that Richards and, to be honest, I too regard as instances of collective insanity: Brexit and the government of Liz Truss.’

In The New Statesman, where, as the magazine’s former Political Editor, Richards might have hoped

A political history that makes you distrust the present for a warmer welcome, Freddie Hayward called it ‘a journalist’s political history that makes you distrust the author’s prognosis of the present’. Those ten turning points were front and centre, he complained, but Richards also uses the smoking ban, and several episodes in Mrs Thatcher’s premiership: By page five, it is clear that what Richards means by “turning point” is no more precise than an “important moment”.’ He further regretted that Richards ‘explains the 20th century almost exclusively through the personality traits of cabinet ministers.

‘Turning Points is not without merit [but] there is no reason to read this book over other, subtler accounts of the period. The more interesting question is why the book was even written.’

THE ABUSE OF POWER THERESA MAY Headline, 352pp, £25

This not an autobiography or a political memoir, explained Tim Dale in the Literary Review, but ‘a series of case studies of scandals’ which May was ‘able to use her position in order to bring to light’. As a result, it ‘risks being seen... as an extended humble-brag by a politician who feels both underestimated and under-appreciated’.

May blames ‘the systemic abuse of power by politicians, civil servants,

and the police’, without apportioning even a part of the blame to her beloved Conservative Party. ‘I honestly wouldn’t waste your time with it,’ Dale concluded.

Robert Shrimsley, in the Financial Times, was more generous. ‘The book will reinforce the view that May was a politician of conviction and compassion... Across a number of shameful episodes, including the Grenfell Tower fire, the Rotherham child grooming scandals, the Hillsborough disaster and the Windrush saga, May sets out stories of official back-covering or failures of empathy’. But she is ‘unreflective of her own failings. As premier, she tried to rule as if she had an enormous parliamentary majority when she didn’t.’

The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley said ‘May’s prose is plain – she is no more gifted as a wordsmith than she is sparkling as an orator – but she can be punchy’. Still ‘the acid test o

May: ‘unreflective of her own failings’

this book is how she addresses the Windrush scandal, one of the most despicable abuses of state power because people who had been living in and contributing to the UK for decades were suddenly and entirely wrongly told that they had no right to be here. This scandal very much occurred on her watch... She can’t authentically present herself as the righteous scourge of injustice when she flinches from properly confronting her role in one of the ugliest abuses of power to stain recent British history.’

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Politics & society

Liz Truss made history when she resigned on 25th October 2022 – the shortestserving British Prime Minister ever – to be replaced by Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first PM of South Asian and Hindu heritage. Cartoon by Steven Camley from Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2023, edited by Tim Benson (Hutchinson, 190pp, £16.99)

IMPERIAL ISLAND CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY The Bodley Head, 384pp, £25

‘Riley’s aim is to push the notion of multicultural Britain much further back into the national past than the recent emergence of this term would suggest is justified,’ wrote Barnaby Crowcroft in the Literary Review.

‘This story runs through seven chronological chapters, which bring in everything from Live Aid and football hooliganism to the Iraq War and Brexit.

The method of composition, a kind of historical free association, makes it fairly difficult to summarise.

Yet the overall gist of the book can be divined from the fact that in under three hundred pages of text the words “racism” and “racist” appear nearly two hundred times, inserted wherever Riley seems to lose her chain of thought or thinks that readers need reminding of her

argument.’ Unfortunately, Riley’s scholarship is not entirely reliable. ‘A bit more reading might also have saved the author from some of the howlers that litter the book. Winston Churchill, for example, obviously did not lead a “Conservative government” during World War II...

But it is probably obtuse to highlight all the historical errors in Imperial Island since it is so clearly not a historical work but a political one.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Paul Lay found that ‘when Riley puts on the hat of a historian, rather than a cheap polemicist, she has interesting things to say.’ The historian’s job is ‘to create as complete a picture of the past as possible – and Riley’s picture is far from complete, reading sometimes like a primer of recent Left-ish obsessions... Britain’s black and Asian populations have faced many challenges, and still do so...

‘Yet modern Britain has become, both wittingly and unwittingly, one of the most successful multiracial societies on earth... It is messy, it is flawed, but its day-to day-realities are, like the empire from which it derives, more complex than the black-and-white simplicities that historians should reject.’

COVENANT DANNY KRUGER Forum, 192pp, £20

The lion’s mouth: a hard life for incomers 10 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

The Conservative MP Danny Kruger has been a vocal backbench advocate of a particular species of social conservatism: deploring the breakdown of the traditional family,

the erosion of Christian values, and the fraying of the social fabric. In Covenant, he sets out a vision for Britain in which the economic freedoms some of his colleagues are excited about are rooted in a traditional community of time-tested rights and duties.

Charlotte Ivers, writing in the Sunday Times, emitted a ‘guttural grunt of surprise’ when she came across the sentence: ‘Marriage is the safest and best place for sex. It is always rather intriguing to come across a genuine social conservative in British public life,’ she said. ‘Like turning up at King’s Cross for your morning commute, only to discover that the trains are steam-powered.’

Yet, as she concedes, even if ‘faith, flag and family’ conservatives may be rarities in public life, many people hold socially conservative opinions’.

‘Kruger’s book is framed by an opposition between “The Order” and “The Idea”. The former is ‘a pre-20thcentury way of living, a “common conception of the way to live and around the practices of common worship”; the latter is a “rampant individualism whose roots lie in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, and from which all modern evils flow.”

‘This is a culture war and the author is losing’ ‘Kruger’s problem is that so many, including most Conservatives, are smitten with the latter: the author has been abandoned even by those who purport to be on his side. This is a culture war, and he is losing.

‘The rearguard action Kruger fights against the idea is a thoughtful one, though. Against a backdrop of boring and technocratic politics, it is uplifting to see a frontline politician setting out a vision of such scope and ideological coherence. Covenant is both persuasively argued and elegant to read, something that can’t be said for many politicians’ offerings.’

Writing in the House, Salma Shah found Kruger’s book longer on diagnosis than prescription. ‘Danny Kruger is a man of integrity,’ she wrote, ‘but his dense and occasionally confusing thoughts read like the musings of a progressive Victorian not a modern politician looking for credible answers.’

Language PENNING POISON

BLASTED WITH ANTIQUITY

EMILY COCKAYNE

DAVID ELLIS

OUP, 320pp, £20

Lutterworth, 180pp, £20

David Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent, has written a book, drawing on many decades of deep reading, that should have been more widely reviewed, given its universal theme – which is the consolations of literature in old age.

Allan Massie in the Literary Review found Blasted with Antiquity ‘never dull, always intelligent and often moving.’ Massie mused that ‘Old age may bring serenity. Ellis draws attention more than once to Eliot’s Four Quartets. There is wisdom there indeed. Then one reflects that Eliot was only middleaged when he wrote these poems.

‘As I was reading Ellis’s book, I was rereading W Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook, published in 1949, when he was seventy-five. The concluding pages are comforting, revealing a man at peace with the world; there is no hint, happily, of the raving dementia which made his last years so horrible. Now, of course, the triumphs of medicine mean that we are in greater danger of ending up condemned to the seventh age so bleakly foretold in Jaques’s ‘Ages of Man’ speech in As You Like It. Norman Douglas asked, ‘Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?’ Good question. He took an overdose when pleasure fled.’

Massie noted too that ‘probably most, pictures of old age in literature have been offered by writers who knew it only by observation, not experience. Ellis quotes characters from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, but he was a young man when he wrote these poems, ignorant of the realities of age. There is no funnier depiction of old age than the one provided in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, but she was only in her early forties when she wrote that novel.’

THE DICTIONARY PEOPLE SARAH OGILVIE Chatto, 384pp, £22

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a vast project, begun in 1879 (and still going) and overseen by the indefatigable Sir James Murray

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

who recruited a network of 3,000 volunteers around the world who were tasked with reading a particular book — James Hogg’s narrative poem The Queen’s Wake, say, or Horace Greeley’s history book The American Conflict — and then filling out a slip for each unusual word which called for further research.

Sarah Ogilvie’s delightful book follows the stories of some of these people. And what a curious and eccentric crew they turn out to be.

Kathryn Hughes, reviewing The Dictionary People in the Guardian, set the scene. ‘Ogilvie worked at the OED for many years, and nine years ago was thrilled to discover an overlooked black book in which Murray had written down the details of the 3,000 previously anonymous contributors.

Among them were three murderers, a collector of pornography, Karl Marx’s daughter, a president of Yale University, the inventor of the tennis-net adjuster, and a cocaine addict found dead in a station lavatory. This ragtag crew comprise the “dictionary people”.’

Nigel Andrew in the Literary Review was enchanted by a ‘fascinating read’: ‘What makes The Dictionary People so readable (and such a pleasure to dip into) is that it is, like a dictionary, arranged alphabetically, beginning with ‘A for Archaeologist’.

In Kirkus Reviews, the book was praised as ‘fresh, vibrant, entertaining’ history in which ‘while bringing to life a host of passionate volunteers, Ogilvie also charts decades of social, economic and cultural change, mapped by words.’

Poison pen letters were how people stirred unhappiness before the days of anonymous comments online.

Emily Cockayne whose books delve into interesting corners of human experience (her last was about waste) has scoured three centuries of local newspapers to gather examples of dripping poison Dinah Birch in the London Review of Books reflected that ‘her earlier work gives a broadly positive view of human interactions, but it’s hard to find anything uplifting in these stories.’

In the Literary Review, Stephen Bates listed some gossip: ‘What woman was signalman Edginton with up the Hagley Road one Sunday night near midnight … very fishy.’

Others have been more consequential, such as the letter which did for 42-year-old Ethel Major, a ‘frail, sallow complexioned’ woman whose husband, Arthur, died suddenly after eating a corned-beef sandwich in 1934. Someone signing themselves ‘Fairplay’ wrote to the police with searching questions: ‘Why was he jerky when dying? And why did a neighbour’s dog die after eating the scrapings off his plate?

The answer was that Ethel had laced the meal with strychnine. She was hanged for his murder six months later.’

In the Financial Times, Miranda Seymour wondered if anonymous missives are sparked by ‘lack of power’.

Enoch Knowles, a factory worker, targeted famous people, including judges, royals and high-up clergymen — or, as he pleaded in his defence, “folks that I have seen in the newspapers”.’

But motive is hard to define. Bates found ‘a diligent and fascinating study of a pervasive social phenomenon, but Cockayne struggles occasionally to answer the question of why people do it.’

Birch put it down to the newly professionalised Post Office which ‘introduced convenient pillar boxes and pre-paid stamps, helping secretive senders to conceal their identity. The number of unsigned letters expanded with the increasing volume of postal traffic.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 11

History HUNTING THE FALCON JOHN GUY AND JULIA FOX Bloomsbury,624pp,£30

Anne Boleyn: fatally attracted to France

‘This book is at once an education and a joy to read,’ Sarah Gristwood proclaimed in theLiterary Review.

There have been a plethora of biographies of Anne Boleyn, but Guy and Fox take a different approach – ‘something more interesting’.

Leanda de Lisle in the Times praised ‘a book that moves and informs, improving our understanding of “the marriage that convulsed a continent”.’

‘You get the feeling that the authors, being a married couple, understand the dynamics of the Henry-Anne relationship better than any of the many historians who have speculated about it’, Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Daily Mail.

Gavanndra Hodge in the Sunday Times agreed: ‘The Guy/Fox approach is fresh partly because they are a married couple writing about a marriage, but more because they reframe the story in the context of continental European politics, in contrast to the usual parochial English writing about this era.’

Sent as a child first to Margaret of Austria’s court at Mechelen and then to the household of Queen Claude in France, Anne learnt the ways in which women could exercise political power and absorbed the ideas of the French religious reformists. Returning to England at 20, a Francophile in a largely Francophobe country, she was notable for her French chic, but also—fatally in the more conservative English court—for introducing the 12 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

novel idea that the sexes should mix.

Guy and Fox have delved deep into the Continental archives to produce ‘the most cogent narrative reading of the evidence to date,’ Mark Bostridge noted in the Spectator. ‘They achieve this by emphasising the influence of France on the formation of Anne’s personality, her ideas and even on the circumstances of her fall.’

‘Unfortunately, Rowan Williams noted in the New Statesman, ‘Guy and Fox tell us that Anne rapidly became a diplomatic liability rather than an asset, added to which, the authors‘make it very clear that for all her intellectual gifts she had a startling lack of political intelligence.’

Henry had made Anne Queen, but she failed to fulfil her part of the bargain, to give him a son. She was quickly disposed of, condemned in a show trial for infidelity with several men and incest with her brother.

From now on, Hughes concluded, ‘Henry was adamant about what sort of wife he wanted—a doormat and not a co-pilot.’

HEIRS OF AMBITION

THE MAKING OF THE BOLEYNS

CLAIRE MARTIN The History Press,256PP,£20

Of the two new biographies of Anne Boleyn and her family, Claire Martin’s ‘is the more unorthodox of the pair,’Daniel Brooks wrote in the Telegraph, ‘a bold study of the Boleyn family which takes us from the first evidence of the name in the village of Salle, Norfolk, in 1283, through to the members of the family who bore witness to Anne’s grisly end.’

It charts their steady rise from humble beginnings as sheep farmers to Geoffrey Boleyn, Anne’s greatgrandfather, a merchant whose savvy investments brought him Blickling Hall in Norfolk and Hever Castle in Kent. Royal honours were bestowed on him and his son, while Thomas, Anne’s father, was an able and trusted diplomat, who secured a place for Anne at the courts of two of Europe’s most prominent royal women.

‘This is a tale of intergenerational graft and wit, of social rise achieved “not by right of birth but by right of worth”,’ Brooks wrote, adding,‘The Boleyn family narrative is propulsive and engaging, so it is a shame that the book’s successes are undercut by an over-lyrical style’.

TRIUMPH AND ILLUSION THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR

JONATHAN SUMPTION Faber, 977pp, £40

‘Given the profound importance of the Hundred Years’ War, it’s astounding that its details are so little taught and so little understood.’

Older readers, recalling with pride such victories as Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, may raise an eyebrow at the opening of Simon Heffer’s review in the Telegraph. But how many of us have heard of Patay? – the first in a series of French victories that by 1453 had reduced English possessions in France to the port of Calais.

Well, thanks to Jonathan Sumption and his monumental chronicle – ‘an enterprise on a truly Victorian scale’ as one reviewer greeted an earlier volume – there is now no excuse for anyone to plead ignorance of this epic feud.

Saluting Volume Five in the Spectator, David Crane writes, ‘Here, after 43 years of research and writing – or roughly two life spans of a 14th century French peasant – is the same faith in narrative history, the same willingness to let events speak for themselves, the same command and deployment of resources, confidence and stamina that marked the first and every subsequent volume.’

Why, despite all those early victories, did we lose?

Answer: the French had deeper pockets, home advantage and learnt from their mistakes. They also had Joan of Arc, a charismatic figure who claimed to have been sent by God to unite the French against the English.

According to Simon Heffer, Sumption ‘paints Joan without sentimentality as a religious maniac with no grasp of the realities of

1484: The Siege of Orleans

History conducting warfare.’

But David Crane sums up her achievement like this: ‘It would be an exaggeration to say that (rather like Alamein) the Dauphin had no victories before Joan and no defeats after, but the defence of Orleans and the subsequent crowning of the Dauphin at Reims were psychological turning points which put an end to the myth of English invincibility.’

Review noted that it was ‘spiced with appealing anecdotes about lesser known rulers,’ such as Eadwig, whose coronation feast in 956 was enlivened by the spectacle of the king being dragged from a back room where he had been enjoying a threesome with a mother and daughter.

‘As the scientific identification of the Winchester bones comes ever closer,’ the Daily Mail opined, ‘perhaps we’ll get nearer to discovering what really happened to those individuals.’

THE PALACE GARETH RUSSELL William Collins, 480pp, £25

‘Gareth Russell’s scintillating hybrid of a book … is partly a biography of place and partly something stranger: an episodic history of England from Tudor times to the present, illustrated by lightning flashes of gossip and politics, set against the handsome backdrop of Hampton Court,’ Thomas W. Hodgkinson wrote in the Spectator: ‘The Palace is closely associated with the Tudor monarchy.

‘That, however, is only part of the story,’ the Tudor Times explained.

‘Russell’s panoramic work places the eighty-odd years of Tudor residence in the much longer context of Hampton Court’s life-span, weaving the palace into an overview of public life in a remarkable fashion, mixing architecture, social commentary, politics, diplomacy, and scandal over five centuries.’

‘Hampton Court emerges as an enduring architectural symbol of royal lust,’ Hodgkinson noted. It was Henry VIII’s passion for Anne Boleyn that prompted him to snatch the Palace from Cardinal Wolsey when he failed to facilitate the royal divorce.

It was there that James I commissioned a new translation of the Bible, and there, too, where he indulged his homosexuality with Buckingham.

The Palace seemed particularly hazardous for women, not least Queen Catherine Howard who ran screaming in search of the King when they came to arrest her.

There was a pattern for royal women at Hampton Court, Ysenda Maxtone Graham observed in the Times: ‘short sojourn, a few strolls in the south-facing gardens, then premature death.’

‘Russell takes a small scene at Hampton Court, and builds it out into a comprehensive explanation of a

Bedchamber of Mary II

social and political phenomenon without it ever seeming forced,’ the Tudor Times argued, A ‘racy delight’, Hodgkinson concluded.

THE BONE CHESTS

UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS

CAT JARMAN William Collins, 272pp, £25

‘We may ask ourselves why we are so concerned with finding and identifying the bones of the distant dead,’ Cat Jarman wrote of her new book. Given the limits of even modern forensic archeology, it is a fair point,’ Dan Jones rejoined in the Times, ‘but Jarman’s smart, inventive book shows that the joy of history often lies in posing questions rather than finding answers.’

December 1642. Parliamentary troops burst into Winchester Cathedral, burial place of kings from the 7th to 12th centuries. In an orgy of desecration they break open the chests containing the remains, using the bones as missiles to shatter the stained glass windows. Afterwards the bones are gathered up and returned randomly to the chests.

Fast forward to 2012 when the bones arrive at the laboratories of the archeologists, who will try to determine whom the 1300 bone fragments of 23 individuals belong to.

Only one can be identified with any certainty, the bones of a woman in her sixties: Emma, wife of two kings, mother of two kings.

‘This is the great allure and the great frustration of medieval history,’ Pippa Bailey argued in the New Statesman,‘alongside what is known, there is interpretation and mystery’.

Philip Parker in the Literary

UNRULY

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND’S KING AND QUEEENS

DAVID MITCHELL Michael Joseph, 464pp, £25

Professional historian Gerard DeGroot, in his review for the Times, noted that ‘big books on monarchy still get published and still sell’, and that ‘the English have an insatiable hunger for boring kings’.

Comedian David Mitchell, panel show guest and Observer columnist, ‘who could render an HMRC manual interesting’, has come up with his own irreverent version of our many monarchs.

‘Mitchell, formerly of Peep Show , is a funny man and (no surprise, really) a skilled historian who studied history at Cambridge in the 1990s.’

In the Observer, Stuart Jeffries described the book as ‘part Horrible Histories, part jolly romp guided by Alan Bennett’s view that history has no sense but is “just one fucking thing after another”. But it is mostly, this being a history of England, swearing.’

But Jeffries had a serious point to make: ‘In 2023, we flatter ourselves that we no longer put foes’ eyes out with swords or die of bubonic plague, and that the NHS, universal suffrage, widespread literacy, social media and increased life expectancy make us different from the toxic wingnuts who predominate in Mitchell’s book. Unruly is worth reading, not just for its exemplary gag to fact ratio, but to disabuse us of such delusions.’

Daily Telegraph reviewer Dan Brooks concluded that ‘despite a set of cultural references firmly wedged in the latter half of the previous century, there is refreshing candour in how it calls out the bastards, bullies and brats who have donned England’s highest-carat hats.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 13

Modern history History SING AS WE GO

BRITAIN BETWEEN THE WARS

SIMON HEFFER Hutchinson Heinemann, 960pp, £35

Perhaps the highest praise came from Nigel Jones in the Spectator: ‘Heffer once more treats us to his vast knowledge and trenchant opinions on almost every aspect of the nation’s state, from high politics to crime and popular entertainment.’ His ‘tetralogy offers a commanding view of a century that saw Britain at the summit and then beginning its descent.I think the word is “magisterial”.’

A NORTHERN WIND BRITAIN 1962-65

DAVID KYNASTON Bloomsbury, 704pp, £30

Last ditch: Chamberlain and Hitler, 1938

‘Heffer has been chronicling our island story, since the accession of Queen Victoria, for years,’ wrote A.N. Wilson, a fellow historian of the period, in the Critic. ‘It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to tell the story of the 1920s and 1930s...

This is a superb book, and will surely be seen as the definitive history of the pre-war years.’

A key aspect of the book is that it ‘has magnificently set out the case for Chamberlain’s rehabilitation,’ wrote Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express.

‘Like his previous three volumes,it is a work of epic scholarship, breathtaking range, and piercing originality. His judgement is shrewd and his prose stylish.

‘In its majestic scope, the quartet is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have shaped our land since the early 19th century.

‘What enhances the richness of this latest volume is the extraordinary amount of change and turmoil in the period covered. The book is superb on all these political developments’, but ‘is just as good on society and culture, covering everything from professional football to cinema.’

For David Mills, in the Sunday Times, ‘the second half of the book, when Chamberlain is centre-stage, is excellent, thorough, detailed and combatively argued. The first half, apart from the chapter on John Reith and the foundation of the BBC, is less immediately engaging even though it deals with the rise of the Labour Party, Irish independence and the General Strike.’

14 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

This is the fifth volume in Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem postWWII social history of Britain, which covers such subjects as the rise of the Beatles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the Profumo sex scandal, the funeral of Winston Churchill, the election of Harold Wilson, and the anti-establishment TV show That Was The Week That Was. ‘Here is an intricate tapestry that conveys the essence of the time,’ wrote Piers Brendon in the Literary

This addictive book charts dizzying social change Review. ‘It is not a superficial exercise in heritage history, an attempt to dress up the past... It analyses complexities, teases out nuances and gauges the currents of continuity and change, many of which still flow today.’

Dominic Sandbrook, in his review for the Sunday Times, gave it an enthusiastic welcome: ‘From Daleks and dingy tower blocks to nuclear threats, this addictively readable book charts dizzying change... To readers addicted to David Kynaston’s mighty chronicle of Britain’s history since 1945, this collage, sometimes moving, often comic, always fascinating, will seem reassuringly familiar. ‘ Once again he weaves diaries, newspapers, TV listings and sports fixtures into a vast, multi-coloured tapestry, depicting almost every conceivable aspect of our national life... As always in Kynaston’s series,

dizzying change jostles with profound continuity.’

Charlotte Lydia Riley, in her Financial Times review, said the book ‘moves continuously and skilfully between moments of high politics and the daily rumble of normal people’s lives...Extraordinarily atmospheric, capturing more than anything a sense of what this moment in the early 1960s might have felt like to live through... Kynaston’s assessment is clear and erudite.’

Selina Todd, in theTimes Literary Supplement, called it ‘a richly evocative, thought-provoking and, above all, compassionate study of those who lived through the much-mythologised 1960s. We can only hope that when historians write about our own times, they will extend the same generosity of spirit.’

ALIENS

THE CHEQUERED HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S WARTIME REFUGEES

PAUL DOWSWELL Biteback Publishing, 292pp, £25

When, last year, Boris Johnson referred to the UK’s ‘proud history’ of welcoming foreigners fleeing persecution, he presumably meant refugees like the Jewish children on the Kindertransport. But all too often, says Paul Dowswell, émigrés have been treated as ‘aliens’, a word that has always had ‘sinister undertones’.

Even the Huguenots, supposedly welcomed with open arms, were resented for their industry. 250 years later, as Dowswell relates, many of the Polish ex-servicemen who settled here after the war annoyed union leaders because they worked too hard.

Plus ça change …

But the Poles were our Allies, which was not the case with the other émigrés, who included the thousands

Fifth columnists – or innocent victims?

History Modern history of adult Jews, that Dowswell considers. No sooner had war been declared than newspapers like the Express and the Mail denigrated these ‘foreign aliens’, about 70,000 of whom held German or Austrian passports. To its credit, the Government was unmoved and only a few hard-core Nazi sympathisers were interned.

Then France fell, Italy entered the war and an invasion seemed imminent. Suddenly the prospect of a Fifth Column loomed large.

Churchill’s response was unequivocal.

‘Collar the lot!’ he’s supposed to have said. Internment camps were hastily set up all over the country and plans were made to deport thousands of their inmates to the Dominions. But following the sinking of the Arandora Star en route to Canada, in which hundreds of internees died, this policy was shelved.

Was it all bad? No, said Matthew Reisz in the Guardian. According to Dowswell, ‘ordinary Britons were often repelled by the exclusionary attitude of the American army towards its coloured troops and did their best to make them feel welcome’.

This, ‘Dowswell suggests, perhaps ‘reflects the way the British like to see themselves – as “fair-minded, decent people.” The jury remains out but Aliens brings together much fascinating material to reflect on this.’

THE NAZI CONSPIRACY THE SECRET PLOT TO KILL ROOSEVELT, STALIN AND CHURCHILL

BRAD MELTZER AND JOSH MENSCH Bonnier Books, 400pp, £25

‘I suppose it would make a pretty good haul if they could get all three of us.’ True enough, Mr President.

Roosevelt was referring to Operation Long Jump, the supposed Nazi plot to assassinate him, Churchill and Stalin, at the 1943 Tehran conference.

