The Oldie April 411 issue

32-PAGE GUIDE TO GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY JOHN GOODALL ON CASTLES

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen April 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 411

Hello, Dolly!

Roger Lewis on Dolly Parton

40 years on – Simon Weston returns to the Falklands The joy of Birmingham – Jonathan Meades turns 50 – Tom Ward

30th

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see page 19

Aston’s villa page 20

Features 14 Return to the Falklands, 40 years on Simon Weston 16 The Godfather turns 50 Tom Ward 19 My dull teenage diaries Simon O’Hagan 20 The joys of Birmingham Jonathan Meades 23 An Englishman’s castle is his home John Goodall 27 The bores are back!

James Pembroke 30 How to talk proper Serena Greenslade 31 Old lags Duncan Campbell 34 The real Brideshead revisited Daisy Dunn 92 Testaments of youth Christopher Woodward

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was a time ball? Karen Peck 12 Modern Life: What is adulting? Richard Godwin 28 Small World Jem Clarke

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Happy 50th, Godfather! page 16 32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 33 Country Mouse Giles Wood 36 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 39 School Days Sophia Waugh 39 Quite Interesting Things about ... doctors John Lloyd 40 God Sister Teresa 40 Funeral Service: Lady Maclean James Hughes-Onslow 41 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 42 Readers’ Letters 44 I Once Met… Sandy Wilson Michael Theodorou 44 Memory Lane Ken Thomas 56 History David Horspool 57 Media Matters Stephen Glover 59 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 59 Rant: Music without melody Laura Sheridan 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Falklands return: Simon Weston page 14

Books

Arts

46 Run Rose Run, by Dolly Parton and James Patterson Roger Lewis 48 The Red of My Blood, by Clover Stroud Frances Wilson 49 Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution, by Terence Dooley Robert O’Byrne 51 Not Far from Brideshead, by Daisy Dunn Alexander Larman 52 Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the the Art of Being Lost at Sea, by Tom de Freston Mark Bostridge 55 An Author Writes: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal Lucy Cooke

60 Film: Cyrano Harry Mount 61 Theatre: Catch Me If You Can William Cook 61 Radio Valerie Grove 62 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne 64 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 65 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Travel 80 Anglo-Argentines of Buenos Aires Charlie Methven 80 Eland Books: on the road for 40 years William Cook 82 Overlooked Britain: A mosque in Surrey Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Renée Fleming Louise Flind 87 Taking a Walk: Lundy – a treasured isle 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

Pursuits 67 Gardening David Wheeler 67 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 68 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 68 Restaurants James Pembroke 69 Drink Bill Knott 70 Sport Jim White 70 Motoring Alan Judd 72 Digital Life Matthew Webster 72 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 74 Getting Dressed Brigid Keenan 77 Bird of the Month: Egyptian Goose John McEwen

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The Oldie April 2022 3

CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY ON BEHALF OF THE MARK BOXER ESTATE

The Old Un’s Notes Will Boris Johnson finally fall from office – thanks to the Case of the Three Sirloin Steaks at the Garrick Club?

As Stephen Glover wrote in his Oldie media column, he co-hosted a dinner at the Garrick for the Prime Minister and his old Telegraph colleagues last year. The Prime Minister’s three police bodyguards ‘wolfed sirloin steak at [Glover’s] expense’.

And now a retired police sergeant has written to Met Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, before her resignation, asking for an explanation.

The retired sergeant said to her, ‘Thousands of public pounds have been wasted on non-existent police expenses, called “refreshers”, and I daresay that a Garrick sirloin steak with the trimmings and a drink goes well into £40 plus.’

The Commissioner’s office has passed on the letter to a Chief Superintendent in the Royalty and Specialist Protection squad.

There is no suggestion the bodyguards claimed expenses for the steaks. But surely someone should pay poor Stephen Glover back!

‘This boy is not suitable for university,’ declared the Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, after interviewing the lad who grew up to become the first presenter of University Challenge.

Bamber Gascoigne, who died in February, aged 87, won a scholarship to Eton at 13.

Once there, he was daunted by the intellects of fellow scholars (two of them used to play chess at meals without a board). Consequently he became merely ‘the sort of chap who played games’.

At 16, the unsuitable boy, asked about his interests by the Dean, gave a highly disappointing reply: ‘Shooting and fishing.’ He hastily and untruthfully added ‘reading’ – but was stumped when asked what he was reading at the time.

Finally, he remembered his grandmother was halfway through The Cruel Sea. What did he think about this gung-ho wartime yarn which

Triple first: Bamber Gascoigne

wasn’t exactly on the A-level syllabus? Er, ‘It’s about convoys crossing the Atlantic.’

Chastened by the Dean’s verdict, and tutored by more academic fellow Etonians, he

Among this month’s contributors Tom Ward (p16) played Dr Harry Cunningham in Silent Witness. He was also in Doctor Who, Death Comes to Pemberley, Vanity Fair and The Infinite Worlds of H G Wells.

Jonathan Meades (p20) wrote Pedro and Ricky Come Again and An Encyclopaedia of Myself. His latest BBC film is Franco Building with Jonathan Meades. The cartoon of him (left) is by Mark Boxer.

Duncan Campbell (p31) was a senior reporter and correspondent at the Guardian from 1987 to 2010. He wrote The Underworld: the Inside Story of Britain’s Professional and Organised Crime.

