The Oldie magazine January 2022 issue 408 by The Oldie

DOMINIC WEST – ‘I’M LIMERICK’S BASIL FAWLTY’ GREE TINGS , OLDIE SUBS AND FUN CRIBERS FANS!

A Merry, Mirth-fil led Christma All! We’ve Towers withdecked the halls s to You of Oldie boughs together of holly a and put the Oldie festive funfest for never been Comic. Santa’s Jokeshoyou in so busy, provided with constan p has by t larfs elves - fromour elite team of cartoon Kipper Newman to the King Williams and Nick of Comedy Mr Barry himself, Cryer. So Christma s slippers stick on your , lean back favourit in your e armchai r and prepare your right old ribs for a tickling!

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‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen January 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 408

Christmas special! Barry Humphries Antonia Fraser Kenneth Cranham Giles Wood Mary Kenny Gyles Brandreth AN Wilson Lucinda Lambton Anthony Haden-Guest Hugo Vickers Theodore Dalrymple

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GREE TING S, OLDIE SUBS AND FUN CRIBERS FANS! A Merry, Mirth-filled All!

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Christmas We’ve to You Towers withdecked the halls of Oldie boughs togethe of holly ra and put the Oldie festive funfest for never been Comic. Santa’s Jokesh you in so busy, provide with constanop has d by t larfs elves - fromour elite team of cartoon Kipper Newman to the King Williams and Nick of Comedy Mr Barry himself, Christmas Cryer. So stick on your slipper favourite s, lean back in your armchair prepare and your right old ribs for a tickling!

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FREE COMIC Between pages 50 and 51

Z Cars turns 60 page 24

Features 12 Unhappy birthdays in December Eleanor Doughty 16 My part in Oliver! Kenneth Cranham 19 Hello, grim reaper Barry Humphries 20 In search of a good carer Lucy Deedes 22 Christmas quotes Harry Mount 24 Z Cars at 60 Sara Wheeler 26 Back to university at 68 Jennifer Selway 27 My husband’s sad death at home Basia Briggs 28 The heyday of Studio 54 Anthony Haden-Guest 30 The metals of Christmas Anthony Lipmann 32 Life’s scoreboard Hugo Vickers 36 Britain’s oddest bets Graham Sharpe 81 First Old Bailey woman judge Nigel Pullman

Regulars 5 7 9

The Old Un’s Notes Bliss on Toast Prue Leith Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

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ABC circulation figure January-June 2021: 49,181

Golden days of Studio 54 page 28

10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 14 Olden Life: What were broadside ballads? Karen Peck 14 Modern Life: What is revenge bedtime procrastination? Richard Godwin 33 Small World Jem Clarke 34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... January John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: the Countess of Avon James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 46 I Once Met… The Duchess of Argyll Donald Trelford 46 Memory Lane 62 History David Horspool 63 Media Matters Stephen Glover 64 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 64 Rant: Christmas cards Roger Lewis Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 49 Æthelred the Unready, by Richard Abels Hugo Gye 51 Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox Michael Billington 53 These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett Maureen Freely 55 The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, by Janine di Giovanni Ysenda Maxtone Graham 57 Lady of Spain: A Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, by Simon Courtauld David Gelber 59 On Getting Better, by Adam Phillips Oliver Eagleton 61 The Rector’s Daughter, by F M Mayor A N Wilson

Travel 82 Beatrix Potter’s Lake District William Cook 84 Overlooked Britain: Cardiff Castle Lucinda Lambton 86 Taking a Walk: Maiden Castle, Dorset Patrick Barkham Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

87 On the Road: Dominic West Louise Flind

Arts 66 Film: Operation Mincemeat Harry Mount 67 Theatre: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe William Cook 67 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Frances Wilson 69 Music Richard Osborne 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 73 Gardening David Wheeler 73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 80 Bird of the Month: Greylag Goose John McEwen

Reader Event Oldie Gang Show p15

Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 For classified, contact: Jamil Popat on 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Bob Wilson

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It’s the pantomime season once more. Oh no, it isn’t! Oh yes, it is! Pantomimes, growing out of commedia dell’arte, have been around in Britain since the 18th century. The pantomime dame, always played by a man in outrageous costumes, first appeared in around 1806 in the show Harlequin and Mother Goose, also known as The Golden Egg. Jack Tripp (1922-2005), an English comic actor, singer and dancer, performed as a pantomime dame in more than 35 shows. Described in The Stage newspaper as ‘the John Gielgud of pantomime dames’, he was born 100 years ago, on 4th February 1922, in Plymouth, Devon, the son of a baker. A natural dancer, he was soon billed as ‘Plymouth’s Fred Astaire’. He went on to become half of a popular double act with his on- and off-stage partner,

Australia-born singer Allen Christie. A celebrated sketch saw Jack as Rosy Bottom, a refined, sex-starved pianist. During war service with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, Jack honed his skills with the Stars in Battledress show in Europe and the Middle East. After the war, he made his West End debut in 1946 and stole the show in pantomimes until his retirement in 2000. After his death in 2005, his name lived on, gracing the front of the number 713 bus in Brighton. You all know what pedestrians were told when they were nearly knocked over by the bus – ‘It’s behind you!’

The Oldie has lost one of its most dedicated readers in Maureen Cleave, who has just died aged 87. She became famous by writing wittily and sharply about the 1960s pop scene, notably about the Beatles. It was to Maureen that John Lennon said the Beatles would soon be ‘bigger than Jesus’, causing outrage in the American Bible Belt. At her funeral in Essex, her granddaughter Molly played, on the flute, Bach’s G minor Sonata and Let It Be. She later said she’d never again interview anyone young – only older, wiser people. So she took up the cause of The

Among this month’s contributors Eleanor Doughty (p12) began her career at the Daily Telegraph. She specialises in writing about country houses. When she isn’t writing, she can be found either on or near a horse. Kenneth Cranham (p16) was in Shine On Harvey Moon and Hatton Garden and has been in many Harold Pinter and Joe Orton productions. He writes in this issue about playing Noah Claypole in Oliver! (1968).

A. B. DUFFY / STRINGER

Sara Wheeler (p24) is author of The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton.

She’s behind you! Jack Tripp and Beryl Reid, 1969

Anthony Haden-Guest (p28) inspired Peter Fallow, the British hack in New York, in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. He is author of The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.

CENTRAL PRESS / STRINGER

The Old Un’s Notes

Mo’s moment: the Beatles and Maureen Cleave, 1964

Oldie with enthusiasm, when Richard Ingrams invited her, among others, to make suggestions. Her ‘terribly excited’ letter enclosing her subscription was printed in Ingrams’s January 1992 pamphlet heralding his new mag 30 years ago. Miss Cleave suggested having a memorial service correspondent: ‘These are of great interest to oldies, partly because of the whitewash and partly because they are free. They are also competitive, more so than parties – who has the best trumpets etc.’ Another suggestion was ‘Re-reviewing of books. Oldies like to re-read books. I should like to know what Bron [Waugh] thinks of Anna Karenina. (Verdict of my husband: “A very tiresome woman in my view.”)’ The Memorial Service column, written first by Ned Sherrin and now by James Hughes-Onslow, has been a resounding success. And The Oldie Review of Books, which reviews recent books and looks back at classics, has also been a hit. Thank you so much, dear Maureen. The Oldie January 2022 5

Could you be a murderer? The talented Miss Highsmith

Important stories you may have missed 50-yard drive from pub proves costly for North Berwick Man East Lothian Courier Laurels are replanted following complaints Congleton Chronicle

Hefty fine for woman who dropped cigarette butt in Kidderminster Kidderminster Shuttle £15 for published contributions

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‘This just gets worse…’

Historian Lady Antonia Fraser recently had a – thankfully minor – fall on leaving the Athenaeum, the distinguished club for intellectuals, dons and bishops. Her tumble made her think of another fall – and compose this poem: Crashing If it’s true about Adam – There was only one fall – Why blame Adam that he fell at all? Old age is a stage When most people crash And frequently smash But God made Adam Pure without sin. He had his chance. I wish I were him. Yet we have to believe That he fell once. So why blame Eve For the work of a dunce? Antonia Fraser – on the steps of the Athenaeum Are you capable of murder? Yes – anyone is, said the great crime writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), whose notebooks are just out. That’s what she told writer Christopher Matthew, when he met her in the 1970s in her farmhouse near Fontainebleau, with Tinker, her Siamese cat, on her lap and a pastis in her hand. She asked what crimes he had committed. He confessed to nicking office stationery, and travelling by

bus and charging for a taxi. ‘They’re all a breach in the wall,’ she said, with a resigned shrug. ‘If one is capable of stealing a library book, why shouldn’t one be capable of killing someone?’ Bruno, one of the killers in Strangers on a Train, her 1950 novel, also said, ‘Any kind of person can murder.’ Highsmith then told Matthew how easy it was to get rid of a body – as the talented Mr Ripley, her anti-hero, often did. ‘Ripley now lives in a village about 15 miles from here,’ she told Matthew, indulging the fantasy. ‘In the new book I’m writing about him, there’s a prevalence of rivers. In a place like this, for example, everyone goes to bed early. So all you’d have to do would be to wait until after midnight and you could quietly drop someone into

the canal that runs past the top of my garden without anyone noticing.’ Murder is one thing. Theft is quite another, Highsmith thought. ‘I have no sympathy with thieves,’ she said. ‘Theft makes me very angry. So often, thieves take things of no financial value, which may be of great sentimental value to the owner.’ A warning to all Oldie readers. If you’re driven to murderous thoughts at family gatherings this Christmas – it’s easier than you think! We have just celebrated the bicentenary of Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on 11th November 1821. 2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the first publication of The Devils (1871-72, also known as The Possessed or Demons). Along with his other three classic novels – Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80) – it often appears on lists of the greatest books of all time. However, the Russian great

‘Don’t worry – you’ll shrink into it’

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has had his detractors in the last 200 years. Turgenev called him ‘a new pimple on the nose of literature’. In a letter to writer and critic Edward Garnett in 1912, Joseph Conrad said that The Brothers Karamazov was ‘an impossible lump of valuable matter. It’s terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. It sounds like some fierce mouthings from prehistoric ages. I understand the

Biggest funeral in Russian history: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russians have just “discovered” him. I wish them joy.’ D H Lawrence wasn’t keen on his work. In a letter to society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1915, he said, ‘I have been reading Dostoevsky’s Idiot. I don’t like Dostoevsky. He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows. He is not nice.’ More recently, Vladimir Nabokov called him ‘much overrated’ and ‘a third-rate writer’. As so often, the people wisely disagreed with the superior disapproval of envious writers. When Dostoevsky died on 9th February 1881, aged 59, 30,000 people watched his coffin being carried to the cemetery in St Petersburg – the largest funeral procession in Russian history. Not bad for a third-rate writer…

Soy-glazed, fried aubergines with sesame, rocket and garlic mayonnaise on jalapeño bread

‘Everyone loves a good Oscar Wilde quote,’ says Oldie columnist Gyles Brandreth, whose new book Odd Boy Out discusses how Wilde inspired him. ‘He had an unparalleled ability to make us laugh and think with just a few words.’ Gyles is also the honorary president of the Oscar Wilde Society, which invites Oldie readers to enter the third Wilde Wit Competition. The goal is simple: write an original quip, aphorism or profound statement that sounds like something Oscar Wilde could have said.

‘To be honest, I only came in to get my eyes lasered’

Last year, the competition drew more than 500 entries – there are a lot of clever people out there. The cleverest turned out to be Darcy Alexander Corstorphine, who won with the line ‘Wit is the ability to say entirely the wrong thing in precisely the right way.’ Submit your best lines at oscarwildesociety.co.uk/ wilde-wit by 31st December 2021. You can enter up to 10 witticisms – all must be your own, original work. Three winners will receive signed copies of Oscar Wilde: A Man for Our Times, a fine catalogue of Jeremy Mason’s collection of Wilde books and ephemera. Meanwhile, here’s a thought from Oscar on behaviour at Christmas parties: ‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.’ Of course, Oldie readers fall into the first category. A merry Christmas to one and all! The 2022 Oldie Cartoon Calendar has a gift subscription offer of 12 issues for £36, plus a free cartoon book. Please use the code CAL21 when you go to subscribe.theoldie.co.uk to take advantage of this offer The Oldie January 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

RIP Little Weed, my first love

I’m bereft – Denise Bryer, the flower’s voice, has died at 93 They say you never forget your first love – a psychiatrist once told me that your first proper intimation of your own mortality comes when you learn that your first love has died. Well, when I was a little boy, my favourite television programme was The Flower Pot Men, featuring Bill and Ben (the flower pot men) and their friend Little Weed, a flora of indeterminate species (a curious dandelion/sunflower cross) with a beaming smile and a squeaky voice. Little Weed was only a string puppet and I don’t think she ever said much more than ‘Weeeed!’, but the way she said it enchanted me. When I was five, Little Weed was my first love and now she is dead. Denise Bryer, the actress who was the voice of Little Weed (and, later, of Noddy, and Kiki the Frog in Hector’s House, and the villainous Zelda in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Terrahawks, and many more memorable characters besides), died in October, aged 93. I got to know her in the early 1970s when she was married to my friend Nicholas Parsons. She was a funny, feisty, gifted lady, and the voice of my childhood. Of yours, too, perhaps. The Flower Pot Men was the BBC’s Watch with Mother offering on Wednesday afternoons, which is, I think, why Wednesday has always been my favourite day of the week. Andy Pandy was on Tuesdays and my mother’s favourite, but not mine. I thought Andy was a bit of a drip in that silly clown’s costume, though I liked Teddy and (you’ll not be surprised to hear) I had a soft spot for Looby Loo. Thursday’s offering – Rag, Tag and Bobtail – never had me hooked, and I had no time at all for Friday’s fare, The Woodentops, about a goody-goody family who lived on a farm. As a child, I thought they were dreary. Revisiting them now, I

Green giants: Bill, Little Weed and Ben

think there is something a tad suspect about Daddy Woodentop. These were black-and-white puppet shows. You could see the strings attached to the puppets. On Mondays, we had something different. Picture Book was a show-and-tell activity programme – ‘Do you think you could do this, children? It would be jolly fun if you could!’ – presented by a young and beautiful Irish actress called Patricia Driscoll. I preferred her when she left Picture Book in 1957 to play Maid Marian with Richard Greene in The Adventures of Robin Hood. She died in 2020, aged 92, just before the pandemic took hold. No wonder I’ve been feeling a bit low. To cheer myself up, I agreed to take part in an ITV Christmas show called All Star Musicals. In it, I have to choose a number from a favourite musical (My Fair Lady, in my case) and perform it in a proper production on a real stage to a real audience with a full orchestra and chorus. It’s proved a living nightmare, principally because I can neither sing nor dance. But I have loved it because it’s been exciting working with a dozen dazzling dancers (all in their twenties and so fit it’s frightening). It’s exhilarating to be taken out of my comfort zone. And it’s therapeutic to be forced to spend a month in a world of song and dance that’s so full-on you quite

forget the horrors of the real world. When you get home at the end of the day, you are far too exhausted to switch on the dismal, dreary, ever-depressing TV news. When my wife heard that I had agreed to take part in this musical adventure, she said, ‘Can’t you say no, just once in a while?’ In fact, I do say no quite often. I agree to do something nowadays only if it satisfies the 4K test. It’s an old showbusiness rule. Do something only if you can be sure it will give you one of the four Ks – kash, kudos, kicks or knooky. Well, knooky is very much off-limits as a possibility nowadays, and there’s not a lot of kudos associated with appearing on a celebrity talent show on ITV, but there was a bit of kash with this and plenty of kicks. It’s always easier to say no, but in retrospect it’s usually more fun to have said yes. In the 1990s, when I was an MP, I got my foot on the lowest rung of the parliamentary ladder working as a parliamentary private secretary at the Treasury, alongside David Amess, the MP for Southend who was murdered in his constituency office in October. I liked David hugely – you couldn’t not. He had such an engaging smile and such enthusiasm for life. He was so patently decent and so committed to his constituents and to the causes he espoused. In the mid-1990s, when I got onto the second rung of the parliamentary ladder (as a junior whip), I discovered that the powers that be, while liking David, reckoned him too much of an oddball to be considered for even junior ministerial office. Now we can see what a very special human being he was. Truly, given his faith and his story, I reckon one day he could be canonised as a saint. Gyles’s memoir Odd Boy Out (Michael Joseph) is out now The Oldie January 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

My new Benny Hill look

The only cure for my latest illness – imitating the late comedian matthew norman Reflecting on the year drawing mercifully to its close, I am aware that it has, even by the hypochondriacal standards of the last four decades, been a frantic one on the medical front. Many phials of blood have been extracted and analysed. Vinyl-gloved fingers have been inserted, and duly waggled. The wizened little raisins that so reluctantly stand proxy for my testes were prodded by a GP, preparatory to the date with ultrasound technology that unearthed no worse than a matching pair of benign cysts. By way of gastroscopic merriment, meanwhile, a camera was threaded down my throat, past the oesophagus, and all the way into the duodenum, where a tiny polyp was the sole abnormal discovery. You needn’t be a top-ranked haematologist to know that those with Jewish blood tend not to be huge fans of tempting fate (‘beshroying’ in the Yiddish). When tempted, it has that tendency to kick you in the cobblers – though the very best of British to fate with, in my case, finding them. So absolutely the last thing I would ever reply, to anyone kind and/or foolish enough to ask after my health, is ‘I’m absolutely fine.’ What I do in fact reply is that I have no idea how I am, not having had a full body MRI scan in the last 12 hours; but that nothing too worrisome has been diagnosed at this point. That said, something irksome has been self-diagnosed. A new ailment to me, though sadly I presume not to some of you, nocturnal bruxism is the grinding, thanks to the winsome mischievousness of the subconscious mind, of teeth in one’s asleep. Before we go on, we must guard against beshroying (we are not, after all, goyim) by observing this: these 10 The Oldie January 2022

symptoms may stem from a malignancy, or some alarming disorder of the nervous system. That said, touch wood, they do seem plainly to point to bruxism. Along with a remorseless ache in the jaw, and sporadic ear and scalp pain, most of what teeth remain in situ are jagged, chipped or worn down. All classic signs of sleepful dental grinding. In the brave new world of Omicron, I haven’t even considered waging attritional war with the surgery’s recorded message (‘You are number 197, 273 in the queue…’). And because I’ve dispensed with my dentist after a curt six-and-a-half-minute check-up, the other conventional diagnostic route is also closed off. It is to the internet, then, that I turned for advice. In one sense, this proved a triumph. There may not be a cure, other perhaps than five-times-weekly psychoanalysis for the next 35 years. But there is a simple remedy. The most effective analgesic for this condition is to poke out the tongue, well beyond the lips. This not only relaxes the muscles in the jaw, however, instantly relieving the pain. It also makes one look, at best, like Benny Hill in upside-down saluting mode, moments before he embarks on another high-speed chase of his Angels; and, at worst, like a savagely cruel parody of someone with learning difficulties, vaguely in the style of Ricky Gervais’s curious creation Derek. It also has a predictably potent effect on the diction.

Most people who have encountered me these last days have, to their credit, been too mannerly to comment. My mother, who is by no means most people, was wontedly unconstrained by the dictates of politesse. ‘What on earth are you doing now?’ was her reflex response when the tongue popped out, as a peculiarly tense moment in Homes Under the Hammer sharpened the pain. ‘Do you honestly believe, with your looks, that you can afford to make yourself look even more like an imbecile?’ She had a point. The romantic opportunities for a man of my age, wits and appearance were adequately narrow as things stood. An attempt to explain myself to her was met with first bemusement, and then a brusque reference to the limited commercial opportunities nowadays for the professional Lester Piggott impersonator. Anyway, assuming that the subconscious mind has no interest whatever in spontaneous remission, the choice henceforth is stark. Keep the tongue sheathed, and uncomplainingly tolerate the pain. Or seem perpetually to be auditioning for a part as an extra in a community-centre revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Readers of whatever gender, or none, may well be familiar with a version of this conundrum from the age-old high-heels question. Is it worth enduring agony to look good (or, in my case, less hideous)? At this initial stage of a brave battle against bruxism, it is uncertain which way things will go. On the one hand, suffering in silence has not, thus far, been a notably defining character trait. On the other, being approached in a north-London park by a palpably concerned dog-walker, who asked if I was able to tell her where my carer might be, is an experience I wouldn’t necessarily care to incorporate into the daily routine.

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The Oldie January 2022 11

For Eleanor Doughty, a December baby, Christmas has always trumped her birthday. She remembers other forgotten anniversaries

Not such a happy birthday

n 22nd November 1963, the unthinkable happened. The president of the United States of America, John F Kennedy, was shot in Texas. An hour earlier, in Oxford, the author C S Lewis had died. Later that day, in California, Aldous Huxley also died. ‘I didn’t think much about the timing,’ said Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham. When a press release was issued reporting Lewis’s death, only two journalists responded. The death of the creator of Narnia had been completely overshadowed. ‘In a way, it was good because it gave me a lot of peace,’ said Gresham. ‘People only very slowly became aware of [his] death. For years afterwards, his estate would forward letters to me that were still addressed to him.’ JFKs death isn’t the only tragedy to have eclipsed other things that would have been headline news. On 5th September 1997, the day before Princess Diana’s funeral, a sub-editor at the Daily Telegraph was heard to shout across the newsroom, ‘Oh no. That’s all we need – bloody Mother Teresa has just gone and died.’ On 11th September 2001, the 7th Earl of Carnarvon, the Queen’s racing manager, died of a heart attack. Prince Philip died on 9th April, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall’s wedding anniversary. I asked around for other coincidental anniversaries, and found Roxanne Thomas, who got married on the same day as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in May 2018. ‘There were lots of jokes about people having to turn down an invitation to the royal wedding because they’d accepted ours first,’ she says. A schoolfriend of mine was born on 12 The Oldie January 2022

Armistice Day. ‘At prep school, I used to be vaguely miffed when we had to have a two-minute silence on my birthday,’ she says. Kevin Briscoe, who works in PR, was born on April Fools’ Day: ‘At school, I was picked on for pranks by teachers – I was sent next door for some tartan paint, that sort of thing.’ He also took (and passed) his driving test in Portsmouth on 5th April 1982, the day the task force left a completely ‘mobbed’ Portsmouth for the Falklands War. ‘The test route was like an automobile obstacle course.’ My own birthday, 23rd December, raises a few eyebrows. At school, term had finished and everyone had dispersed across the country. So birthday parties were not very convenient. Now, in my late 20s, I find it’s just as tricky: friends are either enjoying warm white wine at their work Christmas dos, or packing for a week with their in-laws. Being selfemployed, I have imposed a luxurious rule not to work on my birthday – kicking off the holidays a day early. Alas, the British Army, my partner’s employer, has a less generous approach. I’m not alone in having an annoying

winter birthday – but at least mine isn’t New Year’s Eve, unlike my friend James Deacon’s. It’s a double-edged sword, he says: ‘On the one hand, people try to combine presents with Christmas, and by that measure you get only half a birthday. But the great thing about New Year’s Eve is that almost everyone has the next day off work, and they’re hoping for someone else to organise an event – therefore there’s no risk of people wanting to be sensible just because it’s a Tuesday.’ Scouring my phonebook for strange birthdays, I discovered that five friends have birthdays in the first week of January. ‘Decidedly rubbish,’ said one. ‘No one wants to go to a party on 5th January, do they.’ Another said, ‘By February, at least people have dispensed with Dry bloody January.’ Property-buying agent Henry Pryor was born on 24th January 1965, the day Sir Winston Churchill died. ‘My mother said that I carried an obvious inheritance, and whenever I misbehaved, she would tut and mumble, “Of course, we all know where you got that from.” Apparently I wasn’t allowed to cry in the first few hours after I was born, as everyone in London was in mourning.’ Few people, says Pryor, actively recognise the date. ‘My headmaster was the only person to make the connection spontaneously. He added that he hoped I had Winston’s ability to hold his drink and so wouldn’t be up in front of him too often.’ Still, he’s embraced it. ‘I’ve always secretly been rather chuffed to have the connection, and at least once in my youth bought a large Montecristo cigar from Davidoff, hoping each time it would bring me as much satisfaction as they seem to have brought him.’

what were broadside ballads? Broadside ballads were the social media or tabloid press of the day. Starting in the early 16th century, they lasted into the 19th century, when newspapers and other printed material took over. For a halfpenny or a penny, you bought a large, single sheet of paper (the broadside), on which was printed a ballad. The ballad would report an interesting event, crime, scandal or social matter. There was no music printed on the sheet to accompany the ballad, but there would be a suggestion as to which tune the ballad should be sung to. Usually this was a popular, familiar tune or hymn. The ballad-writer would sell his ballad to a printer, and subsequently had no claim to his work and was very unlikely to profit from its popularity. For the publishers of these ballads, however, they were a money-spinner. They were sold by hawkers and travelling salesmen called chapmen at markets, fairs and taverns. The seller would also often give a rendition of the tune to encourage sales. Gallows ballads were big sellers. There was nothing like a good execution for a moral lesson on behaviour, not to mention the gory details of the crime and the accused’s confession of guilt – though

what is revenge bedtime procrastination? Revenge bedtime procrastination is that thing you do when you know you should go to sleep, but you do something else instead – even though the main person who will suffer from this is you. The term originated in China. It is a rough translation of the Mandarin phrase bàofùxìng áoyè, or ‘staying up late in retaliation’. Its rapid spread through social media tells us that revenge bedtime procrastination is a human universal. As the Chinese-American journalist 14 The Oldie January 2022

Ballad-singers, 1790. A violinist accompanies the woman, singing from her ballad sheet

these confessions were often figments of the writer’s imagination. Along with an engaging title, many broadsides had a woodcut image at the top of the page. The woodcut wouldn’t always be made specifically for a particular broadside, but would give a general idea of what the ballad was about to those who were not very well read. The woodcuts were reused, sometimes for decades, and were quite crudely carved. Individual woodcuts could be cobbled together to form one – often incongruous – image. Broadsides were used not only for news but to comment on social issues. The temperance movement in the 1830s used ballads to warn of the evils of drink. I found one stirring ballad with the immortal line ‘Such Taverns as these are the Railroads to Hell’.

Many broadsides delighted in the wondrous, the weird and the bizarre. I came across one such ballad, The Lady with the Pig Face. The story went that she was a wealthy, noble lady living in London. Allegedly she had a pig’s face, ate from a silver trough and spoke in grunts. Who knows how these stories started? As with most strange tales, there may have been a small grain of truth. Maybe this one was based on some real unfortunate woman or possibly was just an attempt to smear someone’s character. It was more likely a tale invented for comic effect. Whatever the truth, I bet it was a bestseller. Karen Peck

Daphne K Lee explained, ‘People who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to go to sleep early, in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours.’ It can afflict anyone, at any age. Her Majesty the Queen is a revenge bedtime procrastinator at 95, or so the Sunday Times implied after she was hospitalised back in October. Apparently, one of the reasons Queen Elizabeth II was feeling so ‘knackered’ was that she was watching TV long into the night. Line of Duty is a particular favourite. How much of The Queen’s time is truly her own? Not much, clearly. Common forms of revenge bedtime procrastination include: playing the same foolish game on your phone over

and over; rewatching episodes of a 1990s sitcom you’ve seen three times before; filling in sudoku after sudoku until the numbers become a blur; arguing with the internet. Who or what is being avenged here? In the Chinese context, it is the ‘996 working hour system’ – an expectation that you will work from 9am until 9pm, six days a week, and not complain about it. More broadly, it is a culture of alwayson industriousness made worse by the toxic combination of smartphones and globalised capitalism. More locally (as a working parent with young children) I identify it as a feeling, when I turn in at 12.13am, that at no point in the day have I had a couple of moments when someone isn’t asking

something of me. The Chess.com app doesn’t need feeding or changing or wiping. The Chess.com app is pleasurable, undemanding and compulsive. The Chess.com app is … wait, how did it get to be 1.37am?! At some point, we need respite and it’s much easier to find that respite when everyone else is asleep. And late at night, when we’re tired, self-control is harder to exert. While this is a digital-era term, there are analogue forms of revenge bedtime procrastination. Reading novels, for example. Filling in the middle bits of a 1,000-piece jigsaw. The other night, I found myself revenge bedtime procrastinating by wandering into the garden after midnight with a torch in order to ambush the snails feasting on my lupins. The bitter irony the revenge bedtime procrastinator faces at 7am is that the only person they have avenged is their future self. They must now perform

By royal appointment: the Queen stays up late to watch Line of Duty

all their tasks on an extremely suboptimal amount of sleep. ‘I have wasted time and now doth time waste me!’ as Richard II wailed. The revenge bedtime procrastinator is thus advised to begin winding down at least 30 minutes before bed. Turn off the

‘auto-play’ feature on Netflix. Banish all screens from the bedroom. And buy a good, old-fashioned analogue alarm clock to ensure an early start that must not be shifted thanks to a late-night revenge bedtime. Richard Godwin

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Olly goes to Hollywood When Kenneth Cranham acted in Oliver!, he loved the American production values – and was photographed by Harry Secombe

n 1967, I was given the role of Noah Claypole in the film of Oliver!. What luck. Five days’ filming at £50 a day – and, at the same time, playing Hal in Joe Orton’s Loot at the Criterion Theatre, which the previous year had won the Evening Standard Best Play award. I was 22 at the time. Jane Asher brought Paul McCartney to see Loot. He said most plays gave him a pain in the arse but he loved this one and wanted it to last longer. Meetings were even arranged between Joe and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, to discuss Joe writing the script for their next film. The late ’60s were like a surfboard that everyone, young and old, was riding, waiting to be enthralled by what the Beatles and their acolytes did next. At Shepperton, where Oliver! was filmed, they were also making a Swinging London ’60s film, called Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford. After work, Sammy and Peter would cruise the King’s Road together in an open-top car. The film isn’t shown much these days. But there is a compilation of Magnum images from the ’60s taken by Eve Arnold. One of them has Sammy Davis Jr, eyes closed, lost in reverie, wearing love beads, a real gone cat with a silver-clad, mini-skirted go-go dancer in attendance. It looks far more dated today than Oliver!. I went out to Shepperton before filming started, for a costume-fitting. On the train on the way back to London, I saw Judi Dench. I recognised her from having seen her at the Old Vic with Tommy Steele in She Stoops to Conquer. I introduced myself and we talked all the way back to central London. I asked her how long she’d been acting. ‘Twelve years,’ she told me. 16 The Oldie January 2022

Men in black: Leonard Rossiter and Cranham on set – by Harry Secombe

‘’Kin’ ’ell!’ I thought. ‘You can do it for that long?’ She was very gracious and kind. I felt blessed. Oliver! had American funding – and they knew how to spend it. They built Victorian London at Shepperton. There were streets, markets, bridges, riversides, quicksand, pools of mud, beer halls, Fagin’s den and all its warrens. And, in the distance, as far away as the eye could see, there was a railway bridge, with a real Victorian train chuffing across it. The backdrop of the Who Will Buy? sequence – which people think is a real Georgian square that they recognise – was just a façade. You opened one of the doors and there was just mud behind it. So much energy: hundreds of dancers;

Oliver Reed creeping about, frightening people – and succeeding. You blended into it all – you were wearing Victorian clothes in funereal black, with a top hat. It was like finding yourself in William Powell Frith’s masterpiece, The Derby Day. None of it was CGI. All of it was three-dimensional. After Oliver dares to ask for a move from the orphanage, he is offloaded by Mr Bumble, played by Harry Secombe, who leads him through the street, singing Boy for Sale. What amazed me was that the street had been built indoors, inside a soundstage. If you looked up, you could see the soles of the shoes of the men dropping artificial snow from above. A dog was set off across the ground, a

COLUMBIA PICTURES

blacksmith was shoeing a horse and at the end of the street was Mr Sowerberry, played by Leonard Rossiter. The first interested buyer of the boy, he is an undertaker who thinks he might be of use in the elaborate funeral processions Victorians liked. Mrs Sowerberry, played by Hylda Baker, is not so keen on the extra cost of the boy’s upkeep. My character, Noah Claypole, the charity boy working for the Sowerberrys, is already resentful. Noah confronts Oliver in this scene from the screenplay: NOAH: How’s your mother, Work’ouse? OLIVER: You leave my mother out of it. She’s dead. NOAH: What did she die of? Shortage of breath? OLIVER: You’d better not say anything about her to me. NOAH: Better not? Better not? Don’t you be cheeky, Work’ouse. Your mother! She was a nice ’un! A regular rightdown bad ’un, she was! A fight ensues. Noah is knocked to the ground. He gets to his feet, grabs Oliver, shoves him into an open coffin and sits on the lid. Noah Claypole is the first character to attack Oliver maliciously, making spiteful remarks about his dead mother. I’ve met many adults, years later, who’ve

From top: The funeral march; Oliver (Mark Lester) watches Noah (Cranham) prepare a wreath; Cranham with Carol Reed, the director of Oliver!