‘Supposed’, because to this day nobody can be certain that there really was a Nazi plot, or whether, instead, it was a ploy cooked up by the Soviets to make Roosevelt move from the American Legation, which was somewhat isolated – and therefore vulnerable – to the Soviet Embassy – which was, of course, bugged.

Sceptical about the launch of a Second Front, Stalin hoped his eavesdropping

would reveal whether Britain and America meant business.

The authors of two bestselling books about conspiracies, Meltzer and Mensch admit that the truth about Long Jump will probably never be known, so thick is the smokescreen of misinformation that still surrounds it. But they remind readers that because Tehran was full of Nazi sympathisers, a Nazi hit squad could easily have gone to ground there – literally, since the city was full of

narrative, the Oman Ghana Trust Fund never existed and the tale of Nkrumah’s secret offshore fortune was a lie’.

Another admiring assessment came from Henry Hitchings in theTimes Literary Supplement. ‘As Yepoka Yeebo makes clear in her richly entertaining account of [Blay-Miesah’s] rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic... She has a sharp eye for droll detail and is especially successful in evoking the two decades that followed independence – a glitzy but sleazy world of nightclubs and casinos “where the champagne flowed, even when the electricity did not”.’

THE WEIMAR YEARS

RISE AND FALL, 1918-1933

FRANK MCDONOUGH Apollo, 656pp, £35 Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

underground tunnels, one of which was connected to the Soviet Embassy.

Describing the book as ‘actionpacked’, Publishers Weekly said that Meltzer and Mensch ‘acknowledge doubts about the plot’s actual existence yet convincingly argue that it was real, and provide necessary historical context while setting a brisk, thriller-like pace.’

ANANSI’S GOLD

THE MAN WHO SWINDLED THE WORLD

YEPOKA YEEBO Bloomsbury Circus, 400pp, £20

‘Dr.’ John Ackah Blay-Miezah (1941-1992) was a Ghanaian conartist who presided over a bogus offshore trust fund for two decades.

‘Fabulously entertaining,’ declared Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph.

‘Like all good biographies of artists, Yeebo’s book conveys the uniqueness of his personality while also showing how his art was forged in, and fed the requirements of, the times’.

It is ‘crisp and well-told, brimming with vivid scenes and colourful writing,’ wrote Aanu Adeoye in the Financial Times, while Martin Vander Weyer, in his review for the Literary Review, admired Yeebo’s ‘elegant prose, bringing complex detail, vivid background colour and an extensive cast into her compelling

A prequel to the same author’s two-volume The Hitler Years, the story this book tells ‘acts as a dark mirror to modern democracies, disturbingly absorbing for its spectacular fall from the heights of liberalism to the depths of Nazi tyranny,’ wrote Katja Hoyer in the Spectator.

The vastness of the available material is tackled with admirable scholarly discipline. The chaos of Weimar’s political parties, its rich cultural landscape and the bewildering speed of events are parcelled into 15 digestible chapters, one for each year, with beautifully reproduced images evoking the faces and places of the era. It is ‘a timely book’, delivering a stark reminder of what happens when democratic foundations become eroded by social division and political apathy.It ‘also highlights the creative energy of this intensely disturbed society’.

In his review for the Times, Pratinav Anil was excoriating. ‘The pictures are great. Sadly, the writing isn’t. McDonough writes competently about diplomacy and defence, treaties and parties.

‘For everything else, however, we get reams and reams of monotonous lists. There’s a sexy gloom to Weimar – a whiff of flamboyance and decadence, permissiveness and licentiousness – and McDonough’s clerking prose is unsuited to it.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 15

Arts & music although at first Giacometti was lonely in Paris in the early 1920s, the surrealists soon took him up: ‘Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau praised him and Man Ray photographed him in his studio — he was hailed as “the sculpturewunderkind all Paris is talking about”.’

Barber thought the book not only ‘a wonderful portrait of Giacometti, but also of many of his friends and associates’.

WITHNAIL AND I

Giacometti: the ‘sculpture wunderkind’

GIACOMETTI IN PARIS MICHAEL PEPPIATT Bloomsbury, 352pp, £30

‘In the 1960s,’ explained Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer, ‘the fledgling art historian Michael Peppiatt moved to Paris with a letter of introduction to Alberto Giacometti from Francis Bacon. He was still plucking up the nerve to deliver it when he learned that the Swiss sculptor and painter had died just days earlier.

He has been preoccupied by Giacometti ever since, and his new book sets out to understand exactly how the artist’s distinctive talent was shaped by Paris in its artistic heyday.’

Giacometti is best known for the bronze sculptures of tall, thin human figures, made in the years 1945 to 1960. He used to say, wrote Laura Freeman in the Times, that he would have preferred to carve and cast voluptuous women like Marilyn Monroe. ‘The more I tried to make them broader,‘the narrower they got.’

Peppiatt’s telling of Giacometti’s story, continued Freeman, ‘is insightful and sprightly, but it is not lean. Peppiatt’s rich style sits oddly, though, with this most pared back of artists. The man and his motivations get lost in the folds of flesh.’

‘The human side of Giacometti’s life is not neglected,’ wrote Keith Miller in the Telegraph, ‘from his remorseless self-criticism and outright self-sabotaging to his sometimes complicated love life ...

Peppiatt explores his fascination with the “night creatures” frequenting the bars and brothels of Montparnasse.’

In the Spectator, Peppiatt explained to Lynn Barber that 16 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

FROM CULT TO CLASSIC

TOBY BENJAMIN

AMY WINEHOUSE IN HER WORDS

HarperCollins,288pp,£30

This is ‘essentially a souped-up scrapbook of photos, drawings, postcards, poems, home-made cards and copious lists from Winehouse’s early years, compiled by her parents’, said Fiona Sturges in the i.

Alexis Petridis in the Guardian reflected on the fact that Winehouse’s reputation was largely based on her only two albums, but the demand for her is unabated. With no more music to feed it, the public appetite has to be satiated with other things.’

Titan,160pp,£39.99

What is the essence that makes Bruce Robinson’s movie Withnail and I so appealing? ‘ “Sublime melancholy” is what the dramatist Martin Keady calls it in one of the essays in this lovelorn and richly illustrated coffee table book,› said Ed Potton in the Times, ‘a mix of criticism, interviews and reproduced scripts and letters.’

In the Guardian, Max Wall wrote that Withnail had been a huge influence on his younger self: ‘My swishy, three-quarter-length coat was half my personality. I would have had to be surgically removed from it.

‘I wanted booze and drugs, and to cause outrage in provincial tearooms.

In fact, I just looked like a dick, and wouldn’t have known weed from oregano. Still, the film left an imprint like a branding iron.

‘I was one of many, obviously.

None more so than Benjamin, whose book charts the journey of a film that was initially a flop, gained a following among students and then assumed a granite-like position in the culture.’

Potton said, ‘[The film’s] perfection comes from [the] script. Even the stage directions are works of art, — Withnail is as “pale as an ovenready chicken”. Robinson, demanded the dialogue be done verbatim and never for laughs.’

Dorian Lynskey in the Spectator said, ‘Withnail and I can also feel like a caravan of famous lines: “I’ve only had a few ales”; “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”; “We want the finest wines available to humanity!” ’ But Potton said, ‘[The book is] spot on when it notes that the real genius of the film is not its quotability… but its lingering sadness.’

Winehouse: ‘a down-to-earth diva’

He felt that the book’s reproduction of ‘everything from school work to song lyrics, letters and diary entries can make for a faintly discomfiting read, particularly given Winehouse’s struggle with intrusion in her later years’.

Sturges said, ‘While it has its poignant moments, much of what is presented as insight-laden artefact is, in fact, humdrum childhood memorabilia, the stuff that clutters up the attics of doting parents.

‘Despite the fact that Winehouse’s name is a byword for the failure of the music industry to protect vulnerable artists, there is no apportioning of blame over her death,’ said Petridis.

And ‘her ex-husband Blake FielderCivil’s name is never mentioned, only “an ill-fated-relationship”.’

The book was released to tie in with what would have been Winehouse’s 40th birthday, a time when Kieran Gair reported in the Times, ‘Fielder-Civil, who was married to the singer for two years, expressed regret about the drugtaking the pair engaged in.’ This and the family scrapbook only seem to add to the Winehouse tragedy.

China PARTY OF ONE

THE RISE OF XI JINPING AND CHINA’S SUPERPOWER FUTURE

CHUN HAN WONG Simon and Schuster, 416pp, £25

A native of Singapore who studied international history at the London School of Economics, Wong covered China for the Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2019 when he was expelled for writing an article about one of Xi’s cousin’s links to organized crime.

‘Wong’s book helps us to better understand China, the CCP, and Xi as the new Cold War heats up in the western Pacific,’ wrote Francis P. Sempa in the New York Journal of Books. There are ‘separate chapters in which he describes Xi’s and the CCP’s uses of the law, businesses, the media, the military, and security services to crack down on internal dissent and expand the party’s control over virtually every aspect of Chinese society... It is all part of what Xi calls the “China Dream,” the fulfillment of which includes reunification with Taiwan and replacing the United States as the world’s leading power.

‘Xi has made sure that he has no successor’ Wong notes, however, that in his pursuit of the China Dream, Xi now confronts a bi-partisan anti-China policy in the United States and opposition from regional powers in east Asia and the western Pacific.’

The author confesses, wrote Guy Sorman in City Journal, that ‘after spending five years in China and conducting extensive research, he does not know how the Chinese government makes decisions, who makes them, or what principles or strategies guide it. Everything comes down to Xi Jinping, who himself is vague concerning his ideology and his intentions.’

Wong’s central thesis, argued Sorman, is that ‘the regime’s fundamental weakness is its concentration of power in the hands of a dictator for life. If he dies, then what? No one knows, since Xi has made sure that he has no successor and, in fact, has eliminated anything

resembling a constitution or the rule of law. Because of Xi’s unlimited power, China has become a giant with feet of clay.’

WAITING TO BE ARRESTED AT NIGHT TAHIR HAMUT IZGIL Cape, 272pp, £18.99)

as the Chinese government put it, that the local parks and Izgil’s own office were completely empty.’

As Dan Keane put it in the Washington Post, this ‘lucid and quietly terrifying book’ repeatedly returns to ‘moments of eerie silence.’

SPARKS

CHINA’S UNDERGROUND HISTORIANS AND THEIR BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE

IAN JOHNSON Allen Lane, 400pp, £25

Tahir Hamut Izgil: ‘lucid and terrifying’

The Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s remarkable memoir of life under the cold cosh of Chinese rule is, wrote Barbara Demick in the New York Times, ‘an outlier among books about human rights. There are no scenes of torture, no violence and few sweeping proclamations about genocide. Izgil writes with calculated restraint. As his title suggests, the terror is in the anticipation.’

For the Guardian’s Kenan Malik, ‘we know all these things are happening, but off-page. Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered.

The book’s restraint is also its strength. The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title – the dread of waiting to be arrested, to be vanished into detention, a dread no Uyghur can escape.’

Izgil, who fled to America with his family in 2017, recalls living in fear in icy detail. In this climate of constant, debilitating uncertainty, Izgil, like many other Uyghurs, learned to speak in code. People who were arrested and vanished were said to be “gone with the wind” or “in the hospital”; a “guest” at home referred to a state security agent. So many Uyghurs were being sent to “study”,

Spark was a mimeographed magazine, read by a tiny number of people, which ran to two editions in 1960 before it was closed down and its contributors imprisoned and, in some cases, eventually executed. It had contained articles criticizing Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

‘In his superb, stylishly written book’ and ‘with firm but never dogmatic moral conviction’, said Ian Buruma in the New Yorker, ‘Johnson pays tribute to the writers, the scholars, the poets, and the filmmakers who found the courage to challenge Communist Party propaganda.’

These dissenters – he calls them “underground historians” – looked beyond the official lies about the past and the present, and decided to document the truth about forbidden topics, including Mao’s campaigns to massacre putative class enemies and, indeed, anyone who pricked his paranoia... If their conclusions – presented in homemade videos, mimeographed sheets, and underground journals – didn’t reach a wide audience, they were at least on record, for later generations...’

In the Literary Review Rana Mitter wrote that ‘Johnson’s account is moving and full of human character. It’s a compelling read, beautifully written, and the product of deep research carried out in China over many years... Most authorities in China today would rather that the stories of mass death and trauma in the era of Mao disappeared along with those who lived through them.

The historians, chroniclers and filmmakers celebrated by Johnson are doing their best to prevent that from happening. This book is an exemplary tribute to their efforts, made lucidly comprehensible to a Western audience.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 17

Freedom of thought Why we must think for ourselves. By MICHAEL BARBER In Orwell’s dystopian fable,1984, the boss of the Thought Police, O’Brien, tells Winston Smith, ‘It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.’ Now, thanks to the internet, it’s we who are in danger of being brainwashed. Reviewing two new books that consider this topic in the Literary Review, Emma Park asked, ‘Are our minds strong enough to withstand the continual interference we face every time we pick up our smartphones – in other words, to think freely.’

Park, editor of The Freethinker magazine, applauded The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century by Simon McCarthy-Jones (One World, 416pp, £16.99). A professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, McCarthy-Jones describes freedom of thought as a ‘forgotten freedom’ – not least because it is difficult to define in law. But, he says, we should insist on legal protection to protect our minds, because thanks to ‘behaviour-reading technologies’ companies – and of course governments – are able to ‘“see into our souls” and know us better than ourselves.’

This scary predicament would not be news to Patrick Fagan, co-author, with Laura Dodsworth, of Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (Harper Collins, 384pp, £22).

Fagan was once lead psychologist at Cambridge Analytica, the company involved in the huge Facebook data harvesting scandal. He and Dodsworth, a vehement opponent of Lockdown, anathematize mental manipulation, but conclude rather lamely that ‘we all have to submit to something, and some masters are healthier than others.’ The ‘master’ they recommend is religion, leading Emma Park to conclude, ‘A sceptical reader will be left wondering whether this sounds like freeing your mind or the opposite.’

The American philosopher Daniel Dennett would certainly endorse Park’s objection. One of ‘The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism’ – the others were Christopher Hitchens, 18 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris – he once declared, ‘Religious faith gives people a gold-plated excuse to stop thinking.’ This offended Bryan Appleyard in the Times, who called it ‘emphatically untrue.’

Reviewing Dennett’s new memoir, I’ve Been Thinking (Allen Lane, 464pp, £30), Appleyard calls the Horsemen ‘an intellectually vain bunch, and none more so than their philosopher king, Dennett.’ For example, Dennett’s ‘imperious self-confidence leads him to dismiss other thinkers with a very

Human brain (sagittal section)

philosophical flick of the wrist. “They think they know better. They don’t,” he says of one list of prominent names.’

The Observer’s Stuart Jeffries was also critical of Dennett’s ‘chippy score-settling with intellectual opponents, some of them long dead.’

He thought it a great pity that what was, in some respects, an ‘engaging memoir’, should be spoilt by so much ‘professorial preening’.

If you aspire to think positively and make sense of the world then David Sumpter is your man. A professor of Applied Mathematics, his career has been spent demonstrating that his rather arcane speciality can be applied to ‘everything and anything’, including a happy marriage (like his) and professional football: he has worked with Premier League

teams and the England squad.

The title of Sumpter’s book is a giveaway: Four Ways of Thinking: Statistical, Interactive, Chaotic and Complex (Allen Lane, 306pp, £18.99). Fortunately, for readers like myself who found even O Level Maths too challenging, you don’t need to be a Senior Wrangler to understand it.

And while I hesitate to echo James McConnachie in the Sunday Times, who wished that Sumpter had been his maths teacher, (I wouldn’t wish that thankless task on anybody), I can believe McConnachie when he writes that Sumpter has a ‘genius’ for applying his four ways of thinking to ‘relatable situations’.

That said, McConnachie does admit that some of what Sumpter writes ‘defies easy summary’. The author may have anticipated this, because according to Steven Poole in the Guardian he writes that ‘complexity is a function of our own (lack of) understanding, rather than an objective feature of the world’, which leads him to the ‘lovely thought that science itself is simply “the process of finding progressively shorter explanations for the phenomena around us.”’

And now for a little light relief thanks to Mick Brown, who invites readers to join him on a magical mystery tour – ‘from the Buddha to the Bhagwan’ – aboard The Nirvana Express (Hurst, 400pp, £25). Their fellow passengers include Aleister Crowley, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maugham, Timothy Leary and, notoriously, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, both of which bands proclaimed, for a season, the lifeenhancing properties of Meditation.

Were they conned? Probably.

‘Addled by postwar comfort and the commodification of drugs,’ said Dominic Green in the Literary Review, ‘a generation took the likes of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the inventor of Transcendental Meditation, seriously.’ Well, yes. But you could also argue that he and his fellow hucksters like the Bhagwan added to the gaiety of nations, a commodity in very short supply right now.

Nature & country MOUNTAINS OF FIRE CLIVE OPPENHEIMER Hodder, 368pp, £25

with excitement”. He calls Erebus “my muse”; as he is airlifted away from it he feels “the heartache of leaving a lover”.’

Fergusson concluded ‘Perhaps one final attribute of a volcanologist is that he should be a good storyteller.

Oppenheimer is better than good.

This is terrific.’

DUST

THE MODERN WORLD IN A MILLION PARTICLES

JAY OWENS Hodder, 400pp, £25

Mystical: why volcanoes ignite passion

Volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer’s book was greeted with admiring awe by reviewers. Ben Cooke in the Times noted that he is ‘barmy enough to walk up active volcanoes.’ Not only is the book ‘at once a history of volcanology and a memoir of Oppenheimer’s own research expeditions, there is a display of mind-boggling bravado in the face of Earth’s pyrotechnics.’

Mountains of Fire is more than a book about the science of volcanoes but an examination of the hold they have on the human imagination – and on the real-live humans who live within lava-flow’s distance of one. In the New Scientist James Dineed wrote that it ‘shows how seriously the volcanologist takes the mystical meanings volcanoes hold for those who live nearby.’

Volcanoes have existed far longer than humans Maggie Fergusson in the Spectator also enjoyed the poetry of this scientists’ passion for his subject: ‘Fieldwork is what he loves. He has studied more than 100 volcanoes, and he feels a kinship with them. Not only have most of them existed on Earth much longer than human beings, but our “fleshly inventories” are the same – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur. They are anthropomorphic.

Flying over the Tibesti region of northwest Chad, he calls out, against the roar of the plane engines, the names of the volcanoes he is about to visit – Emi Koussi, Tarso Yega, Pic Toussidé – and he feels “delirious 20 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

‘Each particle of dust may be tiny, together they have outsized consequences’, noted Oliver FranklinWallis in the Guardian. He was reviewing science researcher Jay Owens’ new book on the stuff that surrounds us, invisible but omnipresent. ‘Approximately 2bn tonnes of dust are lifted into the Earth’s atmosphere each year, Owens tells us, both absorbing and reflecting the sun’s energy and seeding clouds – therefore directly affecting global temperatures and climate.

Dust from the Sahara, whipped up by the Harmattan winds, crosses the Atlantic to fertilise the Amazon; interplanetary dust, having made its way across the galaxy and survived entry into our atmosphere, is sprinkled over polar ice caps, giving climatologists a glimpse of distant parts of the universe. Like water, dust is part of an intricate and essential ecological cycle.’

The Telegraph’s Simon Ings was also impressed. ‘Owens’s pursuit of dust – defined very broadly as particles of a certain size, however generated – sends her tripping through many fascinating and rewarding realms. The journey can sometimes be at the expense of her main subject; for instance, a lot of this book is less about dust than about the absence of water.

And in Nature, Alexandra Witz enjoyed a ‘fresh’ look at ‘tiny particles doing terrible things’, from ‘coal smoke smothering London in the seventeenth century to pollutants hastening the melting of Greenland’s ice cap today.’ Ings thought the author a ‘superb travel writer’ and Witz picked out her account of attending a rave party on the edge of the vanishing Aral Sea – ‘disaster tourism at its peak.’

THE FARMER’S WIFE MY LIFE IN DAYS

HELEN REBANKS Faber, 336pp, £17

The title of Helen Rebanks’s memoir suggests a diary, but it is more than this. Behind the deep delve into her day-to-day life of keeping a home, raising a family, rearing sheep, cows and dogs, Rebanks uncovers the quiet power behind the daily choices we all make; from the food on our table to the kind of life we choose to live.

Caitlin Moran on Twitter found it ‘just beautiful and very honest: the little-told story of just what farmers’ wives have to do, which is around fifty separate jobs, but all unpaid, and being described as merely “a farmer’s wife.”’

Juliet Nicholson, in the Spectator admired its overall sensibility.

‘Rebanks is always conscious of the gossamer thread linking life and death which might suddenly fray or snap through miscarriage, old age, a killer virus decimating the cattle, a violent snowstorm endangering the sheep or the final illness of a beloved

Rebanks: not ‘just’ a farmer’s wife

dog. The blood, mud, slog, exhaustion, bureaucracy, financial angst, challenges of sustainablitiy, the role of the consumer and the concerns of animal welfare are ever-present.’

Rebanks breaks off to include comforting recipes from her kitchen which Nicholson enjoyed, ‘this is a luminously beautiful memoir that I will give anyone tempted by a recipe for field mushroom soup or who struggles with the turbulence of life, has ever doubted themselves or questioned the sustaining power of love. Two ribbons, intended perhaps as recipe reminders, work as markers of passages to which I already long to

Nature & country return. On finishing the book, I wished for many more ribbons.’

Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian agreed, ‘Rebanks does an excellent job of writing women’s labour back into the story of the English farm. The result is a tart anti-pastoral that nonetheless reminds readers that satisfaction and joy is to be found not in life’s big set-piece moments but in the obligations of the everyday.’

FIRE WEATHER

A TRUE STORY FROM A HOTTER WORLD

EIGHT BEARS GLORIA DICKIE Norton, 272pp, £25

Bears are on the move, both fleeing and invading their human neighbours and Gloria Dickie’s fascinating book shows how far bears are embedded in our mythology and landscape.

She examines eight kinds of bear - Spectacled, sloth, panda, moon, sun, American black, brown and polar bear – all of them, as Edward Posnett in the Guardian observed, ‘so

JOHN VAILLANT Sceptre, 432pp, £25

At the centre of this book is what John Vaillant calls ‘an island of industry in an ocean of trees.’ This is Fort McMurray, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Canada. It is an oil town; when the price of crude is high, it is known as Fort McMoney. There are often forest fires but in April 2016, the ninth of the season was an event like none other, a cataclysm of white hot destruction feeding on the chemical and plastic by-products of modern industry as well as the resin-y wood of the trees.

By the end of one week the fire had burned half a million acres. It was still burning 15 months later, having consumed about 2,500 square miles of forest, an area roughly the size of Devon.

As Tim Adams put it in the Observer, this is an ‘urgent disaster story, meticulous in its detail, both human and geological in its scale, and often shocking in its conclusions.’

David Enrich in the New York Times revealed Fort McMurray as a ‘gargantuan mining and processing operation – so vast that it is visible from 6000 miles above the earth.’

In the next few decades, Vaillant argues, ‘humanity will face its greatest challenge since it “(almost) mastered” fire. Somehow we must bring the Earth’s atmosphere back into equilibrium before it really is too late.’

On the bright side, he adds, ‘life – in one form or another – has always won out against fire in the past, surviving even the volcanic cataclysm and great extinction that ended the Permian Age more than 250 million years ago.

“That there will be life at the end of the Petrocene Age is a certainty,” he writes, “but whose, how much, and where is less clear.”’

Bearing up: bears are struggling to survive

wondrously varied in physical form, character, diet, range and habitat that it is sometimes hard to fathom that they all belong to the same family.’

Posnett continued: ‘Were you to invite them all to dinner you would need an impossibly varied menu (salmon, seal, insects, bromeliads, bamboo, honey) and impractical seating arrangements (a sun bear may weigh 60lb; a grizzly, 600lb).

The sun and spectacled bears, shy tree dwellers, might retire early, while others, notably the sloth bear, might dominate proceedings (sloth bears are prone to aggressive behaviour, possibly due to their precarious position in the food chain, just below India’s leopards and tigers).’

In the New Yorker, Jill Lepore noted that rewilding schemes mean that bears ‘are coming back to places they haven’t been in generations’.

Last month, she wrote, ‘a black bear turned up on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Monroe in Washington. He wandered around, ,climbed a tree, and took a nap.

‘Animal control shot him with a tranquillizer gun, put him on a truck, and released him in Maryland.’

Posnett found Dickie’s book a ‘compelling attempt to see through their eyes: to explore what it means to be a bear in a warming world that is short on space.’

RIVETS, TRIVETS & GALVANISED BUCKETS LIFE IN THE VILLAGE HARDWARE SHOP

TOM FORT Headline, 336pp, £22

Tom Fort’s new book is about the village hardware shop-cum-general store rescued, restored and run by his daughter-in-law Shro; the store, Heath & Watkins, is now a family concern.

Normally,’ wrote Patrick Scrivenor in the Literary Review, ‘hardware and DIY make for dry subjects, but this delightful book is full of surprises.’

Max Hastings in the Sunday Times was also charmed: ‘We might suggest that this is an extraordinary book, but it is hard to say that when its author has already written tomes on lawns, eels, the weather and the A303.

‘He battens on to crazy subjects and writes about them irresistibly — to me, anyway.’’

‘This is the book for anyone who wondered about flat-head and Philips screwdrivers, or the history of DIY,’ wrote Jason Goodwin in Country Life.

‘Centred around the vicissitudes of running a shop in a big village, this is a book full of trivia, but it is strung together very agreeably, with dry wit and, dare I say it, considerable polish (third row, second shelf).’

The book, continued Hastings, is partly about how the family learnt to be shopkeepers, and partly backstories of some of the products they sell, tracing Kilner jars, for example, back to their 1840s originator, the glassmaker John Kilner in Wakefield.