Daisy Dunn (p34) is a classicist and the author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars. She also wrote In the Shadow of Vesuvius and Catullus’s Bedspread.

worked so hard that he won an exhibition to Magdalene, where he achieved a First in his first year.

In his second year he informed Arthur Sale, his supervisor later described by his pupil John Simpson as the best English teacher in Cambridge, that he wouldn’t be handing in any essays for a bit. He was writing and directing the college revue, Share My Lettuce. It transferred to the West End. Gascoigne pulled off Firsts in not only his second but also his third year.

Not bad for someone who wasn’t university material.

This year is the 80th anniversary of Desert Island Discs, first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29th January 1942.

But how do you qualify to get on the show?

Bruce Beresford, Oldie contributor and director of Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy (1989), cheerfully admits that he’s tried to appear – without success.

‘Anxious to broadcast my music choices and book and luxury selection, I’ve often wondered how to become a guest on the programme,’ says Beresford. ‘The BBC website offers no advice on the matter – so I assume an invitation from the producer is the only method. Despite this and despite my innate reticence, I have made a number of attempts, over many The Oldie April 2022 5

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6 The Oldie April 2022

‘They still haven’t solved this one’

years, no doubt establishing myself as an eccentric, persistent menace.’

In 1980, Beresford’s film Breaker Morant was shown in London. ‘Perhaps overemphasising its impact, I called the BBC to express my enthusiasm in being a Desert Island Discs guest,’ he says.

‘There was no response.’

In 1982, he was nominated for an Oscar for directing the film Tender Mercies.

He says, ‘I didn’t win.

Perhaps if I had, I’d have made it onto the programme.’

Then, in 1989, he directed Driving Miss Daisy which actually won the Academy Award for Best Film.

‘I thought I was now a Desert Island Discs certainty,’ he says. ‘I was not.’

Now, at the age of 81, Beresford is in England, directing a film about Isaac Newton. Might this be his big chance?

He says, ‘I’m not as celebrated as the two most recent guests I’ve heard on the show – Sophia Loren and Garry Kasparov – but who knows?’

Henry Lamb (18831960) was rare among war artists in also being a war hero – as well as being a doctor. He won an MC in the First World War. In 1915, Lamb (pictured in Daisy Dunn’s feature on page 34) tended to the wounded Allied soldiers in Fécamp, Normandy. He also drew the nurses, doctors and patients.

Fécamp soldier – Henry Lamb

A Henry Lamb show, including the Fécamp pictures, is at Messums Gallery, London, until 18th March. Proceeds go to the Longford Trust for ex-offenders, set up in memory of Lord Longford, Lamb’s brother-in-law.

Trevor Lyttleton, an Oldie-reader, was intrigued by the article about Rose Heilbron KC, the first Old Bailey female judge (January issue).

In 1958, as an articled clerk at Bromley & Walker, he attended the trial at Leeds Assizes of the infamous serial killer Mary Elizabeth Wilson.

Rose Heilbron KC was defence counsel.

Known as the Merry Widow of Windy Nook, Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering her last two husbands with phosphorus poison. She had in fact lost four husbands in three

years. All four were found to have died of phosphorous poisoning after her death, following the exhumation of her first two husbands’ bodies.

At the start of the trial, Rose Heilbron KC was interrupted during her defence submission by a juror who rose to address Mr Justice Hinchcliffe in the following unforgettable terms: Juror: Please, m’lud, I wish to be excused.

Judge: And on what grounds do you wish to be excused?

Juror: Because my wife is about to conceive.

Judge: Surely you mean she is about to be confined – but either way I think you ought to be there!

(Laughter in court) Judge: Silence in court!

Mr Justice Hinchcliffe then placed the black cap on his wig and imposed one of the last death penalties in Britain as he sentenced the Merry Widow of Windy Nook to death by hanging.

The sentence was tempered by mercy: she was later reprieved owing to her advanced age. She died in Holloway Prison in 1963.

Scotsman Lord Foulkes recently made a parliamentary speech, pleading the case for peers who live, as he does, far from the capital.

London-based lords, argues Foulkes, can eat breakfast at home, sleep in their own beds and easily accept second jobs because they don’t have to travel so much. And they can slip into Parliament at weekends when no one else is about in order to ‘run off documents’.

Using the office printer for free when the clerks aren’t looking? Oops. Has George just betrayed one of the secret perks of being a peer?

The Oscar Wilde Society’s third Wilde Wit

Competition, run in conjunction with The Oldie and The Chap, challenged entrants to match Wilde’s style with their own original entries.

There were more than 300 entries – and the winners would make Oscar smile.

The top entry came from Darcy Alexander Corstorphine, who is no stranger to this contest. He took top place in the first two Wilde Wit Competitions!

This year, he achieved ‘I’ve always needed a gag-writer’ another feat, tying with himself for first prize, with introduce piped music from these two aphorisms: Classic FM or Virgin Radio. A nervous patient finally decides to have a jab and turns up at the vaccination centre only to be subjected to the wheedling tones of Alan Titchmarsh or Chris Evans? Come back!

The real Oscar Wilde

‘A moment of reflection should be taken before the mirror or not at all.’

‘There are only two sources of sorrow in this world: one is a lack of understanding, the other is an excess of it.’

Second place goes to Robert Eddison for this wonderful line: ‘The quickest way to make your name is to lose your reputation.’

Silvia Gasparini won third place with her charming truism: ‘Truth is the name we give to the lies we like.’