The Oldie January 2022 17

never forgiven me. One director had lost his mother at the age of eight and identified totally with the film. He was appalled to be in the company of this demon from his nightmares. Hylda Baker was the only actor who had the foresight to book a table at the restaurant in Shepperton. We had an hour for lunch – so we sat in costume in our funeral-parlour clothes. Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford came over to introduce themselves and shake our hands. I looked forward to telling the cast of Loot that evening. Leonard Rossiter avoided Hylda – there was no sign of him at the lunch table. I found out that he’d been in a panto of Robinson Crusoe with Hylda. Leonard was Man Friday. There was one scene ending that they hadn’t sorted out. One night, in a fit of desperate improvisation, Leonard said, ‘Oompah, oompah,’ and the Brothers Four, who were on stage with him, said, ‘Stick it up your joompah.’ When they came to the stage door the next night, on the noticeboard it said, ‘When Man Friday says, “Oompah, oompah,” Hylda Baker will say, “Stick it up your joompah.” ’ In other words, Hylda was stealing the laughs. Harry Secombe kept his own company. He had a coterie of retired gentlemen, asking things like ‘Glass of water, Harry?’

Above: The original Columbia Pictures poster. Right: Mr Bumble (Harry Secombe) and Oliver (Mark Lester). Below: Cranham’s shooting script

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Jeremy Thorpe said that when he worked in films, the floors were made of rubber They were like Harry, brimming with good nature. He’d become a keen photographer. I wondered if he had been influenced by Peter Sellers, the cameramad Goon. He took the photo of me with Leonard Rossiter that appears in this article. It’s never been published before. Hylda was put out that Harry had a canvas chair with his name printed in large black lettering and she didn’t. She let it be known that she should have such a chair. So they cobbled together a canvas chair with a large strip of pink bandage, on which ‘Hylda Baker’ had been scribbled with a Biro. It looked like something a child had made, but she accepted it. They had a publicity department on set. One day, Carol Reed, the director, was talking to Jeremy Thorpe, who was wearing his familiar velvet-coloured coat. The flashbulbs flashed as they talked. I 18 The Oldie January 2022

heard Thorpe say that when he worked in films, the floors were made of rubber. Suddenly Hylda elbowed her way between them and struck pantomime poses of listening intently, first to one, then to the other, like a child pretending to be enthralled. Then I saw, across her back, the jumbo strip of Elastoplast. It had become twisted up and attached itself to her costume, with ‘Hylda Blaker’ scrawled in Biro, there for all to see. Not long ago, they showed the original cut of Oliver! on the biggest screen at the NFT. Mark Lester (who played Oliver), Ron Moody (Fagin) and I did a Q&A. Mark Lester has turned out to be an

elegant, charming, professional man. I knew him at the age of nine, along with another seven stand-in Olivers, all dressed identically – one of a tribe; all little Olivers. He was very pleasant. At the screening, I was shocked to see what a monumental piece of creative cinema the film is. What most people know is a cut down version, re-edited for television. It has a vastness and power that have been neglected. What I’m famous for in Oliver!, though, is my run in the snow, fetching Bumble. I fall on my arse and bounce up again, to musical accompaniment. I couldn’t do it now!

Hello, grim reaper Barry Humphries feels young, but he’s now older than the oldest man he ever saw – Augustus John

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he was a babe. A fully paid-up, card-carrying babe. There was absolutely no doubt about it, and she was heading straight for me. She was almost sprinting towards me across the recently reimagined lobby of Claridge’s. She looked up, her scarlet-anointed lips parted in entreaty. A student, I supposed; probably Events Management or Gender Studies – they are both comparative no-brainers. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ she said. A thin garment of a dark, unattractive colour snugly accommodated her convexities. It was a warm summer evening, and her bare feet were betrayed by expensive sandals. She seemed to have neither pen nor paper; certainly none was proffered. I rummaged for a scrap of paper, or an old envelope. I would have even ripped a page out of the Gutenberg Bible to please my young supplicant. ‘The usual spelling of Sidonie?’ I enquired with dry lips. She drew closer, glancing from side to side conspiratorially. I caught a whiff of her product and, faintly, Britney Spears’s Curious which she must have peeled off the cover of an old copy of Heat. ‘My late grandmother was a big fan of yours,’ she said. A peck on the cheek and she was off. But I glimpsed her looking at my autograph – and was that the faintest shadow of disappointment on her face? Did she think I was someone else? I wondered. David Walliams, perhaps, or Jimmy Carr, or even the great Rob Brydon? No, I was too tall, or too short, or too … old. Sidonie’s gran had never even heard of those Johnny Come Latelys. Intimations of senescence come thick and fast. Life is a near-death experience anyway and, as in the W E Henley poem, ‘Death goes dogging everywhere’.

When a taxi driver jumps out of his seat and rushes round to help me to heave myself out of his cab, I feel the chill hand of the Reaper at my elbow. Many men, younger than me, tell me they ‘have to get up a lot at night’ – information that I absorb with smug self-satisfaction. So far, I have been blessed with nocturnal continence. However, I have been getting names wrong for some years. My first hint of that infallible sign of losing it occurred one night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, after the first act of Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss, with its melodramatic action and incomprehensible libretto. After Act One, I spotted the film director Michael Winner at the Paul Hamlyn Hall Champagne Bar. ‘Just up your street, Michael,’ I cried enthusiastically. ‘You could make a great movie out of all that drama.’ The film director regarded me strangely (who doesn’t?). ‘You think so?’ he said, before he was whisked away. ‘Who did you think that was?’ said my wife. ‘Michael Winner, of course.’ ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said she. ‘It was Jeremy Isaacs, General Director of the Royal Opera House.’ Abashed, and compounding my error, I rushed over to the retreating Jeremy. ‘Oh, Jeremy,’ I exclaimed, ‘I’m terribly sorry. You must have thought I was mad. I mistook you for somebody else!’ ‘Who did you think I was?’ he said, still smiling. ‘Michael Winner.’ There was a long pause, as the bells

Old Master: Augustus John, 83, plus self-portrait, 1961

rang summoning us to Act Two. ‘I’ll never speak to you again,’ said Sir Jeremy Isaacs. As I contemplate a long theatrical tour next April and May, I suddenly feel worryingly youthful. I feel all the physical benefits of a life not vitiated by any form of exercise. My hair has a few silver strands but there is no loss of pigmentation elsewhere. A woman I know calls the tangled yellow-grey stooks in her husband’s nostrils ‘distinguished’. It is a distinction I hope to avoid. The oldest man I ever saw was, when I first arrived in London, the veteran artist Augustus John. It was in 1960, at the Royal Academy, when that institution could still be taken seriously. There was a large crowd of art-lovers present. They loved art then, and not ‘artworks’. Most old-style artists, like John, wore beards. Facial hair was the prerogative of Royal Academicians and Captain Birdseye. Now every man you can think of hides under one. TV commercials, which tick boxes to an insane degree, are densely populated by the tufted and the bushy, all indistinguishable from one another. When I met him, my bearded idol Augustus John seemed as old as Methuselah: a portly dotard with his red eyes, his stinking pipe, his beret and deeply stained habiliments. He was then five years younger than I am now. I’m now mourning Stephen Sondheim, whom I loved in spite of his ragged beard, which he was constantly scratching. Santa Claus was another barbate friend. I hope this year he sees to it that thy Christmas stocking runneth over. The Oldie January 2022 19

When her father needed looking after, Lucy Deedes, a carer herself, discovered that foreigners were kinder than the British

Who really cares?

NICHOLAS GARLAND

he country and the government are much exercised, and rightly so, on the issue of social care. Our increasingly ageing population has literally nowhere to go and nobody to look after them. Other nations – such as India, where my son lives – are astonished that we don’t revere our old people and gather them under our roofs. It occurs to me that you can chuck all the money in the world at this problem and still not find the right calibre of person to nurture the old through their final years. Admittedly, elderly people – like all people – can be difficult. They may be bereaved, lonely, depressed, regretful for lost opportunities, irritable or in pain. And that’s even without dementia – the onset of which is subtle enough for the early stages to be mistaken for sheer cussedness. For my sister in Australia, caring is a vocation. ‘You need a sense of humour in bucketloads, but also respect. They weren’t always old.’ Aged ten, she used to help our aged neighbours in Kent, paid in Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars. I knew a widow who was sharp as a tack but immobile. One Nurse Ratched-like carer left early in a seething huff; the next never spoke to her at all. The old lady wilted in the strained atmosphere, but her family just said, ‘Stop being difficult, Mother.’ Yes, she was fortunate in being wealthy enough to remain in her own house, but was still bullied because she was small and old and they were big and young. She’d have settled for a nice chat and some hand cream rubbed into her bent fingers. After all, isn’t dealing with a certain amount of deafness, tactlessness and incontinence part of the job description? These are old people, not kittens. It’s not just the end of life where help can be a problem, as anyone who has ever despaired of finding childcare will 20 The Oldie January 2022

know. Even the best nannies can be competitive – one otherwise saintly nanny of ours used to relish putting my toddler to bed while I was feeding the baby, then forbid me from disturbing her to say goodnight. Still, there are training colleges and diplomas required for those we entrust with our babies; not so much for our grandparents. It may be easier for an elderly man to attract good carers. It may be 2021, but many women (about 84 per cent of the UK’s carers are women) appear to find looking after – and taking orders from – a man more palatable than a woman. When my mother, beginning her descent into muddledom, would potter outside to see to her chickens, the female housekeeper immediately clicked the latch and locked her out. She would confuse our mother by unnecessarily unplugging the kettle and toaster. My mother retaliated by throwing a brick through the locked glass door, and quite right, too. Later on, for the three years that my widowed father, Bill – W F Deedes (1913-2007), the former editor of the Daily Telegraph – was bedridden, the agency sent a new carer each fortnight. They varied massively; the best by miles came from overseas. They bore no resentment at the repetitive domestic and personal tasks, whereas the homegrown carers struggled – not very hard – to contain their apparent feelings of affront. I plucked up the courage to ask the agency, ‘Could we … is it possible … um, not to have any British ladies?’ We established a rotation of three

Dear Bill: W F Deedes (1913-2007), Lucy’s father

exceptional women – two from South Africa and one from Poland – under whose care he bloomed. They were generous, good-humoured and impossible to offend. Can the quality of mercy be taught? Some years ago, I worked as a carer in a cottage hospital, the only work I could find at age 50-something. With no qualifications, I learnt on the job, found it rewarding and decided to do an NVQ. The questions were so full of bonkers jargon and devoid of common sense that I gave up any idea of a qualification. If I had wanted to be a caregiver in the USA, I would first have had to acquire more than 75 hours of clinical experience. Even in the public space of a care home with vigilant matrons, alarm bells rang. A frightened lady who hated sudden movement was rocked on the hoist so she squealed in terror; an unreachable lunch tray was dumped in front of a recumbent patient. Yes, the pay was rotten and there was never enough time, but it was disquieting to see a small number of people relishing their power over the frail. There are thousands of devoted and unsung carers slogging away on low wages and ready to make a difference. But there is a need to recruit many more and increasingly, probably, from the UK. We owe it to our old people to realise that looking after them is a privilege, and shouldn’t be the job of last resort – the final bastion of the minimum wage. But then neither should it just be about money. It’s about kindness and imagination, and I wonder whether those qualities can be bought or taught.

Harry Mount reveals the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read, saw and heard in 2021

Christmas commonplaces When a director told me, ‘A drunk is a man trying to walk straight and speak properly. You’re an actor trying to walk crooked and slur your speech.’ Michael Caine’s defining moment

Great minds: Michael Caine; Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips (1813); Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (1941)

He had learned by the age of 20 a lesson it took me half a lifetime to learn: namely that there was nothing that could not be said and no one to whom one could not say it. Alan Bennett on Russell Harty (1934-88) Don’t just do something. Sit there. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (b 1926) The ventriloquist’s big problem: six letters of the alphabet – m, b, p, v, w and f – are impossible to pronounce without moving your lips. You’re a mix of butler, cheerleader, Hitler, psychiatrist and artist. Michael Winner on being a film director Dialogue is the ‘part of a book readers never skip’. Elmore Leonard All nice rooms are a bit shabby. The Mitford test of interior décor Show the dance from head to toe without close-up, film it in as few takes as possible and run it from start to finish without reaction shots. Fred Astaire’s rules for filming dance. ‘Either the camera will dance,’ he said, ‘or I will.’ 22 The Oldie January 2022

There are some men who mind more about enjoying their work than about what they are paid for it and where they stand in the hierarchy. So why, when a woman does the same, should it be taken for granted that she is brainwashed? Diana Athill, Stet It was not until 887, when he was nearly 40, that Alfred the Great started reading and translating Latin. Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity and all the virtues of man without his vices. Lord Byron’s epitaph to his dog, Boatswain (1803-08)

Money, fame and wisdom are the booby prizes of the elderly. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink, which after all are easy to bear, as troubles go nowadays. Evelyn Waugh writes to Coote Lygon about Brideshead Revisited, 1944

All men are mad who devote themselves to the pursuit of power when they could be fishing or painting pictures or sitting in the sun. A J P Taylor

All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House, & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect it all seems very dull… Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home though some were one or the other… You see English Society of the ’20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs… I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is. Lady Pansy Lamb’s letter to Evelyn Waugh when Brideshead Revisited came out, 1945 ‘Heseltine is too old, Clarke is too cavalier and Portillo is too ridiculous. So who will succeed John Major? Step forward, Jonathan Aitken … the only Cabinet Minister who hasn’t a single enemy.’ Roy Hattersley, Mail on Sunday, 1995 From Failed Prophecies: An Overview, an article by Craig Brown The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered, by interests taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by the nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far different from the egoists’ own affairs. Anthony Powell on Kenneth Widmerpool, the antihero of his series, A Dance to the Music of Time

Almost all of the hundred most common words in our language worldwide, wherever it is spoken, come from Old English. There are three from Old Norse – ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’ – and the first Frenchderived word is ‘number’, in at 76. TOP 10 MOST COMMON ENGLISH WORDS: (1) The (2) Of (3) And (4) A (5) To (6) In (7) Is (8) You (9) That (10) It Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English One computer translated ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ into Russian and back again as ‘The whisky is fine but the meat has gone off.’

The poet emperor: bust of Hadrian (76-138 AD) in the Museo Vaticano

Animula vagula blandula Hospes comesque corporis Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula rigida nudula Nec ut soles dabis iocos Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, My body’s guest and companion. To what places will you go now? Pallid, stiff, naked – you won’t make your usual jokes any more Emperor Hadrian’s poem to his soul, written as he was dying, 138 AD

Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy. And that is just what Eliza did. George Bernard Shaw on what happens to Eliza Doolittle in the end Below, from left: George Bernard Shaw in 1909; George Eliot, aged 30; Melvyn Bragg

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. George Eliot, Middlemarch There was a celebrated Doge of Venice who found nothing in a play so remarkable as the fact of his presence at it. Philip Hensher The Oldie January 2022 23

Happy 60th, Z Cars! The vintage series is still gripping, says Sara Wheeler. It depicts a lost, dark world of capital punishment and smoking, boozing cops

The Z Cars crew. Left to right: Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor), Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns), PC Bert Lynch (James Ellis), PC Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp)

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f my childhood had a theme tune, it was Johnny Todd. Don’t know it? Yes, you do. It was the Z Cars music. The BBC detective series first beamed into our cold living rooms 60 years ago, on 2nd January 1962. Within two months, it drew in 14 million viewers. It went on to run for 801 episodes over 12 series. Glasgow-born screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin conceived Z Cars while in bed with mumps. To stave off boredom, he listened to local police messages on his transistor. Why not, he thought, bring police to life on the small screen? Why not depict bobbies as real, flawed human beings, like us? Police presence on TV was at the time limited to the cosy Dixon of Dock Green, which had been running for seven years when Z Cars revved up. In the title role, at the start of every show, avuncular Jack Warner looked straight at the camera and greeted viewers, saying, ‘Evening, all.’ We thought he was talking to us. To heighten the realism, Kennedy Martin set the series in Lancashire. TV drama seldom depicted the north. The fictional Newtown was based on Kirkby, now in Merseyside, around estates that

24 The Oldie January 2022

had replaced Victorian slums and blitzed housing. Whaling ships put in at nearby Seaport, and consequences of the sailors’ ‘fighting beer’ became a series regular. Z Cars folk were working class. In the first episode, Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) and sidekick Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor) set up a motorised unit. ‘If we had crime patrols [in cars] like other divisions,’ Barlow reckons, ‘Reginald Farrow [a murdered colleague] would be alive today.’ In the fourth minute, this line sets out the premise of the next 800 episodes. Not everyone approved. On the front desk, tetchy Sergeant Percy Twentyman ridiculed the plan to ‘take the best men off the beat and put them in those fancy cars’. After that, storylines revolved around pairs of officers patrolling in the cars. They bet on horses, drank beer and chased women. The dapper Brian Blessed (‘’e ought to be in Rome’) makes his first appearance as PC ‘Fancy’ Smith, gyrating nimbly in a dockland dance-hall doorway and leering at a girl who says she is 15. (Sadly, Bernard Holley, who played PC Newcombe, died in November, aged 81.) No wonder the Police

Federation made an official complaint. The programmes were too true to life. The series took its name from the radio call signs given to Lancashire police divisions. A Division was based in Ulverston; B Division in Lancaster. The TV series took the fictional call signs Z-Victor 1 and Z-Victor 2. The Ford Zephyr was the standard traffic-patrol car in Lancashire – the Z stood for Zulu, not Zephyr. The cars on set were primrose yellow at first, as the colour showed up better than black-and-white. For the first three years, programmes went out live – among the last British dramas to do so. When a gloop of fried egg slithered out of PC Bert Lynch’s mouth mid-sentence in the Steeles’ living room as pinny-wearing Janey Steele (Dorothy White) put coal on the fire, it did so in front of 14 million viewers quietly consuming their own tea. There could be as many as 15 sets an episode, with actors racing between them. Men sat in half-cars with a street projected onto a screen behind them. I was just one when Z Cars began, and left home the year it ended. When I watched some episodes recently on YouTube, I was amazed, after the

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Left to right: James Ellis (Lynch), Frank Windsor (Watt), Stratford Johns (Barlow), Joseph Brady (PC Jock Weir), Colin Welland (PC Dave Graham), Robert Keegan (Sergeant Bob Blackitt), Donald Gee (PC Ray Walker)

Proustian rush of Johnny Todd, at how good it remains – and how much it reveals about Britain in the early sixties. Everyone smokes. Capital punishment is still on the statute books. ‘If he’s a nutcase,’ says Barlow when he hears a suspect has been arrested for murdering a police colleague, ‘they won’t top him.’ Barlow looks the way my dad looked, though I soon realised all the men do. Besides the standard haircut, a blanched and creased postwar mien lingers. Early on, PC Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp) only semi-apologises for giving his wife a black eye. She responds that, at least, ‘I get some respect from the neighbours now.’ In other words, domestic abuse was a badge of honour and ‘better’, to local eyes, than a husband’s ‘stretch in Strangeways’. As for the theme tune, Austrian-born Fritz Spiegl and his first wife, Bridget Fry, arranged the Liverpudlian folk ballad (‘Johnny Todd, he took a notion/For to sail the ocean wide’). When the Liverpool Music Group recorded it, with Spiegl himself conducting, it reached number two in the charts. Another set of boys in blue, the Everton football team, adopted the anthem midway through the 1963-64 season. The Toffees won the league in 1963 and PC Ian Sweet (Terence Edmond) was an Evertonian. He suggested players run on to the tune. Thirty years later, during the

1994-95 season, club officials replaced it with Fanfare for the Common Man. But not for long. The Goodison faithful made their opinion clear – and back marched Johnny Todd. Everyone seemed to be involved in Z Cars. Michael Caine turned down the role of Steele, but future Monkee Davy Jones appeared in three episodes, Leonard Rossiter in eight, and in four John Thaw played a detective constable who had to leave the force because he couldn’t drink hard enough with the crims – part of the job description then. When the original run ended in 1965, BBC executives hived off Barlow and Watt into Softly, Softly. After a two-year hiatus, in March 1967 Z Cars roared back in a twice-weekly soap format, with two 25-minute episodes forming one story. Four years later, the BBC put both together as a single 50-minute show, and thereafter Z Cars alternated between two shorts and one long until settling permanently to one 50-minute episode a week. In 1967, Pandas zoomed around

the Newtown streets instead of Zephyrs, as they did in real-life Kirkby. Kennedy Martin left the show after three episodes. Auntie felt he was going too far, and that villains had to be caught. He was too left-wing, really – ahead of his time at the corporation. He went on to write the screenplay for The Italian Job in 1969 and had a hand in the fabled Cathy Come Home. By the late seventies, US imports Kojak, Hawaii Five-O and Starsky and Hutch were ushering in a new era for police shows, and Z Cars parked up for the last time. For the final episode, which went out on 20th September 1978, the BBC brought Kennedy Martin back, as well as original director John McGrath and several early cast members. The one character who remained throughout was Irishman Bert Lynch. In a 2000 BFI poll to find the 100 greatest British TV programmes of the 20th century, the voting public put Z Cars at 63, between Ready Steady Go! and Culloden. In my opinion, it should be higher. The Oldie January 2022 25

Fifty years after her first degree, Jennifer Selway, 68, is doing an MA. She’s still a swot – but university standards have vastly improved

Never too old to learn something new

seem as thrilled to see me as I had hen I tell people that, at expected. And the lure of prancing about the age of 68, I’m doing on stage in a DramSoc production of an MA in Medieval What the Butler Saw seemed more fun Literature, they react as than doing The Faerie Queene for weeks though I’ve confessed to suffering from on end. Oh, how we toiled on that some unfortunate medical condition. interminable epic. There’s embarrassment, mixed with My tutors over three years were Frank mild concern. Then a furtive glance to Kermode, Stephen Spender and Antonia locate the nearest escape route in case I Duffy (the novelist A S Byatt). Did I start banging on about Beowulf. This was a big surprise to me as I had appreciate what a privilege it was to have foolishly imagined that, given the a one-to-one with these intellectual opportunity, anyone would want to do an giants for an hour each fortnight? And MA. Who wouldn’t like to spend a wintry for free? Not really. afternoon in the warm library at So now I’m having another go, London’s Birkbeck College, the pale topping up my BA with an MA. shafts of the setting sun breaking The Middle Ages have always seemed through a mullioned window, the peace like the blackcurrant fruit gums in the broken only by the sound of a scratching pack – desirable, delicious and slightly pen and the turning of pages? mysterious. I had hoped that one could Apparently lots of people wouldn’t. sink into that deep past, untroubled by I’ve always been a priggish swot. Aged the culture wars. I now know that’s eight, I played a blinder, doing the impossible. Hardly a day goes by without entrance exam to my independent day some angry nitwit calling on us to school, and was put in a class with girls a remember our Anglo-Saxon heritage, or year older than me. O Levels at 13 and 14. complaints that Chaucer was a rapist. By the age of 16, I had four A Levels and The COVID pandemic was no an S Level with distinction, and was out deterrent to my academic plans. If we the other end of the school system. had to do everything online, so be it. As it Exam stress? What is that, actually? happens, we meet once a week in the Summer was to me the heady scent of flesh in an actual classroom, wearing mown grass and Quink ink, the crisp masks. I’m decades older than cotton of my school shirt, the everyone else but I’m deeply satisfying heft of my remembering how much I liked ring-binder revision folder, and the sitting with a group of moment of breathless anticipation like-minded people, when the invigilator announced, teasing poetry apart. ‘Girls, you may turn over your Having taken for papers.’ Bliss it was in that granted the teaching I had dawn to be alive. as an undergraduate, I’m now What an insufferable in awe of the way my course child. But, after such a supervisor leads each week’s flying start, the groves of seminar with such elegance academe (the English and erudition. department of University In the 1970s, when very College London) didn’t My medieval guide: Chaucer few went to university, the 26 The Oldie January 2022

guiding principle was that of benign neglect. Nobody even told you where the library was. The English department at Foster Court rarely felt like an engine room of the intellect. As in Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, it was a land where it seemed always afternoon. You were left to your own devices and, after all, we were technically adults. Times have changed. I should have realised how much – in terms of reading material – would be accessible online. Almost everything is. And there’s an awful lot of institutional ‘support’. Rather too much for my liking. In my attempts to be a model student, I’ve attended online seminars on using the library and on how to write in the ‘correct’ academic manner, cite references and avoid plagiarism. I’ve been told that if I have any mental-health issues, I can contact someone or other. I’ve been invited to a careers fair. The internet makes everything almost too available, sending you down endless rabbit holes of enquiry. In the era of the book, you felt you’d done a day’s work by strolling to the library, unpacking your bag and settling down to an hour’s leisurely reading before seeing someone who’d suggest going for a coffee. Anyway, I’m in for the duration. My greatest difficulty isn’t deciphering Old English – it’s all come back to me like how to ride a bike. It’s deciphering the messages I get from the tech help department when I beg for assistance with Moodle, whatever the hell that is. Long ago, when I was a newspaper executive, I used just to phone Tony in IT. Now the university techies answer my questions with supplementary questions that I simply do not understand. Or perhaps this is the Socratic method of learning, subtly adapted to the 21st century…

After her husband’s death at home, Basia Briggs went through a bureaucratic nightmare. She wishes he’d died in hospital

My rage against the dying of the light

y husband died at home in London on Friday 3rd September, aged 76. His breathing became erratic and laboured in the night and, at 5am, he vomited a large gush of blood. At 10am, I heard the death rattle. So I told him I was going to ring for an ambulance. The 999 operator asked me to describe his breathing with more accuracy. I returned to his room and found him lying dead: a terrible sight – red-faced, eyes and mouth open. ‘Oh poor man, poor man,’ I cried to the operator, who asked me if I had a defibrillator in the house. I didn’t. ‘Just send the paramedics quick and stop asking silly questions,’ I said, desperately carrying out CPR. The three-man ambulance crew arrived soon after and placed him on the floor. They attached electrodes to him to administer violent electric shocks, put a drainage tube down his throat and removed a pint of bloody mucus from his lungs and stomach. I sat and watched with horror, listening to the machines bleeping and my husband convulsing. They valiantly worked non-stop for nearly an hour. But at 11.50 that morning, they pronounced him dead. He was still warm as I stroked his face and told him I loved him. The medics returned to their vehicle, but I did not leave him. I had never experienced such desolate, despairing, lonely moments as in those hours alone with his body. I had spent nearly all my life with him. If a death occurs unexpectedly at home without a doctor present, I was told, the police must be called immediately. They inform the coroner and an autopsy is necessary. The paramedics said they would stay in their ambulance until the police arrived. This took over two hours, thanks to confusion over police shifts. Several times,

Richard Briggs (1944-2021), the late owner of Hyde Park Stables, and Basia

one of the paramedics suggested I go into another room. But I insisted it was my duty as a wife to sit with my husband. Two police officers finally arrived, apologising repeatedly. They were kind and courteous but the one taking my statement said he was dyslexic. It took a long time for him to write by hand. He asked me the same questions again and again until I exclaimed, ‘Do I really have to be put through all this?’ My husband was still lying there, dead on the floor. At 6.30pm, the solemn undertakers came in their private ambulance and removed his body. As the pathologist didn’t work at weekends, the postmortem would happen on Monday. On Monday morning, an official from the Coroner’s Court rang to say there was a backlog of bodies. He added that pathologists work on a rota system and they were very busy with trainees. During the pandemic, I was told, most experienced coroner’s officers ‘work from home’. ‘If the pathologist turns up on Wednesday,’ I was told, they would do it then. Until there was a cause-of-death certificate, I couldn’t register the death and arrange the funeral. By Friday, my husband had been dead for a week and nothing had been resolved. I had this emotional need to see him again but was told viewing was

discouraged as he hadn’t been embalmed. I insisted. Once I got there, on that Friday, I was ushered into a cubicle where I could view my husband through a glass partition. I gazed mournfully at his dead face and took some final photographs. His hair was dishevelled and the plastic drainage mechanism was still attached to his mouth. Afterwards, in much distress, I stood in the hallway with three staff members and begged them to do his postmortem the following Monday. They promised they would put him ‘first on the list’. On Monday, I was telephoned to be told that ALL autopsies had been cancelled because, on Friday night, there had been a power cut. I was told I was ‘lucky’ to have viewed my husband on Friday; it would not have been possible now. The man went into some detail about health and safety and the dangers of decomposition. The undertaker managed to persuade a superior officer to have the autopsy done as soon as possible. The funeral took place seamlessly two weeks after the death. The following week, I collected the ashes from the undertaker. To my horror, there was too much ash to fit into the urn! It had a beautiful brass plaque with his name – yet in addition I was given a cardboard box, out of which my husband’s remaining grey ashes rose, in a clear plastic bag tied with a knot. My legs gave way. I asked, ‘Why was there so much ash that it couldn’t fit?’ ‘It was the bones,’ they said. Surely they could have provided a bigger urn. Most people would like to die in their own beds, far from the clinical impersonality of a hospital. But dying in a hospital – ideally in a comfortable room, with the family present – is preferable to the distressing chaos and officialdom that follow an unexpected death at home. The Oldie January 2022 27

Manhattan nightlife has slumped, thanks to COVID and the internet. Anthony Haden-Guest remembers Studio 54 in the city’s heyday

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE

ho or what killed New York’s night world? A number of perps come instantly to mind. ‘The camera phone basically killed off the VIP room as an arena where anything interesting might happen,’ I once told the writer Christopher Tennant, who referred to me as the ‘three-time winner of Spy magazine’s infamous Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon’. I went on to say, ‘There’s not nearly as much drunkenness as there was back then, and certainly not as much fun. I can hardly remember the last time I saw a queue of giggling girls waiting to use a restroom.’ I moved to New York in the late 1970s, from a still somewhat swinging London. I had long been happily living in a studio in the Pheasantry on the King’s Road when a traditional horror occurred: Developer Swoop. So I was kicked out, and looking for a place when I bumped into Clay Felker, the great creator/editor of New York magazine, at a party. I’d done some pieces for him – Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on-stage in Oxford etc – and he said he’d been looking for me. I explained that I had been somewhat sleeping around. ‘Come to New York,’ Felker proposed. Yes. A ticket materialised. A lifechanger. The New York in which I arrived was hardly a fun capital. It was just after the famous Daily News ‘Drop Dead’ cover (pictured) about President Ford’s refusal 28 The Oldie January 2022

to to save the city. New York was so close to bankruptcy that Abe Beame, Mayor of New York from 1974 to 1977, planned to lay off thousands of cops and firemen. Several unions then set up a joint Council for Public Safety which printed a million copies of a pamphlet, Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors. It had a hooded skull on the cover and opened with the tip ‘Stay off the streets after 6pm.’ Bankruptcy was staved off. And then along came disco. Yes, Studio 54 – the 54th Street club that boomed from 1977 to 1980. Such has subsequent coverage of Studio been that one could easily imagine that it was back then the only game in town. Not so. Xenon, Howard Stein’s club on 43rd Street, was as big a draw for another element in New York’s ballooning as an international city – the Eurotrash. That was the semi-affectionate nickname for the incoming rich folk, some distancing themselves from the terrorist groups then bombing and kidnapping in Europe and Latin America. There was also Area, the very artoriented Hudson Street club. There Andy Warhol created an ‘imaginary sculpture’ and the Mudd Club, which was Downtown and punkish – heroin chic, not coke. It was also where an artist friend, Ronnie Cutrone, installed metal cages. ‘They were like rooms. David Bowie had a room,’ he told me. He built a room for Grace Jones while working on an album cover for her. ‘We put her in nude. And we threw in raw meat,’ he said.