Fort recounts the development of lightbulbs by Edison and Swan — ‘we will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles’.

‘Do you know what a trivet is?’ asked Hastings. ‘ I did not until I read here that it is a metal stand to support a pot or kettle on a stove.

‘Rivets were also big business and if Harland & Wolff had done a better job fastening their plates on the Titanic, the wretched boat might never have sunk.’

He concluded: ‘This book tells a quirky tale of a subculture, a shrine where many of us worship. It made me itch to get to my drill again.’

Long live the village store.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 21

Food NATIONAL DISH

AROUND THE WORLD IN SEARCH OF FOOD, HISTORY AND THE MEANING OF HOME

ANYA VON BREMZEN Pushkin One, 352pp, £22

we are deprived of when we nourish ourselves from supermarkets or multinational fast-food joints.

INVITATION TO A BANQUET

THE STORY OF CHINESE FOOD

FUCHSIA DUNLOP Allen Lane, 480pp, £25

Spaghetti carbonara

JAVIER SOMOZA

Anya von Bremzen undertook a journey in the name of food. She visited six cities, Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca and Istanbul and set about defining the significance of the ‘national dish’.

Why are certain foods, like pizza, ramen and tapas, adopted as symbols of their places of origin? The author uncovered myths and marketing that surround many famous foods, based not necessarily on historical fact.

Pizza Margherita has no connection with a visit by Queen Margherita of Italy to Naples in 1889. (Pizzas there had long been adorned with basil, tomato and mozzarella, the colours of the Italian flag.)

Ramen is a Chinese import to Japan, And fish and chips in Britain grew out of the beloved fried fish of Jewish immigrants.

Along the way, von Bremen talks to star chefs, food bloggers, agricultural scientists and culinary historians. The result is ‘a fast-paced, entertaining travelogue, peppered with compact history lessons that reveal the surprising ways dishes become iconic,’ said Irina Dumitrescu in the New York Times.

Bee Wilson, writing in the Financial Times found it a ‘dazzlingly intelligent examination of how foods become national symbols.’ Food, von Bremzen shows, is never simply a question of geography or history. ‘It carries the “emotional charge of a flag or an anthem”.’

The national dish has become iconic in an era of globalisation where there is a Starbucks on every continent. Now more than ever, national and local foods offer an emotional ‘anchor and comfort’ that 22 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

Fuchsia Dunlop is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Chinese cuisine confirmed Miranda Brown in the Literary Review. In her new book, she concentrates not on recipes but on ‘matters of history and seeks to tackle big questions: what is Chinese food and how should we eat it...’ showing us the ‘depth and range of Chinese cuisine through thirty highly varied dishes’.

Brown thought the book would inspire readers ‘to reflect on their own relationship to one of life’s greatest pleasures’.

Her book is a ‘love letter to several millennia of Chinese gastronomy’, wrote Isabel Hilton in the Financial Times. She continued: ‘Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score....

Gastronomic joy: the Chinese dumpling

Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronomy.

In the Times, Bee Wilson thought the book ‘a brilliantly informative appreciation of Chinese food past and present, told through a series of essential ingredients and dishes, from soybeans to seafood, from noodles to dumplings...and overall, an ‘erudite joy’.

Dunlop told Tim Lewis in the

Observer that writing about China will probably be her life’s work, and contained ‘lots of lessons for the West: not least how to eat less meat and how to make the meat we eat go further.’ ’

BETWEEN MEALS

AN APPETITE FOR EATING

A.J. LIEBLING PenguinClassics, 150pp, £10.99

‘You do not read him for information,’ wrote James Salter in his ‘magisterial’ introduction to A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals. Instead, here is a series of essays written by a ‘dedicated, unrepentant hog’ during one year spent eating in Paris’s best restaurants in the late 1920s.

Thus did David Sexton describe the author of this ‘wonderfully readable short book’ in the Times, in which Liebling’s, ‘massive consumption is both his aim and admiration.’

It’s true, the quantities consumed as well as the quality of cooking is at the heart of this ‘astonishing’ book, which is ‘a rich dish itself, gross eating making for good reading.

‘This is a book that may do rather well in present circumstances; the pieces within are just the thing for anyone who pines for a nicely roasted guinea fowl followed by a crisp, cold slice of vacherin’ wrote Rachel Cooke in the Guardian, clarifying, that she meant, ‘the pudding, made of ice-cream and meringue, not the cheese.’

She continued, ‘Liebling’s account of eating escargots is the best I’ve ever read, though admittedly this is niche territory.’

Ed Cumming in the Telegraph, also saw a relevance in Liebling’s book with the obsession for food writing, today.

‘From the vantage point of 2023, with its powdered meals and Ozempic and junk-food-induced obesity crisis, Between Meals reads like a lament for a way of being. He craved the best of everything, on his own terms, wherever and whenever he could find it.

Rupert Wright in the Guardian summed up the book, ‘A heroic account of gluttonous eating in Paris in the 1920s when you could get 26 francs to the dollars Liebling did not meet the avant garde, such as Picasso, Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein. Instead, he met lunch.’

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Fiction Literary critic STEPHANIE CROSS selects her novels of the. year In a year short of reasons to be optimistic the world of books has offered some comfort, with a wealth of new and exciting voices coming to the fore in 2023. More than a quarter of the novels on this year’s Booker Prize longlist were debuts, and first novels comprised half of the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist (although the eventual victor was veteran American novelist – and previous winner - Barbara Kingsolver for Demon Copperhead, (Faber, 560pp, £9.99) – her brilliant update on Dickens’s David Copperfield.

Surprisingly, Alice Winn’s epic World War I love story In Memoriam (Viking, 400pp, £14.99) was nominated for neither of the year’s top awards, but in August it deservedly carried off the Waterstone’s Debut Fiction Prize, with the judges hailing it a ‘truly stunning feat of fiction’.

Centering on the relationship between two teenage soldiers, Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood, who together travel from boarding school idyll to the hell of the trenches, it was described as ‘propulsive, visceral and heartrending’ by the Telegraph’s Marianka Swain.

John Maier in The Sunday Times admired Winn’s ‘intelligent feeling for her historical material, careful treatment of character and wellpaced style’, while Hephzibah Anderson in the Observer found the author’s prose imbued with a ‘clarity best described as cinematic’ - a skill

Crewe: a highly lauded novelist of ideas

Winn no doubt honed in her previous career as a screenwriter.

‘Greek feeling’ was at the heart of another highly-lauded historical debut, The New Life (Chatto, 384pp, £16.99) by historian-turnednovelist Tom Crewe. Drawing heavily 24 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

on the lives and work of the Victorian writer John Addington Symonds and the psychologist Havelock Ellis, it followed the intersecting paths of two men who collaborate on a study of ‘sexual introverts’.

When, against the backdrop of Oscar Wilde’s indecency trial, the publishers of their book are put in the dock, its authors must decide how far they will go in defence of their work. In the Financial Times, Michael Arditti noted that ‘it is refreshing to find any contemporary novel, let alone a debut, which is first and foremost one of ideas’.

Lara Feigel in the Guardian concurred, hailing it as a ‘virtuoso’ first outing: ‘Crewe’s brilliance… is in dramatising moral dilemmas with complexity and rigour’.

Yellowface: ‘zeitgeisty’ novel of the year

From the trials of the past to the culture wars of today, Yellowface by 27-year-old Rebecca F. Kuang was perhaps the most zeigesty novel of the year (not to mention a must-read for anyone in publishing). The first literary offering by an awardwinning fantasy writer, it featured would-be author Juniper who, in the book’s opening pages, witnesses her much more successful friend Athena’s tragic demise.

Naturally Juniper is traumatised – but not enough to prevent her stealing Athena’s latest manuscript and passing it off as her own. The snag? Athena was Chinese-America, and Juniper is white. ‘As a tale of rivalrous friendship that morphs into lurid revenge melodrama and even a sort-of ghost story, Yellowface keeps us agog, narrowing its eyes all the while at an industry’s attitudes towards racial diversity’, judged Anthony Cummins in the Guardian.

It wasn’t just bright young things making waves this year. Go As A River (Doubleday, 320pp, £16.99) the first novel from creative writing lecturer Shelly Read, was published when its author was in her late fifties.

Read, a fifth-generation native of Colorado, charts the decades from

the aftermath of WWII to the Vietnam draft through the lens of one woman’s life, all played out amidst the state’s majestic landscape.

Despite being translated into over 30

The big names were far from absent in 2023 languages internationally, this absorbing, profoundly sympathetic and evocative tale received limited review coverage in the UK – which didn’t stop it becoming a bestseller.

‘Through lush imagery of the natural world, Go As A River shows the possibility of growing in the most challenging of circumstances’ wrote Anita Sethi in the i.

The big names were however far from absent in 2023. Zadie Smith was another novelist who this year trained her gaze on the past, returning to bookshops with her first novel since 2016’s Swing Time. The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton, 464pp, £20) took as its point of departure the true-life Tichborne Trial, a legal case that became a cause célèbre in Victorian Britain. But the novel’s true centres are Andrew Bogle, a former Jamaican sugar-plantation slave turned star witness in the dispute, and the woman in whom he inspires a fascination, widowed Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet. ‘A richly enjoyable, sophisticated book,’ wrote Erica Wagner approvingly in the Telegraph. ‘A novel full of people, ideas, humour, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life,’ applauded Richard Goodwin in the Evening Standard.

Smith’s failure to secure a Booker nomination raised some eyebrows, Arthur Orton , the claimant in the Tichborne Trial, as portrayed in Vanity Fair by ‘Ape’, June 1871

Fiction but Paul Murray’s doorstopping The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton, 464pp, £20) always seemed a shoe-in. The fourth novel by the much-loved author of Skippy Dies, this epic, tragi-comic family saga followed the fortunes of one Irish clan over the course of four decades, asking if a single piece of bad luck can determine the course of a life.

‘At its core this is a novel concerned with the oldest clichés: the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss,’ observed Antony Cummins in the Guardian: ‘They’re all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish.’ Johnna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times was similarly admiring: ‘The range and depth of [the novel’s] sympathies mean it’s painful to let go of the characters at the end.’

Readers may feel a similar pang on turning the last page of Rose Tremain’s Absolutely and Forever (Chatto, 192pp, £16.99). In contrast to Murray’s maximalism, Tremain’s novel numbered less than 200 pages, but packed an immense emotional punch. Colonel’s daughter Marianne is a teenager in the 1950s when she falls head-over-heels in love with Oxbridge-bound Simon.

But when he flunks and skulks off to Paris ‘to become a writer’, the pair’s paths diverge. Tremain here has the courage to acknowledge that first love - and first heartbreak - can sometimes never be surmounted, and yet her tale is anything but depressing. ‘This gorgeous, pitchperfect novel is a world unto itself,’

A novel of secrets and lies, love and loss thought Rachel Cooke in the Guardian. ‘Not a word is wasted; not a phrase trite,’ wrote Sue Gaisford in the Financial Times. ‘It is mesmerising, masterly and profoundly moving.’

Another masterly storyteller, Louise Doughty, returned in the autumn with A Bird in Winter (Faber, 368pp, £16.99). The author of Apple Tree Yard and the soon-tobe-a-major-series Platform 7 here delivered a superbly unputdownable psychological thriller featuring a woman (the eponymous ‘Bird’) on the run. Why? Well, that would be

Monet’s The Magpie in Winter (1869)

telling, but suffice it to say that the novel’s range of photogenic backdrops – Scotland, Norway, Iceland – suggest another screen adaptation will soon be forthcoming.

‘Louise Doughty’s ability to create complex, often flawed protagonists who retain our sympathy is one of her hallmarks’, observed Lucy Popescu in the Financial Times, while Laura Wilson in the Guardian noted that this was, among other things, ‘A compelling study of trust, and the contradictory desire both to escape and to be found.’

Francis Spufford’s two previous novels have won him both awards and acclaim, yet his name isn’t perhaps as known as it deserves to be. Not for want of ambition: his debut, the Costa prize-winning Golden Hill, was set in 18th-century Manhattan, and in Cahokia Jazz he returned to America – only not the country we know today. In Spufford’s noir murder mystery, Native Americans have survived smallpox in far greater numbers than in reality, and in 1922, when the novel is set, they live in the sprawling fictional metropolis of Cahokia alongside people from Africa and Europe.

A gruesome slaying, however, stirs up racial tensions in a place where no-one is who they seem.

‘Even within the context of a genre that requires the author to carry out so much visible world-building, his flights of imagination and generosity of spirit carry the reader along,’ wrote Alex Preston in the Observer.

‘Spufford also has fun with the nature of novel writing, the fictioning of the past and the use of narrative

voice,’ seconded Natasha Tripney in the Guardian. ‘He has a lot of fun, full stop – this is a supremely entertaining read.’

Finally, something a little different. Kick The Latch (Daunt, 176pp, £9.99) by Kathryn Scanlan was a true word-of-mouth phenomenon (in the UK at least; in

Under starter’s orders , US style

the US it was deemed worthy of a substantial spread in the New Yorker magazine). The novel is based on the author’s transcribed interviews with a racehorse trainer, Sonia, and captures in unflinching detail the hard knocks and unexpected poetry of life on the track.

‘Kathryn Scanlan makes the mundane details of everyday life hum with electricity,’ wrote Amber Medland in a rave, five-star review in the Telegraph.

Wendy Erskine in the Guardian also paid homage to the extent of the author’s artistry. ‘Scanlan is nowhere, and yet everywhere, in the shaping and patterning, in the rendering of a voice so distinctive and rich and true.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023 25

Fashion

Sport

BRING NO CLOTHES CHARLIE PORTER Particular, 368pp, £20

Fashion journalist Charlie Porter’s book is about how the Bloomsbury Group used clothes to express what Alex Needham in the Observer described as their ‘revolutionary lifestyle.’

Its title, Bring No Clothes, refers to a letter from Virginia Woolf to the sober-suited bank clerk TS Eliot, inviting him to spend the weekend at her home in Sussex. She meant there would be no stuffy rules about dressing for dinner. While EM Forster and Maynard Keynes still favoured the three-piece suit and Duncan Grant was quite often naked, for the rest of the group, costume was a creative free-for-all.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Sophie Oliver described Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell: ‘Woolf preferred roomy clothes: no tight waists or finnicky detail. She wasn’t afraid of colour and prints.

Bell made her own garments and reused, mended and safety-pinned old ones. The aesthetic was loose and the construction was just as slapdash: layered, wonky, seams visible.’

Porter interweaves his account of Bloomsbury garb and its meanings with his own experiences of dressmaking to process his grief at his mother’s death. But his grasp of historical context is shaky – as was that of some of his reviewers.

Needham, like Porter, seemed to think sartorial Bloomsbury was a reaction against ‘starched crinolines, whalebone corsets and medals’ when in fact Vanessa and Virginia were brought up in the late-nineteenthcentury Arts and Crafts movement which had long rejected corsetry.

Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes 26 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

The Queen and Bobby Moore in 1966

ANSWERED PRAYERS ENGLAND AND THE 1966 WORLD CUP

DUNCAN HAMILTON Riverrun, 352pp, £25

‘No better book about England’s victory in the football World Cup of 1966 and what followed it has ever been written,’ declared Wynn Weldon in the Spectator. It ‘has the authority of a work of history and pulses with the narrative power of fiction. Its unlikely hero is Alf Ramsey. He emerges as a curiously complicated character through whom Hamilton tells his story.’

Hamilton also charts the subsequent ‘sad, downward trajectory’ of the players. Answered Prayers is ‘a feast of a book, constantly engaging, and a proper contribution to the history of the period.

‘The World Cup was as big as the Beatles... Through it all there is a distant suggestion of the author’s own approaching mortality, which may contribute to what makes this marvellous book genuinely affecting.’

The book contends ‘that the euphoria of 30 July 1966 marked not a beginning, but an end,’ wrote Anthony Quinn in the Guardian. ‘It is sometimes agonising to read, because we are made aware of how the bright star of a single summer’s day is set against the long haul of lives drifting into eclipse. Agonising, but also absorbing.

‘Like all the best football books, Answered Prayers is not just about football; it’s about hope and despair, friendship and enmity, and the character it takes to handle them... Hamilton hails from the cultured end of sportswriting: thoughtful, hostile to cliché. This will be catnip to footie aficionados but also to those interested in the 1960s, just when the age of deference was

giving way to a new porousness in the class system.’

Simon Kuper, in the Financial Times, wrote that Hamilton is ‘an expert observer of different forms of Englishness’, who ‘treats sports people as three-dimensional humans.

Answered Prayers is mostly a delight, even if, like many gifted stylists, he sometimes lets his prose get too expansive.’

TINSELTOWN

HOLLYWOOD AND THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

IAN HERBERT Headline, 400pp, £22

In 2020 Wrexham AFC was bought by the billionaire Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds and the American actor Rob McElhenney and in April 2023 the club was promoted to League Two. Ian Herbert, a Daily Mail sports writer, spent much of his spare time in the early part of 2023 researching this book. ‘Conversations with the two prime actors have not been possible,’ he explained in an article for the Mail, ‘though some who know the two well – particularly Stateside, where there’s generally a less suspicious response to journalistic endeavour – have helped me get to the nub of the most challenging moments and questions they’ve faced along the way.’

There was only one review in the British press ‘It could easily have been a story of mercantile rapaciousness, of American cultural imperialism, a grim Wrexploitation,’ wrote Victoria Segal in the Times.

‘Yet Tinseltown, Herbert’s astute, lovingly detailed account of this cross-cultural exchange, tells a warmer, happier story, one rooted in community, affection and a rare social philanthropy that merged a North American can-do attitude with wry Welsh pragmatism.’

Herbert ‘emphasises that Wrexham was not some kind of damsel in distress, waiting limply to be saved by heroic princes. There has always been a fierce grassroots movement behind football in the town. Reynolds and McElhenney’s ‘intentions never seem malign, their outreach well-meaning. For all their dreams of Premier League triumph, there seems little danger of Wrexham turning into a soulless machine.’

Technology Will AI be the death of humanity, asks NIGEL SUMMERLEY When we asked to split the bill, our bright young waiter cheerfully admitted he had no idea how to divide the total in two. ‘But the card machine can do it,’ he said. Technology is a wonderful thing, but doesn’t it also steal our ability to do things ourselves – or know whether something is right or not?

The much more serious aspects of tech advances have produced a rush of books covering issues around the internet, social media and artificial intelligence (AI).

Books themselves were once viewed as a dangerous new technology; even writing was seen as a backward step since it meant loss of the discipline of remembering everything you might say or do.

Reviewing Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy and What We Can Do About It (Piatkus, 416pp, £14.99), Publishers Weekly commends the author Tobias Rose-Stockwell for ‘placing online polarisation in historical context, arguing that “most major technologies”, from paved roads to nuclear power, follow a trajectory in which they’re greeted with euphoria, give rise to anxiety over the dangers they engender, and are then regulated to temper their worst effects’.

The internet, said Kirkus Reviews, is ‘a collection of dangerous echo chambers where minor disagreements quickly escalate into savage confrontations. RoseStockwell delves into how this happened.

A crucial aspect of civilisation is that it tamps down instinctive responses in favour of moderation and tolerance. [But] social media aims at the primal parts of the psyche... The companies that run social media soon realised there was money to be made by promoting extremism, and little profit in asking people to think rather than feel.’

Now into the mix comes AI – which might be better referred to as machine learning, since the ‘intelligence’ of sophisticated computer programs lacks consciousness, reflection and morality.

In that may lie dangers that we were warned about a decade ago by James Barrat in Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence

Reassuring? An android in human form

and the End of the Human Era (Quercus, 326pp, £10.99); and his new update is even scarier. ‘In the short term AI presents great dangers, and in the long term it could bring about our extinction,’ says Barrat.

‘For every dreamy somedaybenefit, ten deep holes of peril open right in front of us. 300 million estimated jobs lost in the US and Europe over the next decade.

Tsunamis of propaganda and deep fake video aimed at overturning elections and disrupting balances of power. Autonomous battlefield robots…’

‘Some believe AI may take over humanity, while others believe we’re far away from AI achieving anything close to human intelligence,’ said Kathleen Walch in Forbes. ‘[Barrat] is surprisingly more on the fence than his title would imply. [He] interviewed a wide variety of experts from various technology fields, and what’s most notable is that each had something incredibly different to say about AI technology and what its future might look like.’

David Runciman in The Handover: How We Gave

Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (Profile Books, 328pp, £20) says we’ve long been familiar with unfeeling, inhuman machines.

‘States and corporations, from the East India Company to Facebook, [Runciman] writes, are also robots of a kind, or at least “artificial persons” that we have created to serve human interests, but over which we have little if any overall control,’ noted Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times.

Runciman, said Tim Adams in the Observer, contends that ‘the challenges “we the people” face from AI are, while urgent, not as revolutionary as we may think. The blueprint for negotiating these challenges, [he] believes, has been established by the related threats from state and corporate power.’

Mustafa Suleyman, explained John Naughton in the Observer, ‘was co-founder of DeepMind, arguably the smartest AI company around, but he has also worked at Google – where he laboured on the thankless task of trying to persuade the search behemoth to take ethics seriously.’

The spanner that Suleyman throws into the works in The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (Bodley Head, 334pp, £25), written with Michael Bhaskar, is the conjunction of AI and synthetic biology. ‘Together,’ said Naughton, ‘he thinks, these two “will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating

‘We’ve long been familiar with unfeeling machines’ wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” ’ Spoiler alert: the prologue to Suleyman’s book is sharp and lucid – and written by AI. It’s a clever way of illustrating how a machine can mimic a human... but we should remember that it doesn’t yet know what it is doing. That, hopefully, is a vital difference – and long may that last.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2022 27

Office life LUCY LETHBRIDGE on the golden days of the office romance Now that office life as we knew it seems to be consigned to history, we can feel nostalgic (or at least mildly so) about its historical heyday – which is surely the mid-twentieth century. The age of the clerks, toiling at their ledgers with their copying quills, had gone and the office was brighter, airier, at the forefront of new technologies and freedoms. Women and men worked together (though still mostly – not always - at different levels in the hierarchy); there was the possibility that love could emerge over the fax machine (or the Telex or the water cooler or even the kettle).

In her new book, Jobs for the Girls (Abacus, 320pp, £22) Ysenda Maxtone Graham, always expert at illuminating social trends still lingering at the edge of living memory, has followed her examinations of girls’ boarding schools and summer holidays and homed in on what she calls the ‘typewriter age’ – which runs from the late 1940s to 1991, the year when, as she observes, we sent our first emails.

Before, in fact, the general computerisation and atomisation of clerical work – which has ended up with lonely office workers hunched over laptops in their parents’ spare bedrooms or having international zoom meetings at 10pm.

She concentrates for the most part on middle-class women, many of them having emerged from expensive private schools with minimal education, who found new and un-imagined prospects in the offices of the post-war period.

Ashtrays and drinks cabinets overflowed; eccentric colleagues proliferated; sexism was rife (though it was not completely unheard of for a woman to go in a secretary and retire as chairman). Sartorial nonconformity was frowned on but, before the protective but often disapproving mantle of HR, other types seem to have abounded.

One woman interviewed in Maxtone Graham’s book worked for a man who was also the president of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau and regularly sent her up to Scotland to sit in a hide for days and watch for monsters.

No wonder that office life is such rich material for novelists. Like 28 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

families, offices are almost always dysfunctional – and all in their own particular way.

They were rich material for nineteenth-century novelists too – but, by the twentieth-century, women had entered the plot and offered the promise of the office romance; tensions could be stirred by desire and jealousy and frustration.

In his memoir of working in an engineering firm in the 1880s, Alfred Bennett wistfully recalled that ‘the fair sex was a rare sex’ in the workplace.

Not so by the 1950s when John Braine wrote Room at the Top (Arrow, 240pp, £9.99) about highly-sexed and ambitious Joe Lampton climbing the greasy pole of a northern accountancy firm.

Tensions could be stirred by desire and jealousy As Maxtone Graham points out, women in offices were still encouraged to think that jobs were things you did until you got married and stopped. But with the wife patiently at home like David Nobbs’ Mrs Reginald Perrin, the secretary was on hand as the fantasy figure of fictional (and often real-life) dreams.

Remember Reggie’s fevered imaginings of Joan tearing her clothes off while he dictates a letter.

Twentieth century office men are more often Reggie Perrin than Joe Lampton. They long for escape and abandonment.

A 1911 office manual described the

Women at work – or fantasy figures?

female stenographer as a mere robot: ‘She serves us, but she does not serve our bodily needs. She is at the service of the mind, the wits of her employer.

A mechanical service of memory and tapping fingers.’ The novelist knows better. By the 1950s, the boss/ secretary affair was almost a prerequisite of any plot set in an office.

In 1970, Jonathan GathorneHardy decided to write ‘an epic of which the office would be the hero.’

The resulting novel was an account of a day at work as if it were a screenplay, with scraps of dialogue interspersed with some narration and camera direction and a bit of sideways comment.

The Office (Hodder, 128pp, from £16) is odd but painfully evocative to anyone who has worked a shift among white collar toilers.

Typical is this description of Janice being summoned to an interview, staring at a stain on the carpet and finding Mr Bolton the boss standing rather too close to her.

At that moment, ‘Miss Sturt comes briskly in from her adjoining office.

She is fifty, competent, plump, motherly. She has been Mr Bolton’s secretary for ten years. When she comes in he steps quickly back.’

Mr Bolton muses that he would like to find a post for Janice. ‘“Yes Mr Bolton,” says Miss Sturt. She goes out. It is evident she has no intention of doing anything. Mr Bolton stares after her, rising slowly up and down on his toes. He is standing on the stain just vacated by Janice.’