Many congratulations to all these supreme Wildeans.

Most oldies did their bit when it came to having COVID jabs. But would this continue to be the case were the NHS to follow a suggestion from Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood?

The Bournemouth East MP rose in the Commons to suggest that vaccine centres

Many readers will be familiar with the works of the Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare, among other ripping yarns.

MacLean was born 100 years ago, on 21st April 1922, and died in 1987. His books have sold over 150 million copies, and several have been made into hugely popular films.

MacLean served with the wartime Royal Navy, and began his writing career in 1955 with the classic sea story HMS Ulysses. The book sold an almost immediate 300,000 copies in

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Herb falafel, garlic yoghurt, broad beans and red-pepper hummus on warm flatbread

Alistair MacLean (1922-87)

straight face that he had been captured and cruelly tortured by the wartime Japanese.

His own son called this a ‘drunken raving’.

MacLean’s last years were afflicted by alcoholism, and he met an appropriately mysterious end. He died, after a brief illness, while staying in a Munich hotel. No one, including his own family, claimed to know what he was doing there.

hardback, and made its author a wealthy man.

MacLean’s plots tend to affirm qualities like national integrity and personal heroism, and eschew the love element. Asked about this in an interview, he replied briskly, ‘Sex? No time for it.

Gets in the way of the action.’

MacLean had mixed feelings about the whole literary process, claiming he wrote at top speed because ‘I dislike the job, and the sooner I finish a novel the better.’ He even wrote two books under a pseudonym in order to prove that the public would still buy them without his name on the cover. He was right; they did.

MacLean’s imagination wasn’t confined to the printed page: he often insisted with a

The Lib Dems’ shock victory in December’s North Shropshire by-election marked another great comeback for the Liberal Democrats.

To celebrate the occasion, they planned a dramatic photo opportunity. The idea was to have party leader Sir Ed Davey drive a tractor through a wall of blue ‘Tory’ bricks.

Sadly for the Lib Dems, a few days before polling day Sir Ed went down with COVID and was forced to isolate, scuppering the stunt.

‘It’s a real shame,’ says a Lib Dem HQ insider. ‘Ed was really looking forward to getting behind the wheel of the tractor!’

The Oldie April 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Cressida Dick is just wild about Wilde The ex-Met Commissioner is devoted to my hero, Oscar

The moment you’re born, you’re doomed. The moment you’re appointed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, you know it’ll end in tears.

I have a soft spot for Dame Cressida Dick, the latest head of the Met to become unsaddled in post – for a special reason: we have a mutual interest in Oscar Wilde. I am president of the Oscar Wilde Society and she shares a birthday with him: 16th October.

It was the men from the Met, of course, who arrested Oscar Wilde in 1895. In 2017, 120 years after Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol, I invited Cress (as colleagues call her) to propose a toast to his memory at a drinks party in his honour. She came with her partner, Helen. I think they had thought of announcing their engagement that night.

They didn’t, but the evening was memorable all the same.

‘We cannot change the past,’ said Britain’s most senior police officer, looking out over a sea of upturned faces – many those of men old enough to have known the time when expressing their sexuality would have made them liable to arrest and imprisonment – ‘but we can look to the future and hope that it is one that is kinder, fairer, more tolerant, more loving, more humane.’

It was a strange and moving moment when the head of the very organisation responsible for Wilde’s arrest said in a quiet, firm voice: ‘As the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, I am proud to invite you to raise your glasses in a toast to the memory and genius of Oscar Wilde.’

Cressida Dick was the first female and the first openly gay Met Commissioner.

Sir Robert Mark (1917-2010) was the first Commissioner to have Wilde woman: Cressida Dick

started as a bobby on the beat and to have risen through all the ranks from the lowest to the highest – the route followed by all subsequent Commissioners.

Formerly the Chief Constable of Leicester, Mark was brought in ‘to clean up the Met’ in 1972 – and he succeeded.

He was a friend of my father’s and I remember my dad taking me to lunch with him at New Scotland Yard.

Fine wine was served (that wouldn’t happen now) and, after lunch, Sir Bob took us on a tour of the Met’s celebrated Black Museum (they don’t call it that any more). Started in the 1870s, the museum featured everything from Victorian swordsticks to the hangman’s nooses used in the execution of assorted murderers of note and the revolver used

by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England.

I realise now that my father must have known Bob Mark quite well. In the early 1970s, my parents lived in a block of flats above Baker Street tube station. It was just round the corner from the scene of the notorious Balcombe Street siege, in 1975, when four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army held an innocent couple hostage for almost a week.

When my father saw the Met Commissioner on TV, arriving to take command of the situation, he said to me, ‘Come on, boy.’ He marched me round the corner, ducking under the police barriers, and announcing to every officer who tried to stop us, ‘Friends of the Commissioner – laissez passer!’

Incredibly, we got through the cordon and right up to the Commissioner who allowed us a ringside seat for the

climax of the drama: the surrender of the four IRA terrorists and the release of their two hostages.

Incidentally, the four IRA men, part of an active service unit involved in a sustained bombing and murder campaign across London, served 23 years in English prisons, before being transferred to a jail in Eire in 1998.

Gerry Adams called them ‘our Nelson Mandelas’; they were released as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1999.

By coincidence, there is another Irish revolutionary who shared a 16th October birthday with Oscar Wilde and Cressida Dick – and that’s Michael Collins (1890-1922), commander-in-chief of the Irish Free State army until he was killed in an ambush a century ago, towards the end of the Irish civil war.