Disco days: broke New York was ripe for revival, 1975

There were dozens of such clubs, but Studio was the most effective player in the celebrity culture. This was growing fast but hadn’t gone ballistic. Warhol, the designer Halston and Bianca Jagger all broadened their brands at Studio. The paparazzi would freely shoot the celebs at the door. Inside, the famous would usually be snapped by consent only. It was full Mondo Celebrity. Big clubs bulk big in Lost City lore. But such clubs have always come and gone – as arenas for performance and display, rather than for people to connect. The real clubs of New York, in the timeless sense of places where a specific group would regularly cluster,

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might be restaurants, hotel bars or dodgy joints. These were the real hang-outs. Manhattan was peculiarly rich in such hang-outs and their loss has been more hurtful to the fabric of the city’s continuing life than that of the most eye-catching, famous, named clubs. That was brought home to me personally with the closing, within 12 months of each other, of the restaurants Gino’s and Elaine’s. Gino’s was on the Upper East Side. It was the first posh eatery to which I was taken in New York. The mood was set by zebras prancing amid a hail of arrows on the tomato-red wallpaper. Elaine’s was also on the Upper East Side, and it was hugely well known – but not posh. I was a habitué. That was where I last talked with the writer Hunter S Thompson. As I was on my way out, he said he had left me a drink outside. He then followed me and, yes, a beakerful of bourbon stood on a windowsill. He stood there as I swallowed every drop. A big fellow, Hunter. I was at a dinner in Elaine’s with Matuschka, the model/artist, when her lynx coat was stolen. Cops were called. It turned out that another guest had filched it as a prank. Ho ho! One cop remarked that I had nearly been arrested as an accessory. Then there was the evening when Harvey Weinstein joined my table while I was eating with a celeb. Weinstein engaged him in a conversation without acknowledging my presence. Gosh, I was saddened when he walked into that media buzzsaw. Gino’s, Elaine’s … both gone. As have such distinctly different venues as the Life Café on East 10th and Avenue B, an action centre for the emergent life of the Lower East Side which I had got to know while investigating heroin for

Smokin’ hot: David Bowie at Studio 54, 1977

Left: Bianca Jagger rides through Studio 54 on her 32nd birthday, 1977

Rolling Stone – the dealer in the story was located opposite. So too the Mars Bar at 25 East 1st, round the corner from the hardcore punk club CBGB. Mars drew that crowd and had also had a strong art element after its owner allowed an artist/photographer Toyo Tsuchiya to put on a show there in 1986. In 2015, Dan Glass, a writer and regular, reconstituted the famous Mars Bar bar for a gallery event for my book The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night. I happened to be at the closing night of the Mars Bar. Pure accident. Also, equally accidentally, I discovered that I was at the closing night of Swifty’s on Lexington. Swifty’s was the heir to another defunct legendary hang-out, Glenn Bernbaum’s Mortimer’s. It had been launched by Robert Caravaggi, Mortimer’s maître d’, and had been popular with the same Social Registerish crowd. Until it went pfft! Why? Why did any of them? Financial specifics sometimes. It was the meltdown of 2008 that belted business at Gino’s, and one can only guess how durable the impact of COVID will prove to be, even as British flights to New York are allowed once more. ‘The

business climate has not been conducive to a little restaurant like ours,’ Caravaggi said at the time. Often the closures have been personality-based, as when Glenn Bernbaum mandated that Mortimer’s should not outlive him, and Elaine’s failed to survive the death of Elaine Kaufman. But the techscape we increasingly inhabit plays a central part – not just hand-held screens, but lives increasingly lived on-line. That has led to the consequent melt of social glue, the person-on-person disconnects and the narcissism of the everyday. Thank-yous are a lost language and individuals bawl into their devices in public places. So, as the last of the hang-outs are hung out to dry, will this be their lullaby? Are there signs of hope? Always. Robert Caravaggi’s Swifty’s has been reborn – admittedly in Palm Beach. ‘People are always saying New York is in its death throes,’ says Samara Bliss of the Locker Room, a Brooklyn Arts collective. ‘A lot of people left after September 11. New York survived. A lot of people have been leaving now. So don’t let the door bang you on the way out. We’ll survive.’ The Oldie January 2022 29

This Christmas may bring you gold, beryllium and gallium. Metals merchant Anthony Lipmann gives you the hard facts

Steel yourself for Xmas

ow metallic will your Christmas be? As a metals merchant, I can tell you. I’m assuming the five gold rings my true love intends to give me this Christmas are 22 carat (91.6675 per cent gold) with five grams of content. The balance is nickel for hardening. So the metal value of my true love’s purchase this year will be around £200 per ring (with gold at around £1,300 per troy ounce). It sounds cheap, doesn’t it? But, of course, that’s not what she’ll be paying. Although a ring is little more than a metal tube, thinly sliced and shaped, it’ll likely set her back £5,000, proving the real craftsmanship is in the selling and buying! This will be demonstrated if you happen to fall out of love with your true love in 2022 and try to flog it back. The likelihood is your friendly local jeweller will tell you it’s just scrap. For that is where 50 per cent of the gold in my true love’s ring most likely came from – perhaps the recycled solder point in a piece of high-end electronics or a Russian’s old tooth. If the atoms originated direct from a mine, they’re probably from China, Russia or Australia. Christmas Day has other metallic riches in store. On waking, I reach for the light switch. It’s made of beryllium copper, containing 1.5 per cent toxic beryllium. The toxicity is rendered harmless by the copper alloy in which it’s contained. The springy metal allows my switch to perform its task reliably a million times before deformation. Without it, Christmas Day would be once again candlelit. Beryllium, mined in Utah, costs about £370 per kilo; copper, from Chile, is £6.70 per kilo. I glance at my smartphone. ‘Oh dear, only three hours before Uncle Eddy is due!’ I hope he managed to recharge the 30 The Oldie January 2022

NMC battery in his e-vehicle for the 250-mile journey. NMC stands for: nickel, taking up a third of the battery; manganese, another third; cobalt, the final third. Cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo costs £44 per kg; manganese from China £3.70 per kg. At least, I happen to know, he is using wind as his power source: the 200-foot-long fan blades on wind turbines turn a huge, neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnet to create current. With luck, the rare-earth elements of neodymium with a dash of dysprosium might come from magnets recycled in Europe. Otherwise, the neodymium (£90 per kg), dysprosium (£410 per kg), boron (£3 per kg) and iron (£0.15 per kg) all come from China. Christmas lunch would not be the same without the best cutlery. I lay out the knives, forks and spoons, with a quick glance at the backs. Some are etched with the numbers 18/8. That means a standard stainless steel (18 per cent chrome and 8 per cent nickel, with a balance of iron). But Uncle Joe is coming too and he’s a metallurgist, so I need to make sure I give him the 18/12 (12 per cent nickel). A finer stainless steel, it’s less likely to tarnish or show the slight rust you sometimes see when you take the cutlery out of the dishwasher. The nickel has travelled a long way to the table – most probably from Norilsk in Russia, once a gulag. Far above the Arctic Circle, it’s the world’s largest nickel mine. Nickel costs around £13.5 per kg;

chrome £6 per kg. If the cutlery is Sheffield-made, 80 per cent might be from recycled stainless steel. In a previous life, it might have been part of a washing-machine drum or sink top. Or it might be stainless steel from an old car body containing 4 per cent titanium. In this case, there may be just a soupçon of Russian Komsomoletsclass nuclear submarine inside. When the Russians chopped up their submarine hulls to pay the military’s bills in the 1990s, thousands of tons of prime titanium alloy were processed in Sheffield. Titanium, £4 per kg from China or Russia, is added as ferro titanium to stainless steel. After a fine Christmas lunch, it’s time to turn on the flat-screen TV to watch the Queen. Her picture is crystal clear. That’s thanks to the gallium crystal compounds of nitrides, arsenides and phosphides, stimulated by a current conducted invisibly along indium tin oxide pathways, etched on the screen’s surface, which display her image pixel by pixel. Gallium is £400 per kg; indium is £200 per kg. They are both from China. Soon we bid our tearful farewells. It’s been wonderful to see the older children back from their jobs in America. As I wave goodbye, I am comforted by the thought that the 3 per cent of rhenium (£1,000 per kg, from Chile) in the high-pressure, single-crystal-turbine nickel alloys at the core of the RollsRoyce Trent 1000 engines powering their Dreamliner will have no trouble withstanding the 1,700°C temperature of the hot gas. And so a happy, metallic Christmas to one and all!

Life’s scoreboard Hugo Vickers compares his achievements with those of John Lennon, the Queen – and Matt Hancock

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO / ALAMY

t my age, I have lived through a great number of ideas being rejected. Agents, publishers and booksellers conspire to ensure that books of mine do not reach the reading public. My redoubtable agent, Gillon Aitken, refused to represent my book that became The Quest for Queen Mary. He said I knew too much about obscure German royalty and advised me to cut the footnotes. The book languished for ten years in the drawer until Tom Perrin at Zuleika took a punt on 100 hardbacks, and Hodder took it up – and now, in one form or another, it has sold over 40,000 copies. Another idea that bit the dust was Milestones – a perfect book for the millennium. It was conceived, some research was done and it should have been published in 1999. It is a simple concept. Perhaps it should be an app, not a book. You plot your life against those of others. The project is designed to disconcert. Everyone starts at the same point, 0.0. If you die aged 90 years and six months, that is 90.6 (years, then months). You progress through each year, regardless of the century, decade or year. Against yourself, you mark the careers of other people – and you fail. Pitt the Younger was 24 when he became Prime Minister – he was born towards the end of May 1759 and assumed office in December 1783. That is fed in at 24.7. He died aged 46 in January 1806 – so 46.8. The Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo at the age of 46. You can insert anyone you like into the system. You soon find that you are hopeless – way behind everyone else in the path of life. But if you keep going, you begin to outlive all kinds of people and realise that you have been given more time to enjoy life on earth than all sorts of great achievers. For the present purposes, I have mapped some of my own moments 32 The Oldie January 2022

(under the initials HV), for better or worse. As ever, this is a work in progress. Many more can be added to the template. 0.0 Hugo Vickers born (1951) – like all the others 5.0 Aashman Taneja wins a gold medal in taekwondo (2020) 13.1 Ruth Lawrence goes up to St Hugh’s College, Oxford (1983) 15.8 Greta Thunberg becomes a famous environmental activist (2018) 15.11 Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations (2018) 17.0 HV meets the Queen and the Queen Mother (1968) 17.5 Boris Becker wins grand-slam singles at Wimbledon (1985) 17.2 Jude Bellingham becomes the youngest football player to represent England (2020) 17.3 Malala Yousafzai is the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner (2014) 18.5 Christine Keeler meets John Profumo (1961) 19.3 John Lennon creates the Beatles (1960) 19.1 HV becomes a Lay Steward at St George’s Chapel, Windsor (1970) 20.1 Lady Diana Spencer marries the Prince of Wales (1981) 21.9 Barry Humphries creates Edna Everage (1955) 22.7 Garry Kasparov becomes the youngest-ever world champion in chess (1985) 24.6 Pitt the Younger becomes Prime Minister (1783) 25.4 Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen (1952) 25.6 Monet first exhibits at the Salon (1866) 25.11 HV’s first book published (1977) 26.1 Vivien Leigh wins her Oscar for Gone with the Wind (1939) 33.8 HV’s book on Cecil Beaton published (1985) 34.0 Margaret Thatcher elected as MP (1959) 36.2 Marilyn Monroe dies (1962)

36.2 Diana, Princess of Wales, is killed in a car crash (1997) 40.4 HV’s mother dies (1992) 40.10 HV’s father dies (1992) 42.3 Proust publishes first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913) 42.5 Edward VIII abdicates (1936) 42.8 Matt Hancock resigns as Health Secretary after his snog (2021) 43.8 John F Kennedy becomes 35th President of the USA (1961) 43.10 HV is married (1995) 43.11 Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister (1997) 44.3 Adolf Hitler becomes Führer and Chancellor of the Third Reich (1934) 45.6 President Kennedy is assassinated (1963) 46.1 The Duke of Wellington wins the Battle of Waterloo (1815) 46.5 Bill Clinton becomes 42nd President of the USA (1993) 46.6 Pitt the Younger dies (1806) 47.4 HV’s first son born (1999) 48.5 John Profumo resigns (1963) 53.7 Vivien Leigh dies (1967) 54.0 Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman Prime Minister (1979) 55.9 Chairman Mao establishes the People’s Republic of China (1949) 56.2 George VI dies (1952) 71.6 Princess Margaret dies (2002) 80.2 Anthony Quinn fathers another child (1996) 94.11 The Queen is widowed (2021) 99.10 Prince Philip dies (2021) 99.11 Captain Sir Tom Moore releases his single (2020) 100.0 Many celebrate their centenaries 100.9 Captain Sir Tom Moore dies (2021) 101.5 The Queen Mother dies (2002) 102.9 Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, dies (2004) 103.3 Dame Vera Lynn dies (2020) 122.5 Madame Jeanne Calment dies (1997). She is the oldest known human – a target we can all aim for, however great our other failures!

Small World

My ABBA tribute – at the police station Like the Swedish supergroup, I’ve got a new look for my relaunch jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… Mother has been buoyed by my first substantial job of the year – and became particularly giddy when she heard it would involve two days a week working in an office in a far-off city. ‘With multiple trains, he’ll be gone before we’re even up,’ she gabbled excitedly as she scraped butter substitute onto a celebratory crumpet. Crumpets are normally reserved for surprise death notices of perceived enemies. Father and I often reflect that if Mother could find a tall enough stool to reach the computer desk, she would make an excellent troll, in every sense of the word. My own attitude to my return to full-time filing duties is a little mixed. At age fifty-and-change, I will be the oldest by decades among the new starters, but I’m excited by the prospect of listening to Voyage, the new ABBA album, on repeat during the lengthy commute. I have some loyalty to the SuperSwedes. I incurred the wrath of my father when I ran up a huge telephone bill using the Dial-a-Disc service after becoming addicted to Fernando, and had my first snog to Super Trouper. ‘A little bit ploddy and over-eager to engender any romantic feelings’ was my date’s review of the song and my kiss. Annoyingly, I bumped into the same person a couple of years ago, and she can’t remember even kissing me, let alone dancing to ABBA. I insisted she must because it was such a significant moment in my life, but she rationalised, ‘I’ve probably kissed a lot more lips since then than you have.’ Unnecessary. I hatched a plan: just like ABBA, I could use my new job as a ‘relaunch’ of Jem Clarke as an object of attraction. Unfortunately, unlike ABBA, I could not pay for a hologram of how I used to look three decades ago. So I settled for my first-ever hairpiece – £30 (thanks, Amazon) – and a pair of white skinny jeans.

‘Am I rolling the years back, Dad?’ I asked, emerging with longer, blacker hair and drainpipe legs. ‘Yes, but only inasmuch as you’ve just reminded me of Max Wall.’ I had to trial this look for ‘walkability’ and ‘credibility’. Luckily, that very afternoon I had an appointment with a senior police officer. He had invited me to meet with him at Cleethorpes Police Station to discuss my lengthy email, rounding up my many concerns about a decline in local policing baseline standards. I felt safer going in my new ‘disguise’, in case I was later targeted because of my complaints. For good measure, I teamed my tight white trousers and flowing faux locks with a walking cane. The police station is only a street away from my house and I was soon rapping with my cane on the locked station door. To no avail. Peering in through the gloomy glass, I could see the station lobby was unmanned. I used all my ‘SAS-are-you-toughenough’ smarts to sidle along a small ledge until I dropped down into a yard at the back of the station. I knocked on the back window with the over-eager impatience of a trainee bailiff. In hindsight, I realise the police are understandably jumpy in these times. Suddenly, the fire exit was kicked open and an officer wearing body armour appeared, yelling, ‘Identify yourself!’ I threw my cane down and, for no good reason, raised my wig in greeting as

if it were a hat, explaining as best as I could, ‘I’ve got an appointment at four o’clock.’ Desperately trying to recall the name of the officer, I squealed suddenly as I remembered: ‘Marsh – Willy Marsh.’ ‘Wait here,’ barked the officer. I was led, shamefaced and de-wigged, through what looked like a 24-hours-in-policecustody theme park. Real police-folk sat at desks, looking intently at cyberscreens, while doubtlessly sharing off-colour jokes. I was taken into a room and the officer announced, ‘All right, Sergeant. I’d like to introduce you to … Willy Marsh.’ I suddenly realised where I’d gone wrong. Marsh was in fact the name of the district that a Sergeant Will policed. And now they thought I was called Willy Marsh. It was so confusing that I just went with it and we had a genuinely useful conversation. He even unlocked the front of the police station to see me out. I walked proudly out of the police station, having fulfilled my civic duty – and no one had sniggered at my trousers. I put my earphones on and listened to the emboldening lead ABBA track, I Still Have Faith in You, and waved confidently at a couple I knew as they passed, my chest as swollen as my taut-trousered testicles. Then the police-station door re-opened. A voice yelled, ‘Oy, Willy! You forgot your wig.’ A hairpiece was frisbeed at me, landing on my shoulder. I wish ABBA better luck with their comeback. The Oldie January 2022 33

Town Mouse

The e-bike – a bicycle made for gloom tom hodgkinson

A new and worrying phenomenon on the streets of London has been the appearance of a strange variety of battery-powered personal-transportation devices. As I pedal my old bicycle around the streets, I gaze witheringly at the poor saps who have been gulled into forking out thousands on these absurd contraptions. They look bloody silly. There was a great noughties television show, Nathan Barley, written by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. It followed the misadventures of a ridiculous fashion victim who was always desperate to keep up with the latest trends. In one episode, he is seen wearing an early version of earpods. In others, the prophetic writers have him zipping to meetings on an electric scooter. Brooker’s vision has come to pass. Nathan Barleys are everywhere. These electric or ‘micromobility’ devices are being heralded and sold as an ecologically sound alternative to cars which belch pollution and rely on fossil fuels. In fact, there’s nothing new here – remember milk floats and the Sinclair C5? The eco argument doesn’t stand up. Electric bikes need batteries, which require exotic minerals mined by dirt-cheap labour in faraway places. They use electricity which has to be created and delivered. Not very green. How silly these vehicles are. Take the electric unicycle, costing up to £2,000. This device has a single wheel on which the user stands. The website says the unicycle is a ‘travelling beast that will take you anywhere in no time’. It also claims you’ll feel ‘like a super-hero’ while riding one. Their aficionados call them simply ‘wheels’ and they can go for 60 miles on a charge. Then there are the hoverboards. These have two wheels with a little platform 34 The Oldie January 2022

between them. Costing from two to five hundred quid, they claim a range of ten miles. Again, completely daft and unnecessary. Electric skateboards also make a menace of themselves on the streets of London. Controlled by a wireless, handheld remote, they can go for five to 20 miles on a charge. The marketing message on one electric-skateboard website appeals to our ignoble impulses with the claim ‘Nothing beats the feeling of flying past a struggling cyclist with ease.’ Electric scooters are ubiquitous. London has allowed three electricscooter rental companies to ply their trade. Conveniently for these start-ups, privately owned scooters are banned from the streets, even though this ban hasn’t deterred many people. Over 130 pedestrians have been injured by electric scooters in the past year.

Lime is the most egregious company. They say they have an altruistic ‘mission’: ‘Lime is founded on a simple idea that all communities deserve access to smart, affordable mobility. Through the equitable distribution of shared scooters, bikes and transit vehicles, we aim to reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short-distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.’ In fact, Lime is just another company out to make money. It was once valued at $2.4 billion dollars but lately its investors lost confidence and a recent deal valued it at a mere $510 million. Lime’s competitors in London are Dott, an Amsterdam start-up which recently raised $85 million in investment, and the German company Tier, valued at nearly one billion dollars. Electric scooters are dangerous, too. The latest figures reveal three riders of e-scooters were killed in the last recorded, while 199 were injured. Why a community like London should be helping these non-UK moneymaking schemes is beyond me. They take our money and put it investors’ pockets. Operating these privately owned electric mobility devices is completely illegal on public roads. Transport for London says that, while rental scooters are legal, ‘All other types of e-travel are illegal on public roads, cycleways and highways and cannot be used on London’s roads. They can be used on private land only.’ The least undignified and only legal option of the whole lot are electric bicycles. They cost £1,000 or more and use batteries to reach 15.5 mph. They can go for 30 miles before running out of charge. Your legs are used a bit, but essentially this is a way of getting around without using much of your own energy. Instead, you use energy from the battery which you charge overnight at home. The point that their users make in their defence is that they take the effort out of cycling. Yes – but the effort is precisely the point in cycling. It’s good exercise. We already have a thoroughly ecologically sound form of transport: the bicycle. It uses precisely zero energy from fossil fuels. It uses only renewable energy – muscle power, derived from vegetables and meat, and gravity when you’re freewheeling downhill. It gives the user a free workout and a glorious experience. And there’s another mobility trick that gives the user exercise, uses no fossil fuels and costs precisely nothing. It will also leave our children with a cleaner, healthier planet. It’s called walking.

Country Mouse

My dream job? The office Romeo with blondes on tap giles wood

John Betjeman was born into a middleclass family in Edwardian Hampstead. His parents, Mabel and Ernest Betjemann (with the extra ‘n’), had a family firm which manufactured the kind of brown furniture and ornamental silver gadgets loved by the aspirational classes of the day. A sensitive, lonely child, he knew early on that he would grow up to forswear his participation in the family business, in favour of poetry and his love of architecture. A mixture of snobbishness and guarded affection for the world of commerce is a recurring theme in his verse: ‘I have a Slimline briefcase and I use the firm’s Cortina./ In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill/ The mâitres d’hôtel all know me well…’ I too was a sensitive – and musical – child who suspected I might grow up to forswear my own participation in the family business, S A Wood & Sons, Hanley, Stoke on Trent, tile merchants and fireplace manufacturers. Now, in what Violet Bonham Carter called ‘the fifth act of life’, I wonder what I missed out on because I never got the chance to forswear it. My father wound up the business in the early 1970s, stripping its assets and, in the process, disinheriting me of my birthright. According to my public school’s prospectus, I would be brought up to be a ‘leader of men’. How I would have fared leading a team of slabbers, a foreman, an office junior and sundry ledger clerks – as well as an attractive young blonde secretary – is anybody’s guess. But it wasn’t to be. As it was, the only part of the job that my father really enjoyed was driving the lorry when he was delivering fireplaces. Yet, while I was at school, the family firm gave me a sense of pride and identity. I blubbed when Healey minor

callously snapped in two one of my collection of hexagonal slimline pencils with the name S A Wood inscribed on one face in tiny letters. ‘Tile manufacturer est 1774’ was inscribed on the flip side. They were HB office pencils. I was blissfully unaware that the game of tiles and fireplaces would soon be up. Central heating was delivering the coup de grâce to open fires and fireplaces. Moreover, my father also designed those hideous tile or mosaic fireplaces with their mean Baxi grates. Come the eighties, when open fires came back into fashion again, people would be levering off the walls to replace those grates with stripped pine, or the more upmarket, reclaimed, Edwardian, grey marble fireplaces. My father turned heads in the sixties. The double of Simon Templar – later Richard Burton – how touchy-feely he was with his secretary, I noted from an

‘You’re going to need a shovel!’

early age. She was kind to me and ushered me into a showroom displaying sanitary ware, emblazoned ‘ETRUSCAN VALE’, where I got down on my hands and knees in the dust and created an assault course for my various Dinky toys among the ceramic U-bends. No natural light reached the dust fest except for one beam of sunlight, which penetrated where someone had once smeared a grimy window pane – no doubt out of curiosity. My mother made the best of the closing of the works. She sealed my future as a non-office worker by telling me, with the great authority she has always had – it’s earned her the nickname the Oracle of Delphi – that ‘some people dress up in suits and ties and go to the office and others wear polo-necked shirts and that’s the tribe that you belong to; people like Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, Ben Gazarra and Simon Dee’. Never one to be pigeon-holed, I never wore a polo neck again. ‘Nor did you ever work,’ observes Mary. The other day, one daughter told me there was a pile of office furniture in a skip outside her artist’s studio, as the business next door had gone bust. It was almost midnight when she told me but I leapt to my feet, saying I must go and get as much of it as I could. I have always dreamed of a high-back executive swivel chair with oak-effect wooden arms where, in my dreams, I could hire or fire to my heart’s content. An office desk to put my feet on while I puffed a cigar or played with an executive toy. ‘But why do you want office furniture?’ chorused Mary and my daughter in disbelief. ‘We already have far too much ordinary furniture in the grottage. We can hardly move and it would completely spoil your new shed – all that leather and metal.’ Bright as a button, as always, Mary diagnosed that I was now feeling I had missed out on office life and wanted to try to recreate one within the cottage. She explained that, even if I got a job in an office now, the days of Dolly Birds and Benny Hill-type office Romeos are truly over. Nevertheless, would I have been a more effective person in the milieu of the cut and thrust of office life? Have I ever exercised my risk-taking muscle? – as the financier Crispin Odey once asked me. Not often. But then remember the adage: who, on their deathbed, has ever wished they had spent more time at the office? Well, there is an exception to every rule. The Oldie January 2022 35

Britain’s oddest odds

For 40 years, William Hill’s Graham Sharpe calculated bets on everything – from who shot JR to the chances of a white Christmas

YAY MEDIA AS / ALAMY

joined the press office at bookies William Hill in the mid-1970s with one brief: ‘Get us as much publicity as possible – outside horse racing.’ My long-term strategy was to target the time of year when the newspapers, television and radio had their largest audiences of the year – Christmas. I’d do it by offering bets about the major talking points of the festive seasons, things that got people talking and the media speculating. Would there be a white Christmas? If not, would it rain? What would be the most-watched TV programme on Christmas Day? Who would have the year’s biggest Christmas chart hit? I specified that the Christmas Number One single would be the record that topped the chart used by the BBC on 25th December. A contract with the Met Office enabled me to offer odds on snow falling at any time of day in any of a dozen or so major cities. Previously the only bet available was that it would actually be snowing at noon, and bets were lost if inches of snow fell but had stopped by midday. The annual ‘Will it snow on Christmas Day?’ cliffhanger saw me sharing turkey and the trimmings with a TV crew who came to my home to film the scene if snow fell on me on the big day. It didn’t. I was woken up at 5am one 25th December morning, to be told, ‘This is the Press Association news desk. Do you know it’s snowing in Hyde Park?’ These festive flutters rapidly proved astonishingly popular. Any number of amateur meteorologists rushed to back their predictions. One year, I was on the roof of the London Weather Centre with a certain Piers Corbyn, who had begun a meteorological-prediction company in competition with the Met Office and

36 The Oldie January 2022

staked bets with me to back up his predictions. I have to say he was surprisingly successful. I took Christmas Number One bets from many big names in the music world, not least Simon Cowell. In 1994, he not only staked a significant sum on his act, the Power Rangers, topping the Xmas chart (they didn’t); he also bailed me out by supplying me with the toy figures of the Power Ranger cartoon characters my young son was demanding but which had sold out almost the moment they hit the toy-shop shelves. Take That almost cost me my job. Their single Babe was regarded as a certainty to be the 1993 Christmas Number One and was backed

I’m gambling on a white Christmas: the Met Office provided snow reports for William Hill

In 1993, Mr Blobby squashed Take That to become Christmas Number One

accordingly. My company ended up with a potential six-figure pay-out and my bosses were threatening me with the sack. My only hope of survival was that Take That would be beaten by a purpleand-yellow plastic character championed by Noel Edmonds – Mr Blobby, who had an eponymous record out at the same time. I felt that mums and dads looking for a kid’s stocking-filler present would buy the single in their droves and lift it to the top of the charts.

She shot JR: Larry Hagman (Dallas’s JR) and Mary Crosby (Kristin Shepard). Right: Screaming Lord Sutch bet he’d become PM

It was a close-run thing, but the Take That camp made a huge error by releasing their single a week too early. Yes, they blasted up to Number One, as teen fans of the group rushed out to buy the single in their hundreds of thousands, sending it straight into the charts at Number One. But there was a week to go, during which the stocking-filler effect kicked in big-time. Mr Blobby grabbed the chart-topping position and kept me in a job. Take That’s Robbie Williams got his revenge, though – later staking £1,000 on one of his own singles to reach Number One, which it did.

PHIL REES / ALAMY

My boss said, ‘If we lose a fortune, it was your idea, and if we don’t, it was MY idea’ In 1997, a man from Hertfordshire changed his name by deed poll to Santa Claus and backed himself to top the Christmas charts. He didn’t, but we still lost a fortune as the Spice Girls were backed down from 16/1 to 1/8, costing us £92,000 in the process. We were also lost in a snowdrift of 7/1 bets as the white stuff fell in London, Manchester, Newcastle and Norwich. I’m not sure anyone much cares what the Christmas Number One is these days – although if you fancy a bet on it this year, I’d have a couple of quid on ABBA with a track from their new LP, Voyage. The success of offbeat bets led to my taking all manner of previously unheardof wagers. I opened a book in 1980 on the most famous TV series plot line of all – ‘Who shot JR?’ in the hugely popular Dallas series – inspired by my wife Sheila’s fanatical interest in the show.