Funny, silly, sad, poignant, full of power struggles and exposures. It’s the office to a tee.

Books & Publishing

Children’s books EMILY BEARN chooses Christmas books for all ages PICTURE BOOKS Forget the Star of the East.

The brightest light this Christmas is that unstoppable oldie Julia Donaldson, who at the age of 75 has no fewer than three new picture books hogging the bestseller lists. The Oak Tree (Alison Green, £12.99), illustrated by Victoria Sandoy, is one of Donaldson’s most reflective stories to date, using her familiar rhythmic verse to chart the changing seasons and cultures witnessed by a thousand year-old tree. (‘Way back in time, a thousand years ago, / An acorn on the ground began to grow ….’)

Younger readers, meanwhile, will love the gentle domestic drama in Dormouse has a Cold (Macmillan, £7.99), the latest in Donaldson’s long-running Acorn Wood series, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. ( ‘Dormouse sniffs and snuffles. / Being ill is hard. / But squirrel comes to visit her / And brings a lovely card.’)

And in a delightful celebration of the bond between old and young, Betty and the Mysterious Visitor (Walker, £12.99) by the debut author Anne Twist tells the story of a little girl and her grandmother who must come up with a cunning plan when a mischievous badger threatens to destroy their beloved garden.

And it wouldn’t be Christmas without a book with a festive cover. Some such titles risk looking distinctly stale

by Boxing Day, but Amy Adele’s The Christmas Songbook (Magic Cat, £20), which uses eight traditional carols to tell the story of the Mouse family’s preparations for Christmas Day, is a present that will have a shelf-life for years to come. The book plays snippets of the songs out loud, and includes sheet music for budding musicians.

Pop-up enthusiasts will delight in Christmas, the latest in Kew Gardens’ sumptuous Welcome to the Museum series (Big Picture Press, £29.99). With illustrations by Emily 30 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2023

From top: The Oak Tree; Betty and the Mysterious Visitor; Christmas for Winnie the Pooh; Adventure Mice

illustrations in the style of E.H. Shepard.

Carter, the book explores Kew’s winter fauna and flora, and unfolds into a stunning – and sustainable advent calendar.

5-PLUS Readers who have not yet started

Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre’s wonderful Adventure Mice books have some catching up to do. Mice on the Ice (David Fickling, £6.99) is the fourth caper in the series, and this time Pedro and his team ride to the rescue when a snowstorm threatens to sabotage a much-loved local fair.

The simple text and expressive illustrations make this an ideal choice for readers approaching chapter books for the first time.

It’s also another busy Christmas for Winnie the Pooh, who stars in a new, rhyming adventure by Jeanne Willis. In Winnie the Pooh at the Palace (£12.99, Macmillan), the accidentprone bear gets stuck in a snowdrift, and receives a surprise invitation for tea with the King.

Pooh purists might huff, but children will love the gentle suspense, and engaging

8-PLUS For slightly older readers, The Kingdom of Broken Magic (£8.99, Everything with Words) is the uplifting children’s debut by Christine Aziz, telling the story of two young pickpockets who stumble into a world of magic after visiting a circus. And Wonka (Puffin, £7.99) is Sibeal Pounder’s highly anticipated prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, telling the story of how Willy Wonka grew up to become the world’s most famous inventor.

Copies are still embargoed, but Pounder is known for her razorsharp characterisation, so Wonka is likely to have been hauled over the psychiatrist’s couch.

Meanwhile in The Ice Children (Macmillan, £12.99), M. G. Leonard tells the story of a young girl who must come to the rescue after her brother is found frozen in a city park.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 classic The Snow Queen, Leonard’s quickfire prose creates a fairy-tale with a refreshingly modern feel.

Christmas always brings a bumper crop of glossy reference books, but while last year the environment was the dominant theme, this year the focus has turned to the human body.

Gabby Dawnay’s 5 Minute Human Body Stories (Magic Cat, £16.99), uses catchy rhyming text to explain everything from conception to digestion – in very little detail. (‘Fantastic elastic holds everything in - / And this thinnest of organs is known as your SKIN!’) Brevity is also the theme of A Really Short Journey Through the Body by Bill Bryson (Puffin, £25) which, manages to bottle a vast topic into a series of astonishing facts. ‘If you formed all [your] DNA into a single strand, it would reach 10 billion miles across the solar system, to Pluto and beyond … You are, in the most literal sense, cosmic!’

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Christmas Gift Ideas from

54 The Oldie December 2023

Christmas Gift Ideas from

To advertise, contact Kami Jogee on 0203 859 7096 or via email kamijogee@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 26th October 2020

The Oldie December 2023 55

Christmas Gift Ideas from

56 The Oldie December 2023

I Once Met

Gérard Depardieu The first time I met Gérard Depardieu, the great French actor was stark bollock naked and about to get into bed with me and my wife in a Paris penthouse.

It was not how I had imagined things would turn out on that fateful night some 20 years ago. We had travelled from Italy to stay with a close French friend who had been going out with Depardieu since meeting on a film set in Cambodia.

Back in Paris, the actor paid all her bills on the apartment in the upmarket 7th arrondissement and bought her a Mini Cooper to run around the city.

Depardieu would show up unannounced on his motorbike, usually late at night.

I had long admired his acting in films such as Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources, Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card. I had also read, with incredulity, of his dysfunctional behaviour off-screen.

So, a bit starstruck, I was looking forward to meeting the actor, often dubbed France’s Olivier.

There was no sighting of him on our first night in Paris; we discovered in the morning that he had slipped into the apartment overnight – with the munchies. Rifling through the fridge, the stocky star of more than 250 films in French and English had grabbed the cheese and salami that I had brought from Italy for our host. So hungry, he did not even bother to unwrap the packages, biting

Depardieu: too hungry to unwrap salami

through paper and plastic to satisfy his craving for food.

The next night, we went out for dinner; there was still no sign of the star and I was beginning to wonder if we would ever meet him. I went to bed feeling quite disappointed.

In the middle of the night, Depardieu turned up at the apartment on his

motorbike and made for the master bedroom, which was next to the guestroom where we were sleeping.

Later in the night, naked and halfawake, Depardieu went to the lavatory – and got lost on the way back to the master bedroom. He chose the wrong room and made a full-frontal grand entrance, flashing the bijoux de famille (family jewels) to the unfamiliar couple.

Our initial confusion turned to horror and then panic as our eyes adapted to the light and took in the scene. I was getting to meet too much of my hero.

But Depardieu kept his cool. Possibly used to this kind of experience, he calmly said, ‘Pardonnez-moi,’ turned round and made his way swiftly to the correct room.

By the time we rose later in the morning he was long gone.

We did get to see him once before leaving, but I never had much of a conversation with the actor. He insisted on speaking French, which did not help. And he preferred to entertain my sons, who were with us and delighted to meet Obélix in the flesh. Depardieu played the popular cartoon character in four live-action Astérix films. He taught my youngest son to eat salad with his hands. I felt he was encouraging subversion within the family.

But I still like his films and follow his antics and outbursts around the world.

Leo Dobbs

EVERETT COLLECTION INC / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Gielgud’s hissy fit in my flower shop

My first job at age 16 was in a posh florist shop in London’s Jermyn Street.

With carpet on the floor and antique vases, it was designed to attract the rich and famous, which in the swinging sixties it certainly did.

One busy morning, in came Sir John Gielgud and his companion, a tall, good-looking, perma-tanned young man.

Not recognising this important personage, I asked Sir John how I could help; he said he wanted to send some flowers.

I was really more interested in the dog the handsome companion was carrying under one arm, which Sir John was constantly petting.

This dog was from a breed with very long hair and you would have to offer it a biscuit to know which end was which.

Having correctly taken and written down his order, I politely asked, as protocol required, for his name and

address. I asked him to repeat his name, because it was unusual, and he did so with a heavy sigh.

Then, horror of horrors, I asked him to spell it!

With a thespian, high flourish of the hand and in a loud, theatrical voice so everyone in the shop could hear, he said, ‘THIS IS RIDICULOUS! WHERE’S JOAN [the shop-owner]?’

I shrank into the background. On all subsequent visits, I avoided serving him – but always went over to stroke the dog.

By Caroline Caseley, Liguria, Italy, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie December 2023 57

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

Giles the reluctant guest SIR: Among the things that Giles Wood is so pleased to have avoided, by turning down an invitation to stay for a week on a Scottish island (October issue), is the prospect of chatting through three-course dinners every night. As his putative (and erstwhile) host, can I put his mind at rest: we have a strict no-starters rule (for exactly that reason).

Think again next year, Giles!

Yours sincerely, Richard Oldfield, Doddington, Kent

Inside Byron’s dog’s tomb SIR: I always enjoy Lucinda Lambton’s travel writings, and September’s Overlooked Britain with its association with Newstead Abbey and Lord Byron was particularly enjoyable.

I was fortunate, as a resident of Newstead Abbey Park, to have the opportunity to enter Boatswain’s tomb.

Byron wrote to a friend to say that he had built a tomb for himself on the site of the Priory Church high altar. This was before the sad death of Boatswain.

It seems he thought so highly of the ‘poor dog’ that he placed his remains in the tomb, meaning later when the time came to join him. Unfortunately, he sold the Abbey and so was not able to be laid beside his ‘firmest friend’.

I was invited to enter the tomb during renovations; the attached photograph (below) shows the beauty of the stonework vault together with the stone slab where the body of Boatswain was laid to rest – now empty. It seems that the later Victorian owners of the Abbey thought it sacrilegious to have an animal’s remains buried Boatswain’s vault – in holy emptied by the Victorians ground and 58 The Oldie December 2023

‘I’m not building a nest this year – I want to focus on my music’

had them removed. They clearly didn’t understand, or chose to ignore, the deep meaning of the inscribed poem.

The irony would not have been lost on Byron.

Terence Fenning, Newstead Abbey Park, Nottinghamshire

For hands that do dishes SIR: There is help for Mary Killen’s hands (November issue).

You can buy (or make) embroidered mittens; there are some lovely ones for sale.

Of course, out of doors, gloves are the answer.

Charlotte Joseph, Manningtree, Essex

Graeme Garden’s Japanese SIR: I enjoyed the articles about Barry Cryer (November issue).

Despite what Graeme Garden says, the Japanese do have a problem with Ls. While I was on a trip with a colleague, we arrived at our hotel in Kyoto. We checked in and our bags were placed behind reception. We were politely informed that our rooms weren’t quite ready, but while we waited we could have a drink in the ‘robby rounge’.

Nigel Beaumont, Grantham, Lincolnshire

issue) have irritated Richard Bean who wrote One Man Two Guv’nors. Carlo Goldoni’s play was called A Servant of Two Masters (but in Italian of course).

Elaine Whitesides, Market Harborough, Leicestershire

Dear Barry Cryer SIR: A wonderful few pages on Barry Cryer in the November issue.

My wife and I went to a show at the Snape Maltings Proms a few years ago.

Colin Sell came on first and, seated at the Concert Hall’s Steinway, performed a couple of songs in the tradition of Flanders and Swann. He introduced Barry, who came onstage to rapturous applause and began, ‘Thank you – Bechstein have asked me to point out that Colin Sell is playing a Steinway.’

That brought the house down.

A charming man and a very sad loss.

Regards, Nick Clare, Framlingham, Suffolk

A rare Gyles slip SIR: I hate to do this, as I admire Gyles Brandreth enormously for his humour and erudition. But he may (November

‘He gathers data’

‘It’s a girl – at the moment’

Joy of books SIR: May we suggest a different view from that expressed by A N Wilson (‘The illiterate world of books’, November issue) with regard to books, book clubs, reading and literary festivals.

We have visited the Cheltenham Literary Festival and enjoyed listening to authors; there is a danger that a favourite author you had formed a positive opinion about is not present, but in our experience this has not been the case; it is heartening to see queues forming to buy books and obtain authors’ signatures.

Literary festivals also provide an opportunity to discover books and authors not known or previously considered, and to buy these and support the high-street booksellers who attend.

We also find that reading and holding a book is more satisfying than reading on a ‘device’, and enables us better to retain the content.

We belong to a book club and, contrary to Mr Wilson’s belief, we exchange views on books and rarely on relatives or friends (dangerous ground, especially in smaller communities).

We understood that reading is on the increase, and this is due largely to the ownership of iPads etc on which Kindle has been downloaded – this applies to most people in our book club – plus an over 16-per-cent increase in audiobooks.

According to the latest surveys, children’s enjoyment of reading has increased from 47.8 per cent pre lockdown to 59 per cent post lockdown, and the sale of books of adult fiction has increased by 16 per cent.

Roy and Eve Wallis, Painswick, Gloucestershire

Clap for the app SIR: Greetings from the sunny Philippines!

For some time, I have been making do reading and enjoying a few old copies of The Oldie. I’ve never subscribed because

the iffy Philippine postal system means it would take around three months for copies to arrive – that is, if they arrive at all.

Being a geriatric, it took me some time to think there might be an app. I have now subscribed. Best 29 quid I’ve ever spent! Now, I no longer care how long the cashier takes at the supermarket checkout. I have The Oldie to enjoy as I sit in my walker and wait my turn.

Thank you.

Best, Robert Harland (retired flack and hack), City of Bacolod, Philippines

Streets full of tourists

Stephensons, father and son … never indulged in … bridges.’

George Stephenson built the River Irwell Railway Bridge in 1830; it still stands today and is a Grade I listed building.

His son, Robert, designed the Conwy and Menai railway bridges in North Wales, which enabled the railway to reach Holyhead in Anglesey to link with ferries to Ireland. The Conwy bridge survives; the Menai bridge was sadly destroyed by fire in the 1970s.

I find it hard to believe that Ms Thomas carried out any significant research to validate her assertion about the Stephensons and bridge-building.

Julian Lloyd, Chester, Cheshire

SIR: The streets of Venice, writes Gyles Brandreth (November issue), were ‘rammed with tourists’. I have noted more and more writers using this ugly neologism ‘rammed’ to describe a crowded state, but I did not expect such a master wordsmith as Gyles to join them.

What, ‘pray’, is wrong with the familiar ‘crammed’?

Michael Davison, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey

A bridge too few SIR: Bella Thomas writes in her article about her ancestor Isambard Kingdom Brunel (November issue) that ‘The

‘You just put it in the slot – you don’t need to push the “send” key!’

The Oldie December 2023 59

A royal ghost story HUGO VICKERS Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII Jane Tippett Hodder & Stoughton, £25 Here is another ghost story – we are yet again in the world of the Royal Family and their ghost-writers.

The year 2023 kicked off with Prince Harry’s less-than-worthy Spare, and now we have an intriguing alternative take – a behind-the-scenes look at what the Duke and Duchess of Windsor wanted to say in their memoirs, before the ghosts, the 60 The Oldie December 2023

Royal Household and the lawyers got their hands on them. Walter Monckton, masquerading as the Duke’s close adviser, was more on the side of the British court.

The most interesting dichotomy of ghost and ‘subject’ was highlighted by Prince Harry’s ghost, J R Moehringer, in an article in the New Yorker: ‘Strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people…’

Personally, I see the ghost’s role as to help the writer say what he wants to.

A good ghost-writer will be something of a mimic, telling the story in the

rhythm of the writer’s words – not his own – and not using the ‘subject’ to tout his own agenda.

With this book, I must declare an interest. I did encourage the author and I steered her towards a publisher; but the work is entirely her own. It was a considerable relief to get back to primary material instead of the tabloid rubbish lately peddled by self-seeking authors.

The biographer’s quest itself is a fascinating adventure. Andrew Morton boasted that he had unearthed the uncatalogued archive of one of Edward VIII’s ghosts, Cleveland Amory.

In fact, only one tape was Amory’s, while the other three were those of the longserving ghost Charles Murphy.

Tippett soon rumbled this, and off she went to Boston University, where she found four boxes of Murphy’s papers, covering the decade Murphy spent working with the Windsors – a treasuretrove, previously overlooked by biographers good and bad.

There were the four tapes, with the Windsors’ diaries, transcripts, notes in the Duke’s hand and letters between the key figures – a cornucopia of original, authentic, un-doctored material.

The Duke produced A King’s Story in 1951, and the Duchess The Heart Has Its Reasons in 1956. Both are beautifully written. I nearly said ‘crafted’. And, unlike Prince Harry’s, a lot of the Duke’s memoirs were actually written (rather well) by him. So here we get a new slant on this ever-fascinating saga – the Duke’s account of the First World War, relations with his parents, his aims and hopes and the drama of his abdication.

It has become a fixed idea that the Duke was a Nazi sympathiser. One author even peddled the nonsensical theory that the Duke gave the Germans clues as to how to bomb Buckingham Palace, killing the King and Queen and princesses, so as

GARY WING

Books

to return to the throne with his Duchess at his side.

The Duke died in 1972. As Philip Ziegler, his authorised biographer, wrote, ‘Lack of evidence rarely inhibits the most venturesome biographers. Many other fantasies have been voiced in the last thirty years. The laws of libel mercifully ensured that the most grotesque have been published only after his death and thus did not trouble him.’

There is no point in my appealing to the sensationalist writers at whom Ziegler rightly took a swipe, but I do urge sensible historians to read the conversations between Murphy and the Windsors on the contentious issue of the 1937 German visit.

Here the Windsors relate their conversation with Goering, in which politics were not discussed. People think they went to Germany specifically to meet Hitler, whereas they had no idea that such a meeting would happen.

‘It wasn’t on the schedule at all,’ said the Duchess.

Only when they got to Munich were they told that Hitler would like to meet them. Of course they were interested.

As the Duchess put it, ‘I think anyone that you see a whole country become absolutely fanatic about, you are fascinated to meet him.’

The interpreter, Paul Schmidt, wrote that the Duke and Hitler ‘did not discuss political questions’. As for the German documents, outlining the Duke’s alleged conversations with German agents, Monckton described these as ‘of no real consequence’. Eisenhower told Churchill they were ‘obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda’.

I greatly welcome this book. It is fascinating and confidently created, and it tells a convincing story of the Duke – his hopes, aspirations and frustrations.

Hugo Vickers wrote The Private World of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor

‘I think it’s time you upgraded your phone contract, Grandad’

Back of the net!

RACHEL JOHNSON Tackle!

By Jilly Cooper Bantam £22 When Tackle! with its saucy cover shot of a buff bloke in tightie whities thudded onto my mat, I thought I could predict the plot without even having to gallop through the 424 pages.

For her new book, the first since Mount! in 2016, our greatest living Englishwoman novelist is balls-deep into the beautiful game.

It is set in Rutshire. It stars Rupert Campbell-Black and would include all the traditional tropes – Taggie (CampbellBlack’s wife), sex, racing, horses, dogs, ghastly crashers who say ‘noggin’ and ‘partake’ – the things that led to Rishi’s describing Riders as one of his all-time novels.

There would be sex, scandal, sabotage and thrilling descriptions of knife-edge matches and all manner of jiggery-pokery and romping rumpy-pumpy – but this was the twist I would have bet the farm on.

‘She shoots, she scores!’ the cover shouts. There is an early, single, glancing reference to a sister who kicks and heads better than her football-player brother. I was 100-per-cent confident that, late into the second half of this triumphant bonkbuster, when our home side Searston Rovers is at least two down, an insanely talented and adorable female player would be subbed in from somewhere and go on to score the winning goal in the final at Wembley. The club side (improbably managed by racing’s heart-throb hero Campbell-Black, who is still match-fit at 60) would make global headlines and history.

I don’t want to ruin your reading pleasure, so all I will say for now is that I was not quite on target. Cooper is funnier, cleverer and just Jillier than that: in the acknowledgements (seven pages long, but still half the length of the cast of characters), she acknowledges that she covers the years 2016 to 2020 in the book and deftly swerves Covid, VAR and women’s football.

Tackle! is a long, joyous, overdue tease of woke and #MeToo. An Integrity Committee of witless worthies at the club is summarily dispensed with. Women are basically there, without apology, to provide sex, succour and lashings of home cooking for everyone else – grandchildren, stepchildren, husbands, lovers.

Female characters are constantly sobbing over dogs, men and babies in a winning way that makes even the reader fall in love with them. There are tugs on the heartstrings aplenty: a touching gay love affair between closeted Elijah, the manager, and Dolphy, a player; a tragic helicopter crash that recalls the doomed Man U Munich flight; Taggie having cancer and her hair falling out during chemo. While Rupert is beside himself, this somehow hasn’t prevented Rupert from doing what Rupert does – having a brief, rip-roaring affair with one of his riders at his yard.

As ever, Jilly brings her own life into the novel. Adopted children, Cotswolds social climbers, the Daylesfordisation of the countryside are all here.

Every single page of this marvellous return to form had me underlining jokes and unimprovable bons mots. Yes, sometimes Cooper lays the groundwork quite far ahead, but still I laughed out loud when she managed to convert the ‘Dog with the Waggiest Tail’ feature in the local newspaper to one called ‘The Wag with the Dodgiest Tale’. Just brilliant.

What a treat to have Jilly, who has brought almost as much pleasure to millions all over the world with her writing as football has, throwing her unique and witty filter over the whole culture and practice of the sport.

We have ‘bitch invasions’ of WAGs and hairdryer-level insults – ‘Searston couldn’t even pass the parcel!’

The whole shooting match is so entertaining that it reminds me why I had to stop reading Jilly before attempting fiction myself. All I did was struggle to come up with pound-shop puns which were never a patch on hers.

Every page is soaked with a love of life, writing, the world and, above all, animals first and people second. Everyone has a name and a nickname. Dogs and horses are main characters on the page, as they are in animal-lovers’ lives.

Really, Jilly should get a special Oldie of the Year award for continuing to provide us with such joy and happiness into her ninth decade. Age has not dimmed her, her talent or her beauty, and Tackle! is as juicy and springy as Rivals.

It was only as I turned the last page that it dawned on me – Jilly is the female striker I’d been anticipating when I tried to predict the book’s plot!

She shoots and scores faster, more funnily and more quickly than all her rivals less than half her age.

Rachel Johnson is author of Notting Hell and Shire Hell The Oldie December 2023 61

Dreamy spires CHRISTOPHER HOWSE Oxfordshire: Oxford and the SouthEast (Pevsner Buildings of England) Revised by Simon Bradley Yale University Press £45 Round the great domed rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera ‘there is a density of monuments of architecture which has not the like in Europe’.

So wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in 1974, on completing his daringly ambitious project, begun in 1945, of surveying, volume by volume, the buildings of every county in England, Simon Bradley, the current editor of the series – and of this bigger, better volume about Oxford – goes further by calling that area round the Camera ‘unique in the world’ or ‘if that seems a hazardous statement, it is certainly unparalleled in Cambridge’.

The glory of the setting, bounded by the Bodleian Library, All Souls College, St Mary’s Church and Brasenose, was already appreciated when Dr John Radcliffe left £40,000 for a new library there. Hawksmoor was nearly the architect, and came up with the idea of a rotunda, but he died in 1736, the year the bequest became available, and it was to James Gibbs that the task went.

Houses were pulled down and the new hub set in the centre of its square.

Oddly enough, the purpose of the library had not been settled, and it was only in 1863 that it became a reading room for the Bodleian. It was then that the ground floor, open to the air, had its openings glazed.

Despite the shabby treatment of Broad Street by the local authority (with mean planters holding gangling shrubs disrupting the prospect), the glory has not departed from Oxford.

The 130 colour pictures (supplanting black-and-white) make me itch to be looking at the real thing: the Norman choir of Christ Church Cathedral (the chapel of the college), vaulted with a version of hammerbeam roof rendered in stone; the rich texture of Nicholas Stone’s classical gateway to the Botanic Garden (1632); the madly steep Gothic roofs in glass and iron of the University Museum (1859) on exuberant vegetal capitals of wrought iron; and the tower of Magdalen (for towers, not dreaming spires, characterise the city’s skyline).

Yet it was all assembled haphazardly, not planned centrally, not even by the University, but by the corporate pride of

colleges and the pious ambitions of prosperous alumni. Some builders were town not gown, such as Frank Cooper, who made his celebrated marmalade in a little factory near the station: ‘Fruit was cut up on the second floor, the first floor was for bottling, and boiling was done in the outhouse behind.’ The building is now shorn of its letters of gold proclaiming ‘Oxford Marmalade’.

That building stands in what is called by the council Frideswide Square, though it remains an ill-defined bit of widened road alongside the Saïd Business School (2001), with its 12-stepped ziggurat turret of patinated copper. This stands on the site of the London & North Western Railway terminus, Oxford’s spare station to the nearby Great Western building, which Max Beerbohm satirically remarked ‘does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age’.

The LNWR station was built with Joseph Paxton’s modular system of prefabricated iron, as used in the Crystal Palace. It has been reconstructed at the railway museum in Aylesbury.

While the 600 pages devoted to the city make up the best available handbook to Oxford, the volume’s other 250 pages cover the part of the county not included in Oxfordshire North and West (2017).

There are wonders here, too.

The two ornate early-17th-century pews in the chapel of St Michael at Rycote are to ordinary pews what dreadnoughts are to rowing boats. They flank the steps to the 15th-century chancel, one double-decked, the other domed and canopied, and both painted and gilded. They might almost have been erected for a durbar.

Two colour pictures show Mapledurham House: its huge, brick east front with mullion and transom windows, tall chimneys and old tile roof; its charming Gothic chapel of the late-18th century. At Ewelme, a 15thcentury almshouse, God’s House, survives next to the church sheltering the remarkable tomb of Alice, Duchess of Suffolk (d 1475), lying with her head on a pillow supported by angels, and underneath her bier a wizened cadaver as a memento mori.

With Oxfordshire, the revision of Pevsner’s England is finished – apart from Staffordshire – in 56 volumes.