Some days (like 8th March, the day on which I was born) don’t seem to have any notable births. Others are awash with them. Two of my favourite actors are also 16th October people: Dame Angela Lansbury, born 1925, and Peter Bowles, born 1936.

Peter, a friend and neighbour for 40 years, trained at RADA. While he was there, he shared a flat with his contemporary Albert Finney. Late one night, so Peter told me, the two young men fell to talking about the part each would most like to play. Both, it turned out, aspired to play Macbeth.

Albert asked Peter how he would approach the part. Peter told me, ‘I went on about Scottish history, the possibility of playing it with a Scottish accent, probably in a kilt, and how I would study all the great scholars, including Granville Barker.’

‘How would you approach it, Albert?’

Peter asked his friend.

‘I’d learn the fucking lines and walk on,’ said Albert.

Gyles’s memoir, Odd Boy Out, is out now (Michael Joseph) The Oldie April 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Confessions of a gambling addict

The Government has made it far too easy for us to bet our lives away matthew norman The day approaches when historians must turn to analysing Little Britain’s final, irreversible descent into the post-imperial cesspit.

Reassuringly, it won’t dawn for a long time. Next Thursday would be my best guess.

But whenever it comes, the budding Simon Schamas will identify a host of disgraces that have lent this increasingly septic isle the enticing fragrance of a sub-Saharan failed state.

Take, for instance, the barely reported fact that prisoners are dying, unattended, from such anachronistically lethal ailments as the stomach ulcer.

The horror of the Windrush scandal fights for honours-board prominence with the kind of blatant corruptions (dirty Russian funding, PPI contracts gifted to ministerial mates etc) that afflict yucky foreign regimes, but could never happen here.

Among all the symptoms of terminal decay, one that for me stands out for personal reasons is the attitude to gambling.

Backbench libertarians – those geniuses who passionately believe in the freedom to choose one’s own path to hell while cheerleading deafeningly for the ‘war against drugs’ – would take issue.

But those who know the peril regard it as a basic duty of government to protect the vulnerable from such a pernicious drug.

The philosopher Paul Merson – more familiar perhaps as an erstwhile midfield magician for Arsenal and England – could not be clearer on the danger.

Mr Merson landed the dazzlingly addictive trifecta of drink, cocaine and gambling. Seven million pounds later, he has licked the addictions to booze and Colombia’s finest. The third he can’t beat.

Since his troubles predate the uncontrolled explosion of digitised gambling, in his case the state is exonerated. But for former cricketer Patrick Foster, author of Might Bite: The 10 The Oldie April 2022

Secret Life of a Gambling Addict, governmental greed stands accused.

His travails began with one of those roulette machines Labour allowed to invade the sovereign turf of the highstreet bookie in 2003.

A flash of beginner’s luck grew a couple of quid into several hundred. So began Mr Foster’s charge to the edge of suicide.

For those with the predisposition, it takes only one spin. I have mentioned before the family holiday to Portugal during which my late father altered a passport to make me old enough for the casino.

Befuddled by the chips that Algarve night, for my first spin of the ivory ball I put the equivalent of a fiver, rather than the intended 50p, on 17 black.

Up the bastard came. I was £175 up, the psychochemicals surged berserkly and that was that. When later I blew two months’ wages in an hour in Cannes, I never felt so exhilarated. Real gamblers – sadomasochists with no appetite for the Frank Bough Memorial Gimp Mask – gamble not to win, as Dostoyevsky wrote, but to lose.

Another few years on, the last night of our honeymoon at the sadly defunct Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City – a night lubricated by multiple octuple bourbons on the house – went so poorly, I had to beg 50c off a bellboy to get through the New Jersey Turnpike en route to Newark Airport.

How close I came to serious selfdestruction is hard to gauge. One will romanticise the past. But if anything saved me, it was the relative difficulty of

‘I miss the old days when you could offend people without them taking offence’

gambling. The legal requirement to apply for casino membership and wait for approval (long since revoked) was a sufficient psychological barrier to restrict the catastrophes to foreign holidays.

With the arrival of the high-street fixed-odds betting terminal (I hesitate to use the acronym FOBT lest anyone confuse it with that popular diagnostic tool the faecal occult blood test) came a relapse.

Suddenly, battalions of pensioners, migrant workers and benefits claimants were, to use the technical term, doing their bollocks. The Treasury of the supposedly puritanical Gordon Brown relished what is effectively a regressive tax on the poor.

Mr Foster wasn’t poor – at least for a while. Soon enough, he had debts of £250,000, and was moments from redecorating the underside of a commuter train with his innards.

He withdrew from the brink, literally and otherwise, but many others have not. Of all addictions, this one drives more to suicide than any other. Untold numbers of those who survive visit barely imaginable grief on themselves and their families.

That high-street virtual roulette has been tamed, by drastically limited maximum stakes, is almost meaningless when the plethora of online casinos have not. It takes two minutes to make a credit-card deposit of £500, and less to lose the lot.

It is avarice bordering on wickedness for a government knowingly to heap the pile of human suffering for the kind of annual revenue it blew in a week on phantasmal face masks.

This may not be the present Prime Minister’s paramount concern right now. But, having closely studied the form book, we may rely on him to correct this abomination if and when we emerge from Mr Putin’s cheeky little punt on Ukraine.

what was a time ball?