Long shot: Harry Wilson, who played for Wales at 16, won his grandpa £125,000

This was probably the most popular non-sporting betting market ever opened. I got the go-ahead to launch it only after my director boss said, ‘You can do it, but only on the basis that if we lose a fortune, you’re fired because it was your idea, and if we don’t, then it was MY idea.’ We won money when 5/2 second favourite Kristin was revealed to be the shooter. Had it been hotly fancied Sue Ellen, I’d have been on the dole. I encouraged customers of my company to back themselves in one-off bets, which they did by the hundred, betting they’d live to be a hundred. One gentleman, John Richardson – still alive – will collect half a million pounds from his £50 investment at 10,000/1 if he not only makes it to his century but also manages to father a child – in the conventional manner – at the same age. In 2000, Pete Edwards bet me £50 at 2,500/1 that his infant grandson, then three years old, would grow up to represent Wales at football at senior international level. Thirteen years later, Harry Wilson came on in the final few minutes of the Wales–Belgium game, winning Grandad £125,000! One of my then bosses called this ‘a sacking offence’ because of how much I’d cost the company. I showed him an estimate from a PR agency that the publicity from this pay-out would have cost a seven-figure sum to buy. If politics is your thing, you may fancy betting on who will succeed Boris – Rishi Sunak is at 5/2, with Priti Patel available at 33/1. That reminds me of the time I gave the late leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, Screaming Lord Sutch, odds of 15,000,000/1 – confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records as the longest odds ever accepted by any bookmaker – to become Prime Minister. He bet a fiver on himself. The Oldie January 2022 37

Postcards from the Edge

The joy of being a granny

Forget the difficulties of motherhood, says Mary Kenny – just rejoice in the prospects of grandmotherhood

TOBY MORISON

‘Never have children – always have grandchildren,’ was one of Gore Vidal’s cynical, gnomic utterances. Being a flamboyant, gay guy, Gore wasn’t faced with the choice. Yet the advice might be useful to the numbers of fretful women I hear agonising over whether to become mothers or not. Motherhood is rather unpopular these days – the British fertility rate is at its lowest since 1938. The thirtyish and fortyish generation debate with themselves over whether the worry, trouble, expense and sacrifices involved in parenthood are worth it. And modern babies seem to demand such high-intensity focus! It’s that word ‘choice’ that has so many ambitious women in their prime agonising about whether or not to propagate. Throughout most of human history, there wasn’t that much choice about it. I recall that jolly author Margaret Powell telling me, ‘Back in my day, if you got married, you were expected to have children.’ Or, as Princess Anne once put it, with her characteristic dry wit, ‘Motherhood is a professional hazard of being a wife.’ But now, behold the bewildering range of possibilities: marriage, civil unions, babies, no babies, IVF, baby by surrogacy, babies by donor sperm, single parenting by choice, childlessness by choice or even the traditional route of wedlock and then a sprog or two. What to do? Here’s my Gore Vidal-ish advice. Don’t ask yourself if you want to be a mother. Ask yourself if you want to be a grandmother. Grandchildren aren’t a guaranteed product of parenthood, but looking ahead does help you to take the long view. To the 38-year-old career girl I heard saying, ‘I just can’t decide whether I want to be a mum,’ I just say, ‘Try to decide whether you want to be a grandma.’ Patricia Casey, a professor of psychiatry at University College Dublin, thinks Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are misleading young people with their emphasis on 40 The Oldie January 2022

‘mental-health issues’. Not getting along with – or feeling undermined by – your in-laws, or even suffering the loss of a parent in tragic circumstances, is not a mental-health issue, says Patricia Casey. ‘Mental-health issues are schizophrenia, bipolar illness, severe depression. Distress in reaction to sad events is normal.’ Harry has had therapy, but Professor Casey doesn’t think he’s much of an advertisement for it – or he’d recognise the difference between mental-health afflictions and normal distress. It’s evident that the Sussexes are a ‘highfunctioning couple’; people who have mental illness can’t function at all. Describing reactions to difficult or sad life events as a ‘mental-health issue’ is detracting from serious mental illness, she says. ‘The focus has shifted too far away from real mental illness like schizophrenia or clinical depression, and too much towards ordinary negative feelings, which are normal.’ COVID and, indeed, climate change may make some people anxious and indeed fed up, but they are not a trigger for mental illness. Professor Casey’s Fears, Phobias and Fantasies explains the difference between the worries, vexations and sadness of everyday life and genuine mental illness. When Brexit occurred, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt hoped to replace the

City of London as Europe’s major international financial centre. But London bounced back and the City is said to be thriving – Shell’s decision to move to London, leaving the Netherlands, was considered significant. I daresay these decisions are related to London’s historic links with wider international finance. But perhaps an added factor is that London has a social ‘buzz’, absent in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. A city’s ‘buzz’ is hard to define but it’s palpable, and London has it. Much as I appreciate my residency in Deal, by the Channel coast, I always find those words ‘This train is now departing for Charing Cross’ exciting. When Simon Jenkins, author of the lavish Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals, is asked to name his own favourite, he nominates Seville as the finest in Europe. Wells Cathedral wins the laurels in this country. Seville Cathedral, which is also a palace, is certainly stunning. Yet the European cathedral that I have found most affecting is Beauvais (by Ryanair’s ‘Paris’ airport). It’s small for a cathedral and propped up with buttresses; it was here that so many men came to pray when serving in the First World War – and many came, afterwards, to mourn. It now has a special dedication to peace, and that affecting memory of the Great War lingers. For basilicas, I’d pick the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, partly because every leftie, including George Orwell, wanted it destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, just as most of Catalonia’s other churches were. But even anticlerical Catalans knew that Antonio Gaudí was a great architect: his basilica survived and is now a World Heritage Site – as well as a place of worship. Let the cathedral bells ring out for Christmas!

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Time to take on the pandemic bullies I do have a skewed view of the Something odd is happening among problem. My room is at the end of a the children. corridor, overlooking the courtyard. Off While classroom behaviour seems on the courtyard is the huge room where the the whole to be improving, the antics of heads of years and their assistants are the disaffected around school are becoming increasingly crazed. It’s not just based. It used to be the library – but that is another story. at our school: head teachers around the So all the rebels roam round the county – and probably the country – are courtyard, yelling at the pastoral scratching their heads in perplexity. assistants trying to round them up. We could blame the pandemic, of They circle my room like sharks, course. I have a feeling we will be blaming banging on my windows, slamming my the pandemic for everything for years to door, twerking their bottoms or flipping come. Children have been out of school, their fingers at me. My classes have to many with no effective ‘parenting’, for witness the horrendous swearing and months at a time. If no one has set any kicking over of bins and pretend not to boundaries for months, how can we be interested. expect the students to slot back into My year sevens, who in September normal ways of being at the drop of a hat? flinched each time they heard a child This is too flip an answer, though. Many of the naughtiest children were the swearing, are now quite hardened to it. All staff agree bad behaviour is on the most delighted to return. They had rise among a small but very significant actively missed the very thing against which they had been rebelling. One of my most troublesome girls came back from lockdown determined to change her ways and she’s been successful. Now, when other children are shouting and swearing, and other pupils start to titter, she says angrily, ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing. It’s not funny – it’s sad.’ She has ditched her boyfriend for smoking too much weed and sits quietly in the corner of my classroom, trying hard, where she used to complain and walk out. ‘Yeah, mate – goin’ through a tunnel, innit’

minority. This is the minority who have not responded to our stricter behaviour policy. Children get one ‘warning’ for bad behaviour. On the second, they are sent to the Reflection Room, run by one of the heroes of the school, an ex-Marine who reads Plato and listens to country music in his spare time, and has no truck with bad manners. This system has proved our saving and our downfall. Most children go quietly off to Reflection when sent, nearly always admitting to the error of their ways and apologising. For most of them, one visit is enough to shock them into good behaviour. The next time they get a warning, they remember the consequences. But then there are the recidivists who roam around the corridors causing trouble. They play football with water bottles and graffiti the walls. They beg those in the classroom to join them, opening windows and reaching in for books to throw into the pond. Should we send them home, only for them to roam the streets where representatives of county lines lie in wait to corrupt them? Should we exclude them (which is almost impossible), meaning some other school has to take them? I just wish I knew the answer to the problem. And that my classroom didn’t overlook what sometimes appears to be a holding bay for prison.

Quite Interesting Things about … January Until January 2013, it was illegal for women in Paris to wear trousers. 8th January 1835 is the only day in history when the USA had no national debt. By January 2021, almost two million podcasts (with over 100 million individual episodes) had been recorded. Just under a third

of them fizzled out after one or two editions. January in Anglo-Saxon was Wulfmonath, when starving wolves dared to enter villages. In January 1205, it was so cold in England that wine and ale froze solid and were sold by weight, not volume.

In January 1945, Nova Scotia police received complaints that drivers were using their horns to send filthy messages in Morse code. In 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed January into state law as California Dried Plum Digestive Health Month.

On 1st January 2010, the Czech Republic legalised possession of up to five tabs of LSD. JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

The Oldie January 2022 41

sister teresa

Michelangelo’s Christmas card It would be lovely to receive a picture of Michelangelo’s sculpture the Taddei Tondo as a Christmas card. It’s on show in the Royal Academy, with Mary and the infants Jesus and John the Baptist – even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, a nativity scene. There is a legend that, during the infancy of Jesus, he and his mother, Mary, visited Elizabeth and spent some time with her and her little son, John. Like many legends, it has a strong element of probability. What is far less probable is its sequel: that, from then on, poor little John the Baptist began his life in the desert as a hermit, aged two. Jesus, here hardly more than a baby, has an expression of anguish on his face and seems to be trying to escape from the protection of his mother long before he is old enough to do so with safety. Is he already being sidetracked from the normal paths of infancy? Although his face is turned towards John, the whole of the rest of him is moving away as if he’s afraid. He seems to be ducking at the same time as looking back.

Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo (c 1504-5)

In the garden at Gethsemane, Jesus initially and instinctively tried to avoid what was about to happen: ‘If this be possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Matthew 26:29). John has his forearms crossed. This is the first reference in this (unfinished) carving to Christ’s future Passion. The second is more shadowy, in that John seems to be holding a ghostly and indistinct little bird

in his hands. Michelangelo was probably thinking of a goldfinch. Apparently, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the child Jesus was painted accompanied by a goldfinch over 500 times. Many fables are attached to this colourful little bird. The main one is that at the Crucifixion, trying to remove a thorn from Jesus’s head, it was splashed on its cheeks by Christ’s blood. It was left with the sign of this honour for evermore. Michelangelo gives us a seated Mary in an elegant turban, with her face expressing one of her greatest qualities: strength. She is not perhaps given enough credit for this in written and spoken scripture commentary. We should think more about the courage and sheer grit that enabled her to stand, completely helpless, at the foot of the Cross. She is the most remarkable woman of all time, even though so little is known about her. She nurtured Jesus and was responsible for teaching him the standards by which he lived – and because of which he died for our sakes.

Funeral Service

The Countess of Avon (1920-2021) Clarissa Avon, the widow of Anthony Eden, Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957, had her funeral at the tiny church of St Mary’s, Alvediston, Wiltshire. Lady Avon famously said the Suez Canal flowed through her Downing Street drawing room; here, a chalk stream trickled past the churchyard. The grave was being dug by hand as the last cars drove up the narrow lane. The Reverend Catherine Blundell took the service for the 15-strong congregation. Writer Hugo Vickers gave the eulogy. He said, ‘When I talked to Catherine, the vicar, on the morning that Clarissa died, she said touchingly, “We’ll bring her home.” ’ In her 90th year, Clarissa said of Alvediston in her diary, ‘At once I feel at home, out of the wooded valleys & into 42 The Oldie January 2022

the green downs. We battle our way through flocks of rams to get to the church.’ Vickers recalled Lady Avon coming to the church in 1977 for Eden’s funeral on the arm of her stepson, the 2nd Earl of Avon. Clarissa Avon continued to live at the Manor House at Alvediston until 1982. Vickers said, ‘Clarissa will be remembered differently by many whose paths she crossed. Some found her distant and disapproving – she could be (rather enjoyably so, actually) – and others no doubt found her somewhat authoritarian (such as the youthful steward, John Prescott, aboard the ship that took the Edens to New Zealand in 1957). ‘But, to this congregation, the family

and friends she allowed into her world, she will surely be remembered for her sparkling intelligence, her exquisite taste, her unique, sometimes impish sense of humour, her love and knowledge of literature, music and the arts, her extraordinary Garbo-esque beauty and also her quality of unswerving loyalty as a friend.’ Vickers talked, too, of her later life and the challenge of living to a great age. But, he said, ‘to have a chocolate soufflé and a glass of champagne on a Sunday night at the age of 101 and then not wake up the next morning is surely an enviable way to go. Now she has indeed come home, to rest at Anthony’s side, in a remote churchyard in the green downs of the beautiful Wiltshire countryside.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Losing weight can be bad for you

Weight loss, particularly when you’re old, can be a bad sign theodore dalrymple People are inclined to worry about their weight, most commonly because it is greater than they think it ought to be. Often these days they are right, as any walk down a street will tell you. Certainly, there is a statistical association between people’s body mass index (BMI) – their weight in kilograms divided by their height in metres squared – and their life expectancy. Though statistical association is not causation, there is a natural tendency of the human mind to suppose that it is. When the relation of BMI to life expectancy is plotted on a graph, the result is what is known as a J-shaped curve. In this case, it means that an abnormally low BMI, as well as a high one, is associated with a reduced life expectancy. Indeed, a low BMI is associated with a reduction in life expectancy as great as that associated with a high BMI. Mrs Wallis Simpson might have been mistaken when she said you cannot be too thin – at least if you want to live as long as possible. However, because a low BMI is much less common than a high one, its association with a reduced life expectancy is much less well-publicised. Unexplained involuntary loss of weight in adults (ILW – nothing is real these days until it has an acronym), though, is a serious sign. Researchers in Spain analysed nearly 800 cases of adults who presented with ILW, defined as weight loss greater than 5 per cent in the previous 12 months, without specific symptoms pointing to an obvious possible cause. This is a quite common problem with elderly people and should never be ignored. The patients’ average age was 68. They were not accepted into the study if they had symptomatic pointers to their underlying diagnosis, if they had started taking diuretics recently (thereby losing excess fluid) or if they refused follow-up treatment.

The study found that 44.5 per cent of the cases had non-malignant organic causes, most commonly of the digestive tract, for example hiatus hernia (by definition, without specific symptoms of that disease). Prescription drugs of, for example, digoxin and metformin, occult infections (particularly of the lung) and rheumatic diseases were also responsible in some cases. Next in frequency were psychiatric causes: about 29 per cent – more common in women than men. Overwhelmingly the most common psychiatric diagnosis was depression. It was probably mostly of what used to be called the endogenous type – that is to say, depression without obvious precipitating cause, or depression out of proportion to any precipitating cause. At any rate, most such cases are treatable. Severe anxiety also caused weight loss. Nearly a quarter of the patients had malignant disease, more common in men than in women, and again most commonly of the digestive tract (about

half of the cases of malignancy). The commonest cancers of the digestive tract were gastric, colonic and pancreatic, though lung cancer was more common than either colonic or pancreatic cancer. It has to be borne in mind, of course, that patterns of cancer, as of other diseases, vary in different populations: in another place, the proportions of cases might have been quite different. In about 3 per cent of cases, no cause, organic or psychiatric, was found. At 12 months, 3.6 per cent of the psychiatric cases had died, 6.4 per cent of the organic but non-malignant cases had died, and 61.1 per cent of the cancer cases had died. No controls matched for age and other factors were given, but one figure stands out nevertheless – cancer. Let us look on the bright side, however. Involuntary weight gain is for the moment a greater problem for many of us than involuntary weight loss. Let us also, perhaps, be grateful for the enjoyment that, as often as not, has given rise to it.

‘The boss really throws himself into the Christmas spirit’ The Oldie January 2022 43

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

Born in the USA SIR: David Horspool writes (December issue) of Presidents’ Day in the USA. As Adlai Stevenson once said, ‘In America, anybody can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.’ Yours, Bob Frost, Deal, Kent

Controlled happiness SIR: Sister Teresa’s recalling (December issue) a naval joke about the correct attitude at a sailor’s funeral, one of ‘subdued joy’, is delightful. It reminds me of a collection of choral arrangements of classic popular songs, In the Mood, used occasionally by the choir I sing with, where the performance instruction for Tea for Two is ‘with controlled happiness’. Michael Rodgers, Lower Heyford, Oxfordshire

Radio 4’s comic moment SIR: As usual, I enjoyed Valerie Grove’s Radio column (December issue), but can I be the 94th person to point out that the bloke in the Private Eye cartoon actually said, ‘Come quick! Bernardine Evaristo isn’t on Radio 4!’ Valerie missed out the Radio 4 bit – a shame, because it would have chimed rather well with the rest of her engaging piece. All best, Matt Phillips, London W6

Boris’s seating plan SIR: Just to add a note of support to Stephen Glover on the now historic Garrick Club dinner. This was, as he says, an ebullient reunion of over 30 Telegraph leader-writers which had been planned many months in advance. On the night, I was seated next to Charles Moore and diagonally opposite Boris Johnson (and, indeed, directly opposite the editor of this magazine) and can testify that not a word was exchanged on the subject of climate change. The conversation, as is usually the way at such gatherings, 44 The Oldie January 2022

consisted entirely of jocular reminiscence and gossip. Very enjoyable evening it was, too. Yours, Janet Daley, Barnet

Normans conquered SIR: I read with interest the Last of the Nigels article by Nigel Pullman (December issue). But what of the Normans? My best friend is a Norman (b 1952). I know of no other! Yours respectfully, Graham Sherwood, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

Thank ’eaven for Maurice SIR: Re Nigel Pullman’s article about names (December issue) – I guess how I got mine. 1928: parents marry. 1929: fun in Paris. Merci, M Chevalier! Maurice Dybeck, Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria

Folk memories SIR (I see you are still Sir): Why on earth does the Rev Steven Morris (Olden Life, December) consider the choice of Folk Song in Britain an odd choice for an Observer’s book in a series designed largely for children? One of the few pleasant memories I have of life at a dreaded prep school (1944-47) is of the weekly community singing. It included such treats as The Vicar of Bray, The Golden Vanity, Weel May the Keel Row and The Girl I Left Behind Me; from Ireland, The Minstrel Boy and Let Erin Remember; and from Wales, All Through the Night and The Ash Grove; all to be found in the New National Song Book. After these sessions, the general level of brutality and anxiety in the atmosphere dropped appreciably for a time. Wouldn’t schools in the state sector find this helpful? As in modern pop songs, it is the rhythm that counts, far more than the words. But in the older ones there is melody as well. Yours faithfully, John Jolliffe, Frome, Somerset

The Dying Soldier: WWI window at St Mary Magdalene, Enfield

Lest we forget SIR: Your piece by the estimable Lucinda Lambton (October issue) unfortunately contained an error. The penultimate paragraph wrongly names the church on Windmill Hill, Enfield, which is actually called St Mary Magdalene. It also mentions a mournful First World War window. I believe it is worth seeing – so I attach a picture [above]. Best wishes, Alan Urie, Enfield EN3

Turkish delights SIR: Bill Knott’s article on raki (December issue) reminded me of a time in the 1970s when I worked in Turkey. This was before tourism blossomed there, and outsiders were still regarded with curiosity by many. I soon gained a taste for raki. Bill writes that ‘raki is famous for provoking good conversation’ and so it proved when my wife joined me in Istanbul, for a short break.

‘Mother says, “Tell Harold to get lost” – bless her, she always remembers you!’

On our first evening together, we visited a restaurant that served local fare and I introduced her to the drink and the accompanying meze. We attracted attention not only for being foreigners but also because of my wife’s blonde hair. A sea captain and his father at a neighbouring table duly engaged us in conversation and commented on how pleased they were to see an English woman drinking raki. We continued talking over travel, world events and many other things throughout the evening until they departed. At the end of the meal, I asked for our bill and the waiter said that it had been paid for – ‘by your two friends’. Yet another success for raki? Bill mentions ayran, a ‘salty yoghurt drink’. That is a lovely beverage but, as I found, drinking too much of it – with

delicious pastries – does add thickness to one’s girth. I also grew to like mutton tripe soup for breakfast, but my wife did not find that appealing at all and it had to stop. I return to the incident in the restaurant. It is a fact that, during my time working in that wonderful country, I found the Turkish people to be the most perfect of hosts throughout my stay. I’ll drink to the memories. Yours faithfully, Alan Castree, Fetcham, Surrey

Co-optimism SIR: Thank you, Liz Hodgkinson, for ‘Confessions of a Co-op snob’ (November issue). I am 92 years old, born in a Yorkshire mill town. Family funerals were always Co-op funerals. Any new clothes I was lucky enough to get were bought at the Co-op annual sales. My grandmother would send me on errands to the local branch: ‘Ask for Mr Bentley’ (the manager). The divi number is still embedded in my mind after all these years: 22208. Freda Morgan, Sydney, Australia

between 25 and 30) is no great threat, with only slight increases in morbidity and mortality compared with those of normal weight. Overweight individuals do gain from exercising more. As Dr D says, they probably won’t lose much weight, but they will live longer. Being obese (BMI over 30), however, does matter, becoming exponentially more dangerous as BMI rises. The obese would be wise to lose weight if they can, particularly if they are diabetic – but it is extremely difficult. The best approach is both to diet and to exercise. Exercise on its own needs to be hard, the equivalent of running 15 miles a week or more. Exercise is not readily adopted by the obese, which is why most of the obese are obese. As a result, only about four per cent of obese people can be classed as fat and fit. A big problem is self-deception due to so-called social-desirability bias. People eat about 50 per cent more than they say, and exercise about 50 per cent less than they believe. Similarly, perception of obesity is very inaccurate, with only ten per cent of obese subjects recognising their own obesity. Studies of perception of physical fitness have shown no relationship at all between perceived fitness and actual fitness level. Losing weight requires strong motivation and great self-discipline – and motivation requires an acceptance of reality. Obese people are unlikely to be motivated if they do not see themselves as obese, and unfit people will not be motivated to take up exercise if they consider themselves to be fit. As I said, easier said than done. I am etc, Hugh Bethell MD FRCP, Alton, Hampshire

Why fat people are fat

Inventor of the Tudor spirit level

SIR: How right Dr Dalrymple is (December issue) when he promotes exercise as the first measure for those who are carrying too much embonpoint. Everyone benefits from getting fitter, and the fitness element does neutralise some of the ill effects of the fatness. However, this is easier said than done. Being overweight (with a BMI

‘My husband will never guess my password – it’s our anniversary’ The Oldie January 2022 45

I Once Met

The Duchess of Argyll Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (1912-93), emerged as an outrageously scandalous figure when her husband, the 11th Duke, cited 88 men as her lovers. They allegedly included government ministers and three members of the Royal Family. The most famous exhibit in her 1963 divorce from the Duke was a Polaroid picture of the Duchess, naked except for a pearl necklace, engaging in a sex act with a man, also naked, who was wearing a mask. Speculation went on for decades about the masked man. Was it Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, or the film star Douglas Fairbanks Jnr? Years later it emerged that the man in the mask was in fact a less celebrated figure, an American banker called Joe Thomas. Her name is in the news again, 28 years after her death, aged 80, in 1993, with a BBC drama about her, A Very British Scandal. The Duchess is played by Clare Foy, the young Queen in The Crown. I sat next to the Duchess in 1979 at a dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel in London to mark the publication of a book by the disgraced American President Richard Nixon. She would then have been 66; a rather scrawny figure with straggly fair hair. I described her in my diary as ‘a vision in red gauze, diamonds

‘Fine earrings but nothing between them’

and pearls, with a gold handbag and a sprained wrist’. She was still living in some style, with a live-in maid, at the Grosvenor House Hotel, though she was later evicted and died in penury, having got through her multimillion-pound inheritance. I found that Alastair Forbes’s cruel words about her – ‘Her father may have been able to give her fine earrings but nothing to put between them’ – were sadly correct. The Duchess professed herself an unashamed admirer of Nixon. ‘I love the man, I love him,’ she enthused. Before dinner she said to him, ‘Do you remember a crazy Englishwoman sending you cable after cable of support?’ The former President thought hard. ‘No,’ he said finally, with characteristic wit, style and unwonted honesty.

She kept turning to me throughout Nixon’s speech with ecstatic stage whispers. ‘He’s awfully good, isn’t he?’ she said as the hazy rhetoric rolled on: ‘The Russians don’t want war… (long pause) … but they want the world.’ The Duchess was now beside herself. ‘Kiss, kiss,’ she cried. (Afterwards someone offered an explanation for this enigmatic cry. ‘She was trying to say, ‘Kiss-kissKissinger,’ he suggested – perhaps to acknowledge the source of Nixon’s remarks.) She grabbed my arm and trilled, ‘Don’t you love him, don’t you love him?’ She was so childishly happy that I couldn’t bring myself to voice my disagreement. One theory links her nymphomania to a head injury she suffered in a four-storey fall down a lift shaft in Bond Street in war-time London in 1943. She was first seduced at the age of 15 by the film star David Niven and had an abortion. So her later conduct may have been due to sickness –she should be pitied rather than reviled. She may deserve more sympathy than she’s likely to get from the TV series. Even so, I can’t wait to see it. Donald Trelford A Very British Scandal is on BBC1 in December

Allan warren / Alamy

I was the Archbishop’s ghost

John Sentamu, the former Archbishop of York, wrote all his own sermons and speeches, but needed help with his huge correspondence. As the Church of England’s first black archbishop, Sentamu was hot news – and in great demand. He asked a retired archdeacon to assist with the shoals of letters, invitations and emails. One day, that archdeacon asked if I’d look at an article he’d drafted for the Sunday Express. I had also retired – so it was two ‘oldies’ working together. The first half was more Observer than Express 46 The Oldie January 2022

– so I rewrote that in popular journalese. Two days later, I was delighted to find the article exactly as written. And I was amused to read a note saying that the Archbishop had generously donated his (our?) fee for the article to charity. Quite right, too. A glossy Yorkshire magazine wanted a Christmas piece from the Archbishop. His press officer asked me to write a draft. I knew a bit about John Sentamu’s early family life in Uganda from interviewing him for a Radio 4 Sunday-morning service. And I guessed that his favourite place to celebrate Christmas might be York Minster.

Again, I was amused – and pleased – to find my article in that periodical exactly as I’d penned it, complete with a photo of the Archbishop. They also serve, who only sit and write… I drafted low-level responses to letters. The Archbishop and his Chief of Staff read those letters and made them personal before they were signed by the Archbishop. The topics were varied: anything from a serious point of theology to church politics; from a complaint about a local vicar or church practice to a thank-you letter. Am I being disloyal to the Archbishop in revealing these

secrets? I decided to contact a former senior member of the palace staff to ask advice: he encouraged me to go ahead. This gives some insight into the pressures of high office – whether in the world of commerce, politics or religion. Archbishops and bishops work very long days. When they are out of their diocese or province – perhaps travelling to encourage Christians and others in distant lands – emails and questions need to be dealt with in their absence. By Rev Canon John Young, York, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books Æthelred the Unlucky HUGO GYE Æthelred the Unready By Richard Abels

GARY WING

Penguin £6.99 A temperamental leader, written off by many when he came to power in controversial circumstances. A man with complex family relations and a constantly changing cast of allies. A high-energy politician hamstrung by a true national crisis. Sound familiar? Boris Johnson could profitably leave his classical comfort zone and pick up Richard Abels’s new minibiography of Æthelred the Unready if he needs a cautionary tale of just how badly it could all go wrong. The book – part of the Penguin Monarchs series – is subtitled The Failed King and there can be little doubt that Æthelred, who was forced to hand England over to the Danes in 1013, was ultimately a failure. COVID is no picnic, but at least it is unlikely to ravage the country for 25 years, as the Vikings did. Like our current Prime Minister, who is always ideologically flexible, Æthelred was seen as something of a ‘blank slate’ when he became king in 978 – primarily, in his case, because he was 12 at the time. This meant that royal advisers, led by the Queen Mother Ælfthryth, were able to set the political weather; at least until the king came of age and overhauled the court, banishing his mum in the process, a gambit he would later reverse. The U-turns and regime changes of Æthelred’s reign leave the reader thinking that Johnson’s ‘trolley’ nickname could be applied to him. Nonetheless, Richard Abels is clearly sympathetic to his subject, whom he describes as ‘an energetic ruler committed to the defence of his

kingdom’. He points out that Æthelred was a prolific legislator and that England around the turn of the millennium experienced a cultural flourishing, with clergymen such as Wulfstan and Ælfric producing remarkable theological texts; three of the four surviving manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon poetry date to this time. Æthelred was let down by his predecessors, who failed to maintain the military machine created by his greatgreat-grandfather King Alfred. He was also unlucky, in that, this time around, the Danes were not just roving warriors out for plunder, rape and pillage: Swein Forkbeard (father of Cnut) was serious about expanding his empire and settling down for the long term. To the average reader, 1,000 years on, Anglo-Saxon England can sometimes seem nothing more than a string of brutal wars, occasionally brightened up by artistic treasures such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Abels explains that, in fact, by Æthelred’s time England had

quietly become the most sophisticated state in western Europe, with the king holding unmatched control over the economy, the law and the church. Given his long-standing position as a professor at the United States Naval Academy (the mind boggles at the thought of Kentuckian cadets receiving lectures on figures such as Bishop Æthelwold and Olaf Tryggvason), Abels is unsurprisingly strong in his handling of the military evidence. He also deftly draws on archaeological surveys and builds on the seminal work of Cambridge historian Simon Keynes in using land-grant charters to build a narrative of Æthelred’s rise and fall. At just over 100 pages, this biography is inevitably incomplete, but it is a compelling introduction to the study of this complex king which will leave the reader – whether living in 10 Downing Street or not – questioning their preconceptions. If there is one figure they may wish to hear more about, it is

Unready cash: Æthelred the Unready hands money to the Danes to appease them – the subject of the poem Dane-geld by Rudyard Kipling The Oldie January 2022 49

Eadric Streona, a superb villain who emerged from obscurity to become the king’s right-hand man, only to start bumping off most of the other royal advisers, dodging the battlefield and ultimately switching sides to help Cnut take the throne. The book naturally closes soon after its protagonist’s death – but it sows the seed of an interesting thought experiment. Danish rule in England ended up lasting just a quarter of a century, with Æthelred’s son Edward the Confessor taking the throne when Cnut’s hapless offspring died off. Edward had grown up across the Channel, having been packed off by his father to the Norman court. Without this link between England and Normandy, could William ‘the Bastard’ really have lodged a plausible claim to the throne in 1066? Did Æthelred inadvertently sign the death warrant for Anglo-Saxon England? A reminder, perhaps, to today’s rulers that striking deals in Europe can have unintended consequences.