It is an undertaking achieved by no other country. Its editors should certainly be raised to the higher peerage. Cancel next year’s holiday and buy the lot.

Christopher Howse writes for the Daily Telegraph

‘Maybe we should never have encouraged him to express himself’

Mantel’s pieces JASPER REES A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing Hilary Mantel John Murray £25 ‘On Sunday last, I had a shock waking up to find that my novel Wolf Hall was 2-1 favourite to win the Man Booker prize.’

So wrote Hilary Mantel in September 2009. ‘It was almost as much of a shock to be described in the press (repeatedly) as “the 57-year-old from Glossop”.’

This was for a piece in the Guardian about the invisibility of women past 50.

Any invisibility that clung to her ended the following month when, the bookies being right, Mantel awoke one morning and found herself famous.

It so happens that the first journalist she saw that day was me. I had been commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to interview the winner.

On the table, alongside a fresh leather-bound copy of Wolf Hall reeking aromatically of a Tudor saddlery, was a spread of her overnight cuttings. One not strictly accurate headline – ‘Booker Prize is won by Henry VIII’ – tickled her. ‘He’d have claimed it,’ she said.

Because the deadline was tight – a thousand words by lunchtime – I typed her answers. The hypnotic cadences of her speech must have gone in deep because in A Memoir of My Former Self I can hear her saying every word in that wry, wise, gossipy, Glossopian voice of hers.

This selection of her writing for hire goes as far back as 1987, when Mantel won a prize for beadily describing her life as a sequestered expat wife in Saudi Arabia. ‘When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it,’ she concluded. ‘You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it.’

The most recent entry, which movingly closes the book, speaks of The Oldie December 2023 63

DONALD COOPER / ALAMY

ghosts and specifically the spectral father who when she was 11 was ousted from the home by her future stepfather, never to be seen again.

There are other ghosts hereabouts.

One goes by the name of Sara, whom she conjured up for a fortune-teller when researching psychics. Forget Thomas Cromwell. It was out of this mechanical exercise that she fashioned ‘the most successful, convincing, rounded character I have ever made’, and it is this self-mocking piece from 2010 that gives the collection its title.

Mantel’s first regular gig was as the Spectator’s film critic. Cleverly they gave her a most generous word count. It’s pleasing to find that in the late 1980s she high-fived all the right films: When Harry Met Sally, Babette’s Feast, Goodfellas and even Robocop, whose violence she deemed ‘perhaps quite therapeutic’. She pondered close-ups of actors as if they had been painted by Holbein: Glenn Close’s ‘fashionable, photogenic face is made up of intersecting hatchet blades’.

In 1990, filing her last movie review, she announced that she was ‘quitting journalism altogether’ to get on with fiction. The bulk of this collection is happy proof that she was lured back, preponderantly to the Guardian, then the New York Review of Books.

Here, therefore, is Mantel on anything and everything: Tudors, the French Revolution, fellow novelists, capital punishment, Biggles, grief, cricket, persons from Porlock, Diana and anorexic saints whose self-harming brings out the squeamish in her.

Mostly Mantel writes about writing.

She is brilliant on the necromancy of night-time composition, for example, and adamant about blotting paper whose fussy users ‘remind me of those people who jump up and wash straight after sex’.

Her self-involvement is not without melodrama. You don’t remotely believe her when she announces that, ‘by the end of summer I’ll have finished the book, or the book will have finished me’.

The summit is reached in her magnificent 2017 Reith Lectures on the ins and outs of the historical novel. Here she argues that ‘as soon as we die, we enter into fiction’. She seemed to mint these hypnotic apophthegms as easily as breathing. ‘We are made of memories,’ goes another zinger, ‘and we persist as long as our story is worth telling.’

Mantel left a memoir of childhood but not of adulthood, so this miscellany steps in as a sort of autobiography of the mind.

At her most self-invasive, she will also bring up her body, returning again and

again to the endometriosis which doctors dismissed or overlooked until she went and diagnosed herself.

She writes of herself as ‘an unwilling stranger in my own body’, as someone who ‘went to live in a body I didn’t recognise’.

Her body’s finest hour came when she learned in Saudi that she was to be a published novelist. Anyone else might have portrayed this moment as an out-of-body experience. Not Mantel: ‘Every cell in my body was exchanged for a new and better type’.

She is going to need a very fine biographer.

Timot Prune BRAZ Vic Th

Old stagers ROGER LEWIS Pru & Me: A Love Story

By Timothy West Michael Joseph £22

Timothy West and Prunella Scales in Bamber Gascoigne’s Big in Brazil, 1984

Until relatively recently, Timothy West and Prunella Scales were middle-ranking mimes. They had to put up with members of the public saying things like (to Pru) ‘I’ve seen you in that comedy with that awful tall fellow. I’ve never liked him, a shame as you’re quite good’; or (to Tim) ‘What was that show you were in back in the 1980s?’ – ‘I was in quite a few. Did I play a northern gentleman? Could it be Brass?’ – ‘No, it wasn’t that. I wasn’t keen on that.’

Then, in 2014, came the gentle documentary series Great Canal Journeys, and the husband-and-wife team were propelled to National Treasure status. Like cookery for the Two Fat Ladies, narrow-boating was an excuse for viewers to spend time with agreeable, interesting people. There was a relaxed pace, nice scenery – the waterways of England and the Continent.

By 2019, there had been 32 episodes, which I can watch time and again. The reality of the shoot wasn’t quite so tranquil. There were often eight or nine cameramen, sound engineers and other television crew members crammed aboard, crouching and keeping out of shot.

Though never out of work, for much of their careers ‘jobbing actors’ Tim (89) and Pru (91) had to be separated, as they each chased gigs up and down the country. ‘If she was playing in Bristol and was about to move to Sheffield, and I had left Manchester and was going to Coventry, we would meet in Birmingham.’

Being busy stage people involved a lot of logistics, particularly when it came to recreation. Whatever went on there, the

Eastgate Hotel, Oxford, still puts smiles on their faces.

In this book (a digest of earlier volumes of reminiscence) we hear about provincial tours in forgotten farces, world tours in worthy Shakespearean productions, stints in long-lost sitcoms and drama serials.

Pru and Tim wrote to each other daily, their preserved missives – in the era before mobiles and texts – ‘our only insight into how we were feeling and what news each other had’. We are told of doing voiceovers for Tetley Tea Bags and making 13 episodes about Edward VII – even if the public these days swear blind Tim was Henry VIII, a monarch he has never in fact impersonated.

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born in Surrey and raised in Yorkshire – you can still hear Yorkshire in her voice.

She graduated from the Old Vic Theatre School in 1950, and started out in weekly rep in Worthing. Pru was a bus conductress in two episodes of Coronation Street, was in a David Lean film and played Peter Sellers’s daughter in Waltz of the Toreadors. Sellers kept trying to ask her out.

Timothy Lancaster West was born in Yorkshire and raised in Bristol and Ruislip. His father was the actor Lockwood West, whom Sellers called Montagu Mews West, which is a street in Marylebone. Tim spent some years selling office furniture before becoming a stage manager in Wimbledon. He served time in rep in Newquay, Northampton and Salisbury, and was then engaged for a few seasons at Stratford – where The Oldie December 2023 65

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he was disappointed to discover from an internal memo that he was on Peter Hall’s D-list, with the bit players.

The stars in those days were Paul Scofield and Eric Porter, Janet Suzman and Glenda Jackson.

Things picked up. Tim has played Macbeth and Uncle Vanya twice and Lear four times, enduring incessant train journeys and dire digs with damp sheets.

When he and Pru met – they were married in 1963 – he already had a wife, Jacqueline, who suffered from ‘emotional highs and lows’ and was ‘hospitalised on a sadly regular basis’.

The pain of this experience is not dwelt on here. Instead, after the divorce, Tim and Pru are conjoined, their ‘adoration for one another’ compelling them to share Polo mints and fail to complete the Times crossword.

They have enough money to buy a place in Wandsworth, which is still home, ‘a tall, rather forbidding-looking fourstorey Victorian house on the South Circular’. Pru toils in the garden, where parties are thrown in marquees. Two sons are born, the children visiting their parents’ dressing-rooms with their nannies. Sam West is himself now a distinguished actor.

Tim’s worst experience was having to put up with imbecilic Peter O’Toole, during the Macbeth débâcle at the Old Vic. The production received the worst notices in history. When O’Toole came on covered in blood, paused, and said, ‘I have done the deed,’ the audience screamed with laughter.

Meanwhile, Pru was in Fawlty Towers, receiving plaudits for the shrieking harridan, Sybil. She said of her character, ‘Too late she realises she is landed with an upper-class twit… Behind all her apparent disenchantment with Basil, there is some real affection for him.’

I never thought so. Basil and Sybil are surely another example of comedy’s horror marriages, like Olive and Arthur in On the Buses, Bob and Thelma in The Likely Lads or anything involving Hylda Baker. Pru said of Cleese, ‘It’s like working with a live machine-gun. You have to try and keep it pointing away from you.’

Pru played the Queen so convincingly, for the BBC and on stage at the National, that when she was handed her CBE medal, the real Queen said, with some wit, ‘I suppose you think you should be doing this.’ Unfortunately, Pru’s health did not hold. Vascular dementia was apparent as long ago as 2001. Tim says she was starting to search for her lines and looked visibly in a state of upset.

There was no official diagnosis for 12 years. Pru became increasingly forgetful and deaf, and was endlessly repeating herself. ‘Pru’s periods of normality lessened and her symptoms became more pronounced and noticeable.’

Yet, at the time of writing, she is still with us. They are both still with us – examples of Larkin’s line, ‘Give me your arm, old toad, and help me down Cemetery Road.’ Pru & Me shows most movingly that what will survive of them is love.

Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Quercus)

War stories ALAN JUDD Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine

By General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts William Collins £26 Plato reckoned that only the dead have seen the end of war.

More recently, a 19th-century jurist, Sir Henry Maine, reflected presciently, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.’

Westerners brought up in the wake of the Second World War can be forgiven for thinking that peace is normal, subject to occasional unwelcome interruptions.

However, as this thoughtful and informed survey shows, the world since 1945 has never been without war. In terms of lives lost, the last century was easily the most violent in human history.

We in Britain may think of ourselves

‘How do I turn them on?’

as having been at peace – more or less – for three-quarters of a century. But, even for us, since 1948 there has reportedly been only one year (1968) when British forces have not been on active service somewhere.

And now, with major war in Europe and Gaza, we may be forced to acknowledge that the new normal is really the old normal that never went away.

The authors are well qualified for their task. General Petraeus commanded coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan before heading the CIA. Andrew Roberts is a distinguished biographer and historian well versed in the study of leadership, his subjects including Churchill and Napoleon.

The task they set themselves is to summarise post-1945 conflicts, analysing what went right and wrong, assessing lessons learned and not learned and suggesting – they wisely don’t predict – future trends. Ukraine, of course, is at once a hugely helpful and a complicating factor.

Throughout all these conflicts, from Korea to Ukraine, they identify four tasks of strategic leadership as crucial to success – to get the big ideas right, to communicate them effectively, to oversee their implementation and to determine how to refine them and do it all again.

You can get away without any of these if your enemy is even worse than you, but if they’re half-competent, you’ll need them all at some point, even if you don’t achieve them all at the same time.

Korea started badly, got better, then worse, and then better, once General MacArthur was removed. In Vietnam, the big idea was wrong from the start, a fundamental failure to understand the nature of the war and the enemy.

As Kissinger predicted in 1965, it was folly to try ‘to build a nation in a divided society in the middle of a civil war’.

Another unlearned lesson from Vietnam was telling your enemy you’re not really serious, exemplified by Obama in 2009, when he announced reinforcements for Afghanistan while promising to withdraw them in 18 months. This led ultimately to Biden’s needless and shambolic withdrawal in 2021, for which he will doubtless be for ever fondly remembered by the women of Afghanistan.

Examples of wars or campaigns in which the four strategic tasks are aligned, resulting in clear victory, include Britain’s almost-forgotten campaigns in Malaya throughout the 1950s, in The Oldie December 2023 67

Borneo in the 1960s and in Dhofar from 1965 to 1975.

These were limited wars, in which aims matched methods and local conditions were understood. The Falklands War and Gulf War were other ‘successes’, while the Iraq War got one half of its big idea right – an effective war plan – but neglected the other half – rebuilding a state. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shows what happens when all four strategic tasks are ignored.

It is of course too early to catalogue lessons from Ukraine, but the authors usefully highlight three.

First, the importance of leadership – Zelensky is ‘Churchill with an iPhone’.

Secondly, the advent of drones, cyber attacks on currencies and national infrastructure, trading sanctions and the contributions of tycoons such as Elon Musk in making his satellites available show that modern warfare means ‘the weaponisation of everything’. The more connected the world, the more the world becomes the battlefield.

Thirdly, Ukraine would not be fighting now without the NATO (which means US) stockpile of weapons and ammunition, which are running low.

Britain, meanwhile, has depleted not just its forces but its military-industrial capacity so far that it is doubtful that we could sustain a division in the field for more than a few months.

Grant Shapps should make it a priority of his new job to hammer home the hard truth that ballooning expenditure on health and social care is not only unsustainable but pointless without a functioning country to care about.

Like it or not, that possibility is the new norm, and if Petraeus and Roberts do nothing else than make us more aware of it, they will have done the state some service.

Alan Judd was a soldier and diplomat

The last great emperor JUSTIN WARSHAW Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint

By Peter Sarris John Murray £30 From the date Octavian took the name Augustus in 27 BC to the bloody end of Constantine XI on 29th May 1453, the Roman Empire was ruled by more than 150 emperors.

Leaving aside its much-romanticised first dynasty, the Julio-Claudians,

‘Nope, those aren’t making me laugh either’

Justinian sits close to the pinnacle of the pantheon of widely recognised emperors, eclipsed perhaps only by Constantine the Great and Marcus Aurelius. His 38-year reign, spanning from 527 to 565 AD, witnessed some of the most significant events of late antiquity and left legacies that still reverberate today.

Justinian has been the subject of almost relentless biography since his death. The anodyne but largely hagiographical treatment he received from most medieval chroniclers was turned on its head in 1623. That’s when the Secret History, penned by Procopius, a secretary to Justinian’s most successful general, Belisarius, was discovered hidden in the Vatican Library.

Unlike the rest of Procopius’s works, this one drips with salacious vitriol, including scandalous allegations against Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora.

Her legacy as a great Christian philosopher and thoughtful Nicene Creed sceptic was for ever overshadowed by the account of her simulation of copulation with geese, naked save for strategically placed corn grains, on a public stage in Constantinople.

Since the publication of the Secret History, a long line of distinguished historians, stretching back to Edward Gibbon and including more recently the great Byzantinists, George Ostrogorsky, Averil Cameron and Cyril Mango, have turned their attention to Justinian.

Peter Sarris, however, is the first historian in many years to write a straightforward biography of the emperor, and he is well placed to do so.

Sarris is Professor of Late Antique, Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Sarris explains that he had long been pressed by his publishers to write a biography of Justinian, and that the

pandemic gave him the space he needed for this remarkable work. He says it also gave him perspective on the Justinianic plague, although that claim may be hyperbolic: Europe and the Near East were ravaged throughout the 540s by bubonic plague which morphed into pneumonic plague, killing possibly half the population of the imperial capital.

Sarris clearly loves detail. His doctoral thesis was an investigation into the 6th-century papyri found in the rubbish tips near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, which apparently demonstrate the extent to which Justinian’s legal reforms affected local elites. Some of this thesis material seems to be recycled into some less compelling chapters about the emperor and the provinces.

However, on the big issues Sarris cannot be faulted. His descriptions of the erection of Hagia Sophia are fascinating, as are his insights into the extent to which this apogee of Christian architecture became and remains the archetype of mosque-building throughout the Islamic World – one of Justinian’s great legacies.

However, like so many modern historians less steeped in the classics, Sarris fails to point out that the Latin nominal ending ian is indicative of adoption (while the name Justin is, as all we Justins know, from the Latin iustus – ‘just’ or ‘fair’). Octavius became Octavian on adoption by Caesar.

Likewise, Justin became Justianus on adoption by his uncle.

The greatest inheritance the world received from Justinian was his re-codification of Roman law. In under five years, Justinian empanelled the greatest lawyers of his generation. They created a cohesive body of law from thousands of pages of ancient jurists, spanning 977 years of Roman The Oldie December 2023 69

legal history. Justinian’s Codes remained the law for most of Europe until the Napoleonic conquests. They remain part of civil-law systems.

Towards the conclusion of the book, Sarris explains that, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he was required to write an essay about whether or not Justinian destroyed the empire he set out to save.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sarris avoids answering that question.

The Oxford don who introduced him to Justinian – the Anglo-Saxonist, parttime Byzantinist and my old tutor Patrick Wormald – would have been mightily impressed by this work. But he would have been surprised by Sarris’s failure to answer the question, and quizzical about his rather relaxed English.

I’m not sure Wormald would have appreciated Romans buying silk ‘off’ Asian merchants, split infinitives and views being different ‘to’ what they were.

Justin Warshaw KC is a family law barrister

Badminton champion MARY KILLEN The Unlikely Duke

By Harry Beaufort Hodder £25 Dukes are an endangered species. There are only 22 today, down from 75 a hundred years ago.

Most dukes would be too grand to invade their own privacy. But the 12th Duke of Beaufort, 71, has been kind enough to narrate a top-of-the-range life story, culminating in his taking up residence in 116-roomed Badminton House, Gloucestershire, ‘while inhabiting the slowly dying world of aristocratic privilege’.

Harry Beaufort’s unabashed revelations have been harvested from 50 years of diary-keeping.

‘I admit that there was a period of a few years when I took rather more cocaine than ideal,’ he notes.

In an account of being molested at prep school, by Latin master Mr Frewen, he recalls, ‘From my point of view, he was probably the best teacher in the school, and the only unusual act he carried out on me was sticking his hand up the back of my shorts when I was standing at his desk having my work marked.

‘I was vaguely aware this was unusual behaviour for a teacher, but I found it akin to a rather pleasurable massage; albeit, for me at least, totally non-sexual.’

70 The Oldie December 2023

The Beauforts have been at Badminton since the 17th century.

Harry’s father, David Somerset, the successful chairman of Marlborough Fine Art, was the first cousin once removed of the 10th Duke of Beaufort – aka Master, who led the Beaufort Hunt for 60 years and had no children.

David Somerset was a second son. His older brother was killed in action in the Allied invasion of Germany in April 1945 – and so, in 1984, David Somerset became 11th Duke of Beaufort. His eldest son, Harry, known to most friends and family as Bunter (because of his childhood fascination with Billy Bunter, the obese schoolboy), was his heir.

As a child, Bunter and his younger sister, ‘Monster’ (the historian Anne Somerset), stayed in a wing at Badminton with Nanny Nelson, where they played with Jed, the son of the under-butler.

Big houses have an advantage – you don’t need to go outside if it’s raining.

The children could ride through the servants’ hall on their bicycles.

The siblings adored their nanny but, even at weekends, saw little of their parents: ‘With hindsight, our daily routine of seeing our mother for only an hour at the most after breakfast, and then after tea, seems quite strange, not least because my mother spent much of her time downstairs playing patience and compiling rather obscure lists.

‘When later she showed us these lists, her full eccentricity was revealed. One was headed “People Who Might Be Murderers”, and included Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, whose wife died mysteriously, and Claus von Bülow, who was tried for but eventually acquitted of murdering his wife in a notorious trial in the 1980s.

‘On a more mundane note, the lists included the heading “Things to Do”, in which the first entry was “Go for a walk”, ‘My wife’s more of a cat person’

the second “Watch television” – although I doubt she consulted these entries every time she was at a loose end.’

And so to Eton, Cirencester and then training to be a chartered surveyor: ‘I realised that a life of leisure was not the answer.’

At the age of 32, Harry became the Marquess of Worcester: ‘It was particularly difficult at work to ring clients and say it was Harry Worcester, [my] having previously been Harry Somerset. They naturally had no idea who I was without my going through a tortured explanation, a procedure I found very awkward. I still find my title a little embarrassing, and there’s a part of me that feels that any respect it garners is not totally deserved.’

Now he has to make the house ‘work for itself’. It is rented out for weddings and parties and as a film set. He is helped by his second wife, writer Georgia Powell.

The first was green activist Tracy Ward.

In anecdotes about the hunting community, cock-ups over selling art treasures for too little, international high-life characters and their behaviour, we enter a world where P G Wodehouse and James Bond characters intermingle.

But the enjoyability of the book lies with the Duke’s benign and unpretentious attitude to life. He openly enjoys it, although music is his real love.

His life peaks have happened on stage when he’s been performing (as a singer) with various bands he has knocked up over the years. Yes, he has had the life of Riley – but someone has to have it.

I loved this rare book. But what would a non-snob make of it? I showed it to a chippy friend, who read a few chapters and became quickly engrossed.

‘I like this,’ she declared. He doesn’t seem at all up himself, and it’s interesting.’

Mary Killen is author of How the Queen Can Make You Happy

Commonplace Corner I am not arguing with you – I am telling you.

James McNeill Whistler

My wife said, ‘Can my mother come down for the weekend?’ So I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Well, she’s been up on the roof two weeks already.’

Bob Monkhouse

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.

Proverbs 31:6

When I played drunks, I had to remain sober because I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.

Richard Burton

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

B F Skinner

Imagine I throw a spear in the dark.

That’s my intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear. That’s my intellect.

Ingmar Bergman There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.

A P Herbert A British doctor once explained how to live a good life. He said the idea is to die young, as late as possible.

Ashley Montagu

JSADGMNGBAMSD

I wouldn’t say when you’ve seen one Western, you’ve seen the lot. But when you’ve seen the lot, you get the feeling you’ve seen one.

Katharine Whitehorn

Running My husband is training for a marathon.

This is, in theory, a good thing as it means he is keeping fit. In reality, it means he spends much of his free time running around our neighbourhood in brightly coloured Lycra, stopping only to check his brightly coloured sports watch.

After this spectacle,

What you don’t know would make a great book.

Sydney Smith

‘When I played drunks, I had to remain sober’ – Richard Burton (1925-84)

A child of five would understand this.

Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Groucho Marx Unlike my predecessors, I have devoted more of my life to shunting and hooting than to hunting and shooting.

Sir Fred Burrows (1887-1973), President of the National Union of Railwaymen and Governor of Bengal The penalty of success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.

Nancy Astor

he is encouraged to ‘load up’ on carbs. This involves eating the entire contents of the fridge. After the carbloading, he is required to rest. This mostly takes the form of lying on the sofa, ignoring his family, while studying his route on Strava.

Strava is basically an app that tells you how brilliant you are.

At running. On Strava, you can become a ‘local hero’ simply by running in a circle. You can also check in on your friends running in circles around the world. You can even upload selfies from the top of nondescript hills, your face the colour of corned beef.

Comedy itself is based upon very old principles of which I can readily name seven. They are, in short: the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance, surprise, the pun, and finally, the comic situation.

Jack Benny Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

President John F Kennedy I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Edith Sitwell It is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself, I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

Benjamin Franklin

It’s a shame running clubs haven’t adopted the same mantra as Fight Club, its first rule being ‘You don’t talk about Fight Club.’

Quite the opposite. With ‘run club’, they don’t shut up.

How often must we talk about high-tech trainers and the pros and cons of eating jelly babies?

And no, I am not tempted to start running with him.

But if I ever did start

SMALL DELIGHTS When I come across a modern poem and can understand it.

GEORGIA WREN, NEW RADNOR

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

running, it would be called jogging. When did running replace jogging? Maybe it just sounded too middleaged. Or perhaps it’s like ‘wild swimming’, which is basically swimming in water that isn’t a swimming pool.

Or ‘glamping’, which is camping, only with fairy lights and Prosecco. Or maybe ‘bivouacking’, which is similar to glamping, but your tent blew away and someone nicked your Prosecco.

Maybe all runners could be fitted with a rechargeable battery and donate all their energy to the national grid.

They could be a sort of running wind farm. We could solve the energy crisis overnight.

Maybe then they could call themselves local heroes.

NANCY HOGG The Oldie December 2023 71

Arts DOCTOR JEKYLL (15) Schlock horror! Hammer Films are back!

In fact, they never really entirely went away. Hammer Films, founded in 1934, went into Gothic horror in 1955 with The Quatermass Experiment. After the golden days of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, the company was resold several times and has slowly been producing films – all pretty unremarkable – over the last 15 years.

So Doctor Jekyll is the biggest Hammer film for years: a modern version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with the star casting of Eddie Izzard as nice Dr Nina Jekyll and her wicked alter ego, Rachel Hyde.

We’re so used to seeing Izzard as a woman that you hardly notice the oddness of a tubby transvestite pharmaceuticals gazillionaire living in a vast Gothic pile, with a creepy housekeeper (Lindsay Duncan), straight out of the Mrs Danvers mould. And

thank God there are no ham-fisted attempts to bang on about trans issues.

Izzard is magnificent, playing Dr Nina Jekyll with a languid, old-fashioned manner – James Mason meets Uncle Monty. Izzard is so good – a vamp but not camp – that when Dr Jekyll becomes Miss Hyde, you immediately realise she’s done so without his having to semaphore the change from character to character.

Izzard uses his great big blue eyes to exhibit anger or irony to great effect.

The clever plot involves a new young aide, Rob (a brilliantly gauche Scott Chambers, with a weedy David Beckham-like voice), who’s trying to jettison a criminal past by helping Dr Jekyll deal with a devastating illness.

His crooked old pals scheme, against his wishes, to burgle Dr Jekyll’s pile, unaware of what mighty adversaries Jekyll and Hyde will be when they break in.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella is one of those stories for the ages – so protean that it can survive a jump into any time or place. The jump from the Victorian age to now is seamless.