On the seafront in Deal, Kent, stands a tall tower topped by a mast with a large, black ball. This is a time ball tower, once used by ships offshore in the English Channel to set their chronometers accurately, essential for calculating longitude at sea – an early GPS system.

Time balls were erected around Britain and the world; only a handful remain.

In 1818, Captain Robert Wauchope had the idea of having a large signal in ports that would at a specific moment give the exact time. In 1829, after

Time machine: the Greenwich Time Ball drops at 1pm every day

what is adulting?

Adulting means existing in the world as an independent being.

You have probably been adulting for most of your adult life – even if you were unaware that ‘adult’, a hitherto respectable noun and slightly less respectable adjective (see ‘adult movie’, ‘adult fun’ etc), had acquired verb status.

It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘I’ve finished all my adulting requirements for the week.’

Adulting ought to connote fun adult things, like dashing off for a weekend in Florence; or having sex with strangers.

In fact it describes those mundane, strangely under-publicised activities that 12 The Oldie April 2022

extensive campaigning, the Admiralty agreed to the erection of the first time ball in Portsmouth. This was followed by one at the Greenwich Observatory in 1833.

In Greenwich at 12.55pm, a red wood-and-leather ball would rise halfway up the mast. At 12.58pm, it rose to the top. Then, at precisely 1pm Greenwich Mean Time, the ball would drop. The point at which the ball dropped signified the exact time to ships on the Thames. The Time Ball in Greenwich still drops every day – but now as a tourist attraction.

With the introduction of the electric telegraph in around 1850, time balls could be located some distance from the source of mean time (ie Greenwich), enabling them to be operated remotely.

In Deal, the drop was triggered by an electric signal from Greenwich along the telegraph wires of the South Eastern Railway. Established in 1855, the Deal Time Ball became obsolete in 1927 with the introduction of more reliable radio time signals. The recently renovated tower is home to the Time Ball Museum.

The Time ball is still dropped at 1pm and on New Year’s Eve. It’s controlled by the atomic clock at Anthorn Radio Station in Cumbria.

The coming of the railways brought in the need for a national standard time.

Greenwich would send telegraphs to railway stations at 1pm each day, so they

could set their clocks to London time.

Jewellers and watchmakers particularly appreciated standardised time. A Leeds company, Dyson’s, built its own time ball.

In Manhattan in 1904, the publisher of the New York Times wanted to host a New Year’s Eve fireworks party in Times Square. He never got a permit for the fireworks but, three years later, he had installed his own time ball – a 700lb ball of iron and wood covered in light bulbs and lowered from a flagpole on the stroke of midnight.

Today the New York time ball is far more glitzy, weighing nearly six tons and made up of 2,688 Waterford crystal triangles and 32,256 LED lights. The drop is initiated by a laser-cooled atomic clock in Colorado – a far cry from the days when time balls were winched to the top and released by a hand-operated trigger.

Karen Peck

end up taking up the greater part of adult life. Remembering to buy loo roll; familiarising yourself with a carinsurance comparison website; removing a build-up of lint from the filter of the washing machine; that sort of thing.

For Generation Z, the newest cohort of grown-ups, adulting comes as a major disappointment. Recently, I interviewed Holly Humberstone, a 22-year-old pop star from Lincolnshire, who has just won the prestigious Rising Star Award at the Brits.

You might imagine that moving to the big city, signing a record contract and winning the same award that set Adele on her path to stardom would be a pleasant introduction to adult life – but Humberstone wasn’t convinced. She had ‘no clue’ how to be an adult: ‘I should be more responsible and ready for adulting but I’m just not! You

don’t really get taught these things at school. One day, you just get pushed out of a door and you have to just survive.’

Here is a selection of social-media posts from young people around the world: ‘Adulting is expensive’; ‘Adulting is confusing’; ‘Can I go back to the time when I was just a baby? Adulting and feelings are hard to cope with’.

What’s that weird scrapy noise?

Coming of age in the midst of a global pandemic on top of a housing crisis on top of the longest sustained period of falling real wages in the UK on record is tricky.

Who can blame today’s early-20somethings for looking back wistfully on the days when they didn’t know what Council Tax was and food magically appeared in the fridge.

Richard Godwin

‘You mean I’m dead – no wonder I couldn’t get a bloody signal!’

Forty years after a bomb hit his ship in the Falklands War, Simon Weston still thinks he’s a very lucky man

BOOM! It had all gone kablooey

DEREK D’SOUZA

I

n 1982, I was a 20-year-old Welsh Guardsman and part of the Falklands Task Force.

On board the Canberra, we sailed into San Carlos Water, which was nicknamed Bomb Alley. After about a week, we did a march up to the top of a big hill, said hello to 2 Para and then marched all the way back down again.

We were put on board HMS Fearless, an amphibious assault craft. But the 14 The Oldie April 2022

weather conditions were so awful that night that guys started going down with hypothermia.

So they took us back to Bomb Alley and we got onto the Sir Galahad. She was eight hours late setting sail because she’d been hit with a bomb two days before – but it didn’t detonate. They’d taken the bomb out of the side of the ship and dropped it in the sea – it’s still in San Carlos Water, I assume.

Then we set sail into Fitzroy, into Port Pleasant. They say we went into Bluff Cove, but actually Bluff Cove is a mile or two away. So be careful what you read in history: it’s not always made by those who live it; it’s nearly always made by those who write about it. No book on history I’ve ever read was written by anybody who was there, by the look of it.