Flower of Scotland MICHAEL BILLINGTON Putting the Rabbit in the Hat By Brian Cox Quercus £20 One of Brian Cox’s great strengths as an actor is playing flawed patriarchs. His magnificent Logan Roy in Succession has echoes of King Lear, a character Cox played at the National Theatre. Both men are addicted to power and have a wayward love of their children which manifests itself in demonic rages. You learn a lot about Cox’s approach to both characters, and to acting in general, in this enormously readable if somewhat ramshackle autobiography. What first strikes one is Cox’s unflinching candour. He writes very honestly about his Dundee childhood and his mixed ancestry. His father, who died when Cox was eight, was proudly Scottish. His mother, who lapsed into mental fragility, was a fervent Irish Catholic. Money was tight after his father’s death and, leaving school at 15, Cox got work at Dundee Rep, went to a prestigious London drama school and soon made his mark in theatre and TV before, at the age of 50, deciding to uproot and become a Hollywood character actor. In a sense, it’s a classic rags-to-riches story, but it is one peppered with self-criticism. Cox has been blessed with four children from his two marriages but admits he has often been ‘a fairly crappy

‘You’re going through what Ball, Theisen and Anderson like to call the three stages of grief: denial, anger and lawsuit’

father’. He also confesses to a ‘propensity for absence’ in his relationships: not so much a physical as a spiritual absence at moments of crisis. All this leads to a repeated use of the word ‘expiation’, as if acting for Cox is a way of purging his private guilts. If this makes the book sound like an agony fest, one should say that it is full of showbiz anecdotes and two exceptional passages about the process of acting. At the Royal Court in 1969, Cox gave an unforgettable performance as a troubled son returning to the family home in David Storey’s In Celebration. Lindsay Anderson – one of the few directors Cox admires – encouraged him to take his time on first re-entering the house, imagining all the changes that had taken place over the years. ‘Don’t just do something; stand there,’ said Anderson, encouraging Cox to infuse his acting with a capacity for stillness. Totally contradictory advice came in 1980 when Cox was touring India with Macbeth for the Cambridge Theatre Company. At one point, his 16-year-old female dresser, watching him from the wings, urged him to move more in the

‘I’m more of a night person’

speech where Macbeth confronts an imaginary dagger. For Cox, this was a revelatory moment, leading him to shed his inhibitions and acknowledge his physicality: something that paid off handsomely in 1987 when Cox played Titus Andronicus – another flawed patriarch – for the RSC in what he describes as his favourite performance. If Cox is excellent on the specifics of acting, his generalisations sometimes puzzle me. He says a couple of times that cinema is an egalitarian art form, whereas theatre is an essentially feudal construct – yet I can’t imagine anything more hierarchical than a film set, where the director literally calls the shots. And while he is honest about his own defects, Cox is no less harsh on others. He accuses Ian McKellen of what he terms ‘front-foot acting’ that offers no expiation. Doesn’t that just mean that McKellen is a different kind of actor from Cox? And simply because Cox didn’t enjoy appearing in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the National Theatre, it seems absurd to describe Peter Hall’s terrific production as ‘a shitfest’. Although Cox talks a lot about the importance of focus in acting, he doesn’t apply the same principle to his writing. A chapter on directors starts off with Spike Lee, before veering off into all the film franchises of which Cox has never been a part before finally homing in on Woody Allen. Cox is clearly a man who, whenever he sees a byway, can’t resist the temptation to explore it. Yet, for all its faults, I enjoyed the book immensely. Cox is open about his personal failings and doesn’t attempt to disguise his professional disappointments. It clearly rankles that having played Hannibal Lecter and The Oldie January 2022 51

‘I just hope you’re not using fossil fuels down here’

Winston Churchill on screen, Cox saw other actors go on to win Oscars in the same roles. But Cox also records his wonderment at going from star-struck Dundee filmgoer to pivotal Hollywood player. And he writes illuminatingly about Succession – ‘It’s about Logan Roy trying to teach his spoiled, entitled children the value of hard work’ – in a way that explains his rare ability to find the humanity in bullying patriarchs.

Snoopy loopy MAUREEN FREELY These Precious Days By Ann Patchett Bloomsbury £16.99 Ann Patchett was between novels when the pandemic hit. With death and its shadows gathering all around her, she knew better than to retreat into an imagined world and embark on a new novel. She decided it might be safer and saner to spend the lockdowns in the realm of facts. Her years as a jobbing journalist on Seventeen and Bridal magazine had taught her not to take herself too seriously. When the likes of the New Yorker and the New York Times opened their doors to her, she took full advantage of the new freedoms they offered, but without ever losing the witty,

breezy, self-deprecating voice she’d made her own. Her first essay collection – This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013) – gave a good sense of her range and red lines. When she went back to dust off the pieces she’d written since that first collection, she could have just coasted. Instead, she did the most difficult thing, which was to assemble a collection in which every essay, be it new or revised, is a different sort of meditation on death, or rather, on where death dwells in our lives, and what it leaves us. She begins with a photograph that captures the spirit of the exercise perfectly. There she is, looking rather splendid with her ‘three fathers’ at her sister’s second wedding. Her family has never been good at marriage, she explains. But not for want of trying. Her parents divorced when she was four, and after that she saw her

father for a only week a year, but they found ways to stay close. Her first stepfather was a madman, but he adored her and paid for her to go to college. Her second stepfather was kind and calm. He arrived on the scene after Ann had left home, but they, too, became close. She saw all three fathers to the end, and this essay is a testament to their lasting presence. It is, for all that, a light and charming read. So, too, is her piece about her doctor husband’s many brushes with death, while he pilots the small planes he is always buying. More than once, she is up there with him, taking courage from her lifelong idol Snoopy. It was Snoopy who gave her the courage to write – and her passion for dogs. They are hugely welcome in the bookshop she co-owns in Nashville. Children are, too, though she has never wanted her own. But for years she couldn’t take two steps without someone telling her that she must. The space that might have been taken up by children is taken up by friends of whom, after reading this book, I am insanely jealous. The very long piece that carries its title tells of a very new friend who comes to stay while taking part in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer. Her name is Sookie and she works for Tom Hanks. It is thanks to Ann’s husband that she has this last chance. Sookie arrives in late February 2020 with a very small suitcase. The pandemic locks her in place. For three The Oldie January 2022 53

extraordinary months, she sits in the basement, churning out the paintings that her busy life never gave her time for, while Ann sits upstairs with her facts. At the end of each day, they meet to cook or take long walks and whatever else either can think up to keep death at bay just a little bit longer. Sookie is still alive on the book’s last page, if only just. It is what she leaves behind that gives this collection of true-life stories the aura of a novel, in which all good people have their chance before the end.

The last Christians YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East By Janine di Giovanni Bloomsbury £20 The persecution of Christians in the Middle East is on the edge of the consciousness of any of us who go to church and don’t doze off during the intercessions. ‘We pray for persecuted Christians in the Middle East…’ says the person whose turn it is to do the prayers, reading from his or her sheet of A4. We squeeze our eyes tight and try to imagine a dusty village and people fleeing. Janine di Giovanni has been to those dusty villages and to glaring, blaring Middle Eastern cities under new regimes worse than the previous ones, and has talked to those people, who do not in fact always flee, but sometimes stay put, preferring to live in fear and repression rather than abandon their homes. As a war correspondent, di Giovanni has always had a gift for bringing out the small, telling, human details and fitting them into the larger political picture. This she does here, in a book to make us uncomfortable at Christmas. An unashamedly emotive writer, she draws us in by telling us first about herself. I didn’t mind this, as I rather needed to be taken gently by the hand and led unwillingly to the world’s trouble spots. We find her in a melancholic state, holed up in silent, empty Paris during lockdown, from where she escapes to a village in the mountains to join her ex-husband and her 16-year-old son, Luca. She muses on her own Catholic upbringing, her education by strict Dominican nuns, her grief for her brother Joseph who died five years ago and her craving for the liturgy of the Mass. Wherever she has covered wars, she

has always sought out the local church, for its reassuring ritual and the sense of belonging that it brings. She has seen how Christian communities somehow find a way of gathering together to pray, even in secret in a bombed-out church. From here, she describes her visits to four places where Christianity is under attack: Iraq, then Gaza, Syria and Egypt. It’s heartbreaking stuff. The gentle living side by side of all the various sects and religions that has somehow managed to carry on for millennia is being eradicated by thugs and collapsing economies. How I loved all the names of the branches – Greek Orthodox of Antioch, Greek Melkite Catholic, Syriac Orthodox of Antioch, Armenian Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean Catholic – in this cradle of Christianity. She chats with people over cups of tea in traumatised towns. She talks to a Christian woman who fled from Mosul under attack from ISIS – the woman went to a nearby city, Qaraqosh, which was burned to the ground, and managed to flee to a monastery on a mountain, along with 65 terrified Christian families hiding out, ten to a cell. The last to escape from Mosul was Monsignor Nicodemus Sharaf, the Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church. He said to di Giovanni, ‘They cannot take God from us. They have taken everything else. But not God.’ In both Iraq and Syria, the Christian population felt safer under the brutal dictator than they did or do under the chaos following the attack on or toppling of the dictator. Because Saddam Hussein’s government was a minority Sunni one, other minorities, including Christians, enjoyed a degree of protection in return for loyalty to his regime. Likewise, in Damascus, priests and

parishioners had an underlying confidence that President Assad would protect them. When the Russian and Syrian barrel bombs started falling, Syrian Christians became targets of violence as punishment for supporting the Assad regime. Before the war, di Giovanni visited the tranquil city of Maaloula, where nuns lived alongside Muslims. The locals were certain that their city, famous for its tolerance, could resist the ‘centrifugal pressures’ of a vicious sectarian civil war. But two years later the Battle of Maaloula began, nuns from the peaceful monastery were kidnapped, the medieval Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus was destroyed and all the families, shopkeepers, restaurant-owners and taxi drivers she’d chatted to two years before were gone. In overcrowded Gaza, piled high with trash, she visits a Christian family on the seventh floor of a high-rise block during the daily power cut. They have to apply for permits to visit Bethlehem on the West Bank at Christmas, but do not often get one. In post-Tahrir Square Egypt, the current regime under President El-Sisi is brutally repressive, but Coptic Christians feel more secure under it than they did under Mubarak, who banished the Christian era from the history books. ISIS attacks on Copts and the burning of churches continue, and Copts are emigrating in their hundreds of thousands. ‘I wrote this so that the people documented would never disappear,’ writes di Giovanni. The recent wars and terrorism in each country have been (and are) horrible and chaotic. I admire her for going in, knocking on doors and recording the stories of Christians caught up in it all.

‘Your snoring kept me awake all through January!’ The Oldie January 2022 55

‘But, hey … enough about me’

The reign in Spain DAVID GELBER Lady of Spain: A Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria By Simon Courtauld Mount Orleans Press £22.50 Every summer, the English in their millions jet off to Spain, swelling the hundreds of thousands already living out their retirement in the Spanish sun. In the 16th century, a visit to Spain was a rather less enticing prospect for residents of England, even before the two countries went to war. It wasn’t just the absence of air-conditioning and the stomach-churning passage across the Bay of Biscay. There was also the danger that your beach reading might not get past the bloodhounds of the Inquisition, who nosed through the luggage of new arrivals for unsound texts. It isn’t surprising that few English men and women at this time voluntarily went to Spain. Those who had no choice in the matter – merchants, sailors, diplomats – made haste to depart at the earliest opportunity (Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Spanish court, Sir Thomas Wyatt, even composed a poem celebrating his recall to England). Yet, for one small group, Spain presented a haven: Catholics unwilling to conform to England’s new Protestant order. Foremost among these was Jane Dormer, wife of the Duke of Feria, the Spanish grandee who left England shortly after Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne and died in Madrid a full halfcentury later. Simon Courtauld’s short new life of Jane not only memorialises this largely forgotten figure, but also casts a sidelight on the motley collection of traditionalists, zealots and chancers who abandoned England for the Spain of Philip II. Dormer was born into a Catholic

Nativity in mosaic, in the central dome of the Palatine Chapel, Palermo, c 1143. From Divine Love: The Art of the Nativity by Sarah Drummond (Unicorn, £25)

gentry family from Buckinghamshire. Then as now, the expectation was that she would marry a suitable Englishman of similar breeding. But a more exotic destiny awaited her. Through family connections, she entered the household of Mary Tudor as lady-in-waiting. Shortly after becoming queen, her mistress married Prince Philip of Spain (later Philip II). Jane caught the eye of his confidant, the Count of Feria, a blunt yet dutiful aristocrat 15 years her senior. Courtauld considers it to have been a love match: Jane, a contemporary wrote, was ‘of shuche lively hewe that who so fedes his eyes on her may sone her bewte vue’, and Feria was duly smitten. Yet, while the marriage brought Feria no financial gain, Jane did possess one

crucial asset: information. Philip was absent from England for most of his four-year marriage to Mary and depended on Feria, whom he left behind for periods at Mary’s court, to supply him with intelligence about his wife. Few were better placed to procure it than Jane. Jane and Feria (who was raised to the rank of duke in 1567) married shortly after Mary’s death in November 1558, before the possibility of a Catholic wedding was ruled out. Feria remained briefly in England as Philip’s ambassador to Elizabeth I, but his irascible, plainspeaking style ill suited him for such a role and he was soon replaced. With Jane in tow, he returned to Spain via Flanders and France, where the newly-weds The Oldie January 2022 57

were sumptuously entertained by Mary Stuart and her husband Francis II. They were accompanied by two dozen attendants and a train of refugee monks, for whom there seemed no future in England. En route, Jane gave birth to their first son. The book’s most novel parts deal with Jane’s years in Spain, where she lived between her husband’s estate in Extremadura and Philip II’s court in Madrid. At first, she struggled with the weather and the food – she requested consignments of herring, salmon and Shropshire cheese from England – but within a few decades she was producing recipes for Spanish cakes and biscuits. She became an important figure at Philip II’s court, where the king treated her as an oracle on the inscrutable English queen and she in turn acted as spokeswoman for England’s increasingly downtrodden Catholics. Although the 16th century is commonly regarded as an era of polarisation, Courtauld shows how Jane was able to a degree to straddle divisions of religion and politics. She remained a pious Catholic throughout her life and provided succour to Catholic exiles in Spain, yet also served as unofficial consul general for English Protestant visitors to the country. She involved herself in intrigues against Elizabeth I, but never formally renounced her allegiance to the queen. Occasionally, Courtauld exaggerates Jane’s influence. She was never, for instance, a serious candidate to become Philip’s Governor of Flanders after the death in 1571 of her husband (who had been due to take up that office), however noisily the Catholic exiles championed her cause. Dynamic Jane may have been, but in the 16th century women not of the blood royal were still required to operate in the shadows. Yet, overall, this is a balanced, colourful and revealing biography of a pioneer of Anglo-Spanish living.

don’t want anyone to feel intimidated out of speaking; nor do I want anyone to feel intimidated into speaking.’ Over the next hour, something happened that one rarely sees inside an Oxbridge college. People began to talk freely – almost free-associatively. No one seemed compelled to prove their eloquence or erudition. And Phillips, hanging on every word, responded not so much with arguments, as with counter-questions, quotations, provocations and jokes. In Phillips’s vast oeuvre (more than 20 books, most of them essay collections), the theme of intimidation constantly recurs. Tyrants, experts, authorities and superegos: these forces inhibit the spontaneous flow of language, and hence our capacity to surprise or contradict or understand ourselves. The task of therapy is to circumvent them, and thereby to sharpen our sensitivity to the unruly impulses of the unconscious. In On Getting Better, Phillips sets out to distinguish the aims of talking therapy from those of medical science. The latter, he says, relies on experts, diagnoses and treatments – features that have no place in the former. Unlike the doctor, the analyst does not claim to have exclusive knowledge which gives him or her privileged insight into the patient. If anything, the analyst’s role is to resist making the kind of definitive judgements and prescriptions we’d expect from a GP. In their place, the analyst displays irrepressible curiosity about the analysand’s unconscious and a commitment to follow its sinuous course. Whereas medicine creates a hierarchy of knowledge, Phillips’s vision of analysis involves a radically

egalitarian relationship between therapist and patient. When patients strive to ‘get better’, they are often striving to substitute the person they are with the person they want to be. This, Phillips warns us, is a dangerous operation. For how can we know definitively who we want to be? More often than not, our aims and ideals are derived from external authorities. Our desires are not our own. So an effective psychoanalysis should never teach us to fulfil our ambitions. It should rather explain how we developed those ambitions in the first place, and how we might develop others. Phillips spent years working as an NHS child therapist, and believes that adults have much to learn from children. His latest book observes that ‘to grow up is to learn what it is to be better’. Growing up, in other words, means internalising the images of health, wellness, happiness or fulfilment that society imposes on the individual. It is difficult to read Phillips’s meditations on authoritarianism in 2021 without bringing to mind their political context, as a rising New Right – emblematised by Trump, Modi, Orbán and Johnson – erodes democracy the world over. And when one makes that association, one begins to doubt the broader applicability of Phillips’s model. Do we believe his claim that fluid instincts are always preferable to rigid ideals? Or are certain ideals worth protecting from their political adversaries? Phillips masterfully describes the value of free speech in the consulting room. But is it possible that his vision is more suited to living within a repressive society than to mounting a resistance?

How to get well soon OLIVER EAGLETON On Getting Better By Adam Phillips Penguin £6.99 I first encountered Adam Phillips – Britain’s most prominent literary psychoanalyst – at a seminar in Oxford, where he spoke about the poetry of Frank O’Hara. Before opening the floor to questions, Phillips addressed the audience in a tone that was both solemn and unassuming. ‘I am against intimidation,’ he said. ‘So I

‘I’ve been wrapping presents all day’ The Oldie January 2022 59

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Faith, hope and love A N WILSON The Rector’s Daughter By F M Mayor Persephone Books £13 This novel, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1924 at the author’s own expense, became an instant success. The book was so popular that Boots’ lending libraries restricted the number of borrowers allowed. Perhaps part of its appeal was that it depicted a way of life that was all but obsolete, even then. Mary Jocelyn leads an uneventful existence in her father’s rectory in a remote East Anglian parish, far from the nearest railway or town. Her father is a learned classicist, a griefstricken widower who takes refuge in his studies as a hedge against sorrow. He is incapable of expressing emotions. Insofar as he appears to notice his daughter, as she enters her thirties, it is only to belittle her achievements, to throw scorn on her literary ambitions and to ignore, because too painful, her heroic, heart-rending care for Ruth – her sister with what we should call learning difficulties, who dies in the course of the story. Canon Jocelyn is a Victorian gentleman, who is appalled by the intellectual inadequacy of the modern Church, and who lives, more or less, as if the 20th century has not dawned. Mary subjugates herself almost entirely to her

father’s will, consoling herself by reading the novels of Trollope and Charlotte Mary Yonge. Part of the book’s appeal is that it enabled readers who had lived through the horrors of the First World War, the Spanish flu, the eruption of the Irish Civil War and the poverty and horror of the 1920s to step back into a world that was largely unchanged since Charlotte M Yonge chronicled Victorian parish life in the countryside. But it is a disturbing book, the very reverse of escapist. Mary is a clever person, and if she had been male, she would have done what her brothers have done – escaped the restrictions of life in the parish and followed a career. It is entirely her gender that is the cause of her imprisonment in her father’s parsonage and her father’s ego. This is made the more frustrating since she, and the reader, can see that in his way Canon Jocelyn is an admirable old man, with his veneration for learning. (Mayor was the great-niece of Grote, the historian of Greece, and her father was a high-flying classicist.) But what about love? What about feeling? What about the hope, as she passes into middle age, and watches her sister dying, that life might offer her rather more to look forward to than the next Harvest Festival? Hope flickers that a Bloomsburyish little ‘set’ in London might recognise her skills as a poet. This is an especially powerful element of the novel. This review won’t offer a ‘spoiler’ as to the fate of her literary career, but Mary learns, in her muted,

pessimistic way, that literary ‘success’ would be no more fulfilling than parish life if she cannot have something else. That something is, of course, love. The novel brilliantly depicts a quartet of destinies: those of Canon Jocelyn and Mary and also a neighbouring clergyman, Mr Herbert, and the beautiful, highspirited and highly sexed aristocrat, Kathy, who marries him. Again, no spoiler will be offered here, but the ‘twist’ in the plot is quite masterly. The reader thinks that the crisis in the Herberts’ marriage, and the strength of feeling between Mary and Mr Herbert, can lead in only one direction. The reader is wrong. By the end, that reader is beginning to discover that this most surprising work of art is no crude feminist tract, deploring the lot of the unmarried woman, or the married woman. It is an analysis of love, worthy of George Eliot herself – a novelist whom Canon Jocelyn met as a young man, on one of her visits to Cambridge. What a pleasure to have the chance to re-read this great book, not in the ugly green Virago incarnation of my youth, but in the elegant opal-grey Persephone format, with its fine paper, marbled endpaper and handsome typeface (ITC Baskerville). If you have never read it, you are in for surprise. If you are returning to it, you will be reminded that F M Mayor, that chronicler of the concealed emotion and the quietly nourished intellect, and the well-spent, well-read, unshowy day, left behind a masterpiece. The Oldie January 2022 61

History

’Tis the season to be jolly drunk

PETER HORREE / ALAMY

If you think Christmas is indulgent, remember the Land of Cockaigne david horspool I’m looking at a picture of three wellpadded chaps lying on the ground beneath a table laden with pies and poultry. These overindulged revellers planning to sleep it off might seem a familiar enough scene. But the artist has added some peculiar touches. In the foreground, what appears to be an egg, its top removed and a knife dug into it, has sprouted legs and is skipping over to the man who lies spread-eagled, staring at the sky. Behind the prone figures is a pig, trotting along with a knife inserted in his side. In fact, as a slice out of his back shows, this pig is already cooked, a pork chop available on demand. This is no Christmas lunch, that single day of letting yourself go and never mind the waistband. It’s the year-round medieval fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne, as painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1567. A pretty good idea of what Cockaigne was supposed to be like is given by its Dutch name, which supplied Bruegel’s original title: Het Luilekkerland – the lazy-yummy-land. First surfacing in the 13th century (the Carmina Burana has a character who calls himself the ‘Abbot of Cockaigne’), the appeal of Cockaigne spread through Italy (Bocaccio called it Bengodi, ‘where the vines are tied up with sausages’), Germany, England and the Low Countries. Scholars disagree over writers’ aims in their portraits of Cockaigne – were they celebrating a fantasy or warning of the unChristian perils of self-indulgence? – but the themes remained pretty constant: more food and drink than you could shake a pitchfork at, no work, and sex on demand. The British Library has a 15th-century manuscript of a poem about Cockaigne in Middle Dutch, which is pretty representative, as translated by the Dutch literary historian Herman Pleij: 62 The Oldie January 2022

Bruegel’s The Land of Cockaigne (1567)

Beautiful women are seen everywhere. This is the land of the Holy Ghost; Those who sleep longest earn the most. No work is done the whole day long, By anyone old, young, weak, or strong. There no one suffers shortages; The walls are made of sausages. Windows and doors, though it may seem odd, Are made of salmon, sturgeon, and cod. The tabletops are pancakes. Do not jeer, For the jugs themselves are made of beer. Sounds like heaven – though a rather more earthy one than that conjured up by the Church, or by Dante, whose Empyrean seems to be populated exclusively by ancient and medieval celebs, like a roped-off section of a Gothic nightclub. Cockaigne sounds as if it was meant for people who hadn’t had much chance to choose the path of wisdom or temperance because they were too busy grafting and wondering where the next meal was coming from. If we think we know today about the ‘shortages’ the poet mentions, we are of course kidding ourselves: to a medieval peasant, even a thinned-out supermarket shelf would look like Cockaigne. Plenty wasn’t alien to medieval experience, but it was exclusive. It is notable how many chivalric vows seem to have taken place at exotic banquets, for example: from the vow of the peacock to the vow of the pheasant, where knightly virtue was inspired by the appearance of the next course.

By the time Bruegel was painting it, Cockaigne was on the way out. The artist was probably satirising overindulgence rather than celebrating it anyway. It is tempting to conclude that what did for Cockaigne was the Reformation, elements of which encouraged all sorts of crackdowns on simple pleasures, from dancing to football. But the Church had always seen Cockaigne as disreputable, which was part of its appeal. The reason for its demise probably has more to do with Cockaigne’s replacement by a different fantasy land, in the New World. Columbus described South America as ‘a veritable Cockaigne’, and wildly inaccurate and fantastical reports of the cornucopias on offer (and easily dealt-with or completely ignored original inhabitants) are a feature of explorers’ accounts and imperial cheerleading from then on. No matter that early settlement, at least, was fraught with hardship and danger, from Roanoke to Jamaica. The propaganda kept coming. For all the desperation – and the inhumanity – there certainly were goodies on offer. If we’re looking for Cockaigne, a good place to start is the origins of our Christmas lunch. Of all the old favourites – our turkeys from Central America, roast potatoes from their northern neighbours, Christmas pud spiced with the bounty of Madagascar, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – just about the only dish a medieval reveller might recognise would be the Brussels sprouts. Spices, though known, were so exotic as to be out of reach to almost everyone, and their origins were mysterious enough to make them appear to be the harvest of Luilekkerland anyway. In the 13th century, a crusader reported the tale that cinnamon was gathered in nets at the source of the Nile. As you hover over that extra mince pie, emulate your medieval forebear – and tuck in.

Media Matters

Rothermere, lord of all he surveys

Mail editor Geordie Greig’s dismissal was part of a family takeover stephen glover Should you offer reflections about a newspaper for which you write a column, if it’s the media story of the month? However hard you try, complete objectivity is impossible. But the task must be undertaken nonetheless. Geordie Greig has been summarily dismissed as editor of the Daily Mail (where I have a column), arguably the most powerful job in what used to be called Fleet Street. This came as a huge shock to most observers, and to Greig himself. It seemed he had done what was expected of him when he took over the reins from Paul Dacre three years ago. He had been asked to soften what were seen by management as the newspaper’s abrasive edges, and did so, while heeding its ancestral voices. Why Greig was jettisoned – he retains the fairly meaningless title of ‘consultant editor’ – only the man who wielded the axe, the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, truly knows. But it is possible to read the runes by asking who is thriving following his departure. A couple of people are – and another one now reigns supreme. Nine days after Greig’s dismissal, there was an even more surprising development. Martin Clarke, who has been editor of Mail Online for 13 years, and the driving force behind it, announced his resignation. As I write, the exact reasons are unclear, but it seems likely that this ambitious man asked for more powers over Mail Online than Rothermere was prepared to give him. One obvious victor in this revolution is Ted Verity, formerly editor of the Mail on Sunday. He has been put in charge of both titles, in what will be a seven-day operation with some merged departments. It is a daunting task. Without doubt, he will wield immense power. He will also be expected by Rothermere and the management to make editorial cost savings. A second victor is Paul Dacre,

removed from the editorship of the Daily Mail in 2018 after 26 years at the helm. He returns as editor-in-chief of DMG Media, advising Rothermere and the editors. This is a stupendous comeback. Tellingly, he had left a largely honorific role at the company only weeks before being reappointed to a similarly named job when Greig was dismissed. I am sure the new one carries real responsibilities. So Verity and Dacre have both benefited enormously from Greig’s ejection and Clarke’s departure. The two men get on very well. Verity could be fairly described as a protégé of Dacre’s, and they share similarly robust right-wing views. Whoever succeeds as editor of Mail Online is bound to have less power than Clarke. That suggests to me that Verity and Dacre will have more. There is, however, one person who emerges from the upheaval even more triumphant than the others. I am speaking of Rothermere, the surprisingly little-known 54-year-old proprietor of the Mail titles and Mail Online. For the first time since he inherited the empire from his father, Vere, in 1998, he will be calling all the shots. Much of his enhanced power will come from his taking the company private. Since 1932, his family has had a controlling stake in Daily Mail and General Trust, which

‘I’d like the amount that is good for your health – twice…’

has been quoted on the stock market. As I write, privatisation is not quite a done deal because a couple of significant shareholders have been holding out for a higher price. But people who know more about these things than I do say that Rothermere is likely to prevail. If he does, he will be in unfettered command of his ship. I doubt he will interfere in the editorial running of Mail Online and the Mail titles, though he may exert more influence than before. The point is that no one can impede him. During much of his long editorship of the Mail, Paul Dacre was a de facto proprietor, running the Mail almost as though it were his own newspaper. He returns, honour and dignity restored, as a crucial adviser. Verity will be allowed to get on with the job of editing two titles but within strict financial constraints imposed by Rothermere and management. As for Martin Clarke, he is rumoured to be leaving to work for Rupert Murdoch, but will be unable to do so until the end of 2022 because of contractual obligations to DMG Media. The departure of this formidable, mercurial figure confirms that it is Rothermere who rules the roost. I’m not suggesting that the triumphant proprietor is some sort of megalomaniac who will seize control of the papers in the manner of, say, Lord Beaverbrook, the famous owner of the Daily Express, or indeed Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail. He is not as political a figure as they were. I am sure he will continue to seek advice. But it is entirely his company now – assuming the deal goes through – and for the first time his hands will be the only ones on the tiller. For five decades, since David English became a successful editor of the Daily Mail, senior journalists in the company have had more power than their counterparts in other media groups. Lord Rothermere is now master of all he surveys. The Oldie January 2022 63

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Sense and sensitivity

TOM PLANT

The following words and expressions have been cancelled recently – or may be soon. Abominable snowman This name seems designed to offend friends of the yeti. Atlanta Braves Under attack from Native Americans for their foam-rubber tomahawk mascots and chopping gestures, Atlanta’s baseball team has so far resisted a name change. Bananaland This name suggests Queensland is a banana republic, whereas it is of course a part of the constitutional monarchy of Australia. Belgian waffle Better than double Dutch, but still undesirable and therefore offensive. Chinaman A ball bowled with a left-arm wrist spin is unacceptable even on the cricket pitch. Coventry Supply-chain issues now make it impossible to send anyone to Coventry. Cuban heels Communists, maybe – heels surely not? Dutch courage Now that gin is drunk the world over, it’s time to rethink this expression, along with ‘going Dutch’ and ‘Dutch cap’ – but perhaps not ‘Dutch auction’ (where the bidding starts high and decreases). Danish pastry Are the raiders and marauders of Viking days really now just a bunch of sugary doughballs? Essex girls They make all other shire girls, especially those in Wessex and Middlesex, seem plain and dull.

Christmas cards I was always a diligent and loyal dispatcher of Christmas cards until a few years ago. It suddenly seemed to me a bit pathetic to keep sending a seasonal message to my old geography teacher, whom I’d not seen since the seventies. The Christmas-card list can be a frightful trap. My 64 The Oldie January 2022

French cricket Now that Brexit has restored our independence, surely we should rename French cricket? French windows should also be repatriated as they are essential to all English drawingroom comedies. French letter A slur on France’s postal service. German measles Why blame the poor Germans for this disease? Hamburger When mince in a bun becomes better known than the city from which it took its name, one of them needs rebranding. It’s unlikely to be the hamburger. Hindu rate of growth Some economists attributed India’s slow economic growth before 1990 to the fatalism and contentedness of its Hindu population. Britain now has a Hindu Chancellor. Time to ditch the expression? Indian summer Fine weather in late autumn – nothing to do with Indians, American or Asian. Irish twins Two in 12 months suggests undue haste in procreation. Jew’s harp Harps are best left to the Welsh. Kansas City Chiefs Seminole war chant with tomahawk chop in football stadium equals cultural appropriation. Low Countries Are the Netherlands and Belgium for ever doomed to inferiority? Mexican wave Suggests Mexicans suffer from undulant indecision, not knowing when to sit and when to stand.

mother-in-law sends dozens of cards, even to people who are dead. The Queen sends 750 cards, personally inscribing each of them during the dull, wet summer holiday in Balmoral. Clearly the whole business is a burden. I made an effort to be more selective – and I began to notice a tit-for-tat game was afoot. If I didn’t send a card, I wouldn’t get one back. If I started up again, they started up again. The menopausal wives of old school pals were particularly prone to this – a lower-middle-class, suburban, provincial mentality, always on the alert for perceived slights.