And director Joe Stephenson,

Hammer time: Eddie Izzard as Dr Jekyll; Christopher Lee in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) 72 The Oldie December 2023

cinematographer Birgit Dierken and production designer Natalie O’Connor have cleverly incorporated the slight naffness of the later Hammer films, with OTT Gothic titles and saturated colour.

But the screenplay by Dan KellyMulhern lets the film down. Izzard is so funny that he could have really gone to town with some well-written, ironic lines – and could have played around with our preconceptions about and affection for the great Lee and Cushing days of Hammer Films.

Instead, Izzard is left to inject his own natural wit into the flat script.

Sometimes, there’s an A-level dramaproject feel to it – not in the good production values, but in the plodding series of plot points, delivered with too much exposition along the way.

Still, there’s the great revelation of Izzard as a first-class actor. Comedians don’t always make for very good actors: Peter Cook was a genius as a comedian and a strikingly flat actor. Izzard can do both wonderfully.

If Barbara Broccoli is looking for a new Bond villain, she should give Eddie a ring pronto.

ENTERTAINMENT PICTURES / ALAMY

FILM HARRY MOUNT

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK KING LEAR Wyndham’s, London, until 9th December What a piece of work is Kenneth Branagh! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! He’s surely the leading Shakespearean actor of our age – the finest since Olivier. As a director, he’s a lot more fallible, and his new rendition of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy bears this out.

King Lear is a tragedy of old age, addressing an age-old problem that’s still pertinent. Fundamentally, it’s the same story as in the recent TV drama Succession: the ageing head of a powerful dynasty tries to hand on his empire to his grown-up children, but he cannot bear to lose control.

Unlike Lear, most of us don’t have entire kingdoms to divide among our offspring, but we’ve all witnessed comparable dilemmas, albeit on a more modest scale. Can you pass on your assets to your children, and maintain a say in what they do with them? Must parental love be unconditional? Or do parents have a right to demand love and honour in return?

That a play written over 400 years ago should feel so topical today is testament to Shakespeare’s genius for conveying the eternal essence of the human condition.

Yet, for all its resonance, King Lear is notoriously difficult to stage. It’s one of Shakespeare’s longer plays, the plot development is erratic and uneven, and some of its key scenes teeter on the edge of melodrama.

Branagh’s solution to these problems is to strip the play right down to its bare essentials. With a running time of only two hours (with no interval), it’s by far the shortest Lear I’ve ever seen. On the whole, this works a treat. We race through the story at breakneck speed, and there are only a few omissions that diminish the meaning of the play.

When the curtain falls you’re left wanting more, rather than feeling you’ve run a marathon.

A born actor to his bones, Branagh has an instinctive empathy with other actors, and he draws some fine performances from his youthful cast. The more lurid scenes, which have often defeated other directors (in particular, the gory gougingout of Gloucester’s eyes and his subsequent attempted suicide), are handled with masterful precision.

Bret Yount’s combat scenes are electric, full of grace and danger, and

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Kenneth Branagh as King Lear

Jon Bausor’s stark, neolithic set provides a haunting backdrop to this timeless drama (his neolithic costumes, conversely, seem slightly comic – a bit Monty Python – but never mind).

Where Branagh’s production falls short is mainly in the casting. Cordelia and the Fool are both played by the same actress, Jessica Revell, which is an interesting idea – though rather confusing, I would have thought, for anyone who’s not already familiar with the play.

A less successful venture, by far, is casting a woman as Kent. Eleanor de Rohan is perfectly competent as Lear’s most loyal Thane but this change of gender seemed perverse – distracting, disorientating and ultimately completely pointless. Such flaws pale beside Branagh’s magnificent performance – a heart-rending portrait of a proud man’s descent into madness, self-awareness and repentance.

Shakespeare puts Lear’s age at ‘fourscore and upward’, and at first I feared Branagh was too young to play a man of 80 plus. Although he’s 62, a respectable age to tackle the role (‘At 50, you have the energy,’ observed Oliver Ford Davies; ‘at 70, you have the empathy’), he still looks youthful, almost boyish, with a fresh face, a thick mane of auburn hair, complemented by a lush, bushy beard, and the lean, lithe body of an athlete.

However, in the course of this two-hour rollercoaster, Branagh effects an incredible transformation, from the strutting tyrant of the opening scene to the frail geriatric of the final act, cradling the corpse of his beloved daughter

Cordelia, the only one who loved him enough to dare tell him the truth.

Branagh has an extraordinary ear for the language of Shakespeare. Uniquely, his understanding and delivery are both intellectual and emotional, conveying the complex philosophy of Shakespeare’s verse and the basic humanity behind it.

Naturalistic for the most part, and often understated, he’s consequently all the more effective when he lurches abruptly into impotent anger or helpless, heartfelt grief.

His exhilarating, heartbreaking performance will live on for a long time in the memory of anyone lucky enough to see it, long after his directorial shortcomings are forgotten.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘We live in such horrendous times,’ said Sir András Schiff, the great pianist.

‘There is no escape from the horrors.

But perhaps there is some solace and consolation. Maybe in a small way, in two or three hours – my concerts are rather long – we can make the world a little better.’

That was on Music Matters (Radio 3).

At the request of Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Schiff then played us some Bach – from The Well-Tempered Clavier.

It was divine. But in Gaza things remained much the same – chaos.

On Today, Lord Ricketts, former diplomat and crossbench peer, gave a beautifully measured and authoritative, but quite dismaying, prognosis.

So much analysis; so many words.

Meanwhile, the music plays on. So I The Oldie December 2023 73

74 The Oldie December 2023

Anyway, everyone agrees that his speediness has galvanised University Challenge, with dramatic scores as a result. We’re all fans. On the new Nick Robinson and Rajan Today podcast, he says that one listener complained, ‘Amol, get them to pump your seat up a bit. You look really small.’

Have others noticed a weird proliferation of claims to fame? ‘Today, our guest is the writer, journalist, speaker, stand-up comedian, activist, blogger, vlogger, podcaster – [insert a name you’ve never heard of] – who has XX million followers on Instagram.’

Exhausting. The truly great (Sir David Attenborough) don’t need to flaunt CV excesses.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON ITV’s pre-Christmas treat is a cheery little number called Platform 7, adapted from the psycho thriller by Louise Doughty.

Doughty also wrote Apple Tree Yard, turned into a popular BBC series starring Emily Watson as a 50-something scientist sleeping with a man she knows nothing about.

In Platform 7, Lisa Evans (Jasmine Jobson) is a 30-year-old ghost with amnesia brought on by PTSD. Haunting her local railway station in the pyjamas she was wearing when, a year earlier, she went under a train, she wonders how she ended up dead. The coroner says it was suicide due to ‘mental-health issues’ – but why would she end her own life when, as her dad puts it, she had ‘everything going for her’?

If you die in the station, you stay in the station. The same rule applies in Ghosts, the sublime BBC sitcom which has sadly come to the end of its fifth and final season; the deceased of Button Hall are also doomed to remain within its walls for all eternity.

Ghostly: Jasmine Jobson, Platform 7

In episode one of Platform 7, Lisa is joined by a new spook called Edward (played by the Mike Leigh regular Phil Davis). ‘I assume this is purgatory,’ says Edward, a former pillar of the establishment, when he finds himself back on the platform he had jumped from the night before. ‘Rather more prosaic than I imagined.’

It is certainly less taxing than Dante’s cone-shaped mountain with its seven terraces, one for each of the deadly sins, where the proud on the first terrace are weighed down with stones, the envious on the second have their eyes sewn up, and the lustful on the seventh have to pass through a wall of fire.

Edward’s sin is also lust, and his purgatory on Platform 7 might be a reference to The Divine Comedy, or it might be coincidental.

The script, like Lisa herself, is dead on arrival, and the actors do what they can to resuscitate it. ‘Your mendacity is as breathtaking as it is inexplicable,’ Edward says to Lisa when he discovers she is now able to leave the station confines while he is still stuck there.

Nobody actually speaks like this – so no wonder Lisa looks blank. Looking blank, however, is all that is required of her character, as she invisibly hangs around her former flat and her former friends, seeing what the world looks like without her in it.

Phil Davis, meanwhile, huffs and puffs about the station, feeling his way into the part of a dead paedophile doomed to a limbo of trainspotting before descending into the lowest circle of the inferno. After episode two, he drops out of the plot entirely.

The star of the show is Mattie (Toby Regbo), Lisa’s impossibly perfect boyfriend who, being still alive, at least has some dimensions to play with.

As Lisa’s memory returns, we are told her story. Mattie is an A&E doctor whom she met when she broke a bone in her foot. Five minutes later, he’s feeding her food from his fork while explaining he has no hidden depths because ‘What you see is what you get’. Alarm bells!

Platform 7 is as addictive and easy to consume as a bag of Haribo Tangfastics.

I binged the whole series in one sitting, and then felt queasy and hated myself.

To atone for my sins, I watched Beckham on Netflix – the punishment residing in my zero interest in football.

But, dammit, the series, made by Beckham’s own production company, is not really about football at all. It’s about the history of Beckham’s hair, and what a rollercoaster that is!

ITV

refrain from praising some lively stuff on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio (including Hamlet as a Scandi noir); Jim Naughtie’s Election Countdown: America on the Edge; or Mary Beard’s Being Roman. Music, maestro, instead.

On Private Passions (Radio 3), for Black History Month, Kadiatu KannehMason chose to play Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Deep River, performed by a trio of her seven gifted musician children.

Then came a new Legend series of music biographies on Radio 4. It’s by the Soul Music team, who recently struck gold with the late Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata song. (And I recommend a YouTube video of beautiful Makeba in 1969, singing the Swahili song Malaika.)

Their first ‘legend’ is Joni Mitchell, for her 80th birthday. Her up-and-down life is told by a soft-spoken singer named Jesca Hoop – ‘Joni’s songs are in the audience’s DNA,’ she says. She started with her childhood, when incarceration with polio nurtured her fertile mind.

In an excellent Start the Week, Kirsty Wark focused on the ‘soundtrack to life’, with the writer Michel Faber – whose memory contains no musical associations. He spoke of music as a tribal passion, which gives us something to say in a social context. There were also some thoughtful, moving love songs from Natalie Merchant.

Let more music intrude on Radio 4 and soothe our savage breasts. Such as How to Play, with the Heath Quartet taking us into their rehearsals for Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. But not like those pointless digital plinketyplonks in the background of spoken documentaries. They supposedly imply something portentous, but sound like someone tinkling away in the next room.

So distracting.

Back to speech, and a man whose diction has been criticised in this slot. I kept spotting Amol Rajan – at the grandchildren’s school fête, in pink shorts; on the phone, outside a café, with a tiny newborn babe on his chest. One Saturday, he appeared in the checkout queue in M&S. As I lurked, my husband called me over to meet him, with not just a baby-in-sling but two more children in a double buggy and having (he said) left his eldest at home.

He at once assured me that he had been trying to slow down his words. But the slurring, he said, was caused by insomnia. He sometimes arrives at Today having had no sleep at all. Poor chap! Four infants under seven (I knew that scene, once), and he has to leave for work at 3am. I take it all back.

Ed McLachlan

‘Strikeman – I like the name... Can’t wait to meet this new superhero!’

From the floppy curtains of his teenage years to that shocking buzz cut in 1998, we go back in time to the hairband, the cornrows, the manbun, the pony tail, the double pony tail (during the Rebecca Loos affair), the mullet, the undercut, the slickback, the lob, the mohawk and something called a fohalk.

When Beckham first meets Posh Spice, he calls her up after a match to ask if his hair, which has blond highlights, had looked all right when he took his corner. ‘You need it done,’ she tells him.

They are a match in heaven.

Sporting a quiff as high as one of Madame Pompadour’s wigs, he now shows us around his wardrobes where the wooden hangers, holding their colour-coded shirts, all point the same way. He also opens his immaculatelykept sock drawers.

As if this wasn’t pleasure enough, he says he has recently started to select his outfits for the week ahead on a Sunday, so he doesn’t have that particular stress to deal with in the mornings. He arranges them, in order, on a special rail which we are allowed to see.

The last time I had this much clothes fun was 20 years ago, watching Trinny and Susannah’s What Not to Wear. I hope Beckham gets his own makeover show.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE SCHUBERT IN OXFORD ‘Summer’s a discouraging time to work,’ Ernest Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald.

‘You don’t feel death coming on the way it does in the fall, when the boys really put pen to paper.’

That was certainly the case in the autumn of 1823, when an ailing 26-yearold Franz Schubert began work on Die schöne Müllerin (‘The beautiful maid of the mill’) – the first of the great Romantic song cycles and, for us Müllerin-lovers, the most enduringly wonderful of all.

Two hundred years on, the cycle was accorded a day to itself in this autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It was abetted by the kind of bran tub of related events with which founder/ director Sholto Kynoch has been surprising and delighting us these past 22 years.

One such event involved the painter Caspar David Friedrich, a particular Kynoch passion. Kynoch recently told Country Life that it summoned up ‘awe and comfort, striving and reconciliation, grandiosity and intimacy’, much Schubert’s songs do.

Cue a late-afternoon diversion in

Trinity College’s handsome new Levine Building on those backlit transparencies which were so popular an entertainment in Schubert’s day.

It was introduced by Professor Peter Davidson. He’s the author of The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered, a small gem of a book whose style and erudition would have been taken for granted a century ago but are now more or less a thing of the past.

At one point in his account of lighted windows in art, literature and his own peregrinations through towns and cities, Davidson mentions a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Lonely house by the pinewood’. It perfectly echoes Schubert’s late song Des Fischers Liebesglück (‘The fisherman’s luck in love’), the tale of a nocturnal waterborne tryst between two apprehensive yet blissfully happy young lovers.

Where love is concerned, Die schöne Müllerin is a less happy affair. Here a true-hearted young miller is jilted by a miller’s daughter, lovely but distant. His only confidant is the millstream; and it’s the stream that eventually lays him to his eternal rest in one of the most moving epilogues in all music.

The original poems, by Schubert’s contemporary Wilhelm Müller, were first set to music for a soirée in 1816 The Oldie December 2023 75

– is no small advantage, not least when every word and heart-stopping key change is being so richly explored.

Pianist, polymath and antiquarian, Johnson has never been short of ideas during 40 years of recital-making. Here the idea was to turn Die schöne Müllerin into a three-part drama into which readings of short poems by William Blake could be tellingly inserted.

And there was more. As the drama darkened towards tragedy, so four of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s late Blake songs for soprano and solo oboe were thrown into the mix.

The inclusion before Schubert’s two great final songs of VW’s valedictory setting of Ah! Sun-flower was risky.

But, in the moment, it worked, and worked wonderfully.

The readings were by Dame Janet Suzman, even now the absolute mistress of her art. Schubert songs and Shakespearian soliloquies are, of course, two sides of the same coin – a point made plain by the sight of Dame Janet watching and listening spellbound as the afternoon ran its unforgettable course.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON TAYLOR SWIFT I am late to this party. I was only dimly aware of the Taylor Swift phenomenon.

I’d managed to tune her out with my internal synthesiser since Swift signed a deal aged 14 with Sony/ATV in 2003.

She is now unignorable.

The girl next door is now worth a billion dollars.

MATTHEW WILLIAMS-ELLIS

m r’s ait of bert )

Above: Wilhelm Reider’s portrait of Schubert (1825) Right: Taylor Swift on her mammoth Eras Tour (2023) 76 The Oldie December 2023

As someone in the Netflix doco – called Miss Americana – breathed, ‘Taylor Swift IS the music industry.’

She has 275m followers on Instagram (Madonna has 19.2m) and, on Twitter/X, she has 95m followers. (Her handle is @taylorswift13 as 13 is her favourite number.) Madonna has 2.8m.

By 2008, she was already the bestselling artist in the US and became globally famous when Kanye West jumped on stage during an awards ceremony, threw huge amounts of shade on her win and said the gong should have gone to Beyoncé.

This was considered such bad form that the then President Obama felt he had to defend the poor little petal and called the rapper a ‘jackass’.

All this made the mousy blonde whose folks had moved across country to Nashville so their li’l girl could become a country singer even more famous and adored.

Break it down and her fans think they know her – and, to be honest, they do. If you are a Swiftie, you step into an entire curated metaverse, of Swiftmas and SwiftTok, where the singer and the song are one immersive experience.

She’s just released 1989 (Taylor’s Version). It’s a blockbusting crowdpleaser to mark the year she was born and the end of her mammoth Eras Tour and documentary. The new album has 21 tracks, including re-recorded versions of 16 tracks from the deluxe edition of 1989.

So, I hear you ask, she’s big, but is she any good? Well, the reviews are in and it’s a five-star yes from me (I’m too frightened of all the Swifties to suggest otherwise).

1989 (Taylor’s Version) is mostly the greatest hits, all over again. It’s break-ups, love, her exes – on which note, she’s now dating an American footballer called Travis Kelce. He’d better keep a clean sheet. Swift says if men don’t treat her nice, she’ll write a payback song about them.

Listen to the album, watch the docs and it’s impossible not to fall in love with her.

She’s the little girl who became the biggest star in the world – by being not America’s sweetheart but America’s daughter, girlfriend and best friend.

GRANGER - HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE; ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY

by his friend Ludwig Berger. (We were able to sample those, too, during Oxford’s Müllerin day.) Müller’s dream, however, was to have his verses set by a major composer.

Enter Franz Schubert.

Not the least remarkable thing about Schubert was his decision to give precedence to song-writing – a point made by Richard Wigmore in a fine mid-morning talk on the Schubert iconography. Most portraits of great composers, he suggested, depict them holding music – a sheaf from some immortal masterpiece – but not Wilhelm Rieder in his famous watercolour of 1825.

There we see Schubert (pictured), right arm casually draped over the chairback, book in hand.

Oxford’s 18th-century Holywell Music Room is about the size of one of the salons where Schubert’s friends gathered to hear his music. Not surprisingly, it was packed for this performance of Die schöne Müllerin, one that turned out to be special in all manner of ways.

The performance by tenor Robin Tritschler was memorable in its own right. He’s an intriguingly under-theradar artist with few recordings to his name. His fine 2014 anthology of songs inspired by the First World War, No Exceptions, No Exemptions, is itself a notable exception. After an early career in light operatic roles and oratorio, he’s now graduated to the Parnassian heights of German Lied.

With a voice still possessed of a gleaming top A and the most rapt pianissimi, this was singing and dramatic story-telling of a high order. Having Graham Johnson as pianist – the millstream to Tritschler’s young miller

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU CLAIRE CANSICK: YOU AND I ARE EARTH

CLAIRE CANSICK AND LUCY HARWOOD IMAGES COURTESY OF FIRSTSITE

LUCY HARWOOD: BOLD IMPRESSIONS Firstsite, Colchester, to 14th April It would be mean to say that for centuries Colchester has lived on its status as the first city of Roman Britain.

After all, it was also rich from wool in the Middle Ages and later – and is still famous for its oysters. However, it was in the doldrums until fairly recently; only since the millennium does it seem to have regained a buzz. It has become the fastest-growing and -regenerating town in the country, and was raised to city status just last year.

The arts have played their part in this, stimulated by the contemporary visual arts organisation Firstsite, founded in 1993.

It is the tenant of the newly-built Visual Arts Centre, now more generally also known as Firstsite, or sometimes as the Banana because of the curving gold-clad shape designed by the controversial Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly, also responsible for ‘the Walkie-Talkie’ in the City of London.

The organisation and building have had a troubled decade, owing to funding problems, conflicts of interest among trustees, and criticism that the gallery’s sloping outer walls aren’t ideal for hanging pictures. That it was nearly £10m over budget seems relatively modest.

Those storms appear to have been weathered. There is no permanent collection, and the model is to host exhibitions that run for six months, many of them having regional links. Most

Clockwise from top left: Hurricane Ian, Florida by Claire Cansick; Landscape with Blue Mountain by Lucy Harwood; Agartala India by Claire Cansick. Below: Global Heating Report by Claire Cansick

successful so far has been a show by Essex-born Grayson Perry, which came just before the Covid hiatus.

Claire Cansick was born in Great Yarmouth and lives in the Broads. Her first show in a public gallery offers

46 paintings which catalogue the weather events of the last three years. She paints ecological tragedy and disaster quite beautifully, which makes the works still more poignant. The title comes from an inscribed plate, dated 1661, found in the London sewers and now in the Wellcome Collection.

The landscape, still-life and portrait painter Lucy Harwood (1897-1972) never had a solo show before a memorial in 1975, and there hasn’t been another until now. She trained at the Slade and was a key member of Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School at Denham and Benton End. Much respected by her peers – Sir Matthew Smith wrote of her ‘great delicacy and detail, bold palette and flamboyant impasto’ – she has slipped under the radar.

Exhibits have come from family and local admirers, and her diary has been used to good effect. She is very well worth rediscovering.

The Oldie December 2023 77

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER MY NATURE CURE A year ago, queuing for the surgeon’s knife, I pictured my garden, as the anaesthetist began to inject his numbing potion into my spine.

The op was scheduled to last five hours – ‘but it’ll seem like five minutes to you,’ he said, as I slipped into unconsciousness. I don’t recall dreaming of my garden during the process, but images of special plants flooded into my dozy brain throughout recovery in ICU. Back home after a week, I wondered if I’d manage to cook and eat Christmas dinner – I did, but retreated under the duvet pretty soon after.

As recovery progressed and strength returned to my ancient limbs, I was keen to get into the garden. Alas, no chance of that for several more weeks. And, anyway, the garden in December and January was as sleepy as I was.

Soonish though, I started to fiddle with some bonsai trees, raised 15 years ago while I was recuperating from previous cancer treatment. Scissors, a few lengths of copper wire and bowls filled with compost and grit were easily managed – satisfying a vital urge to get gardening again, however small the scale.

A year on, and I’m making a two-acre woodland garden, having spent many summer and early-autumn months sourcing trees and shrubs, taking numerous cuttings and messing about with seeds.

Admittedly, I have paid help two days a week and a partner seemingly always on hand to tackle those once-easy jobs.

I can now drive myself to several wonderful gardens (Aberglasney, the National Botanic Garden of Wales and Picton Castle), and I’m within reach of at least one (I wish there were more) good plant nursery.

Osmanthus delavayi – April blossom appeared in autumn

My recovery is entirely due to medical science; the garden also played a part.

The last thing I want to do is slop in an armchair, feeling sorry for myself.

Having an interest – nay, a passion – is essential and it doesn’t matter what it is: model railways, quilting, stampcollecting, photography, calligraphy, candle-making, metal detection. Just do it. And, of course, anything involving some proportionate physical exertion – and conviviality – is supreme.

We outsiders regret the agonisingly short days at this time of year. I have a new potting shed (the Potting Palace, no less). Importantly, it has electric light, which means that, come four o’clock, when outdoor toilers must hang up their spade and tread reluctantly back home, I can carry on at the bench, making labels, mixing compost, repotting rootbound plants and fixing pin-ups (of plants!) to the walls…

I’m not a compulsive diarist, but I do have more time now to log some of my horticultural activities and record things going on around me. Noteworthy of late was the way in which so many plants were behaving abnormally.

In November, the leaves on our two mature copper beech trees were ablaze with streaks of bronze, orange and purple

– doing fabulously what they’re supposed to do at that time of the year.

But, at odds with the season, our venerable rhododendron was similarly ablaze – with flowers! It looked the way it should in May, with cheery trusses of heart-warming colour. Weird.

Apple trees were blossoming shyly, as was Osmanthus delavayi, with delectable, scented, white flowers rightly belonging to April. Again, weird.

I’m told it’s a natural response to specific environmental conditions – prolonged heat and drought, both of which we experienced in May and June.

Counting my blessings (better than sheep), I make full after-dark use of the Potting Palace lights: dimmer – but friendlier by far – than those of last year’s operating theatre.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD ANGELICA Christmas in the almost forgotten past of my childhood always included crystallised or glacé fruits and chestnuts.

There were also little candied green bits in the Christmas cake, which apparently were called angelica. It was not until this year that I saw, for the first time, a growing angelica plant.

There are scores of different species of angelica; the only one suitable for the herb garden is Angelica archangelica.

It was once said to have been brought to England by an angel – or archangel? – as a cure for the plague; but it isn’t noted for its medicinal properties today.

With large leaves and domed, cream or pale green flowerheads, looking not unlike cow parsley, the plants will grow to about eight feet. They should be staked, as the stems are liable to break off in a strong wind.

The Oldie December 2023 79

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD CONSTANCE SPRY'S XMAS PUD Whatever’s happening elsewhere in the world, keep the home fires burning with a luscious, sticky-fingered Christmas pudding. It’s best made with butcher’s beef-suet. But it’s fiddly to prepare, as you have to separate the creamy little globules of fat from the membrane (dust your fingers with flour to stop it sticking).

If not, packet suet will do. If you have vegetarians in the family, use butter or the equivalent weight of seed or nut oil.

What follows is Constance Spry’s recipe from the 1960s adapted to the raw materials available in the wilds of Andalusia, where I lived at the time with my young family. Happily for me, the children were still young enough to enjoy the messy business of de-pipping raisins, stoning prunes and separating suet.

Prepare yours, with or without young assistants, any time until the week before Christmas but preferably earlier, on Stir-up Sunday – the last Sunday before Advent – to allow the pudding a little time to mature.

Christmas pudding with sherry and almonds A dark sherry such as Pedro Ximénez gives a fine rich flavour and darkens the 80 The Oldie December 2023

another couple of hours on the day.