The last words I heard before we got blown up – before my life changed –

MIRRORPIX

were ‘It’s air-raid warning green … it’s red, it’s red! Get down, get down!’ – and that was it. I looked up, crashed across right through where my best mate was sleeping, right across into the wall where I’d left my kit, and the next thing you know – BOOM! – it had all gone kablooey.

The bomb went into the engine room and detonated the oil, which blew out over us – the burning oil – and then the bomb detonated – 500lb worth of bomb.

To put that into context, Manchester city centre was blown up by the IRA in 1996 with a 500lb van bomb and the whole city centre had to be rebuilt.

People ask if it’s uncomfortable reliving the bombing. It’s part of my life now – it’s helped shape who I’ve become.

I would prefer it not to have happened, of course. But I wouldn’t change the past, because I have to live in the here and now – and plan for tomorrow.

I’m a great lover of history, and history teaches us so many different things if only people would stop and read it, and look at it. You can’t change history. You may be able to rewrite it if you find out different facts. But no matter how bad it is, around slavetrading and slavery and things like that, I think, yes, we need to create a better narrative, but we shouldn’t try to eradicate the mistakes people made. We have to go forward, and we can only go forward with knowledge.

To realise I had got blown up a few days before the end of the war was a bit of a sickener but, hell, I was alive.

There were 255 guys who didn’t make it home at all – 48 on the Sir Galahad. I can’t complain.

My injuries were classed as 46 per cent burns – I was told by the surgeons I was the worst-injured to come back alive from the Falklands – and over 90 per cent of my body is scarred now, because of my donor sites.

I’m still having surgery today.

I may have been the dumbest man in the doghouse because, for a long time, I thought I’d be able to get out of hospital and go straight back to the Army. I didn’t want to leave. I left because I could no longer be who I was in the Army. People couldn’t tell me what to do – and if people can’t tell you what to do, they can’t control you. I have so much respect for my regiment. I never wanted to be in a position where I could take advantage.

I wanted to walk out of the forces with my head held high and people saying, ‘Well, we lost another good one today.’ I wanted the people who respected me to continue to respect me.

Opposite: Simon today. Above: At a Falklands parade in 1982

Before joining up, I’d been a bit of a troubled youth. I made some very poor choices. None of it was a hanging offence, but it was enough for me to recognise I needed to change the direction of my life, and my mother encouraged me. She dragged me down to the recruiting office – I love telling this story – and I had to go in and do my aptitude test. Afterwards, the sergeant came out of the room and said, ‘Well, Mrs Weston, I’m pleased to tell you that your son has passed. He is of decidedly average intelligence.’ I was perfect material for the infantry!

When the war was over, and there were official celebrations, it felt terrible.

I didn’t feel angry – who would I feel angry towards? – but I felt disappointed.

I was lying in a hospital; I’d just had surgery. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be pushed in a wheelchair.

I hadn’t come to terms with the fact that I was still in a high-dependency ward. The doctors were expecting me to go into renal failure at any time. Going out might have killed me. My wounds

Every day I wake up and I think I’ve won the lottery

were so open that I could have caught any number of infections. I do remember feeling very left out. But there were other battles to fight. That one wasn’t a fight worth having.

I think I’ve always had a positive attitude and believed things would get better. And now, I’m proud of being president of a charity called DEBRA. It’s a wonderful organisation that deals with people with a terrible skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa (EB), which quite simply – it’s a complicated condition – is where the skin doesn’t adhere to the body correctly. So babies are born without skin on parts of their body. They call them the butterfly children because they say the skin is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings.

I was asked to become patron about three years ago, and I agreed to do it because I felt relevant to it, having spent so long with no skin on parts of my body.

We’re fundraising; trying to get enough money to repurpose drugs we believe may hold enough properties to help people with EB. It costs £1½ million for each repurposing and for the trials and everything. A generous American lady has given us half a million pounds. We’re still searching for the other million. I’m proud to have gone on Beat the Chasers just last week – I won 40 grand! I was lucky: they gave me a question about Man United, a team I’ve supported since I was eight.

I don’t know how long I’ve got on this planet, but every day I wake up and I think I’ve won the lottery – because life is just so uncertain, and it may be a grimy old morning but at least I’m here to complain about it.

I’m looking forward to going down [to Argentina] to meet Carlos [the Argentinian pilot who bombed the Sir Galahad] again just before the 40th anniversary, and to the TV filming – and then to going back to the Falklands for the last time. I can’t imagine I will go back again. I’m looking forward to all the things I’ve got to do this year: the cruises I’m going to be speaking on and my current involvement with energy – the possibility of creating greenhouses that, yes, are commercial but hopefully will be in a position to help feed the world.

There are just so many things to do. I haven’t got close to finishing yet. At the age of 60, I feel incredibly fortunate. My wife, Lucy, looks after me better than I deserve. I’ve got a fabulous family – my three children and my grandchildren.

If there’s any disappointment, maybe it’s my daughter – she’s going out with a boy from the RAF, not the Army!

The Oldie April 2022 15

It’s a gangster movie, a family drama and a film about the corrupt American dream, all rolled into one masterpiece. By Tom Ward

Happy 50th birthday to the great Godfather

AF ARCHIVE / ALAMY

E

arly one morning in January 1971, a young film director sat waiting nervously with a skeleton film crew in a sitting room on Mulholland Drive.