Newcastle’s fuel supply Needlessly carrying coals to Newcastle anachronistically implies that the city produces coal, not stotties and brown ale. Oman This should be Operson. Panama hats These are now made in Ecuador. Queen of the suburbs That title went to genteel Ealing in west London. Unfair to the denizens of Morningside in Edinburgh. Ruritania Many microstates are now threatened by rising seas. Bad taste to treat them as comic. Spanish practices Now almost universal – unfair to link them all to Spain. Turkey Would you want to share your name with a Christmas dish? Ugandan discussions These seem to be endless. Unfair to Ugandans? Victoria This Australian state became known as the Cabbage Patch because of its small size. Now it’s the Garden State, like New Jersey. The Victorians deserve better. White Russians Where does this name leave anti-Red (anti-communist) émigrés of colour? Xanthippe So bad-tempered that her name is a synonym for a conjugal termagant, Socrates’s menopausal wife is cruelly misjudged by ignorant men. Ripe for reassessment. Yorkshire pudding An unambiguous slight on Yorkshire tykes. Zurich’s gnomes The notorious speculators in currency markets should now be repurposed to enrich Swiss lawns.

Slightly nastier is the way sending no card implies war declared. It’s a postal version of cutting a person dead. A lot of that goes on in the literary world, with Christmas the opportunity not for goodwill but for spite. A lukewarm review – and no more shall cardboard crib scenes or pheasants in flight over a snowy landscape drop through the letterbox. People who do send cards religiously – and I was until recently in this undiscriminating category myself – are the complete bores, whom I’d never want to see or spend time with at Christmas or any other time: flabby cousins, in-laws with

company cars, dull, widowed aunts, the couple from Glasgow met in Rhodes in 1987. Nevertheless, I am a devotee of their round robins, the more banal the better: ‘Julie fell off a ladder in Marlborough and broke five ribs and her sternum’; ‘We did a spot of hang-gliding in August’; ‘I am still doing battle with the DVLA over my personalised number plate’. Owing to the coronavirus, and not wanting to queue up at the Hastings post office with the plague-carriers, I didn’t send any cards in 2020. I will know the extent of the retribution only this Christmas. ROGER LEWIS

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT

SEE-SAW FILMS / ALBUM

OPERATION MINCEMEAT (12A) Oldie readers will know the familiar, gripping story of Operation Mincemeat – what Hugh Trevor-Roper called ‘the most spectacular single episode in the history of deception’. In 1943, British intelligence came up with the brilliant idea of taking the body of a poor Welsh tramp, dressing him up as a Royal Marines officer and dumping him at sea off the Spanish coast. Letters were planted on the body, suggesting that the Allied invasion would take place in Greece and Sardinia, as a smokescreen for the real planned invasion of Sicily. Extraordinarily enough, this pie-inthe-sky idea worked. A Spanish fisherman picked up the body and passed it on to the Spanish government, who shared the discovery with the Abwehr, the German intelligence service. It’s no wonder such a miraculous story has been retold so often: in Operation Heartbreak, a 1950 novel by Duff Cooper, and The Man Who Never Was (1953), the book (later a film) by Ewen Montagu, the intelligence officer who dreamt up Operation Mincemeat. The best account of all was by Ben Macintyre in Operation Mincemeat (2010) – and it’s his thrilling book that has been made into this strangely unthrilling film (out on January 7). The ingredients should be perfect: the ideal Boy’s Own story of Allied derringdo; a terrific war-film cast, including Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu, and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, who also dreamt up the operation. And both actors are their usual, talented selves: understated, realising that less is more, avoiding the trap of laying on the 1940s posh English too thick. What’s more, there’s even a part for 66 The Oldie January 2022

Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen); Montagu (Colin Firth); Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn)

Ian Fleming, played well by Johnny Flynn – very good-looking, if not quite in the same way Fleming was very goodlooking. Fleming is thought to have been involved in writing the 1939 Trout Memo on wartime deception that spawned Operation Mincemeat. In this, as in so much detail – well-researched by Macintyre – the film is accurate. But, still, the movie falls flat. That isn’t because you know the story already. In fact, the most spine-tingling scene is real footage of Glyndwr Michael’s grave. After his body was discovered in 1943, he was buried in Huelva, Spain, under his Royal Marines pseudonym, Major William Martin. Only in 1998, when the British Government revealed his true identity, was this moving inscription added to the tombstone: ‘Glyndwr Michael ~ Served as Major William Martin, RM’. The film manages to kill off those real-life excitements, though, and make the whole exceptional operation a bit leaden. There are small flashes of interest – such as the sourcing of ‘wallet litter’.

Those were the items placed on Glyndwr Michael’s corpse, along with the fake invasion documents, to make him look convincing: a photograph of Pam (his pretend fiancée), a shop receipt, cigarettes, matches and keys. The director, John Madden, and the writer, Michelle Ashford, fail to build suspense, despite the strong scaffolding provided by the unique story and Macintyre’s telling of it. After a long build-up to the moment when the body is dropped at sea comes the moment of triumph: when the Germans fall for it – or, as the War Office put it to Winston Churchill, ‘Mincemeat swallowed, hook, line and sinker’. But that moment seems strangely untriumphant. Normally, the emotional restraint of excellent actors like Firth and Macfadyen is perfectly pitched for such high points. All they have to do is emit a bat squeak of pleasure, in contrast with their usual impassive nature, and – bingo! – your heart is in their hands. That doesn’t happen here.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE Touring, nationwide In my childhood, the idea that I might climb into a wardrobe and escape into another world was such an alluring fantasy that for several years I hoped and prayed it might come true. Millions of other children, before and since, have felt the same way about Narnia. That’s why C S Lewis’s 1950s stories are still so popular – the seven books have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Sadly, I no longer believe in Narnia. But those childhood memories remain so vivid that until I had children of my own, I studiously avoided all Narnia adaptations, on the radio, on TV and in the cinema, for fear that these modern versions might spoil those precious books. My children weren’t so fussy – they loved the books, and they enjoyed the movies too. So it was with some trepidation that I braved this touring production of C S Lewis’s first – and most famous – Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Does it do justice to the book? Well, yes and no. No drama can recreate the world Lewis conjured into being, but I’m glad to say this bold, imaginative presentation has a pretty good go. The story will be familiar to Oldie readers. During the Second World War, four children (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie) are evacuated to a mysterious country house. From there, they are transported into a magical netherworld where it’s always winter but never Christmas. They meet a wicked witch, a godlike lion and all sorts of other fantastical creatures. It isn’t so much a children’s story – more of a timeless fairy tale. And, like all the best fairytales, it tackles elemental themes: bravery, cowardice, betrayal and forgiveness. It’s an enchanting, disturbing fable, whose sinister undercurrents belie its sparkling surface. The main challenge for any adaptation is to convey the power and mystery of Lewis’s vision, and on the whole director Michael Fentiman succeeds. There’s nothing cute or cuddly about his accomplished production. Although there’s lots of humour, his Narnia is suitably dark and strange. The big surprise was that the Pevensie children are all played by black actors. This took me a bit of getting used to,

Bewitched: the Pevensies fall under the spell of Aslan and the wicked witch

since it jarred with my memories (formed by Pauline Baynes’s wonderful illustrations in the books), but dramatically it makes perfect sense. These four children are all Londoners, stranded in unfamiliar countryside. In Britain, the black experience has been predominantly urban, and so Fentiman’s audacious casting heightens the sense of separation Lewis set out to create. All four Pevensies do him proud, especially Shaka Kalokoh as the treacherous Edmund, who betrays his siblings for some supernatural Turkish Delight. They’re adults playing children, which is always a difficult thing to do, but they all do it brilliantly, without any mawkishness. It’s easy to suspend your disbelief. Chris Jared is an enigmatic, messianic Aslan, and Samantha Womack oozes evil sensuality as the White Witch – but this is primarily an ensemble piece, and it’s in the chorus numbers that it comes alive. All these actors can sing and dance and most of them play instruments. The musicians are part of the action, rather than hidden away in the orchestra pit. At the centre of this archetypal tale there’s a complex Christian allegory: Aslan must sacrifice himself to save Edmund from the witch. When I was a child, this was the only thing I didn’t like about the book (the final book in the series, The Last Battle, has a similar biblical theme), but it’s integral to Lewis’s story and Sally Cookson’s conscientious adaptation doesn’t shirk it. Is this religious subtext successful? I’d say not, but any fault lies within the original book.

There’s far more food for thought in here than you’ll find in most seasonal entertainments, while Fentiman never forgets that the first duty of theatre is to entertain, especially at this time of year. The puppetry (by Max Humphries and Toby Olié) is mesmeric, and the special effects are striking. It’s eminently suitable for children yet it’s not just a kids’ show. If you fancy something festive but are sick of panto, it’s an ideal Yuletide outing. And if you can’t see it over Christmas, don’t worry – it’s touring nationwide until May. For tour dates visit www. lionwitchonstage.com

RADIO VALERIE GROVE Gyles Brandreth, in his riveting memoir Odd Boy Out, waxes nostalgic about BBC spoken English. The infant Gyles heard Alvar Lidell on a crystal set under his pillow. ‘I loved Alvar Lidell’s voice. I loved its clarity and authority.’ Clarity, authority – that’s all we ask. Nobody today aspires to speak like Alvar Lidell – and certainly not to sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even Gyles says ‘poor sod’ about his son, for inheriting his plummy tones. But if you grew up listening to the Home Service, you can’t help finding several current presenters’ voices grating: swallowing key words, dropping to a whisper, gabbling and mumbling. As if the whole point of broadcasting weren’t audibility. One morning, Stephen Fry The Oldie January 2022 67

erupted into the Today studio to make some comment about changing society: out rang the clear vowels and consonants, the cogent sentences – such a relief. The same can be said for Andrew Marr: it’s sad to lose him on Start the Week. There’s a bookplate that reads ‘I like everything that’s old: old books, old wines, old songs, old houses, old friends…’ will it ever include old podcasts? Even the keen young podcast reviewer on the Times has confessed to being bored. And when Observer critic Miranda Seymour found Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart brilliant, she allowed that this was because it was originally programmed for broadcasting – so it was planned, crafted and edited. True. Poor diction, though. You should get it on Sounds, anyway. Caitlin Moran on This Cultural Life told John Wilson at top speed how she got to be such a prolific columnist, top-selling author and screenwriter, whose very tweets became an A-level question. She kindly name-checked me as the Times interviewer who advised her, when she was 16, ‘You gotta be a journalist, babe.’ Really? I love the idea that I’d ever call anyone ‘babe’. The actual story is more interesting. In 1988, Caitlin – then calling herself Tatty – entered a ‘Why I love reading’ essay contest for schoolchildren, which I judged. Her essay opened arrestingly: ‘Basenji! Slartibartfast! Mint Julep, Jolly Super, Necrotelecomnicom, WonkaVite and VitaWonk.’ Tatty – home educated, eldest of eight in a Wolverhampton council house – was the standout winner, aged 13. When she came to get her prize, it was her first visit to London and her first time on a train. She chattered non-stop, full of zest and spirit. As she has been ever since. The Cartoon Museum is conducting a survey, for Oxford University, into why people laugh at cartoons. Most pointless survey ever? Naturally Today gave it airtime. Martin Rowson (of the Guardian) said he’d seen many editorial committees discussing whether a joke is funny, thus ‘wringing every drop of humour out of the gag’. ‘It’s like riding a bike – if you think about it too much you fall off.’ He defined laughter as ‘our survival mechanism to stop us going mad with existential terror’. Just as idiotic was Broadcasting House’s story about male novelists losing out to women writers. They set listeners a task: find a novel by a bloke that Barry Cryer, who said he’d given up fiction, might enjoy. They came up with Jonathan Coe’s Me and Mr Wilder. I Kindled it at once, and love it. 68 The Oldie January 2022

The approach of Christmas once again brings a refreshing dose of timeless radio, stuffed with favourites including Martin Jarvis, reprising his characters from Just William and Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth (with Patricia Hodge as his sister Constance). John Cleese gets quite emotional on Private Passions on Radio 3. On Christmas Eve’s With Great Pleasure, Barry Humphries welcomes Miriam Margolyes and Rob Brydon to his home, to read from Dickens, Wilde and Richard Burton. Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam bicker again in their Conversations from a Long Marriage. Apart from young Brydon (b 1965), this is a seasonal triumph for oldie voices – happy New Year to them.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON When I was at university, we studied something called ‘narratology’. It was a tricky discipline, born of French structuralism and Russian formalism. Those arid autumn lectures came back to me when I was watching the two parts of The Princes and the Press (BBC1). ‘The House of Windsor and the Bri’ish press,’ began Amol Rajan, wearing a tight black shirt, a diamond earring, chunky gold rings and a heavy chain. ‘A complica’ed relationship. And a presentday battle to control the narrative.’ The narrative, offered a gleeful Rachel Johnson, ‘is not controllable’, at which point the nation settled down to its favourite bedtime story. The peerless Samantha Markle explained that she helped stage the paparazzi photos of her dad reading Images of Britain in a café and being measured for his wedding suit for reasons of ‘reality and sincerity’. It was, explained Meghan’s in-house biographer, Omid Scobie, ‘to make him believe that he could take control of his narrative … and who can blame him? They all want to take control of their own narrative.’

But, we are warned by another interviewee, ‘The example of Thomas Markle shows that, however much Royal households want to control a narrative, they can’t.’ Several minutes later, Rajan is talking to Meghan’s lawyer. ‘This narrative that no one can work with the Duchess is not true,’ she says. So what we’ve got here, Rajan darkly concludes, is ‘a megawatt couple refusin’ to play the game with Bri’ain’s expectant press’. ‘How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?’ Oprah asks Meghan in a clip from the famous interview that we are shown in Part 2. We now learn that it was Kate who made Meghan cry rather than Meghan who made Kate cry. My expertise in narratology has not helped me to distinguish Meghan’s truth from Kate’s truth or the truth sought by the Daily Mail. So I’d like to offer another theory to get us through the final hour of The Princes and the Press. The psychologist Stephen Karpman devised a model called the drama triangle, composed of victim, rescuer and persecutor, to describe conflict situations. Whoever controls the narrative invariably sees themselves as the victim. So, in Meghan’s ‘truth’, she is the victim, Harry is the rescuer and the Windsors are the persecutors. In Harry’s narrative, he is the victim, Meghan is the rescuer and the Windsors are the persecutor. And, in the Windsors’ narrative, they are the victim of Meghan’s persecution, and Harry has at some point to get on his white charger and rescue them. In every version of the drama triangle, the press is the persecutor because, as the private investigator who tapped into Chelsy Davy’s phone explains, the press is immoral. But then, as a former courtier also reveals, the palace is a nest of vipers. One question the BBC has left unanswered is what on earth the Sussexes did to Frogmore Cottage that could have cost £2.4 million? Given that

Sussex vs Cambridge: Harry, Meghan and Kate

‘I’m not in a good place right now’

we, the taxpayer, settled the bill, should their renovations not rightly have been the subject of Grand Designs or Escape to the Château? Thirty minutes of makeover TV is enough to justify the licence fee: not only can we poke around in other people’s houses, but we get to laugh at their horrendous taste. Which is where the producers of Virtually Home (BBC1) have catastrophically missed the point. Rather than stapling leopard-print fabric to their next-door neighbour’s bedroom walls, as they do in Changing Rooms, the participants in this snoozefest ‘avoid unsightly and costly mistakes’ by seeing their new homes designed for them on 3-D screens. In other words, reality TV becomes virtual reality TV. This week’s home owners are Janet and Darren, who live in Stafford with their nine dogs. The current arrangement of their kitchen diner means that they bump into each other while chopping the veg, and Janet worries that she might accidentally stab Darren in the chest. With a budget of £5,000, they are offered something in either Scandi or Shaker style, images of which swirl around them in the Design Hub. ‘Wow,’ says Janet. The colours change from grey to blue to white with the flick of a wand, like that scene in Disney’s Cinderella where the fairies squabble over the colour of Cinderella’s wedding dress. As entertainment, it’s like watching paint dry. Virtually.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE CELEBRATING SAINT-SAËNS OXFORD LIEDER FESTIVAL You need to be a person of some consequence to be given a state funeral on Christmas Eve, but that is what was granted the 86-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns, elder statesman of French music a century ago, after his death in December 1921. He had already received a full military funeral in the French provincial city of Algiers where he’d been wintering; protocol demanded as much for a holder of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. A state funeral, however, was something else. Despite his instruction that the obsequies should be brief, they were staged on the grandest scale. The façade of the Madeleine, where he had once been titular organist – the greatest in Europe, said Franz Liszt – was draped in black with silver edgings. The church was packed, the streets impassable. A lifetime’s worth of orders and decorations required the addition of several carriages to an already lengthy cortège. After which the bottom fell out of the Saint-Saëns market. As late as 1970, his works occupied less than a page in the Gramophone LP catalogue, and his entry would have been shorter still had The Carnival of the Animals and Danse

Macabre been extracted. His music was generally viewed as passé and second-rate, even among certain respected Francophile critics – though not, interestingly, among musicians who knew at first hand what riches lay buried within the Saint-Saëns treasure hoard. I remember Mstislav Rostropovich, fabled interpreter of the wonderful A minor Cello Concerto, telling me how much Shostakovich admired Saint-Saëns’s two cello concertos, and how they influenced the pair he himself later wrote. Song, as opposed to opera, was not a medium to which Saint-Saëns gave a great deal of attention. Not that this deterred the endlessly enterprising Oxford Lieder Festival from devoting an entire day to him, in this his centenary year, during its own 21st autumn season. ‘Natural histories’ was one of the pegs, inspired by the fascination French composers have long had with birds, beasts and insects of every kind. A peacock, a cricket, a swan, a kingfisher and a guineafowl feature in Ravel’s gloriously off-the-wall Histoires naturelles with which the young French baritone Victor Sicard ended his morning recital. His Saint-Saëns group had concluded with the original version for voice and piano of the famous Danse Macabre. Like a number of Saint-Saëns’s most enduring pieces, it was written in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the horrors of the Paris Commune that The Oldie January 2022 69

Saint-Saëns in 1876; and (inset) in the National Guard in an 1870 cartoon

followed. The text by physician and poet Henri Cazalis evokes skeletons caught up in a lascivious nocturnal graveyard revel in which a countess couples with a cart-driver. ‘Long live death and equality!’ is the politically cynical pay-off line. The Carnival of the Animals provided the day’s climax in the form of a brilliantly conceived entertainment. This rightly popular ‘zoological fantasy’ was interleaved with an intriguing array of songs on related subjects by composers ranging from Offenbach and Poulenc to Wolf, Mahler and Richard Strauss. (I much enjoyed Strauss’s inspired jest at the expense of hated Berlin music publisher Bote & Bock, Messenger & Goat.) The glory of these Lieder people is that they know their vast and endlessly inspiring repertory inside out. The original Carnival of the Animals has no text; the jokes are all in the music. That said, Saint-Saëns would surely have relished the verses Ogden Nash wrote for that famous 1949 Andre Kostelanetz recording, featuring Noël Coward as narrator. Saint-Saëns himself was a dab hand at private cabaret. One turn was Gounod’s Jewel Song sung falsetto, with a progressively sharpening pitch after the manner of a much-fêted soprano of the day. Another was pretending to be a corpse (pink tights were donned), which the novelist Turgenev, a fixture in singer Pauline Viardot’s home and salon, would then ‘dissect’. All very private, of course. As was The Carnival of the Animals, which Saint-Saëns refused to have published in his lifetime lest the hated Germans use it as ammunition in their continuing propaganda war against ‘the feckless French’. 70 The Oldie January 2022

The Oxford event was a triumph, both for the programme-makers and for a group of musicians – singers Elizabeth Watts and Felix Kemp, accompanist Jâms Coleman and a dazzle of solo instrumentalists from the recently formed Echor Chamber Orchestra – that would have lit up even Mme Viardot’s salon. It was also something of a televisual success, such was the quality of the filming for the festival’s online audience in the austerely beautiful Cowley Fathers’ church on Oxford’s Iffley Road. I have an aversion to watching live music online, but this Saint-Saëns day, available to ticket-holders to view throughout the following month, was both a joy and an education. And cheap at the price.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON PUT ON YOUR DANCING SHOES Now that FOMO has been replaced by HOGO (acronyms glossed below*), the country’s top conveners are having to work harder to get invitees to show up IRL – in real life. We social creatures are therefore both at an advantage and at a disadvantage when it comes to the post-pandemic season. On the plus side, we will be invited to things simply because we have well-earned reputations as party animals, trusted to pitch up even for book launches at Daunt. I maintain I won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2008 against stiff competition from Alastair Campbell simply because the organisers knew I would turn up to collect and he wouldn’t. I did, and accepted the plaster foot from the actor Dominic West with the words, ‘If you ever want bad sex, Dom, you know where to come’. Ah! The glory days when you could make a joke or proposition someone in public without being nuked by the Twitterati!

The minus side is that if we are to risk hosting parties, we have to go the extra mile. If we are asking our friends to make the ultimate sacrifice, ie peel off their loungewear, and click out of the Deliveroo app and Sky Planner, it had better well be worth it. As a festive sharpener, therefore, I devote the rest of this column to revealing the sure-fire floor-fillers that have served me well in every decade of my loving, living and party-giving existence. Satisfaction guaranteed. Thank me later. When I was a teenager, the top dance songs were Le Freak by Chic, which we all bopped to in our dorms at Bryanston, copying the arm movements of Vicky, the only girl in our year who could dance, and Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang. In my twenties, it was Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine by James Brown, the defining track for my generation at Oxford (the one Ivo always says ‘destroyed the country’ by becoming the hacks who created Brexit). In my thirties, it was Firestarter by the Prodigy, as I had three small children and it’s a track to make people of every age bounce off the walls. In my forties, Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines – the first song I asked my Alexa to play when I had some media galacticos to dinner, and they all leapt to their feet. I also danced to Blurred Lines with Michael Gove – at Cheltenham Literature Festival, since you ask – and he is quite the mover, as recent footage has revealed. In my fifties, back to the oldies. The Stones’ Brown Sugar. Let’s Dance by David Bowie. If all the above don’t get the party started – your money back. Happy Christmas, dancing queens! *FOMO: fear of missing out. HOGO: hassle of going out (something this rock critic has never experienced)

James Brown says it loud. He died on Christmas Day, 2006

William Hogarth’s Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants, oil on canvas, c 1750

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU

TATE

HOGARTH AND EUROPE Tate Britain (to 20th March) FABERGÉ IN LONDON Victoria & Albert Museum (to 8th May) Until recently, I thought ‘trigger warnings’ were silly but harmless. Still, the Almeida Theatre’s warning about bloodshed in Macbeth was potentially life-threatening. By including the Samaritans’ telephone number, it could have encouraged people to clog lines vital to the truly desperate. Similarly, many instances of ‘cultural appropriation’ – tourists wearing sombreros or policemen’s helmets – may be tasteless or even irritating, but are hardly matters of moment. Trigger warnings for art exhibitions at public galleries are becoming very necessary. Curators’ insistence that we should look at the art of then through the blinkers of now is cultural appropriation of the worst sort, and likely to trigger apoplexy in anyone who values art and history. The principal function of artists is to put thoughts into the minds of those who

look at the art; it is not for curators to put their thoughts into the minds of artists. That is arrogant towards the past and patronising to the present. Consider Tate Britain’s label for Hogarth in a mahogany armchair painting the Comic Muse: ‘Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?’ To which the only answer is no. It is infuriating not to be allowed to enjoy the raucous humour and ferocious satire of one of Britain’s greatest artists without being hectored by ignorant, badly expressed comments.

‘You might try that inn over there, but it’s only got one star’

Hogarth’s group portrait of his servants is loved even by the far-left intellectual Ken Loach, but we are tartly informed, ‘Such apparently informal studies seem to suggest a new spirit of individualism, but inequities [sic] of race and social status persisted.’ Oh dear. Perhaps I’d better call the Samaritans. In March, I suggested that the National Gallery should consult an astrologer over the opening date of their Dürer’s Journeys show, scheduled for that month, which opened on 20th November (to 27th February). That day also saw the Fabergé opening at the V&A, where admirable labels inform but don’t preach. I cannot love many of Fabergé’s toys for royals, but I admire the craftsmanship wholeheartedly, and the materials are exquisite. This show deserves crowds (if allowed). As well as presenting a whole clutch of Imperial eggs, it tells the story of the firm’s London branch, through which the international market was built. A touching case contains items the Fabergé workmaster Henrik Wigström salvaged from his desk as the Bolsheviks arrived. A big surprise is a pair of actual hand grenades manufactured by Fabergé during the war. My one criticism is the low lighting. The Oldie January 2022 71

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER TREE ENTERPRISE New Year’s resolutions fail me. Good intentions about diary-keeping, diets and the demon drink all evaporate before Epiphany. Except … except when it comes to garden matters. For the past 30 years, I’ve kept an acquisitions book, logging every plant bought: its provenance, size and, most importantly, cost. Plant prices, like everything else, have escalated since my first jottings – I note particularly fine specimens of scarlet and red oaks (Quercus coccinea and Q rubra) bought in 1993 for a couple of used fivers, the five-foot tall youngsters brought home in a family car. The equivalent today would set me back a bunch of crumpled tenners (except the new ones don’t crumple). A recent internet search shows one UK nursery selling 16-inch coccinea tiddlers for around £30 each; another wants more than £100 for a juvenile rubra no taller than 2ft 6in. Perennials – and we bought thousands – were commonly £1.50 to £2. Today? Well, you know. Money apart, the acquisitions book can also be read as a travelogue, charting journeys to far-flung nurseries and specialist growers. I can look back on a car bootful of unfamiliar shrubs (costing little more than £30 for the lot) from two famous Cornish nurseries involving – don’t tell the COP cops – a 500-mile round trip. Journeys hauling back plants from Scotland and Ireland burnt excessive amounts of fossil fuel. Let’s not think of the air miles for imports from Italy and southern France. But over the years I have planted something approaching 2,000 specimen trees and shrubs and another 20,000 hornbeam, beech, yew and box saplings,

to create hedges and decorative enclosures. Might Greta consider that an attempt to balance the carbon ledger? A new acquisitions book has now been inaugurated, following our move from Herefordshire to 12 wooded acres in Carmarthenshire a few months ago. Given my age, I doubt I’ll fill its 250 pages, although two are already fully inked up. As Alexander Pope, 18th-century landscaping genius (and more), famously said, ‘Hope springs eternal.’ After all, gardeners are – or should be – perpetual optimists. Mañana is my reliable mantra. My gardening years have taught me many modest money-saving skills – the making of new no-cost plants being the most rewarding. I don’t rate myself highly when it comes to raising plants from seed. I’m too impatient and perhaps too heavyhanded. When it comes to cuttings, though (I’m seldom happier than when slaving over a heated propagator), or the creation of new plants by division or layering, I excel in wizardry. As a 14-year-old, I took cuttings at a time when, instead of the ‘top-shelf’ magazines my peers were beginning to explore, I bought (and hid from my mates) Amateur Gardening every week. Oh, the untold thrill of sending off for and receiving nurserymen’s catalogues in response to the small ads that choked the back pages. My passion then was for easy-to-propagate fuchsias, bought from

Scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea)

a hugely overweight pensioner. He filled his garden with them and seemingly lived entirely for the joy of teasing newly rooted cuttings from sheltered beds of moist black compost and selling them for a penny each. The years have also taught me to conquer my shyness about requesting cuttings, especially if the plants I crave are mature or plentiful and their owner seems kindly disposed. Similarly, I’m flattered if someone asks me for cuttings. I’ve even dug up whole young plants to give away when I’ve had duplicates and if the person making the plea is someone I respect or deem worthy of the gift. This free dispersal of plants and cuttings remains my one enduring New Year’s resolution. David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD BERRIES I was asked recently whether I had tried growing a new variety of thornless blackberry. My answer was that the blackberries I know are wild, with thorns (they are called brambles in Scotland), and that one of the pleasures of autumn is walking down a lane and picking blackberries from the hedges. I am aware that cultivated blackberries are larger, and perhaps juicier, but they do not have the flavour of the wild fruit. I would rather grow one of the raspberry/ blackberry crosses – tayberries or loganberries (introduced by Judge Logan in California in the 19th century). Once you start looking for unusual berries, a bewildering number of new varieties, all apparently suited to our climate, can be found. There are boysenberries, lingonberries, honeyberries (from honeysuckle), jostaberries (from gooseberries crossed with The Oldie January 2022 73

blackcurrants). Mulberries have of course been around for centuries. I am happy enough growing raspberries and gooseberries quite successfully – strawberries less so, as they are attacked by squirrels before they ripen. Blueberries require an acid soil, which rules them out for this garden, and I cannot really see the point of growing something that is available in shops almost every day of the year. Cranberries make their appearance at this time of the year, but I think of them only at Christmas, so would not consider growing them. Two other berries, which I hadn’t heard of until recently, may be worth investigating. The aronia berry apparently has three times the level of antioxidants in blueberries and has been described as the healthiest fruit in the world. But it is too sharp to be eaten raw. The goji berry is given ‘super fruit’ status by Pomona Fruits, which sell the plants all year round. They are hardy, tolerant to drought and produce little, red fruits which are highly nutritious and can be eaten fresh or dried. Goji berries are native to Asia, where they are used in traditional medicine. Taken regularly, they are said to support the immune system and may even slow the ageing process. A plant for the new year?

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD GAME FOR CHRISTMAS

ELISABETH LUARD

God rest ye, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay. With the possibility of a turkey shortage, go native with pheasant. A beauty from the Caucasus, Phasianus colchicus is the traditional festive bird wherever there are woodlands and gamekeepers. Many a Yorkshire doctor or Carmarthenshire bank manager was grateful for a brace in feather hung on the doorknob as a thank-you for support in time of trouble. However, most of our annual bag is now exported across the Channel. This year, let’s keep ’em all to ourselves. Wild meat being a touch on the dry side, pheasant is best given a gentle braise rather than being oven-roasted. It doesn’t mean it can’t be accompanied with roast potatoes, sprouts and all the traditional trimmings. A light starter is in order. Isn’t it always? Katie Stewart’s grilled pears with blue cheese Arrange sliced pears in individual heatproof dishes, trickle with lemon juice, top with equal parts of cream cheese and crumbled Stilton and slip under the grill for the cheese to bubble. Or serve as a savoury with a glass of port, instead of the Christmas pud. 74 The Oldie January 2022

Tip the pan juices into a small saucepan and bubble up for a few minutes to reduce to a sticky gravy. Stir in the cream, taste, season and bubble up again to make a sauce. Meanwhile, peel, quarter and core the remaining apples and fry them in the finishing butter till they brown a little but without letting them lose their shape. Add the remaining chestnuts and reheat. Pile everything prettily around the pheasant joints and trickle with a little of the sauce, serving the rest separately.