To serve, tip out the pudding onto a warm plate, and push in a few little tokens wrapped in foil (a button for a bachelor, a pound coin for riches, a thimble for a spinster, a ring for a wedding). Top with a holly sprig, flame with warm brandy and serve in splendour with brandy butter or custard or cream, accompanied by a rousing chorus of ‘God rest ye, merry gentlemen’ – or whatever rocks your boat.

colour; if what’s available is oloroso or any other dry sherry, add a spoonful of soft muscovado sugar or black treacle.

Serves 6 125g prunes, stoned and diced 125g raisins, de-pipped 125g currants, de-pipped 125g dried figs, de-stalked and diced 100g dried apricots, stoned and diced 150ml Pedro Ximénez or Bristol Cream sherry 100g blanched almonds, whole or roughly chopped 1 apple, grated (no need to peel) 1 mature carrot, scrubbed and grated 1 orange, zest and juice 2 eggs, forked to blend 125g fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs 100g prepared suet (or mild olive oil) ½ tsp powdered cloves 1 tsp powdered cinnamon ½ tsp grated nutmeg Put all the dried fruits in a bowl with the sherry and leave to soak for a few hours – overnight is even better. Fold in the rest of the ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon till well blended, adding extra sherry or more breadcrumbs for a firm batter that drops easily from the spoon.

Butter a 2-pint (roughly 1-litre) pudding basin and tip in the mixture.

Top with a circle of greaseproof paper and cover with a square of clean cloth – with a pleat in the middle to allow for expansion (this will be minimal, as there is no flour in the mix) – secured in place with string long enough to tie over the top as a handle, so that you can lift the pudding easily.

Place the basin on an upturned metal lid in a large pan; pour in enough boiling water to come halfway up the basin. Bring back to the boil and turn down the heat.

Lid and simmer for 4-5 hours. Check and top up with boiling water regularly.

Leave to cool and keep in a cool place for reheating by the same method for

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE DINING WITH MICKEY MOUSE The most noticeable change since 2021 in the post-Covid world of restaurant service is the rapid ‘turning’ of tables.

Before March 2020, the announcement ‘We’ll need your table back by 9pm’ was the preserve of the truly smart West End restaurant. Now it’s ubiquitous.

Recently, I took my son, Leo, out for lunch at Chez Bruce, in Wandsworth. It has long sat on my list of Big Treat restaurants and what bigger event than a farewell to Leo before he set sail to Melbourne for a year. To be fair, they didn’t ask for our table back within two hours and 15 minutes – but had we arrived at 6.45pm, we would have been asked to leave by 9pm. It was a sublime lunch.

Leo, who had recently completed a ten-month stint as a waiter at arguably the capital’s most renowned eatery, the obligatory haven of every movie star, was shocked by their largesse. He had been briefed daily to turn the tables within one hour 15 minutes – a whole hour less than at Chez Bruce and only 45 minutes longer than at lunchtime at my school, where no apéritif, menu or wine list was ever proffered.

The pressure was on: ‘You’re no use if you’re not getting your turns’; ‘Even five out of six turns is not good enough; ‘You’ll be put on table 82 [a celebrity-free spot]’.

When a waiter left, the others all knew it was because he just wasn’t good enough: he didn’t get his turns. The managers operate a truly Glengarry Glen Ross regime. ‘Coffee is for closers’; ‘Right!

Bill them!’; ‘I need that table back!’

I’m sure Macca and Michael Caine are graciously allowed to linger, but not you at your golden-wedding celebration, after travelling one hour 15 minutes each way.

The lesson: always check the length of your sitting when you book.

Last month, I took this advice with me to Disneyland Paris. But in Fantasyland, quite the opposite regime exists. You are encouraged to queue for up to an hour

ELISABETH LUARD

Germination from seed sown under cover is unreliable; angelica is better started in the garden from a plant – usually available from specialist garden centres.

Although a biennial plant, angelica may not flower until the fourth year, in which case it will continue growing. Once it does flower, it will die and self-seed.

The hollow leaf stalks should be cut no later than the end of May; otherwise they are likely to become too hard for candying and will lose their green colour.

They can be chopped into short lengths, immersed in boiling water to remove the outer skins, blanched in sugar syrup, with the process being repeated a few times, and stored in jars. The angelica is then ready to be used in cakes, puddings or ice cream or added to gingerbread.

The leaves are said to have a sweet flavour of liquorice and juniper; they can be used in jam-making and in teas.

The root of angelica is one of the primary ingredients of gin and of some beers brewed in the Nordic countries. I have read that the roots are also used as a food among the nomadic Sámi people of north Norway, whom I once saw driving their reindeer between islands off the coast.

for a ride lasting no more than three minutes. In six hours, we ‘enjoyed’ five eyes-wide-shut horrors, and for the remaining five hours 45 minutes we queued, with other nonplussed, bewildered grown-ups.

Our only chance of a seat was to sit down for lunch – yet even three days earlier, almost every one of the 20-odd venues had been booked. We ended up in the Aladdin-themed Restaurant Agrabah Café, which operated an eat-as-much-asyou-like Moroccan buffet for €40.

When you’re next passing through, I thoroughly recommend it. If a souk were ever designed by IKEA, this would be it – but the fancy-dressed waiters were quick on the drinks orders. And, yes, unlike the mother ship in California, they serve alcohol, after gilet jaune-style protests from belligerent Burgundian dads. The tagine and salads were delicious and Cecily, 10, and Ophelia, 7, gave the pasta 9½ out of 10. Given they eat it three times a day, their rating (based on two helpings) is not to be sniffed at.

While pondering how to excuse myself from the runaway train ride that is Thunder Mountain, I wondered why a Carry On theme park has never been launched here. Sid James’s laugh could greet you on arrival; the campsite would have a topless section and a cry of ‘Ooh, Matron’ would erupt if you grazed your knee on the rides – which would be often, because the maintenance crew would be permanently on strike.

And in the Khyber Pass Café, the sign for the loos would ask ‘Mustapha Leak?’

'Are you sure we've been down here before?'

DRINK BILL KNOTT A TASTE OF AUSTRIA In common with much of the rest of Europe, Austria in 1983 enjoyed a grape harvest that was pretty good.

A balmy spring had given way to a long, hot summer. So the grapes were abundant and ripe – in some cases perhaps too ripe, lacking the acidity needed for balance.

Two years later, a lack of acidity was the least of the Austrian wine industry’s problems. Several bottles from the 1983 vintage turned out to have been adulterated with DEG – diethylene glycol – a toxic industrial chemical sometimes used in antifreeze.

DEG is sweet and glycerous. The unscrupulous producers had added it to their wines to give the illusion that they were dessert wines made from grapes shrivelled by ‘noble rot’, a much more lucrative style – especially in Germany, Austria’s main export market, where many more adulterated bottles were discovered.

The effects of the scandal were so calamitous that Austria even had trouble getting rid of the tens of millions of litres of tainted wine with which global opprobrium had left it. Some of it was mixed with salt to treat roads in winter, a job at which it was – unsurprisingly – very effective. Austria moved quickly to clean up its act, with stringent new laws enacted in time for the 1985 harvest, but regaining an international reputation took more than a decade.

Forty years on, Austrian winemakers are thriving again. The popularity of Grüner Veltliner has helped hugely.

It has opened the door for other varietals, including reds, in particular Zweigelt (sometimes called Blauer Zweigelt), the best examples of which have rich, brambly fruit and the ability to age. St Laurent is a Pinot Noir-ish variety, capable of producing silky, seductive wines. Try Waitrose Cellar’s cherry-ripe Rabl Titan Zweigelt 2019 (£17.99) or their delicately perfumed Heinrich Hartl St Laurent (£14.49).

Specialist Austrian wine merchants include Soma Wines (somawines.co.uk) and Kipferl (kipferl.co.uk), while the Wine Society lists 30-ish Austrian wines, including a clutch of good reds and – for deep-pocketed connoisseurs – a trio of the superb, single-vineyard Grüner Veltliners. Made by Grabenwerkstatt (£57 a bottle), from low-yielding old vines, they're as complex and well-made as top white Burgundy, and built to last.

For a more affordable, if less rarefied, taste of Austria this Christmas, the Wine Society also offers a fridge-friendly 2.25-litre (three-bottle) bag-in-box version of their own-label Grüner Veltliner (£27). Lively and pear-scented, with bright citrus fruit and a sprinkling of white pepper, it has the twin virtues of value and quality, as well as being as clean and pure as an Alpine stream.

It might even help you through yet another re-run of The Sound of Music.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a premium 12-bottle case designed to perk up your Christmas: two bottles of a lovely fizz from Limoux, four bottles of a delicious, complex Chardonnay, also from la France profonde, and three bottles each of a splendidly fruity Rioja, and a claret fit to grace any festive table. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

‘Grande Cuvée 1531’, Sieur d’Arques, AOC Crémant de Limoux NV, offer price £15.99, case price £191.88 Lively, apple-scented fizz with a toasty creaminess on the palate: a perfect seasonal apéritif.

Morillon Blanc, Jeff Carrel, Vin de France 2022, offer price £15.49, case price £185.88 Rich, Burgundian-style Chardonnay made from botrytised fruit. Splendid on its own, or with a roast bird.

Rioja Alavesa Crianza, Luis Cañas, Spain 2019, offer price £17.50, case price £210.00 Classic crianza Rioja offering bags of ripe, red fruit, mellow tannins and a long, savoury finish.

Château Bonneau, Montagne Saint-Émilion, Bordeaux 2019, offer price £21.99, case price £263.88 Classy, beautifully-made claret: silky Merlot with a splash of peppery Cabernet Franc. One for the Christmas decanter.

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The Oldie December 2023 81

SPORT JIM WHITE NOT SO GRAND NATIONAL Several months ahead of the event, the organisers of the Grand National announced that, from next April, there will be significant alteration in the way the greatest of all horse races is run. This is the beginning of the end, isn’t it?

Altogether, eight changes have been made to the rules, all designed to reduce the catalogue of equine destruction. The number of entrants has been reduced from 40 to 34, in a bid to alleviate the serious bunching over the jumps. The first fence has been brought 60 yards closer to the start. That prevents horses from building up the over-excited head of steam that saw Hill Sixteen break his neck at this year’s race in a pile-up at that very first obstacle.

For those of us who love the National, who go to Aintree every year to wallow in its Scouse-on-the-loose party atmosphere, who relish the thoroughbreds pounding round the country’s most demanding course with such grace and power, the news provokes an oddly mixed reaction.

This is a race designed to challenge; this is the toughest, most demanding event of its kind. Risk is its very purpose; peril is at its heart. If we are honest, that is why we love it, for the vicarious thrill of being close to intense and obvious danger.

It is the heavyweight championship of horse-racing: the winning jockey and their horse are not only the finest steeplechasers of the year, but the bravest, smartest and most resilient. To soften that makes the National less distinct and meaningful.

But here is the moral dilemma. Only the stone-hearted could argue that the hazards had no need to be corralled, that the race could carry on as it was, with carnage stitched into its very fabric.

Over the years, our attitude to animals has softened: the welfare of the industry’s principal assets has to be upgraded. Too often the Aintree screens were pulled across the turf as vets attended to a beautiful animal’s final moments. Too many horses were dying (there were four fatalities at this year’s meeting). Racing people love their thoroughbreds, almost always treating them with immense respect and dignity.

Ultimately a compromise had to be made.

But this is the irony. Even though the changes will unquestionably diminish the meaning of their event, it won’t be enough to appease those who want the race done away with entirely. The anti-racing lobby were there last April – not many of them, but enough to make a noisy statement of intent. And they will be back next April.

82 The Oldie December 2023

They are not interested in improvement. They seek the National’s abolition. Never mind that this is an occasion employing thousands and worth millions to the Liverpool economy. For them, the only way to ensure no horses die is to stop horses competing at all.

And the truth we race-goers struggle to acknowledge is that they are right – that is the only way to do it. Tinkering around the edges, as these official changes do, might well reduce the toll, but it will not eliminate it. Horses will still be at risk.

More and more people, even those who enjoy a flutter on the National, are coming round to that way of thinking.

They may not demonstrate, shout and bawl, but increasingly they agree something should be done.

That is ultimately what those of us who cherish this sport have to face up to: whatever the cosmetic changes, the abolitionists are winning that argument.

How much longer we race-lovers are prepared to allow our fun to override our conscience will determine how much longer the National will continue. I suspect that means its end is nigh.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD TAXING CHOICES The Treasury has a problem: how to replace shrinking road taxes in the age of ZEVs (Zero Emission Vehicles). Left unattended, it would blow a significant hole in government finances.

We pay about 52.95p in tax on every litre of fuel, netting the Treasury about £24.3 billion. With increased use of electronic vehicles (EVs), that figure will be in freefall – especially once the ZEV mandate kicks in next year, whereby manufacturers have to produce an annually increasing percentage of EVs, rising to 80 per cent by 2030.

Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) receipts at present net about another £11 billion on top of the fuel tax. EVs pay no VED but from April 2025 they will, though no one knows how much.

There are various proposals to make up for this shortfall. The Treasury remains tight-lipped, though they say they are ‘making sure that motoring tax revenues keep pace with the switch to electric vehicles, whilst keeping it affordable for consumers’.

They have ‘no plans’ to introduce road-pricing. Having no current plans does not, of course, rule out future plans.

Road-pricing is one of the favoured alternatives, recently recommended by

the House of Commons Transport Committee and not ruled out by the benighted 20mph Government of Wales.

Proponents argue that pay-by-use is fair and reasonable. They cite RAC research that found general support for the principle that the more you drive, the more you pay (which already happens with fuel duty, of course).

One version of road-pricing would be that the roads themselves are priced, ie you pay more to use busy roads, or to use certain roads at busy times. This would presumably involve extending ULEZ across the entire national road network, an expensive option unlikely to provoke national rejoicing.

A more detailed and perhaps more likely proposal is suggested by the Centre for Policy Studies. ZEVs would be charged a mileage rate, which would still amount to less than petrol- and diesel-drivers currently pay in fuel duty. Everyone would be allocated a number of ‘free’ miles a year, with more for those living in remote areas. As the number of ZEVs grows, this tax take would replace VED and fuel duty. So far, so good – ­ in theory.

But how do you acquire mileage data?

Proposals range from making it part of the MOT, to having a device fitted in your car that monitors and transmits your mileage, to GPS tracking. But the MOT version would be retrospective and difficult to collect (and would miss vehicles not subject to it). And tracking devices would provoke civil libertarians and be vulnerable to electronic manipulation by computer nerds. Not to mention that such a complex nationwide system could be brought down or hacked into by enterprising criminals or hostile states.

Simplicity is a forgotten virtue in taxation. Remember when the VED rate was the same for all cars? Then the Government varied rates according to emissions, to persuade us into lesspolluting cars. It led to anomalies, made only a marginal difference to buying decisions and may have lowered the overall tax take.

Well, my proposal to the Treasury is to tax ownership, not use. They should return to a standard VED across all cars – EV and other – set at a rate that replaces (without increasing) the current tax take, including fuel duty.

If they wanted to persecute the diminishing number of non-EV drivers, as they probably would, they could continue levying a portion of fuel duty.

And so no intrusive surveillance, no expensive and complex monitoring networks, simple to collect and easily understood. But too simple, I fear.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Best-kept secret on the internet In October, the slightly improbably named Vinton Cerf spelt out some internet-related home truths when he spoke at the Royal Society.

Mr Cerf is one of the creators of the worldwide web, being part of the team who invented the way computers talk to one another. He is widely considered one of the sanest – and is certainly one of the most senior (he’s 80) – observers.

He’s worth listening to. He was there at the start.

His talk oozed common sense but must also have been, for a pioneer of the

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

www.parkers.co.uk Second-hand-car prices, reviews and good advice about buying them.

Most of the site is free. www.english-heritage.org.uk/ christmas/the-history-of-christmas/ Excellent potted history of Christmas and the midwinter solstice, going back 5,000 years.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie. co.uk

web, a rather disappointing statement of the obvious.

His main point was that the ability of any of us to publish anything we want online has had the effect of polluting cyberspace with rubbish, some of it pernicious and much of it just wrong.

What’s worse, the quantity of rubbish being pumped out is increasing all the time and the proportion of rubbish to non-rubbish is growing.

He went further: he feels that artificial intelligence (AI) is not helping, for the moment. I agree; AI’s strength is that it can read and digest an astonishing amount of data in the blink of an eye and write you a précis. So far, so good, but what is it reading? Mostly rubbish, that’s what, and one of the oldest computer aphorisms is ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out.’

It wasn’t meant to be like this, which is why Mr Cerf has reason to be disappointed. He and the other early supporters of the web were seeking to connect the world and allow the sharing of information. The dream was that everyone should be able to reach everyone else and pool their knowledge, at little or no cost. This is the purist academic approach. All knowledge should be available to all – that way, the sum of human learning will increase.

Of course, this reckons without human nature, which stepped in and ensured that the biggest users of the internet in its early days (and, to some extent, now) were those seeking

pornography and gambling. It has also become an astonishing repository for urban myths, egregious rhetoric and worse. It’s all a bit grim.

But be of good cheer; all is not lost.

The surest way to be confident about the quality of any information is, as it always was, to be satisfied by its provenance.

When I was a boy, I was regularly sent to the Encyclopaedia Britannica to check a fact, or to the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Whitaker’s Almanack, Wisden or any other respectable publication with a reputation to lose.

If a fact appeared in one of those books, or others like them, you could trust it – but you had to put in a bit of effort. The trouble nowadays is that it is too easy to ask Google a question and receive a convincing answer.

Google uses use AI, of course, and so for the time being you should always try to establish where it found the data.

What you’re guided to may well be correct – it usually is – but it has never been more important to apply a little critical thinking.

If you want to seek out impeccable sources, investigate the online resources of your local library, much of which you can access from home for free.

These vary from county to county, but usually include the Britannica, Oxford English Dictionary, DNB and many more, and are one of the best-kept secrets on the internet.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Goodbye, dear readers, and take care I have been writing about finance for 45 years – and am reminding myself how much has changed in that time.

When I began in 1978, credit cards and cash machines had arrived only a decade before. Until 1971, just before decimalisation, you paid two old pennies in stamp duty on every cheque you wrote, and banks stopped business at 3pm.

Bank managers really knew their customers – and vice versa.

In the 1970s, only building societies 84 The Oldie December 2023

sold home loans (banks entered the market in the early 1980s). They all charged the same rate. Rarely was a single woman granted a loan. Mortgage rates touched 17 per cent in 1979 – but there was at least tax relief on the interest you paid, abolished in 2000.

The first financial ombudsman, just for insurers, was appointed in 1981.

Debit cards weren’t invented until 1987, and married women’s income was taxed as their husbands’ until 1990.

People bought their homes with endowment mortgages, which were widely mis-sold and, with falling stock markets in the 1980s, failed to produce enough money to pay off the loans.

When personal pensions were created in 1988, scammers persuaded workers to swap their generous final-salary schemes for risky private pensions. The sharks swooped again in 2015 when pension freedom let us cash in our pensions early.

Mis-selling was rife and was not

attacked by the now defunct Financial Services Authority. What fuels mis-selling is the commission paid to whoever sells you the product. Payment protection insurance (PPI) policies eventually cost banks £50 billion in compensation payments, because they had so many exclusions that they would rarely pay out.

In 2013, financial advisers were banned from earning commission on selling pensions and investments, though intermediaries can still take commission on mortgages, equity release and general insurance products.

The scandals led to better consumer protection. More products and services are being regulated, such as payday lending, claims-management companies and funeral-plan providers, whose customers now have access to an ombudsman and redress.

'He's buffering'

Today, change is happening faster than ever. Anyone not using a smartphone can be left behind – even ignored – by companies who are seduced by the efficiency of operating online.

We have artificial intelligence (AI) taking us into the unknown. It’s already being used for marketing, to calculate insurance premiums and assess claims, to evaluate credit applications, to detect fraud and to recommend investments.

You experience it when you talk to financial institutions through a chatbot or a voice-recognition phone call.

Before long, AI conversations will sound no different from talking to a member of staff.

If there is a way to make money, fairly or fraudulently, somebody will. Any new legislation or product gives thieves an opportunity to attack, and more than £1 billion a year – nearly £2,000 a minute – is lost to fraud in the UK alone.

All of this makes people nervous about their financial dealings, and sadly you need to be. The onus is on each of us to be careful about whom we deal with and what we buy.

This is my 200th and last Money Matters column. Over the past 15 years, I fear I have been lecturing and frightening you each month. I hope some of it has helped.

Join Bill Knott in the

Aeolian Islands, off Northern Sicily

PANTHER MEDIA GMBH / ALAMY

28th September to 5th October 2024 Bill and Tania Knott invite you to join them for a relaxing week-long trip to the wild and stunningly beautiful Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily. They are deploying the same itinerary they used earlier this year.

We have exclusive use of the delightful Principe di Salina hotel (https:// principedisalina.it) on Salina. We have chartered the Lady Salina with which we will explore the archipelago’s breathtaking scenery, charming fishing villages and superb cuisine, indulging in the finest local food and drink. Breakfast and dinner will be served on the hotel’s terrace, prepared by Silvana, the owner.

We will encounter all seven of the major islands: each has a unique character, from the fiery heights of Stromboli to tiny, peaceful, remote Alicudi, with its fishing boats and terraced hillsides. We will be based on Salina, at the centre of the archipelago, with unbeatable views of Stromboli, smoke drifting permanently from the crater at its peak.

You really could not enjoy these wonderful islands with greater ease and in greater style. Full itinerary and description of the hotel at www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours

Tuesday 1st October – Stromboli evening

Lipari and the Lady Salina

Saturday 28th September – arrival at Salina Arriving at Catania Airport around noon, we transfer by private coach to Milazzo and board the hydrofoil to Salina. Transfer to our hotel.

Sunday 29th September – Alicudi and Filicudi

A morning at leisure, followed by lunch at Giuseppe Mascoli’s house. Later, we board the Lady Salina and head towards Stromboli, Come andfor discover the Danish delight hoping spectacular volcanic fireworks. that is ‘Wonderful, wonderful Wednesdaywith 2ndbon October a relaxing day Copenhagen', vivant–Soren A day on dry land; we leave theto hotel Tholstrup, the ultimate guide his midmorning forThe a gastronomic tourkeen of Salina. homeland.

Oldie is always Wehave visit real the village Pollara, made famous to insiderofknowledge, and in the film Light lunchbyin Malfa.

Soren, whoIlisPostino. a wine merchant day, knows all the good restaurants

Thursday 3rd October – shopping in Lipari Time for some retail therapy. Or just relax with an aperitivo in a café by the pretty harbour before lunch at Osteria San Bartolo.

Friday 4th October – Lunch at Leni, Salina

We travel on the Lady Salina to Alicudi, stopping for a swim (optional!) by Filicudi en route. Lunch on a charming terrace a few steps up from Alicudi’s tiny harbour. Free afternoon.

Free morning; lunch in nearby Leni, on the terrace of local food-and-wine hero Salvatore d’Amico, scene of James Pembroke’s best-ever lunch, as covered in The Oldie.

Monday 30th September – Lipari

Saturday 5th October – return home

We set sail for Lipari, home to a superb archaeological museum. After our guided tour, we sail to the south coast of Vulcano for lunch at the lovely Trattoria da Pina.

Up at dawn for breakfast, then by minibuses to Santa Marina to catch the early hydrofoil back to Milazzo, where our private coach will be waiting to whisk us to Catania Airport.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £3,250 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £400.

A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st July 2024.

The Oldie December 2023 85

The Short-eared Owl by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) has a great advantage for birdwatchers. It’s a daylight hunter and not as nocturnal as the majority of owls.

Its ears are concealed as normal at the sides of its head. The tufts – more visible in its forest-dwelling cousin, the longeared owl – are for display.

Winter, on east-coast marshes and wetland nature reserves, is the most likely time to see these birds. This happened on a visit with Carry Akroyd (this column’s illustrator) to the Welney WWT reserve, east of Peterborough.

Near the entrance, there was a dyke along which a short-eared owl was gradually approaching, from convenient perch to perch, to within 30 yards or so.

It silently passed and was later viewable high overhead. It was mobbing or being mobbed – a bit of both, it seemed – by two equally adept and graceful buzzards.

I had never seen an owl at such a height.

There are up to 2,200 resident pairs in Britain which, from October on, are joined by a larger winter migration from Europe.

The first full moon of November is called the ‘woodcock moon’ to announce the conspicuous ‘falls’ of woodcock from the Continent. It explains the shorteared’s traditional name of ‘woodcock owl’. Its migration is in full flood

by November.

A folk tale has it that the goldcrest hitches the ride across the North Sea on the short-eared’s back. In 2022, a WUR transmitter revealed a goldcrest taking under eight hours to fly – albeit with a following wind – the 200 miles from Vlieland in Holland to Spurn in Yorkshire.

All birds hitch lifts on vessels in sea crossings. Short-eareds are no exception.

And, like other carnivores, they will make a meal of smaller avian travellers.

The short-eared’s principal food (80 per cent) is the field vole.

Wanderings are dictated by food abundance. This nomad tendency

accounts for the lack of a figure for its winter population – a reckoning further complicated by some residents’ winter migration to southern Europe.

The resident population is largely confined to northern England and Scotland. There the nest is on rough ground, especially moors, and also in young conifer plantations under 12 years of growth.

The short-eared is a ground-nester, laying up to five eggs in a scrape at the heart of a tussock. Several birds can sometimes nest in relative proximity, yet invisibly – because of their blending plumage. They even close their eyes, preventing a glimpse of the beaming yellow iris (the flammeus – ‘blazing’ – in the

bird’s name refers to the sun-glinting flight feathers).

The resident population tends to move south in winter, joining the European migration which spreads down the east coast from Fife to Kent. Wetlands and marshes are particularly favoured. Their diet of birds is boosted in winter, perhaps because of reed-roosting songbirds.