Everyone was silent – the target of their mission, they had been told, did not like noise. A camera had been set up, a few bits of prosciutto and cheese placed on a table.

Finally, the owner of the house entered, wearing a long Japanese robe.

Without acknowledging anyone, he sat down. As the camera began to whirr, he tied his long, blond hair up in a pigtail, applied black shoe polish to it and filled his cheeks with cotton wool.

‘This man is a bulldog,’ he murmured to himself, with a strange, hoarse rasp.

Muttering wordlessly, he picked at the food, stared up at the ceiling, scratched his cheek, gestured at imaginary people.

The phone rang. He answered. He wheezed incoherently for a few seconds, then hung up. Whoever was at the other end, puzzled as they no doubt were, was a small part of film history.

The director, Francis Ford Coppola, had just recorded the first screen manifestation of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. By the end of the year, Coppola would have created one of the most acclaimed and influential films ever made; and Brando, after a lost decade of self-indulgence both off and on the screen, would have restored his shattered reputation and once again be called the greatest actor in the world.

Watching The Godfather now, 50 years after its première at Loew’s State Theatre, New York, on 14th March 1972, it seems completely 16 The Oldie April 2022

‘Grazie, Godfather’: Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone

self-assured – a tour de force of confidence and virtuosic swagger.

But for Coppola, making it was ‘the most miserable part of my life’. From development to the final cut, via the script, casting, cinematography and score, all of which are considered today to be more or less flawless, he fought continual battles with the studio and his own crew.

Incredibly, for such an unproven director, he won on almost every front.

Coppola had not wanted to make the film. He had given up on Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling source novel after 50 pages, finding it vulgar.

A self-confessed ‘arty’ director, he was

part of a new generation who wanted to get away from old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking, and here, as Walter Murch, his longtime sound editor, put it, ‘was Hollywood at its Hollywoodiest’.

But he was in debt: his friend George Lucas urged him to take the money and then pursue more personal projects.

Finally, he agreed – he had begun to see something in the story that appealed.

Paramount Studios wanted a sensational gangster movie steeped in gore and violence. Coppola saw it differently – both as an archetypal family drama about a king and his three sons and as a metaphor for the corruption of

MARKA / ALAMY

Clockwise from above left: Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) with his father; Brando and Francis Ford Coppola on set; James Caan, Brando, Coppola, Pacino and John Cazale

the American dream. The film’s power is that he ended up doing all three.

‘Making a major film is like running in front of a moving locomotive – if you stop, if you trip, if you make a mistake, you get killed – and The Godfather was worse than most,’ said Coppola later – and indeed the locomotive was roaring behind him from the outset.

Robert Evans, production chief at Paramount, had hired him partly because of his Italian heritage – ‘I want to smell the spaghetti,’ said Evans – and partly because he was a relative unknown who he felt would be easy to push around. He could not have been more wrong.

The two started fighting from day one.

Paramount wanted the film set in the 1970s (cheap), and shot on their back lot (cheap again). Coppola was adamant it should be kept in the 1940s of the book, and filmed on location in New York.

This attracted the attention of the real mob – Evans got a call warning him not to make a Mafia movie in the city if he valued ‘your pretty face’. ‘Fuck you, buddy,’ said Evans, and then perhaps more thoughtfully added, ‘You should

take it up with the producer [Al Ruddy].’

The producer’s car was found riddled with bullets.

Casting was even more divisive. From the beginning, Coppola wanted Al Pacino to play Michael and either Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier to be Vito Corleone. Olivier was ill, and Paramount flatly refused to countenance Brando, whose outrageous on-set behaviour and string of recent flops had left him unemployable. Broke after the failure of his last effort, Burn!, the legend was mocked as ‘burned-out Brando’.

Coppola pleaded, was denied and, in his agony, faked an epileptic fit in the Paramount head office. Finally the studio made conditions: he would have to produce a screen test – a humiliation for a star of Brando’s stature.

Uncharacteristically desperate for the part, Brando acquiesced – hence the visit to Mulholland Drive. One story goes that Coppola slipped the test between some others and the studio owner, an Austrian called Charlie Bluhdorn, cried out, ‘Dat’s fantastic! Who is zis old Guinea?’ Brando was in.

Pacino was a different kind of problem. Evans wanted an established, all-American star – Robert Redford, say, or Ryan O’Neal. Pacino was dark, intense and short (Evans dismissed him as ‘the little dwarf’), and nobody had ever heard of him – precisely the qualities Coppola liked. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on test after test, and Pacino kept flunking them, because of nerves.

Only after seeing him in a film about junkies called The Panic in Needle Park (1971) did Evans relent.

Once shooting began, Pacino’s troubles did not end, and neither did Coppola’s. Both were close to being fired in the first weeks of shooting. The daily footage sent back to the executives was everything they had feared. It was too dark; it was too slow; Brando was mumbling; Pacino was dull; there was no action.

‘They were convinced,’ recalled Coppola, ‘that this was the worst picture ever made.’

The crew thought Coppola slow and incompetent, and he was at odds with his director of photography, Gordon The Oldie April 2022 17

TCD/PROD.DB / ALAMY

Willis. They had the same ideas about the look of the film, but Willis was ten years older than his director, and though his techniques were innovative, his approach to the process was not. He liked actors to hit their marks, say their lines as written, and find his precisely-placed lights. Coppola encouraged spontaneity and freedom.