Braised pheasant with apples and chestnuts Long, gentle cooking tenderises even the toughest old bird, while the apple-andpork stuffing keeps the meat moist. Serves 6-8

2 fine, fat pheasants (a cock and a hen) ½ onion, finely chopped About 100g butter About 200g minced pork 2-3 tablespoons whisky or brandy 6 yellow-fleshed apples (Cox or Golden Delicious) About 350g cooked, peeled chestnuts 1 tsp dried thyme 1 egg, forked to blend Salt and pepper To finish 1 tbsp butter for frying 150ml double cream

Wipe the birds inside and out and season with salt and pepper. Preheat the oven to 400°F/200°C/Gas 6. Fry the onion in a knob of butter till soft, add the pork mince and fry gently till the colour changes (don’t let it brown). Dice a couple of the apples add them to the pan. Sprinkle with the whisky or brandy, lid loosely and continue to cook till the apple softens. Remove the pan from the heat and let the mixture cool a little before you work in the egg and half the cooked chestnuts, roughly chopped. Divide the stuffing between the birds, tying the drumsticks together with thread to keep the filling in place. Place the birds’ breasts downwards in a roasting tin, dot with butter and a pinch of thyme. Roast for 10 minutes, then turn the birds’ breasts upwards, dot with the rest of the butter, cover with foil and reduce the heat to 275°F/150°C/Gas 2. Check regularly and add a splash of water if it looks as if it’s drying out. After about an hour when the birds are perfectly tender and the drumsticks wiggle easily in their sockets, remove from the oven, leave to rest for 10 minutes, then quarter the birds and heap them with their stuffing on a warm serving dish.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY I’m beginning to get more annoyed by people talking about waiter shortages than by the actual effects. Some restaurants open only for lunch at weekends. At one, an overwrought waiter was bouncing around 20 tables for 70 hours a week. Volta do Mar, a new Portuguese restaurant in Covent Garden, served up the most exotic of dinners from all corners of the former Portuguese Empire. That was in spite of their not being open for lunch and having only one waiter who was allowed to take our order. Their croquettes are the best in London. A week later, I was in the Star, at Alfriston, in Sussex, for lunch on a Monday. Its dazzling owner, Alex Polizzi, told us we were lucky because that was the very last day of weekday lunches. ‘It’s terrible everywhere. Not just here but in Germany, the States.’ Uncle Rocco Forte would know. Well, the service we had was Italian sky-high, and Alex and Olga, her mother, have done a great renovation job, even camouflaging her grandfather’s sixties extension block from the Trusthouse Forte days. The focaccia and puddings alone justify a dinner reservation. Harden’s has just announced that they recorded 147 openings in London in 2020 and 2021. Proof positive that even a pandemic has not burst the balloon of London’s belief in itself as the restaurant capital of Europe. That said, this is set against 125 closures, making it the period with the lowest level of net openings since the nineties. I’m sure some of it is due to the impact of staff shortages on revenue – but what to do? I have a solution: go to small, familyrun restaurants like Imad’s Syrian Kitchen in Soho, where Dad cooks and Mum is front of house. Their perfect Baba Ghanoj and Freekeh salad arrived within a minute of our ordering. Or Mum would have wanted to know why. Best of all, ‘do the mambo like-a-crazy’

with the Calabrese. My best dinners this autumn were at two Calabrian restaurants: Il Cavaliere, in Finsbury Park – which doubles as The Oldie’s Huon Mallalieu’s dining room – where Antonio was both chef and waiter; and Il Vicolo in St James’s, where the late owner’s three daughters take it in turns to do the waitering single-handedly. Both have been going for 30 years and they spit on pandemics. They share the Italian South’s dislike of a prescriptive menu. ‘That’s for tourists,’ as they always say before listing what they have in the kitchen. Antonio produced some enormous ceps. ‘Did you bring them back from Cropani?’ besought journalist Robert Fox, in his Mediterranean reverie. ‘No, I picked them in Aldershot,’ said Antonio. And so the feast entirely of his choosing began: bistecca porcini and saltimbocca with chard and beans from his allotment. And to finish? Not limoncello, but his own Christmas Pudding Liquore. Robert says he’s most famous for his lunch buffets when Arsenal are playing at home, but I could sit there every night. When some fellow Mezzogiorno fans treated me to Il Vicolo, exactly the same thing happened. As soon as the waitress/ owner saw we knew our Tropea onions, she snatched our menus back. Another feast washed down with Puglian Chardonnay. All the pressure of choosing evaporated under the mezze of antipasti, the two pasta dishes and calves’ liver. Don’t leave without Torta della Nonna, lemon custard with pine nuts and almonds. And, of course, we couldn’t refuse yet more home-made liquori.

DRINK BILL KNOTT TEA COCKTAILS Eat, drink and be merry, for ‘Dry January’ is just round the corner. Were I ever forced – heaven forfend – to forswear alcohol, I think I would drink a lot of tea, and probably become very boring on the subject at dinner parties. Tea and wine have much in common. Most production is cheap and industrial. But there are also speciality teas grown in manicured gardens, picked and processed by hand and displaying a huge range of aromas and flavours. And some of them are even more eye-wateringly expensive than great Burgundy. Take Long Jing (Dragon Well, in English): a green tea grown on the beautiful hills that surround the West Lake in Hangzhou, China. I went there in

late April some years ago. Earlier that month, just before the Qing Ming festival, the first Dragon Well had been picked and dried – simply but expertly – in a hot wok. My host reverentially weighed out a few of these bright green needles, put them in a small pot and poured water at 85˚C over them. It made a very fine cup of tea: vegetal, sweet, silky in texture, with a distinctly nutty flavour. It was only later that I found out that pre-Qing Ming tea commands prices that occasionally exceed the price of gold. Since then, my palate and my pocket have had to make do with Dragon Well, picked later in spring, from less auspicious gardens – but it is still a lovely drink. Both Jing Tea (jingtea.com) and the Rare Tea Company (rareteacompany. com) will happily sell you Dragon Well and a host of other single-garden teas at prices that might seem hefty compared with PG Tips, but won’t break the bank, especially if you are on the wagon for a month. Both websites are windows on a whole world of pu’erh and matcha, white teas and oolongs, with names like Phoenix Honey Orchid, Iron Buddha and Sichuan Dew. For me, one major difference between tea and wine is that I actually enjoy a mug of builder’s tea whereas I find most cheap, mass-market wine utterly undrinkable. And, while I would never dream of adulterating the finest Longjing with alcohol, humbler teas are very good in cocktails – but not, of course, Long Island Iced Tea, which is supposed only to look like iced tea. Brew double-strength lapsang souchong or Earl Grey, then mix with a little sugar and use in an old-fashioned instead of the bitters and sugar. Just put a tablespoonful of the tea syrup, cold, into a rocks glass with a strip of orange zest and gradually stir in ice cubes and bourbon. Or do the same with jasmine tea (the jasmine silver needle teas from Jing and the Rare Tea Company are excellent; supermarket tea will do at a pinch) and use with gin, lemon and soda for a long drink over ice. There are more tea cocktail recipes at Simon Difford’s encyclopaedic diffordsguide.com. For those of you, like me, whose Januarys will not be noticeably drier than usual, I commend his English Breakfast Cocktail: 30ml gin, 30 ml St-Germain elderflower liqueur, 20ml cold English breakfast tea, 10ml lemon juice and 15ml chilled water. Shake all the ingredients over ice, fine-strain into a chilled Champagne coupe, and enjoy … although perhaps not for breakfast.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a terrific vintage cava that gives many Champagnes a run for their money; a fragrant, very well-made Viognier from the south of France; and a Côtes du Rhône that would complement the Sunday roast admirably. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Cava Brut Reserva, Bodegas Sumarroca, Spain 2018, offer price £13.49, case price £161.88 Elegant, pear-scented cava with a persistent, mouth-filling mousse and a long finish. Viognier, Waddesdon Rothschild Collection, Vin de Pays d’Oc, France 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Crisp and gently aromatic, with typical Viognier notes of apricot and citrus. Excellent value. Côtes du Rhône Rouge ‘La Borde’, Le Plan des Moines, France 2019, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Old Grenache and Carignan vines co-star in a modern, unoaked, fruit-forward style of Côtes-du-Rhône.

Mixed case price £137.88 – a saving of £28.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

Call 0117 370 9930

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 25th January 2022.

The Oldie January 2022 75

SPORT JIM WHITE 2022, THE YEAR OF DIRTY MONEY The year 2022 will see our grandest international competitions staged in places they really should be nowhere near. The Winter Olympics downhill ski races will take place outside Beijing in February. Apparently the annual snowfall there is less than in London. The year will be bookended by the Winter Games, in a location where snow is rarer than a British skiing medal, and the World Cup, in Qatar, out of season, in the baking heat of a desert. What next? The Ashes rescheduled for low tide on Brighton Beach, the British Grand Prix buzzing round Sainsbury’s car park and the world swimming championships held on the ice rink outside Somerset House? How do sporting events that have specific climate demands end up being staged in entirely unsuitable locations? Let’s just say large amounts of money are involved. This is the world we now live in, where appalling states hijack the grandest sporting occasions to promote themselves, by the application of cash. Even if they were the most smiley of progressive democracies, events really should be staged nowhere near such places. If these political bottom-feeders are happy to pay, then go for it. Let’s not pretend there is any reason other than money. The senior figure behind the 2016 Rio Olympics has just been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the way in which, to win the chance to stage the games, he greased the palms of those in a position to vote for it. In a system where a small number of individuals have the power to decide on whom such tantalising gifts should be bestowed, corruption is inevitable. Sure, such serial past offenders as Fifa’s Sepp Blatter are now out of the picture, but there is little evidence of reform. This is how things still operate: never mind how dreadful you are. Never mind how inappropriate your climate. Just show us the money. Qatar wants the World Cup despite the fact they treat women as third-class citizens and lop the hands off gay people? Sure. Saudi Arabia fancies a Grand Prix, regardless of the way they feed government critics into a meat grinder? Of course. China, you want the Winter Olympics, even though the government backs the genocide of the Uighur people? All yours. And, hey, don’t worry about the snow – that’s a minor inconvenience. As it happens, the Chinese authorities will undoubtedly make sure there is plenty of white stuff to ski down. Never 76 The Oldie January 2022

mind the protocols of COP26 – and the claims of the Olympic Movement that they are dedicated to a sustainable future. They will have hundreds of diesel-powered generators working round the clock to manufacture the stuff. Meanwhile, in Qatar, the crowds flocking to the football in December will be cooled by enough air-conditioning to keep Manhattan sweat-free for the next century. Like Russia when it held the 2018 World Cup, both countries will inject enough money to ensure it all goes off without a hitch. After all, they’ve spent a fortune on the right to stage the thing to prove how smart they are – so they won’t mess it up. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be obliged to watch what used to be the greatest of sporting occasions once again tarnished beyond salvation, staged in laughably unfitting places. Welcome to 2022: the year when, in sport at least, absolutely nothing changes.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD WHEN THE MICROCHIPS ARE DOWN Do you want Father Christmas to bring you a new car? Dream on, petal. New registrations fell by 34.4 per cent in the year to September, usually one of the busiest months. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) report 12-month waiting lists; Audi’s average delivery times are six to nine months; VW quotes October 2022 for certain models. Meanwhile, some used cars sell for more than new. The principal reason is a shortage of semiconductors, little chips of material halfway between good conductors of electricity and insulators against it – they can do both simultaneously. They’re essential to modern electronics because you can determine their behaviour by adjusting structure and temperature. Mostly made from a silicon mix, in primitive form they’ve been around since 1904, when they functioned as ‘cat’s whisker detectors’ in radio receivers. Transistors have used them since 1947, integrated circuits since 1958. The average modern car has 1,400 to 1,500 of them, with electric vehicles needing more than twice as many as petrol. They control engine management, emissions, connectivity, safety systems and so much else that the CEO of Intel, one of the largest chip-manufacturers, said recently that ‘cars are becoming computers with tyres’. The shortage is due mainly to a combination of COVID and just-in-time manufacturing. The latter prioritises efficiency over resilience – so when the shutdown came, car companies

abruptly cut future orders. At that time, the motor industry consumed 10 to 15 per cent of chip production, with the personal electronics industry – tablets, computers, phones etc – accounting for about 50 per cent. Lockdown and working from home boosted tech-industry sales – so chipmanufacturers naturally increased production and signed new contracts to make up for the loss of car sales. Then, when car companies came knocking on the door again, they were told they’d have to wait. The largest Taiwanese chipsupplier now earns 90 per cent of its revenues from the tech sector and only three per cent from the automotive. Meanwhile, European chip production declined from about 40 per cent of the global market to nine per cent. Next came fires, floods, earthquakes, an increase in COVID cases in Asian factories, container-ship delays and reductions in air cargo, all further reducing the supply of chips for cars. Yet the future is chips with everything: demand is predicted to double by 2030. An obvious, short-term measure is to de-spec new vehicles – reduce technical sophistication by using fewer chips. This may be no bad thing for those of us who dislike having to grapple with thickets of screen functions, but manufacturing ambitions along with legislative and marketing pressures demand increasing connectivity. Another survival measure would be to concentrate on cars with the greatest profit margins. Those are thin enough anyway, but anything to reduce the anticipated £10 billion of lost UK car sales must help. Longer term, increasing European chip-manufacturing has to be the answer – Bosch has recently opened a factory in Dresden, and Intel plans another two. Of the estimated 18 chip-manufacturers in the UK, few – if any – have the capacity to manufacture complex chips for the sophisticated end of the market. There’s government support for research, but what we need is more chip foundries, as they’re called. We might even call it levelling up. Some manufacturers – Hyundai and Kia – can still deliver within weeks. But, with car factories costing billions, workforces in tens of thousands and already precarious margins, motorindustry insiders fear that the semiconductor shortage may be more damaging than the pandemic that provoked it. There could be casualties – for how long will Indian owners Tata support the limping Jaguar leg of JLR, already struggling before this? Better order now for next Christmas.

Ed McLachlan

‘I just felt depressed and didn’t feel like drawing animal life today’

The exhibition Ed McLachlan Unleashed! is at the Chris Beetles Gallery, London, until 24 December 2021

The Oldie January 2022 77

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Customer dissatisfaction One of the obvious benefits of our digital age is the improved communication. Nobody can regret having online chats with grandchildren who live far away, or being able to resolve complex issues briskly via email that would once have taken weeks of letters. But, like many blessings, it comes with at least one curse. Spam, fraudulent emails and more are the price we pay for the ability to correspond instantaneously at little cost. It has also promoted an industry that is getting out of hand: the online customer-satisfaction survey. I now seem unable to engage with a company in any way, or even go to the theatre, without later receiving a ‘How did we do?’ email.

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

The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square https://tinyurl.com/webster408 Every year since 1947, the city of Oslo has given London a Christmas tree. This exhibit tells the story. White Christmas http://www.askwebster.co.uk/ white-christmas An annual treat – Father Christmas and his reindeer singing the only version of White Christmas worth listening to. 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

It’s accompanied by a survey, asking me to describe and score many aspects of my experience before adding impertinent questions about my circumstances. This reached a zenith the other day when I bought some shoelaces online. They duly arrived by post in a padded envelope. All good – so far. Then the onslaught began. I was asked, by email, a series of multiplechoice questions on various intangible aspects of the transaction. This included my degree of ‘delight’ with both the shoelaces themselves and the postman’s demeanour. Mysteriously, I was asked how the shoelaces made me ‘feel’. I was invited to comment on the packaging and my experience of using the website. Then I was asked my age, marital status, what newspapers I read and more. There were also several empty boxes for me to add my own thoughts on this transaction. All for a pair of shoelaces. I blame eBay. From the start, over 20 years ago, they have operated a ‘feedback’ system, which allows each side of a sale to comment on the other. This allows bad apples to be quickly removed from the barrel. And it’s a streamlined process: you simply report positive, neutral or negative – and add a few words, if you want. This, I suppose, encouraged Google to start something similar. They decided that if a business had good reviews from its customers, they would place it higher in their listings. Google trusts a business’s customers more than it trusts the business, I imagine. Encouraging and gathering these reviews have now blossomed into a major industry, with many firms offering the service. Trustpilot is one; I’m sure that

you’ve received emails from it, asking you to rate something or someone. Trustpilot charges companies to collect, store and display these reviews and does very well out of it – revenues in 2020 were over $100m. It’s obviously no bad thing for a business to take soundings from its customers, and to act on them. I can also see why the service industry especially – restaurants, hotels and so on – would like potential customers to see how past customers feel. However, I really don’t see how it helps anyone to know how excited, thrilled or enthused I was to receive my shoelaces, even if I was – or how trustworthy, sincere or obliging I found the vendor. My involvement with them was fleeting at best. It’s all too much. We should all insist that our pinnacle of approval is ‘acceptable’. I experienced no emotion as part of my shoelace purchase. They arrived as ordered and are now on my shoes. The whole process was ‘acceptable’, which in my book is high-enough praise. If order forms had a box that said, ‘If you don’t hear otherwise from me, your performance has been acceptable – no survey, please,’ I’d tick it every time.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Is a surprise windfall awaiting you? Looking around the table at Christmas, you might think that you know everyone in your family, wherever they are in the world at the moment. But can you be sure? Have you never dreamed that you might have a long-lost relative who will leave you a surprise fortune? It does happen. A 15-year-old 78 The Oldie January 2022

Indonesian girl was tracked down by heir-hunters as the unknown daughter of a former BBC World Service and Far East editor who died without leaving a will – that is, ‘intestate’. She has inherited a £400,000 estate. When anyone dies intestate and with no known kin, the people responsible –

perhaps medical staff or the local authority – lodge the name with the Bona Vacantia division of the Government Legal Department. Bona vacantia means vacant goods or ownerless property. The division publishes online a list of thousands of unclaimed estates, updated daily. Millions of pounds are paid out

each year; three times as much is left unclaimed. Depending on where the deceased lived, their estate eventually goes to HM Treasury, the Duchy of Cornwall or the Duchy of Lancaster. This is where heir-hunters, also known as probate researchers or genealogists, step in. To trace potential beneficiaries, heir-hunters first draw up family trees and then keep searching until they believe they have found all the people entitled to a share of the estate. For their work, they generally charge a percentage of the value of estates they discover – so obviously they concentrate on the ones they hope will be most profitable. There is competition among rival heir-hunters to be first to contact lucrative prospects. Families are usually – and rightly – wary when they hear of a windfall. Most heir-hunters do a genuine job of reuniting money with beneficiaries. But any business involving money attracts chancers, and there are reports of fraudsters taking fees for phantom estates or when a valid will already exists. If a will does turn up, it must be executed and the client not charged. Quoted fees vary widely – from 10 per cent to 25 or even 40 per cent of

‘Now, your mother and I don’t mind footing the bill for the time being, son, but we can’t be carrying you for ever’

the estate – and that might not cover all charges. Check whether it includes VAT and ask whether there will ever be any more to pay. Make sure no fee is payable if no assets are found – and never pay any money up front. Heir-hunters should reveal a name and say how the deceased is related to you. But they are unlikely to tell you how much the estate is worth or what your share of it might be until you instruct them. Do not be rushed or pressurised into signing an agreement. You do not have to

go along with an heir-hunter who approaches you: you can either instruct another firm or do it yourself. Anyone can check the free Bona Vacantia list (at www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ bona-vacantia and www. bonavacantialist.co.uk). Heir-hunting is not a regulated business. So check out any firm you might deal with. Above all, try to identify your relative yourself. You could discover a new branch of your family tree and have more relatives joining you next Christmas.

The Oldie January 2022 79

The Greylag Goose

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd I last had my bottom pinched 40 years ago, trooping from dinner at an ancient university. The suspect, judging by his exaggerated wink, was a venerable ecclesiastical scholar. The other day, while I was bending over to feed some friendly red-breasted geese, it happened again. This time it was an indignant greylag goose (Anser anser; ‘lag’ an old name for goose). Its grand contempt was not surprising: the domestic goose, established in Egypt 3,000 years ago – where the greylag symbolised the sun god Ra – is its descendant. With Christmas dinner approaching, its sharp tweak was a timely reproof. Greylag geese were a popular topic 70 years ago because of the Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz’s 1952 bestseller King Solomon’s Ring. The preface was by his teacher Julian Huxley, who wrote that to Lorenz we owe the discovery of the biological phenomenon of the ‘imprinting’ mechanism, whereby a human becomes parent to an animal. It began when Lorenz bought some greylag eggs to be hatched and raised by a domestic foster mother. He could not resist picking up the first gosling, which protested plaintively. He soothed it with comforting noises, thus unwittingly ‘imprinting’ himself as its parent as the first being it met. He named it Martina as a special pet, thinking one greylag would be easier to control than 10. He was wrong. Geese are instinctively socially organised. Martina’s nine siblings followed her example. He even had to teach them to fly – running ahead until the flock was forced to become airborne to keep up. Nevertheless, Martina remained his favourite. Research included his sharing his bedroom with her, which revealed not least that greylags are resistant to house-training. Seventy years ago, the UK breeding population was confined to the Outer 80 The Oldie January 2022

Hebrides and Scotland’s northernmost mainland. Today, breeding greylags are nationwide, and in Orkney – where in the 1960s, The Oldie’s Johnny Grimond tells me, ‘You would never see any geese in summer’ – they are a year-round pest. So much so that Scottish National Heritage has introduced a ‘greylag goose adaptive management programme’, which means they can be ‘culled’ (killed) on Orkney throughout the year. As ubiquitous and breeding park birds, they do not require pinioning to prevent escape. Flights often pass Buckingham Palace on their way from St James’s Park. The UK’s growing resident population is increased by a winter influx of 230,000 migrants from Iceland.

Greylags lack the romance of carolling pink-footed geese, but their ‘silvershouldered’ wings, as Gavin Maxwell wrote in Ring of Bright Water (1960), make them exotic in flight. These are not pretty birds, Geese fleeing the freezing North. Thick-necked, bulky and aggressive they are built for long-haul journeys and look better on the wing than on the ground. Ian Dunlop (b 1941), from The Urban Fox Maxwell’s five imprinted greylags were as magical a part of his West Highland hideaway, Camusfearna, as his famous pet otters. The 2022 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk

Justice for women

Fifty years ago, Rose Heilbron became the first woman judge at the Old Bailey. By Nigel Pullman

n the night of Saturday 19th March 1949, at the Cameo Cinema in Liverpool, the punters were watching a thriller while the manager, Leonard Thomas, and his assistant, John Catterall, were counting the takings – £50 or so – in the upstairs office. Moments later, a gunman burst into the room, demanded the money and shot both men. The details are murky but chaos ensued, the cash was left behind and the robber, along with his lookout, escaped into the darkness as the two victims bled to death. One year later, after some dubious detective work and two trials, a petty criminal called George Kelly, nicknamed ‘the little Caesar of Lime Street’, was hanged for the murders at Walton Prison in Liverpool. Then – and now – the case was widely seen as a gross miscarriage of justice, and Kelly’s conviction was eventually quashed in the Court of Appeal in 2003. Kelly’s defence counsel was Rose Heilbron KC. Though she failed to get

PA Images / Alamy

A disgracefully tiny number of women have been permanent judges him off, this was the first time a woman had led in a murder trial, and even Kelly, who had earlier wailed against ‘having a Judy defend him’, was impressed by her performance. The Daily Mirror named her Woman of the Year. Why should this curious story be of interest today? Exactly 50 years ago, Judge Heilbron, as she became, was the very first woman judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court – aka the Old Bailey – on 4th January 1972. Born in Liverpool to a Jewish family in 1914, Heilbron continued her

Rose Heilbron (1914-2005)

distinguished legal career after the Cameo case, clocking up murder trials and becoming a beloved local celebrity. In 1974, Heilbron became a High Court judge (though in a career full of firsts, here she was the second woman appointed at the Strand), and honoured with a DBE. But she was never one of the permanent judges at the Old Bailey. The accolade of being the first woman to be a full-time judge at the Central Criminal Court goes to Her Honour Judge Nina Lowry who, some years later, sat with her husband presiding in the next-door court. Heilbron was just 34 – and had a newborn baby at home – when she became one of the first two women to be appointed King’s Counsel, and indeed was the youngest KC of either gender since Thomas Erskine in 1783 (when he was 33). Writing in the Sunday Graphic in 1952, Margaret Thatcher – herself briefly a barrister – made an example of the widely praised Heilbron, who was ‘known throughout the land’ for her career, showing just how much a charming and capable woman could achieve. Earlier, when she was junior counsel

for Learie Constantine in his case in 1944, Constantine v Imperial Hotels, she represented the West Indian cricketer when he was turned away from the London hotel because of the colour of his skin. White US servicemen billeted in the same hotel had complained about him (US army units were racially segregated at that time) and with discrimination legislation still decades away, the hotel management caved in. But they reckoned without Heilbron, who successfully argued that the hotel had committed a ‘civil wrong’. Though Constantine received only a paltry five guineas in damages, the case is recognised as an early victory against racial discrimination. Though Heilbron, who died in 2005 aged 91, blazed an incredible trail, a disgracefully tiny number of other women have been permanent judges under the statue of Lady Justice opposite the site of Newgate Prison. Indeed, after Lowry, until 2012 only Ann Goddard had sat daily with the bewigged men. Happily and very recently, gender parity has now been achieved at the Central Criminal Court. Another anniversary landmark for women in the law is on the horizon: 100 years ago in May, Dr Ivy Williams (1877-1966) became the first woman to be called to the English bar, in 1922. She never practised but she was the first woman to teach law at a British university. The second, a few months later, was Helena Normanton, who was the first actually to practise at the bar. Last year, a barrister called Karlia Lykourgou opened the first outfitter dedicated to female court wear. She named it Ivy & Normanton, in their honour. This coming year, let’s honour Heilbron, too. What about a statue at Liverpool Lime Street station, next to the bronzes of Ken Dodd and Heilbron’s one-time client the Labour MP Bessie Braddock? The Oldie January 2022 81

Travel The Tale of Beatrix Potter

As a show about the writer opens at the V&A, William Cook visits the Lake District spots that inspired her lovely books In the Beatrix Potter Gallery, Hawkshead, Alice Sage, a National Trust curator, is showing me a precious picture that takes me right back to my early childhood. It’s a tiny illustration from The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. What a thrill to see the original painting after all these years – so small and fragile, and yet so full of life. Half a century since I first read her books, I still haven’t grown out of Beatrix Potter. Here, in the antiquated office where her husband, a local solicitor, used to work, her characters seem to live and breathe, just as they did when I was small. In February, a Beatrix Potter exhibition opens at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Beatrix wasn’t only a children’s author (though, to my mind, there’s no higher calling). She was also a scientist, a conservationist – and a brilliant artist too. This extensive show will shed fresh light on all these achievements. But to understand her properly, you have to travel to the west bank of Windermere, where she made her home and set so many of her stories. The Lake District was her great escape from the stifling constrictions of her affluent upbringing, in a grand but dreary 82 The Oldie January 2022

house in Kensington, around the corner from the V&A. She fell in love with the Lake District in her teens, and in 1913 she moved up here and became a farmer. Over the next 30 years, she bought up thousands of acres of farmland, to save it from developers. When she died, in 1943, she left most of it to the National Trust. If it hadn’t been for her, the Lake District would look very different today. A wander around the landscape she preserved is a great way to get to know her. The last time I did this trip, I brought my five-year-old daughter and she loved it. Now she’s 17, far too cool to tag along. So this time I came alone, and it was a journey tinged with melancholy. As Beatrix (who had no children) understood, though childhood is fleeting its memory lingers for a lifetime. For me, and millions like me, that memory is preserved in her timeless books. Unlike a lot of places in the Lake District, Windermere is easy to get to. And it’s one of the few places in the Lakes where you really don’t need a car. My Avanti train from London took barely three hours, with just one

change, at Oxenholme. It’s the most comfy way to travel here – a lot less hassle than driving. From Bowness-on-Windermere, you can visit all the main Beatrix Potter sites on foot, as long as you’re fairly fit and have a few days to spare. If you’re not feeling all that energetic, or if you’re simply pushed for time, I’d recommend Mountain Goat, a local firm that’s been ferrying lazy hikers like me around the Lakes for 50 years. Nowadays their speciality is guided tours, including a bespoke Beatrix Potter tour. I decided to give that a go on my first day, and then walk around a few of the other sites during the days to come. My friendly Mountain Goat driver, Gerry, met me at Windermere station, and drove me to Wray Castle. From a distance, Wray Castle looks medieval, but it’s actually Victorian. Beatrix spent several summers here in her teens and twenties, with her parents. It was here that she met Canon Rawnsley, one of the founders of the National Trust. He encouraged her drawing and writing. They remained friends for life. Wray Castle is now owned by the

Keith Corrigan / History and Art Collection / WorldPhotos /Alamy

National Trust and, thanks to Beatrix, so is much of the surrounding countryside. There’s nothing to see inside the castle but that doesn’t really matter. The exterior is uplifting, and the lakeside setting sublime. You can picture Beatrix here as a shy and bookish teenager, exploring these woods and meadows, sketching the things she saw. Our next stop was Hill Top, just up the road. Beatrix bought this quaint old farm in 1905, with the royalties from her early books. She left the farmhouse to the National Trust, and they’ve kept it just the way she left it. It’s a dark, little house, with low ceilings and small windows (‘I never saw such a place for hide & seek’).