Travelling south by train on a later winter journey, I glanced out of the window when travelling past the Great Fen south of Peterborough.

There, gliding purposefully along a dyke, was a short-eared. ‘I know you!’

I thought.

The 2024 Oldie Bird of the Month calendar is available now: carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie December 2023 87

Travel On the road with John Lavery At a new show in Dublin, Harry Mount tracks the Belfast-born painter from Ireland to Palm Springs via Tangier

Above: Phil the Fluter (1924), Kerry.

Right: St Patrick’s Purgatory (1929), Station Island, Lough Derg, Donegal

S

ir John Lavery (1856-1941) is best known for a banknote.

From 1928 until 2002, his second wife, Hazel, appeared on Irish notes. The formidable, bewitching Hazel appears, too (pictured, above right, in red and gold), in the new Lavery show at Ireland’s National Gallery. She is said to have had an affair with Michael Collins, the Irish hero (pictured, right).

Lavery was well-known in his lifetime

88 The Oldie December 2023

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND EXCEPT ‘LOVE OF IRELAND’

COLLECTION & IMAGE © HUGH LANE GALLERY (REG.744)

Above left: Sunbathers (1936), Palm Springs. Above right: Hazel in Red and Gold (1918). Below right: An Irish Girl (1890) – Kathleen, Lavery’s first wife, in the year before she died. Bottom right: Michael Collins, Love of Ireland (1922)

as a society portrait-painter in Ireland and London. The Dublin show reveals his lust for travel, and not just among the great and the good. In Kerry, in 1924, he painted a local man, whom he dubbed Phil the Fluter, after a popular folk song

by Percy French, Phil the Fluter’s Ball, about a lively group off to enjoy a ball.

In 1929, Lavery went to Station Island, Lough Derg, in Donegal, for the National Pilgrimage of Ireland (pictured, left).

Lavery in fact finished the picture in Cannes, where, you might say, the light is different from that in north-west Ireland.

Lavery loved the southern light and had a house in Tangier. The light is even brighter in Palm Springs, where in 1936 he painted Sunbathers (pictured, above).

He was 80 at the time – and all was not sweetness and light. Hazel Lavery had died the year before, aged 54. His first wife, Kathleen MacDermott, a flowerseller, had died in 1891 of TB, in her early 30s, six months after Eileen, their daughter, Lavery’s only child, was born.

Poor, doomed Kathleen appears in the show (above left) as An Irish Girl.

Lavery on Location, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until 14th January 2024 Harry Mount stayed at the Wilder Townhouse, Dublin (www.thewilder.ie) The Oldie December 2023 89

Overlooked Britain

JFK’s American home – in Surrey lucinda lambton

On the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, how moving to visit his memorial at Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed

Here is a humdinger of a subject, one that goes to the very core of our culture and our country.

Runnymede is named after the water meadow alongside the River Thames in Surrey. Only 20 miles from central London, it’s famed for its association with the Magna Carta – what is considered to be our first democratic step.

A stone’s throw from Windsor Castle – and Slough – its immediate landscape is characterised somewhat picturesquely as ‘Thames Basin Lowland’: a gently undulating vale of small fields, interspersed with woods, ponds, meadows and heath.

What a pleasure it is to relish from start to finish, including the far-distant view of docklands from the stirring 90 The Oldie December 2023

glories of the Air Forces Memorial. The sadly splendid architectural arrangement was designed by Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe in 1953.

Many are the architectural triumphs in and around this area, mostly designed

by Maufe, who was also responsible for the glories of Guildford Cathedral.

Sir Edwin Lutyens was a prominent contributor, designing the two octagonal kiosks and piers somewhat oddly built bang on the A308.

High – so high that you feel it is in the sky – is the Air Forces Memorial, with this stirring inscription: ‘This memorial has been built in proud memory of the men and women of the Air Forces of the British Commonwealth and Empire who lost their lives serving from bases in the United Kingdom and North West Europe in the Second World War, and who have no known graves.

‘They were part of a glorious and far

CHRONICLE / ALAMY; ERIC JAMES / ALAMY

The John F Kennedy Memorial – on Surrey soil given to America by the British. Below: King John signs Magna Carta, 1215

M p

COLIN WALTON / ALAMY; PETER LANE / ALAMY; JULIA GAVIN / ALAMY

larger company who laid down their lives for freedom; and this monument is one of many others, built, wherever the battle raged, so that they may not be forgotten. 20,455 names are recorded on these stones; and all races and countries of the British Commonwealth have here their representatives.

‘It is very fitting that those who rest in nameless graves should be remembered in this place. For it was in those fields of Runnymede seven centuries ago that our forefathers first planted a seed of liberty, which helped to spread across the earth the conviction that men should be free and not enslaved.

‘And when the life of this belief was threatened by the iron hand of tyranny [in the Second World War], their successors came forward without hesitation to fight and, if it was demanded of them, to die for its salvation.’

They have no known grave and are buried here – and very beautifully buried they are too.

Row upon row of exquisitely-cut stone with the thousands of names make the finest sight for sore eyes. Sometimes there is the photograph of a uniformed smiler in uniform. Here is Sgt Seymour

Above left: Memorial kiosk by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Above: The Magna Carta Memorial designed by Edward Maufe, erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association

Clare, 65203 RAF who was number one, number 120 Squadron RAF – ‘Missing from August 12 1942. Never Known, Forever Loved, Peter xx.’

Sergeant Vivian Walters, Pathfinder, was photographed grinning from ear to ear. He was ‘Killed in Action’ on 8th April 1943.

With these beautiful surroundings, I should say that there is no finer war memorial in the land.

Sixty years after the assassination of JFK on November 22nd 1963, how moving it was to visit the John F Kennedy Memorial – officially in America! The Queen announced this sensational state of affairs when she opened it in on 14th May 1965, with these uplifting words:

The Air Forces Memorial to 20,455 men and women killed in the Second World War

‘This acre of English soil is now bequeathed in perpetuity to the American people in memory of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy who in death my people still mourn and who in life they loved and admired.’

Leaving the main Windsor road, you step forth up a long, pebbled-in granite path which guides you through richly planted woods up 50 great steps – one for every American state – to reach a fine, seven-ton Portland stone memorial, standing bold, proud and true on its own.

It is inscribed with Kennedy’s renowned words ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.’

It was all designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe, who drew his inspiration from John Bunyan’s allegory of life, The Pilgrim’s Progress. He decreed that a multitude of pebbles should symbolise all the people who will walk along it and through the ‘wild woods of life’. Once you have reached it, on high, the memorial tablet itself is a most handsome beauty.

What sad joy! What a grim pleasure!

What dignity, what sheer beauty!

By driving high above the Runnymede landscape, which includes Slough and Staines, you come upon as fine an architectural assembly commemorating death as you are ever likely to find anywhere in the British Isles.

The Oldie December 2023 91

On the Road

Growing up with the Globe Zoë Wanamaker’s father devoted his life – and his life savings – to recreating Shakespeare’s theatre, she tells Louise Flind Is there something you really miss abroad?

I miss banter, irony, rudeness and English humour.

Do you travel light?

No, I’m a terrible packer. I didn’t have a uniform at school and I would take things I might change into. Gawn [her husband] is very good at ‘Which shoes should I wear with this? Do I look fat in this?’

What’s your favourite destination?

Our cottage in Wiltshire.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Hayling Island and eating apples till I was sick. The first holiday abroad was to the South of France, but Dad [Sam Wanamaker] had to go back to Liverpool because an actor had been in a car accident. He’d opened a theatre there.

We were in Mougins and I learnt to speak French.

Was it always your ambition to become an actress?

I think so. I didn’t think it was going to be as difficult as it is. My parents didn’t want me to do it at all. I went to art school but discovered that’s a very lonely business.

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

Did you fall in love with your dad’s friends?

We saw a lot of blacklisted people who were living in London. [Sam Wanamaker was blacklisted in Hollywood.] I just fell in love with the smell of backstage.

When Dad first worked at Stratford, they rented a cottage and Paul Robeson used to drop by. And next door were Roy Dotrice, Ian Holm, David Swift – it was very romantic.

What was it like with both your parents being actors?

Mum didn’t really work very much here.

She was a big radio star in America, before the blacklisting. She was the one who tried to control us, and Dad was going away all the time, once he got his passport back.

Did you get to meet all the Hollywood stars?

A couple of them – Yul Brynner, the people he’d worked with.

They weren’t great social animals; he was working and I don’t think Mum was comfortable doing canapés.

How come your dad instigated the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre?

He couldn’t understand why something wasn’t there. It took him 27 years. He would cash in his first-class ticket if he was doing a movie and go steerage with his model of the Globe and the plans, trying to get money.

Was it hard to live with him?

For my mum, it was very hard. They sold the house in Highgate because Dad wanted to be in Southwark. Mum had to forget the double-door fridge freezer and cooked on a Baby Belling.

Are you still involved with the Globe?

I’m an honorary president.

How close is the Globe to the real thing?

I have no idea.

Weren’t you the first person to speak on the Globe stage?

Officially, officially… Mark Rylance was starring in Henry V. I was allowed to do the chorus speech when the Queen went.

Dad would have been so happy.

How do you feel going there now?

I feel it was such an effort to get this up.

Do you prefer the stage to television and film?

Theatre work is much harder. You need a lot of stamina and also it’s relentless. But then film, television – you get no time to rehearse, and that’s why I never watch myself, because I can’t change it.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve ever filmed in?

The British Council tour in 1972 – taking The Birthday Party, Henry IV and Henry V – the first stop was Bangkok, then Kinabalu, Manila…

And the least exotic?

Basingstoke – we opened The Birthday Party there, with Harold Pinter in it.

Are there classical roles that you’re still longing to play?

I would have loved to play Juliet – or Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

When you were in rep touring, where did you stay?

I did a play in Dublin called Ah Well, It Won’t Be Long Now, and the digs were wonderful just because Mrs O’Shea was such a gas. Then you got digs with nylon horrible sheets – and one place in Manchester, there was no toilet roll, just newspaper, for four days.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Dad brought back a tin of chocolatecovered ants.

Do you have a go at the local language?

The only French I know is from when I was a kid. And in Italian I’ve got ‘Thank you’, ‘Excuse me’ – and swearing.

What’s your biggest headache?

The rules.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept?

In England, with one of those showers that just pee at you from all directions.

Do you have any travelling tips?

Try not to be intimidated by officious bastards. And, also, keep your sense of humour.

The Oldie December 2023 93

Taking a Walk

I take my hat off to Wigtown

GARY WING

patrick barkham

A sense of foreboding gripped Wigtown as I strolled into its generous market square.

The wind was tearing at the fabric of this pretty stone town on a hilltop, overlooking the snaking estuaries of the Solway Firth. Then the rain began, great sheets of it, flash-flooding the pavements and racing down the hill for the swirling brown River Bladnoch below. I was soaked in seconds.

A twilight without end took hold, a sinister stormy gauze with a jaundiced yellow horizon. Sodden performance poets, American tourists and other visitors to this far corner of Galloway hunkered down in the cosy bar which had popped up in someone’s living room for the duration of the town’s book festival.

By the following day, we had ridden out the storm: the poet could perform, the tourists could visit the arty-crafty shops and I could take a walk.

I followed the road down the hill towards the harbour. The land was soft and quiet, the world waking up, stretching, wondering what Storm Agnes had done. Charms of goldfinches flocked over blood-red haws. Rooks cawed in a sycamore which had shed half its leaves overnight. Winter comes quickly here.

I passed the grand ‘old prison house’ with its Gothic Victorian chimneys and grey pebbledash bungalows the colour of the estuary beyond. The sun looked like the moon behind a veil of grey cloud.

All was tranquil on the grazing marshes, where Belted Galloways and sheep kept their heads down. The Bladnoch was quiescent again, pushed by its current and pulled by the tide.

Beyond the harbour and the site of the castle – destroyed centuries ago, probably by the Scots to prevent English forces from returning across the firth – were more green grazing marshes and then ripples of copper and grey: the mud, sea and sky meeting in an uncertain place on the far bright horizon.

Wigtown Bay is the largest local nature reserve in Britain, and there was a lot of space and peace here. The sweep of

the marshes with grey-green hills beyond was magnificent.

Turning past the cavernous bird hide, I followed a grazing marsh back towards the town, dancing between channels of water. Six little egrets, beaks like needles, rose from the next channel.

I saw nothing sinister about the rising of the tide, which eddied and swirled its way up brown creeks, until I spied the stone stake, a short distance off on the marshes, that commemorated the Wigtown martyrs.

In 1685, Margaret McLachlan, aged 63, was tied to a stake on what was then a muddy channel. As the tide rose, drowning her, the Scottish Episcopalians hoped it would change the mind of the younger woman, Margaret Wilson, 18, who was staked beside her.

Both women were among many devout members of the Presbyterian kirk who would acknowledge only Jesus as the head of their church, resisting the Episcopalians who made the Stuart kings the head of the church. The ‘killing times’ were 50 years of fines, tortures, executions.

The younger Margaret wouldn’t yield in her faith either, and she too was drowned.

The footpath on the old railway bore the sour tang of fallen sycamore leaves, and I then climbed the hill back into Wigtown, past pretty single-storey stone cottages and the church.

All over this friendly town, front doors were open and people joined the sparrows out and about, chatting about Storm Agnes, fallen trees, this and that.

My walk had a surreal end when this tranquillity was shattered by sirens. More doors flew open. Fire engines, ambulances, police cars raced around, as did curious small boys on scooters. There was a small house fire in the neighbourhood.

Storms, fires, turbulent history; somehow, whatever form the global apocalypse takes, this solid stone town seems well equipped to meet it with equanimity.

Follow signs to the harbour from the town square, turn left to the bird hide and left again across the marshes to join the old railway line back into town The Oldie December 2023 95

Genius crossword 433 TESSA CASTRO Down 1 Flashy party crossing river (5) 2 Control missing leader’s copy (9) 3 Left, as upset about dismissive lies (5,5) 4 Strain on the toilet at sea?

Fool (7) 5 A person’s demand for alimony, say (7) 6 Source of Chardonnay - a very American wine (4) 7 The risk for every single pound (5) 8 Person with letters to his name? (9) 13 Where children may be taught there’s homework on train (4,6) 14 Printer needing fizz on plane? (9) 16 Draw from sun’s heat here (9) 18 Imagine drink with model! (7) 19 Finished up accepting fiction – outstanding work (7) 21 Strains to make cuts in case of teachers (5) 23 A position under king?

Ruined (5) 24 Comfortable feeling sick? No question (4)

Across 1 Bag short suit (9) 6 Application rejected by copper - it’s the drink! (5) 9 Excuse from politician sitting in first-class (5) 10 Got better as adored keeping company (9) 11 Lead, say in hard rock (5,5) 12 Fill up, oddly, in front of village’s last outlet (4) 14 Pirate equipment stored by musicians (7) 15 Brands communist on air (7) 17 Food for the fifth of November? (7) 19 Sharp reply from priest worried about love (7) 20 In arrears, and others must be put back (4) 22 Aid for writer putting limit on session (10) 25 Judge united expats squabbling about love’s place by side (9) 26 Where to find hot or cold, readily available? (2,3) 27 Attractive volunteers remain without answer (5) 28 Rambling on – tell me I must be soothing! (9)

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How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 13th December 2023.

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.

Genius 431 solution

Moron crossword 433 1

7

Across 7 Bread spread (6) 8 Hillocks, mounds (6) 10 Account for, justify (7) 11 Jewelled headdress (5) 12 Trade in; exchange (4) 13 Andean beast of burden (5) 17 Confuse (issue); sweet (5) 18 So be it! (4) 22 Bags; fires (5) 23 Maintains (values of) (7) 24 DNA row (anag) (6) 25 Arctic plain (6)

Down 1 The head of a coin (7) 2 To draw using dots (7) 3 Take it easy (5) 4 Branch of medical science (7) 5 Desolate; offering no hope (5) 6 Try (5) 9 Sauna logo (anag) (9) 14 Student grant (7) 15 Burst inward (7) 16 Rare (7) 19 Berkshire racecourse (5) 20 Frown with displeasure (5) 21 Evil spirit (5)

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Winner: Paul Appelbe, Altrincham, Cheshire Runners-up: Rev Ken Bradley, Marlow, Buckinghamshire; Mrs Lindsay Pine, Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

Moron 431 answers: Across: 1 Carry, 4 Catcher (caricature), 8 Mad, 9 Use, 10 Argon, 11 Along, 12 Tremble, 15 Ease, 17 Toward, 19 Assert, 22 Dart, 24 Useless, 26 Ashen, 28 Usher, 30 End, 31 Nag, 32 Antwerp, 33 Yeast. Down: 1 Compact, 2 Rodeo, 3 Younger, 4 Cheats, 5 Trade, 6 Hog, 7 Range, 13 Rear, 14 Bee, 16 Adds, 18 Woe, 20 Stand by, 21 Tonight, 23 Asleep, 24 Uvula, 25 Eyrie, 27 Henna, 29 Hit. The Oldie December 2023 97

Competition TESSA CASTRO You hit a great drive down the edge of the fairway, but it takes a bad bounce into the heavy rough and your lie is near unplayable. What bad fortune. But there’s no point in ruing the unfairness of it all.

Hack the ball back onto the fairway and try to salvage your par with an accurate iron onto the green and follow with a one-putt.

That’s the golfing equivalent of what declarer faced on today’s deal from the English Premier League Division Three.

No one succeeded. As Paul Gipson of Scotland quipped modestly, ‘That’s why we’re in Division Three.’

Dealer East North-South Vulnerable

West ♠ 6 ♥ K Q J 10 7 ♦ 10 9 8 7 6 ♣ 87

North ♠ A 10 7 5 3 ♥ A643 ♦ AK5 ♣4 South ♠ KQJ82 ♥ 9852 ♦ 3 ♣ K95

East ♠ 94 ♥♦ QJ42 ♣ A Q J 10 6 3 2

I number you among my dearest friends.

How should I sum you up?

The bidding South

West

North

IN COMPETITION No 299 you were invited to write a poem called My Prime. Rob McMahon found it hard to unsubscribe to Amazon Prime: ‘Infected now like some unwelcome affliction / I cannot escape this new monthly subscription,’ and Hugh Cartwright told a tale of prime beef. Basil Ransome-Davies’s narrator’s life ‘went straight from naïf to decadent’.

Christine Acres ran through prime years in her life: 23, 37, 43, 59, 61, 67, 73, while D A Prince reflected, ‘I was not one for whom the numbers danced.’ John Walsh remained optimistically mathematical: ‘Next year there’s a tiny hope / That life may be less starchy, / For that’s when I reach 89, / A prime and Fibonacci.’

Commiserations to them and to Frank McDonald, Mike Morrison and Jeremy Morris, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Con Connell.

East 3 ♣ (1) Pass

Pass Pass Double 4 ♠ (2) end 1. Very strong for a pre-empt. I’d have opened One Club. 2. Jumping with a good nine-count, as Three Spades could be bid with nothing.

West leads the king of hearts and you are preparing to claim your game. Assuming the ace of hearts lives, you can draw trumps, cash the ace-king of diamonds dumping a heart, and merely concede two hearts and a club. However, when you play dummy’s ace of hearts, East rudely ruffs. East exits with the queen of diamonds and it appears you are sunk.

Call for your inner Harry Houdini. Win the diamond, draw trumps (only one round required) and lead dummy’s club. East wins the ace and continues with the queen.

Win the king, discarding a heart, cross to a spade and eliminate diamonds by cashing the remaining top card, discarding a heart and ruffing the low diamond.

The scene is set. Lead your remaining nine of clubs (West discarding) and … drum roll … discard dummy’s penultimate heart (key play). This loser-on-loser play endplays East. On winning the club, he has only minor-suit cards to lead. You ruff in your hand while away goes dummy’s final heart – ten tricks made.

ANDREW ROBSON

Yours were the fingers that I counted on When hand stretched out to hand in those dark days When nothing added up.

By carrying on (would one not know it?)

With Byron, the romantic poet.

But there we are! Men are not wise In love or war, so I surmise.

Prime Ministers will come and go; Lord Melbourne’s been my favourite, though.

G M Southgate Don’t take me yet; my old age is my prime.

I am still an unhatched egg, a blood speck In the wash of gold and white Inside the fragile speckled shell.

I haven’t completed the book of my soul; There are many blank pages, waiting for new Black ink. Let them unfurl.

Now let seeds settle under my fingernails.

Let a new tree root, grow leaves and flower In the wind-ridged desert landscape of my body, And throw a longer shadow. Don’t take my eyes yet.

They love to look on loved faces and the land.

Don’t take my mind; keep it clear as a fast-running stream In a chalk bed, lit by sunlight, cooled by shadows.

Leave me my hands to love with, write with, do some good.

Don’t take me yet.

Catherine Guillemin

A friendship deep, uncalculatingly, yet knowing Each of us will always be more than just one, We stand together, indivisible.

Con Connell

It should have been much earlier, my prime, Maybe in my thirties when the bloom Of youth had mellowed. But now I know that time Was not my best. There was little room For self-development amid the cries Of infants and attention to their needs.

Maybe in my forties I could rise Above the daily chores so that the seeds Of what I hoped to be could start to grow.

At fifty I was free to start my flight To glory and success, but didn’t know How to leave the ground, and so the fight To shine goes on, with circumstance and will At constant odds – my prime is coming still!

Katie Mallett

My Prime Minister, with whom I am Enamoured, was Sir William Lamb, On whom the gods were pleased to set A handsome face, and eyes like jet.

He’d been there since I was eighteen, A mentor to myself, the Queen; Kind, sympathetic, warm – my rock.

And so it was a fearful shock To learn that Caroline, his wife Had compromised his peerless life

COMPETITION No 301 I don’t know whether to hate the cold, now that I feel it so, or love it, as a seasonal gift. Please write a poem called The Cold. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by email (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 301’,

by Thursday 14th December.

Yours was the strength that was not factorised Those dismal times I felt my days were numbered, As each sorrow multiplied.

I’d envy but a fraction of your calm and generosity Which seems, to you, as natural as a number, Yet made your empathy invincible.

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Books & Publishing

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The Oldie December 2023 105

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Texting etiquette

My granddaughter brought her boyfriend over to have lunch with us and he spent most of the time, between courses, texting. I felt this was very rude, but does this mean I’m an old fuddy-duddy as it’s common behaviour these days? Or was he just being rather bad-mannered?

Eleanor G, Edinburgh

A

While this might be normal behaviour for the young, most people of any age know that this isn’t what you should do in the presence of older people, particularly ones you’ve never met before. I’m amazed your granddaughter didn’t pick him up on this. You probably should have saved the situation simply by saying, very kindly and graciously, ‘Unless it’s urgent, would you mind putting your phone away just while we’re having lunch? You probably think I’m very old-fashioned, but I can‘t help finding it rather distracting.’ Yes, it could have been plain thoughtlessness, but more likely he was terrified stiff of you, and of meeting his girlfriend’s family, and retreated into his comfort zone so as not to have to face making conversation – a skill many young people completely lack.

Don’t remind me I’m old

Q

Do any other readers find it annoying when other people of a similar age say things like ‘We old fogies’ or ‘Old crocks like us’ or ‘Of course, we’re completely out of date’.

It’s the way they include me in these

generalisations that annoys me. I know I’m old, but I don’t want my nose rubbed in the fact.

D W, by email

A

A friend did this to me the other day. She was walking along with her dog and passed me, talking to a young friend who was dressed to go to a party. She said to my young friend, ‘Oh don’t you look lovely – especially compared with us frumpy old things!’ I was surprised to find myself snapping back, ‘Speak for yourself!’ She was very taken aback – but I was proud of myself for picking her up. ‘Speak for yourself’ is the only answer to such remarks.

I know his deadly secret

Q

I’ve just discovered that a person who I thought was a close friend has bone cancer and has only six months to live. It turns out it’s meant to be a secret known only to his family and very close friends. Not only do I feel extremely sad but, meanly, I feel angry for being excluded because I thought he and I had a deep and special relationship.

Do I tell him I know, or pretend I don’t?

Name and address supplied

A

You could say to him, ‘I heard you weren’t well … is there anything I can do to help?’ Or, more sneakily, ‘I don’t know why, but I feel that you seem to be bearing a lot of suffering suddenly. Just an intuition. I do hope I’m not right – but you would tell me if there were anything wrong, wouldn’t you?’ It would be much better if this sad truth were to be acknowledged – even if he were to say, ‘You’re right, but

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106 The Oldie December 2023

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I don’t want to talk about it.’ Remember, too, that once a secret gets out, it spreads like measles, so you won’t be the first outside his circle to have heard the news.

Very soon, everyone will know, whether he likes it or not.

Move next door to my son?

Q

I live five miles away from my son, who lives in a flat with his wife and my two grandchildren. I’ve noticed a house for sale at the end of his street and I’m wondering whether to look it over with a view to buying it – it would be lovely to have my grandchildren able to pop in, and for me to be on hand if there were an emergency. I’m thinking of asking my son what he thinks – but I’d be hurt if he said it wouldn’t be a good idea. What do you think?

Elsie Taylor, by email

A

Try to get yourself used the fact that he might well be against the idea. This wouldn’t be because he doesn’t love you, but he’s spent half his life with you and now he might need a bit of space to himself. And, if you do ask him, do your best not to be emotionally manipulative. Say something like ‘I couldn’t help wondering if I should look at that house on the corner, but then I thought that would be the last thing you’d want – your mother on your doorstep.’ If he doesn’t immediately clap his hands and say, ‘What a wonderful idea! Let’s look it over together!’ or even if he just hums and haws, you’ll know he might prefer you not to be quite so close.

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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