She set The Tale of Tom Kitten here, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers – her most sinister story, in which Tom is imprisoned in the attic and rolled in pastry to make a pie. The surrounding village, Sawrey, is almost implausibly picturesque (‘nearly as perfect a place as I ever lived in’). It looks like a village in a children’s picture book – which is fitting: Beatrix used it as a setting for several of her stories, most notably The Tale of Jemima PuddleDuck. A century later, it’s hardly changed. The local pub, the Tower Bank Arms, still looks just the same. We finished our tour back at the Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead. Hawkshead is the town in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, written in 1918. By now, Beatrix was in her fifties – more a farmer than an author now. Her best books were behind her. ‘When one is up to the eyes in work with real animals, it

makes one despise paper-book animals,’ she said. I spent the night at Lindeth Howe, a handsome Tudorbethan villa on the leafy outskirts of Bowness. Nowadays it’s a smart hotel (their Beatrix’s Footsteps package includes a guided tour with Mountain Goat) but it used to be a private house. After her father died, Beatrix bought it for her mother to live in. Beatrix dropped in fairly often. It was here that she put the finishing touches to The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes and The Tale of Pigling Bland. Beatrix’s relations with her mother were always strained, and it’s telling that this house is a safe distance from Sawrey, on the other side of the lake. Here, on the busy east bank, you can see how the west bank might have ended up if Beatrix hadn’t intervened. It’s attractive but, compared with Sawrey, it feels almost suburban – a jolly holiday resort for sightseers like me. Next morning, bright and early, I set off for the Armitt Museum in Ambleside (the nicest way to get there is on one of the pleasure cruisers that criss-cross the lake). Before she started writing children’s books, Beatrix was a budding botanist, and she left her precise drawings of fungi to the Armitt. Today, they form the basis of an illuminating little exhibition about her life. On my last day, I caught the ferry across the lake from Lindeth Howe and walked along the lakeside path to Wray Castle. Because of Beatrix, this wild and peaceful shoreline is protected from all future development, bequeathed to the National Trust in perpetuity. As I retraced my steps back to the ferry, I remembered her words, written when she was 70: ‘It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country-born.’ For information about visiting Beatrix Potter’s Lake District, go to www. visitlakedistrict.com. Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature is at the Victoria & Albert Museum (www.vam.ac.uk), 12th February 2022 to 8th January 2023 The Oldie January 2022 83

Robbie Taylor / Joe Kirby / david a eastley / Alamy

Top: The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908), top left, featured the Tower Bank Arms Middle: The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907) featured Beatrix’s home, Hill Top Farm Bottom: The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913), written in Bowness, and a sign to Far Sawrey

Overlooked Britain

A castle for the world’s richest man

lucinda lambton When the Marquess of Bute met William Burges, they turned Cardiff Castle into a medieval, Welsh, Biblical fantasy Cardiff Castle is a sensational, superb, decorative triumph. The Roman and medieval castle was transformed by the 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900) and his whizz-bang adviser and friend the architect William Burges. They created a town of towers – not a small town, either. Each tower is jam-packed with jewel-like rooms, ablaze with the rarest of architectural riches. As you cheer on their glories, I defy any of you readers to find a building of equal excitement, rarity and splendour. Gold shrieks at you from every wall, along with myriad architectural oddities inlaid into a variety of woods, often enhanced with a wealth of mother-ofpearl. A cockatoo twinkles with a tail and crest shining bright. An armless and bespurred lion boasts a long, motherof-pearl tongue. Lord Bute was only 18 when he first met Burges. Bute’s coal fortune was said to make him the richest man in the world. Together, Bute and Burges created brilliantly eclectic architectural schemes. Both were raging romantics, obsessed with medievalism and craftsmanship. Every room is encrusted with rich and intricate decoration, designed with serious scholarship, yet riddled through with veins of humour that make you laugh out loud with delight at the good fun on show. The clocktower, begun in 1869, is a study in the theme of time. Outside, figures representing the planets flank its four gilded faces. After you’ve toiled up 101 steps to the Summer Smoking Room, its riches burst upon you. It is a room as gay as it is lively; as colourful as it is light; all shone over by a great gilded Apollo on the chandelier, with the rays of the sun beneath him. This gleaming room represents the universe, with a map of the world in silver, copper and bronze in the centre of the floor, surrounded by tiles of man, mammals, birds and fish. The god of love, with a lovebird on each wrist, sits on the handsome hood of the fireplace, above a frieze of romantic 84 The Oldie January 2022

Above: Cardiff Castle’s south gate Left: a bear clambers over the Animal Wall

summer pastimes. The eight winds of Greek mythology act as corbels over a great tiled frieze of legends of the zodiac. So much for the Summer Room’s splendours. Now for the wonders of the Winter Smoking Room (pictured), which glow away at the bottom of the tower. Plunge in and you pass under the grotesque head of Typhon – representing chaos – his ivory fangs at the ready. Tiptoe over the Hounds of Hell inset into a mosaic floor and you are surrounded by shining walnut and boxwood panelling, with mythological creatures set a-shining with mother-of-pearl. The door itself is inlaid with entrancing musical animals: a mouse

beating a drum and a parrot reading a score. Burges particularly admired this bird, describing its ‘great intelligence’. The door handle is adorned with the same decorative bird; many more perch and fly all over the castle’s walls, floors and ceilings. The massive fireplace is stupendous, as indeed are all of them; each a beautiful little building in its own right. The Smoking Room’s was hewn from Forest of Dean stone in a single block, brought to Cardiff and carved on the spot. Under the Latin words by Virgil, meaning ‘Love conquers all and let us yield to love’, the pleasures of winter are paraded above the fire. Great hounds lie at the hearth,

LUCINDA LAMBTON

while a figure loads his crossbow and a berobed woman prepares to fire an arrow. Another, bedecked in mauve, pink and gold, is skating on shinbone blades. TERRIFIC! Four giant corbels, representing ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Sunset’, ‘Day’ and ‘Night and Day’, support gold and black-andwhite checked arches which soar ceiling-high at each corner. The castle was a veritable cauldron of inventive talent. Bute workshops were established in Cardiff. Burges had a tried and trusted team of men, whose names should be cheered to the skies. Horatio Walter Lonsdale, Fred Weeks, Charles Campbell, Nathaniel Westlake and Frederick Smithfield were the decorative artists. Thomas Nicholls, Ceccardo Fucigna and William Clarke were the sculptors. The wood carving and the marquetry in at least a dozen different woods, such as avodire and French Charbonnier walnut, were wrought by Thomas John and his sons Thomas and William. (Three cheers for Thomas and Thomas!) The tiles were produced by W B Simpson and Sons, William Godwin and George Maw. Three architects worked under Burges: William Frame, John Starling Chapple and his brother-in-law, the euphoniously named Richard Popplewell Pullan. How supremely satisfying it is to record all their names. The Arab Room in the Herbert Tower, with its scarlet and gold-leafed Islamic ceiling, is the most exotic creation of them all. With its walls and floor entirely of gilded marble, with golden parrots in niches and wall cabinets mounted in silver, its decoration defies belief. It was all built in 1881, the year of Burges’s death. Inscribed in alabaster over the fire are the words ‘John, Marquess of Bute, built this in 1881. William Burges designed it.’ HURRAY! With it delivering historical lessons about the place, the overmantel in the Banqueting Hall also demands admiring attention: its decorations include figures blowing trumpets from a castle – obviously Cardiff – with the gloomy figure of a prisoner Robert ‘Curthose’ (short-legged) Duke of Normandy gazing at them from behind bars. The eldest son of William the Conqueror, he was the unsuccessful claimant to England’s throne, incarcerated here until he died in 1134. Creatures from the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh folk tales, embellish the walls: a giant frog, a boar and – one of the most beguiling of all the details in the castle – a salmon swimming through the wall, with its head and its tail carved so as to appear to be lashing forth from the body of the building.

And so it goes on, stuffing the senses with medieval lore. The Chaucer Room has all the quality of fairyland, with every inch most delicately decorated, soaring up to the lantern of the octagonal tower. The great writer presides overall, surrounded by the birds of his Parlement of Foules, along with a series of paintings and sculptures of The Legend of Good Women. There are 32 stained-glass windows illustrating The Canterbury Tales. The small dining room has a richly splendid ceiling and fireplace, with little oaks growing up through its hood and their roots splaying out below. Tiny mice nestle in flowers. Particularly bewitching is an elaborately carved wooden monkey with white ivory teeth and a bell push in his mouth disguised as a tasty morsel. A Greek inscription meaning ‘Entertaining Angels Unawares’ is carved amidst grotesque faces, some with their tongues sticking out. Meanwhile, the three angels tell Sarah and Abraham they are expecting a child. Sarah, aged 92, sits laughing with her hand over her mouth. Any look – even a glance – in any direction, at Cardiff Castle, will give you surprise, delight and pleasure.

Top and middle: The Winter Smoking Room: the inscription means ‘Love conquers all and let us yield to love’; ‘Sunset’ below the ceiling corner Bottom: A salmon swims along the wall of the banqueting hall The Oldie January 2022 85

Taking a Walk

Dorset’s last stand against the Romans

GARY WING

patrick barkham

Today, on a hill just south of Dorchester, you can stroll onto slopes that were transformed by Iron Age people into Maiden Castle, possibly the largest hill fort in Europe. But if you’d walked onto these grassy elevations of south Dorset in 43AD, you’d have had to fight your way in. Or would you? To climb the chalk ramparts of this spectacular place is to enter a mystery begging for a sequel to The Dig, Ralph Fiennes and all. The air was filled with the twittering of small birds on a damp, soft, late autumn day as my walking companion, the nature writer Mike McCarthy, and I set off up the hill. Opening times, according to the noticeboard, were a quaint ‘Any reasonable time in daylight hours’. I was trying to work out what would be unreasonable when Mike revealed that his mother-in-law once visited at dusk and spied a strange green light in the sky. ‘This place is definitely spooky,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to spend a night here.’ We were surrounded by a Hitchcockian abundance of birds, but in mid-morning daylight this was joyful. Gulls exuded a modicum of menace. Great murmurations of starlings 86 The Oldie January 2022

and clouds of linnets eddied through the sky like smoke. Among the linnets flew goldfinches, shining like bejewelled princes in a parade of paupers. As we scaled the ramparts, the neoclassical adornments of Prince Charles’s Poundbury glittering on the northern skyline, Mike told me about Roman emperor Claudius conquering Britain. Sitting high in Maiden Castle, the local Durotriges people may have been safe from the marauding of rival tribes but it was futile to resist the shock and awe of Imperial Rome, and the castle was ruthlessly taken. Excavations here in the 1930s by the extravagantly mustachioed archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler and his wife, Tessa, discovered a ‘war grave’ of 52 skeletons, including one with a Roman ballista bolt lodged in his spine. Just to make sure the ancient Briton was dead, the Romans had smashed his skull with an axe. Wheeler’s discovery caused a sensation at the time. Crowds flocked to the castle. Today only several power walkers and a young kestrel were at large as Mike and I walked anticlockwise to the famed east gate, where the ‘war grave’ was discovered. The only excavations I could find were

millions of tiny wormcasts in this innocuous place of hillocks and sheep. But, in recent years, rather like the illumination from an LED bulb, a bright but rather boring light has flattened the shadowy story of the violent Roman overthrow of the Durotriges. Doubts were first cast on the Wheelers’ interpretation when archaeologists leading fresh excavations 30 years ago pointed out that none of the skeletons could be proven to have died defending the hill fort. The castle’s burial ground turned out to have been well established before Claudius’s invasion. Its bodies weren’t buried in haste and only one revealed injuries consistent with a Roman projectile. Many of the dead could’ve been clobbered by rival tribes well before the Romans. Wheeler’s ‘burning’ of the castle gates was recast as the humdrum fires of iron foundries. Most damningly, in the century before the Roman invasion, the Durotriges’ settlement sprawled beyond Maiden Castle’s gates. In other words, by the time the Romans arrived, there was no intact castle to storm. According to modern historians, while Tessa Wheeler hated publicity, her husband adored it. Perhaps Mortimer’s publicity-seeking stories were essential to fund his passion: his Maiden Castle dig was paid for by visitor donations of £1,266 and £3,307 from fundraising in the press. But perhaps he was just swept away by the romance of this misty landscape and its stories. High on the castle ramparts, with superlative views painted in yellow and ginger by the palette of late autumn, I stood in sympathy with Morty. Better tall tales than the LED beam of contemporary evidence-sifting that chases away all shadows and marvellous mystery. Maiden Castle car park, DT2 9PP, two miles south of Dorchester South railway station

On the Road

‘I’m Limerick’s Basil Fawlty’

Dominic West, playing Prince Charles in The Crown, is filming on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. But his heart lies in Ireland. By Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? Returning twice for things I’ve forgotten: keys, phone etc. I need to practise the old Russian custom of sitting silently before leaving the house, to avoid a chaotic departure. Is there something you really miss? The kids, the garden, the check-in deadline. Do you travel light? Yes. I try to take about half of what I think I need. What’s your favourite destination? Glin Castle, Limerick, Ireland [the family home of his wife, Catherine FitzGerald]. It has turf fires, Irish breakfasts and the best pub in Ireland at the gate. How are you finding running Glin? I’m the Basil Fawlty of County Limerick. Your earliest childhood holiday memories? Watching a suckling pig roast on a spit in Spain. What aspects of Prince Charles’s voice and mannerisms are you concentrating on in The Crown (pictured)? All of them. Where’s it filmed and which houses are standing in for which royal palaces? We’re currently filming on Aristotle Onassis’s old yacht, the Christina O, in Mallorca. Very nice. Do you want to play James Bond? How would you play him? I’m too long in the tooth for Bond. But I’d love to play a villain. How did you get on with Michael K Williams in The Wire? He was a deeply sympathetic, wonderful man who helped a lot of people. Is it right that your most enjoyable job

ever was in a circus in South America? It was a South American circus, but in Camden. And your favourite place in the West Country, where you now live? I’ve got a little patch of woodland at home which we’re replanting, and I’m digging a pond. What’s your favourite place in Sheffield, where you’re from? Do you think of yourself as a Yorkshireman? The Crucible Theatre and the Fat Cat pub in Kelham Island. A white rose blooms in my heart. What’s the most exotic location you’ve filmed in? I walked to the South Pole ten years ago with three teams of wounded soldiers. We filmed our arrival at the pole, led by two of the bravest: one blind, the other a double amputee. And the least exotic? The autopsy room in the basement of the coroner’s office in Baltimore. We filmed The Wire there quite regularly and always at night, with body parts in jars and tagged corpses in the fridge. Who are you playing in the Downton Abbey film? A silent-movie star. Are you a traveller? Yes. I started with a hitchhike across Eastern Europe the year the Berlin Wall came down, in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Where did you go on your honeymoon? EasyJet to Mallorca. Do you like being away from home? I love it, but not for long without the family.

Do you go on holiday? As often as we can. Do you lie on the beach? Constantly. Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away? I can’t seem to get a daily routine anywhere. Do you stay in a hotel or an apartment? Or in a house, on a boat, in an RV, a tent or a hammock or, best of all, under the stars. What’s your favourite food? Roasted hazelnuts. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? An armadillo. In Argentina. Roasted in its shell. Do you tend to have a go at the local language? Si. What’s your biggest headache when you’re travelling? The M6. What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in while being away? I had a strange night near Delhi with some sadhus at the top of a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali. She had a terrifying shrine where they sacrificed goats. Do you like coming home? The overgrown garden, the pile of post, the tidy house and familiar bed – I love it. What are your top travelling tips? If the government advises against it, it’s probably a good idea. Glin Castle is available to rent for Christmas: www.glin-castle.com The Oldie January 2022 87

Genius crossword 408 el sereno C has the same meaning wherever it occurs Across

Down

1 Red line crossed by C felt oddly absent (6) 5 Laurel perhaps runs into father C (8) 9 C goes back in spite, possibly for train (8) 10 Firms taken in by routine attack (6) 11 Fish seen stirring in mud on the east of Scottish island (10) 12 C may be new in fusion (4) 13 Early carriage fetched almost a million (8) 16 Film about Times worker still surviving (6) 17 Sleep’s fine for small C (6) 19 Stopped and had a breather after a run (8) 21 C may be answer by son (4) 22 Slip down in place is off (10) 25 Help to accommodate most of relations with love for martial art (6) 26 See 4 Down 27 Such wordy constructs bother memory within a second (8) 28 It’s a strange Geordie drink (6)

2 Burning issue covering origin of rotten grub (5) 3 Snake expert employed in case of rattler (5) 4/26 C’s victory, with poor traders keeping nothing (7,8) 5 Part of body that sees rest changed miners (7) 6 Vicarage in trouble after banning golf as a sin (7) 7 Cuts down number of rodents during appointments (9) 8 Sound quality of country deposing leader accepting one’s mobile (9) 14 Collapse may see motorway dismissed from thought (9) 15 Liberal may be showing no mercy (9) 18 A jar in the morning for broadcast beginning to appeal (7) 19 Everybody may see soldiers used in American attractions (7) 20 Angry warning coming as result of Brazilian diplomacy (4,3) 23 Model small sheds (5) 24 Hide, covering English group of fliers (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 12th January 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties. First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 408 Across 1 Reduce area of a sail (4) 3 Rules (6) 8 Cyclone (7) 9 Aviator (5) 10 Divide by 2 (5) 11 Revere (7) 12 Albanian city (6) 14 Frightens (6) 18 Cheap sales trick (7) 20 Cede (5) 22 Go, abandon (5) 23 Diver’s apparel (3,4) 24 Tin alloy (6) 25 Professional charges (4)

Genius 406 solution Down 1 Chatter (anag) (7) 2 Throw out (5) 3 Fame (6) 4 Conclude from facts; suggest (5) 5 Also not (7) 6 Irish hooch (6) 7 Excursion (4) 13 Run riot (7) 15 Prairie wolf (6) 16 Tranquilises (7) 17 Pierce (6) 18 Cover with gold (4) 19 Unreactive (5) 21 Dodge, circumvent (5)

Well done to those who spotted the lesser known goddess of fortune at 2 down! Winner: Tony Bowditch, Saltash, Cornwall Runners-up: Pam Hayes, Cockermouth, Cumbria; Jared Morris, Andover, Hampshire

Moron 406 solution Across: 1 Phoney, 5 Shun (Phoenician), 8 Gnat, 9 Dictator, 10 Parcel, 11 Napkin, 12 Obstruction, 15 Weight, 17 Fajita, 19 Quick fix, 20 Ripe, 21 Zero, 22 Deduct. Down: 2 Henna, 3 Notices, 4 Yodel, 5 Stamp, 6 Utopian, 7 Iconic, 12 Overuse, 13 Ratify, 14 Injured, 16 Gecko, 17 Foxed, 18 Topic. The Oldie January 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO Forced away from their beloved table and onto the internet, bridge players have fallen into three main categories. (A) ‘I’ll never play online.’ Their mind is as shut as Woolworths. (B) ‘I never thought I’d like it but I really do. I prefer the real game, though.’ They were slow to embrace it but may be slow to leave it. (C) ‘You know I’m almost embarrassed to say, but I prefer playing online.’ You may never see them again across the green baize – they have grown so accustomed to playing in the comfort of their own home. I’m in category (B). For one week each month during the first half of 2021, my team played in the New Alt online competition – against the world’s best. Here was a March disaster. Dealer West North-South Vulnerable North ♠– ♥873 ♦9432 ♣Q J 10 6 5 3

West ♠ AQ8632 ♥64 ♦ J 10 8 ♣8 4 South

East ♠ K 10 9 7 ♥Q ♦K65 ♣A K 9 7 2

♠ J54 ♥ A K J 10 9 5 2

♦AQ7 ♣–

The bidding at table one South West North East 2 ♠ (1) pass 4 ♠ 5 ♥ pass pass 5 ♠ 6 ♥ pass pass Dbl end

(1) Weak Two.

What should West lead against 6 ♥ doubled? At the table, West looked no further than the ace of spades. Declarer ruffed in dummy, ruffed a club, ruffed a second spade, ruffed a second club, ruffed a third spade, finessed the queen of diamonds, drew trumps, and conceded only a diamond at the end. Twelve tricks and doubled slam made. The question West should ask himself is ‘Why did the vulnerable South bid on to 6 ♥, when he had contented himself with 5 ♥ the round before?’ I think the answer is clear. South will have spade length and, in light of East’s 5 ♠ bid, is now convinced his partner is void. With the benefit of hindsight, West should have led a heart – to cut down ruffs. A heart is the only winning lead – no longer can declarer ruff all three spades and the slam must fail. Put it another way: East’s double tells West that the defence have the high cards to beat 6 ♥; in that case, declarer will need ruffing tricks to succeed – again, the heart lead stands out. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 274, you were invited to write a poem called The Phone. Your entries were all the better for the unease, at the least, you felt for the machine. ‘Man home to wife, he barely greets her/ But dials the shop to order pizza,’ observed Daphne Lester. Any affection was reserved for the Bakelite model, or in David Shields’s case, ‘a tin can and a shared string fuse’ remembered from childhood. But the landline is not what it was, as Basil Ransome-Davies pointed out: ‘The phone is ever-active through the morning./ With callers out to profit from a lie./ Each raises hopes that sadly die a-borning.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Fiona Clark. Who’s calling, please? Hello? Hello? (I pray it will be you.) Are you alone? (I have so many questions.) No, don’t go! Where are you now? When are you coming home? I sense it must be you. In empty air, A whisper lighter than a leaf on wind, A shadow language, fine as gossamer, An almost silent, wordless channelling. I call you back and hear your other tone, A bee in amber, crystallised in years, As warm as living breath, as cold as bone: ‘Leave me a message if I am not here.’ How long is it since you ran out of time? Reversed the charges irreversibly? Muffled the loving heart’s insistent chime, And slipped away to meet eternity? Fiona Clark Some things I loathe, I must confess; Injustice; pain; the tabloid press; Worship of money; brutal sport; The claim that prejudice is thought… These some would share. Am I alone If I include the telephone? It does have virtues, I agree; We need it in emergency And when we have a word to say To close ones who are far away; But for the rest, I want no part. Worst is the species labelled ‘smart’ On which the younger folk depend: They gaze at it for hours on end

As if they were its captive slave. I would consign it to the grave. John Robinson My wireless remembers, Even if you don’t. The flat monotone. ‘Dangerously ill.’ Not seriously ill, nor even terminally ill. ‘Dangerously ill.’ Because the danger does not end with the patient. Because ‘Mrs Hall, of Dagenham in Essex, Last heard of holidaying in the West Country’, Is in danger, too. Of finding out, too late, that she must ‘…get in touch with St Peter’s Hospital, Gravesend, Where her father, Mr Samuel Bronley, is dangerously ill.’ A message, if not from home, then from the Home Service, Which delivers, for Mrs H, terrible news, Before The News. I check the screen on my mobile phone. No calls, yet, from the hospital. No news. Con Connell Crass intruder, interrupting The steady pace of time and life, Cutting through the calm of silence Like a jagged butcher’s knife. Who composed your silly ringtones, Who devised your bleeping call, A cacophony of noises That threatens to engulf us all? The demon sits inside my pocket Holding all I need to know. Numbers, photos, information, What to do and where to go. It can call across the planet To reach my friends and family. Though I sometimes say I hate it, Really it’s the world to me. Katie Mallett COMPETITION No 276 A carpet may be Persian, fitted, or three months in jail, but it’s part of life. A poem, please, called The Carpet. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 276’, by 13th January. The Oldie January 2022 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Memorial service bore

My mother died recently and we’re having a memorial service for her. We’re having two speakers: one is a close friend of hers and an extremely good, concise speaker and the other is her brother. This man, even in my mother’s eyes, is an old windbag. He is a crashing bore who loves the sound of his own voice. How can we stop him droning on? He could talk for at least half an hour. Rebecca, by email seasoned and much admired speaker at these events has assured me that no one must ever speak for longer than two minutes. At no event was this better illustrated than at Harry and Meghan’s wedding where the preacher went on for a quarter of an hour. But getting speakers to stick to the rules is difficult. Would your uncle be happy to speak at the crematorium (where time is limited anyway) or in the church – where you will have only close family – rather than at the memorial service? That way he could feel special. Or could you get a young relative to film and direct the proceedings? That would involve a rehearsal, timing everyone, looking at the scripts and giving everyone ruthless schedules. It might even be sensible to get yet another two-minute speaker, whose main role would be to emphasise to all the speakers how important it is to be brief. Lighting and music at the service could give cues as to when he should shut up, too.

Pandemic blues

I went to the doctor’s recently with what’s been diagnosed as depression. I’ve always been reasonably happy in the past, but now I’m beset with anxiety,

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

98 The Oldie January 2022

can’t sleep, snap at people in shops and feel wretchedly disorientated. My GP said it was a common reaction after something as big as a pandemic, and that he’s been extra busy with patients with similar mental problems ever since the end of the summer. I was always locked in my room when I was naughty as a child, and I’m wondering if lockdown hasn’t brought back old memories. I thought these feelings would pass, but they seem to be getting worse. I used to be the life and soul of the party but now I just can’t face going out. J Hodges, Poole You’re articulating what everyone I know is suffering from to one degree or another. I recently attended a large lunch and the moment I entered the room I burst into tears. And couldn’t think of a thing to say to anyone. It could be that you’ve been instilled with such a fear of getting ill that you see any group of people not as welcoming old friends but as a seething mass of germs and viruses;or that you have developed a phobia about going out. Rationally you may know the chances of contracting anything are tiny but, at a subconscious level, the world seems an uncontrolled space, teeming with infection. The more you face your fears and keep struggling on, the easier it will get. And, if you get stuck, see a cognitive behavioural therapist, so you’ve got a bit of a helping hand.

Children love cash

I asked my 13-year-old grandson what he wanted for his birthday recently and he immediately replied, ‘Money.’ My problem is that I don’t want to give him money – it seems so cold and impersonal. Can you think of anything a 13-year-old boy would like? Name and address supplied

ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk To order a print subscription, go to subscribe@theoldie.co.uk or call 0330 333 0195 Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £47.50; Europe/Eire £55; USA/Canada £57; rest of world £65.

Excuse me – you asked him what he wanted and he told you. A present is given to give someone else pleasure, not to give you the pleasure of wrapping something up and watching it being unwrapped. If you don’t want to give him money next year, then don’t ask him what he wants. The relatives I remember with extra-special warmth are those who, if met only occasionally, would always press a fiver or a tenner into my hand as a ‘tip’. Old-fashioned, I know, but money means so much to children of this age, who have so little power of their own.

Alzheimer’s paranoia

I care for my sister, with whom I’ve lived all my life. She’s now 90. She’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and sadly is becoming very aggressive. I’ve resisted pressure to put her into a home. Recently she persuaded a care worker that I was abusing her; and because she’d fallen over she was covered with bruises. The police were called and I was arrested. Eventually it was sorted out and she’s now in a home, but I can tell the staff are wary of me. This has affected me deeply and I often feel suicidal. I would never hurt my sister. I’m now on my own – a pariah –and feel I have nothing to live for. Name and address supplied I’m so sorry. I’m sure your sister would be upset if she were aware she was putting you through this. I suggest you contact carersuk.org – they can put you in touch with other carers who are in the same situation. From your letter you sound like a wonderful brother.

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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GREE TINGS, OLDIE readers AND FUN FANS!

Barry Cryer ’s 10 jokes insidtop e

s to You A Merry, Mirth-filled Christma Oldie of s hall the ed deck All! We’ve put Towers with boughs of holly and in you for fest fun ive fest a together has shop Joke a’s the Oldie Comic. Sant t larfs never been so busy, with constan oon cart of team elite our provided by Nick elves - from Kipper Williams and himself, Newman to the King of Comedy your on k stic So r. Mr Barry Crye in your Christmas slippers, lean back and r chai arm e urit favo prepare your ribs for a right old tickling!

January 2022

health warning: may contain nuts

comic

in’s greatest comics a it Br f o e n o is , 86 , Barry Cryer it ten for everyone r w ’s He s. er it r w yand comed recambe & Wise. from Bob Hope to Mo side-splitting gags... e, it r u o v fa 10 is h e r Here a A gorilla walks into a pub and asks for a pint of bitter. ‘That’ll be £6.50,’ said the barman. ‘What? That’s outrageous!’ said the gorilla. ‘You’re the first gorilla we’ve had in this pub,’ said the barman. ‘I’m not surprised at those prices,’ said the gorilla.

Graeme Garden told me this one A man goes into a record shop and says, ‘Have you got any records by wasps? I love listening to them.’ ‘Yes, we have!’ says the shop assistant. ‘Wonderful!’ says the man. ‘Do you mind if I listen to it first?’ ‘Of course,’ says the assistant, who puts the record on. The man listens to it and says, ‘That’s not wasps! The buzzing’s all wrong.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says the assistant. ‘I put on the B-side.’

‘Knock, knock’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘It’s Grandad! Stop the funeral! Get me out of this bloody wooden box!’

A famous comedian visits an old folks’ home to tell them a few jokes. He chats away to them, tells some very good jokes and then his ego gets the better of him. He asks one old lady, “You don’t know who I am, do you?” She says, “Don’t worry, dear. Matron will tell you.”

A man walks into a bank on Monday morning and asks to see the bank manager. ‘I’m afraid he’s passed away,’ says the clerk. The man leaves - and then comes back again the next day and asks to see the manager again. The clerk tells him again, ‘I’m afraid he’s passed away.’ The man comes in again on Wednesday and asks the same question – and again on Thursday. He then comes in on Friday and asks the assistant manager the same question. ‘Look, we’ve told you every day - your bank manager has died,’ the assistant manager says. ‘Why do you keep on asking the same question?’ And the man says, ‘I want to hear the news again and again and again...’

A penguin walks into a pub. He says to the barman, ‘Have you seen my brother?’ The barman says, ‘I don’t know. What’s he look like?’ This is my favourite joke by Frankie Howerd An 82 year old man goes to his doctor. ‘I want a complete physical examination. I’m about to get married,’ says the old man. ‘How old are you?’ the doctor asks. ‘I’m 82 and she’s 24. I want a complete examination to make sure everything’s working properly,’ says the old man. The Doctor said, ‘24! Well, I’ll do the examination. But it might be better if you also got a young lodger. You know, company for your wife.’ ‘Yes, yes, what a good idea,’ says the old man. The doctor meets him again a few months later. ‘Did you get married?’ asks the doctor. ‘How’s your young bride?’ ‘She’s pregnant,’ says the old man proudly. ‘And, erm, how’s the lodger?’ says the doctor nervously. ‘She’s pregnant, too,’ says the old man.

I was once asked who, of all the great comedians, I’d like to have written for but didn’t. ‘John Prescott,’ I said. ‘He can light up a room just by moving away from the window.’

A man is walking down a train in Northern Ireland. ‘Is there a priest on this train, please?’ he says. ‘God love us, this is an emergency.’ Nothing. ‘Is there a vicar on this train, please? Emergency!’ Nothing. ‘Is there a rabbi on this train, please? We’ve got an emergency.’ Nothing. Then a man put his hand up and said, ‘I’m a Methodist minister.’ And the other man said, ‘Well, you’re no use to us - we’re looking for a corkscrew.’

A group of British people are flying home on a plane chartered by the government. The pilot’s voice comes over the intercom, saying, “We’re flying at 35,000 feet. Visibility is good. The weather in London is fine and clear, at 15 degrees Centigrade... Oh, and by the way, I’m working from home.”

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Order the new Oldie cartoon book at www.theoldie.co.uk/reader-corner/shop

The Oldie magazine January 2022 issue 408

Articles inside

Crossword

On the Road: Dominic West

Ask Virginia Ironside

Taking a Walk: Maiden Castle, Dorset Patrick

Overlooked Britain: Cardiff

Beatrix Potter’s Lake District

First Old Bailey woman judge

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

Bird of the Month: Greylag

Drink Bill Knott

Music Richard Osborne

Television Frances Wilson

Film: Operation Mincemeat

Media Matters

Lady of Spain: A Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, by Simon Courtauld David

History David Horspool

On Getting Better, by Adam

The Rector’s Daughter, by F M Mayor A N Wilson

The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, by Janine di Giovanni

These Precious Days, by Ann

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox Michael

Britain’s oddest bets

Æthelred the Unready, by Richard Abels Hugo Gye

Postcards from the Edge

Readers’ Letters

The Doctor’s Surgery

Country Mouse

Town Mouse

Small World Jem Clarke

Life’s scoreboard

The metals of Christmas

My husband’s sad death at

Z Cars at 60

Back to university at 68

The heyday of Studio 54

Christmas quotes

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The Old Un’s Notes

In search of a good carer

Grumpy Oldie Man

Bliss on Toast

My part in Oliver

Hello, grim reaper

Unhappy birthdays in