Tensions rose until, one day, Willis walked off the set and Coppola stormed to his office. A sharp crack rang out. The crew stared – had he shot himself?

Coppola had just kicked the door in.

Coppola and Pacino were hanging by a thread. Then along in the schedule came the now famous restaurant scene (actually, every scene is famous), where Michael shoots rival mobster Sollozzo and corrupt cop McCluskey.

A masterpiece of tension in its editing and use of sound – and with a compelling display of restrained anger, doubt, even horror from Pacino, despite his barely having a word to say – the scene is in many ways, with its low-key setting yet strange, otherworldly quality, a microcosm of the film itself.

Whatever, it dawned on the studio that they might be dealing with something rather good. From then on, both actor and director were secure.

But the fighting did not end, for Coppola at least. With shooting completed, he had been told to cut his 90 hours of footage to around two or have the film edited elsewhere. He brought it down to just under three: too much. Excising anything not plot-related, he managed to grind it down to the required length. Evans watched it – and was furious.

‘The fat fuck shot a great film, but it ain’t on the screen,’ he complained to Bluhdorn. Sources differ on what happened next. Coppola says he simply put back what he’d taken out; Evans claimed to have recut it himself and ‘saved the picture’. They were still arguing about it ten years later.

Crucially for the film’s success, the mood in front of camera was warm. The dynamic of the casting worked brilliantly for the story: the younger actors were in awe of Brando (Diane Keaton, when he introduced himself to her, stuttered, ‘Yeah, right, OK, good, fine, that’s OK’) and eager to impress him – perfect for their relationship to the Don. Pacino was watchful and withdrawn, unsure of his suitability to the job, and keen on Keaton – perfect for Michael.

And Brando himself, with something to prove for perhaps the first time in 15 years, behaved impeccably. He is 18 The Oldie April 2022

Top: Michael Corleone (Pacino) kills McCluskey (Al Lettieri) and Sollozzo (Sterling Hayden). Above: Don Corleone visits Sonny (James Caan) in the morgue

in only a few scenes, but that early screen test evolved into something that is now part of our everyday consciousness. As so often in his greatest roles, he seems both completely real and yet to occupy some space apart from everyone else. Only 47 at the time, not for a second does he fail to convince as a much older man. Brando stands at the interface between what might be called the classical and the romantic phases of acting – a transition he had effectively brought about himself.

Forget the Method: the much-imitated voice and mannerisms of Don Corleone

are a magisterial demonstration from a brilliant theatrical actor – the kind of thing Olivier did so well.

But what Brando could portray more powerfully than anyone was pain. Watch the scene where he is told of his son Sonny’s death – the face almost pleading that he will not hear what he fears, his whole frame shuddering with grief, the final break in the voice when he says, ‘This war ends now.’ Paramount’s gangster flick is elevated to something very different.

Does the film romanticise its subject?

Yes – the Corleones are represented almost as an order of knights, with a code of honour, loyalty, self-reliance and so on that goes a long way to explaining why it touches the American soul so deeply, regardless of Coppola’s intentions. Both Don Corleone and Michael are selfcontrolled, even puritanical in character; it is the hotheaded and oversexed Sonny who dies.

Of course, the Corleones kill people, brutally – but every victim is either disloyal, or themselves brutal. And, if we are honest, we want the Corleones to kill them.

Kingsley Amis was once asked what made Evelyn Waugh’s prose so good. ‘If I knew what it was, I’d be doing it myself, wouldn’t I?’ said the great man.

Analysing genius can indeed be a futile exercise, and The Godfather is touched with genius: Brando’s acting, Willis’s extraordinary photography – as black and white as a colour film can be – Nino Rota’s soundtrack (again rejected

by Evans, won back by Coppola).

Above all, though, the film belongs to its young, nervous director. Under huge pressure, Coppola kept Puzo’s gripping story, drenched it with homely Italian detail and yet made something universal – a myth that teaches us how to make meatballs.

Ti saluto, Don Corleone.

Simon O’Hagan is astonished by how dull his teenage diaries are

My dreary diary

I

included very few world events in the diaries I kept as a not-quiteadolescent in the early 1970s.

There was one, though, on 9th November 1970. The next day, I wrote, ‘Play rehearsal. Quite good. Home at about 6 o’clock. President de Gaulle died and a programme about Houdini was postponed. Gillingham won away 1-0. Watson scored.’

I kept a diary throughout 1970, 1971 and 1972 – an entry every single day, adding up to 1,196 of them. They cover my life from age 12 to 14, and I look back in astonishment that I remained disciplined enough never to let a day go by without writing it up in all its glorious drabness.

My preoccupations consisted of: the main events of the school day; what time I got home from school; what was on TV; the weather; and what was happening in the world of sport, chiefly the fortunes of the football team I followed, which was – I was a Medway-towns boy – Gillingham.

Rereading these diaries 50 years on, I’m struck by the lack of any description of my feelings. As a young male at public school (though not a boarder), I don’t imagine I was encouraged to explore them.

That might now be something to be grateful for. There’s plenty in my diaries to embarrass me – by 1972, a distinct strain of earnestness has started to emerge – but talk of love, sex or any emotions I was experiencing is mercifully absent.

There are absolutely no attempts at jokes. I guess I knew my limitations. I was a reporter, not a commentator.

Given that my diaries are so devoid of personality – no real-life Adrian Mole was I – what’s left? Hour upon hour of TV. These days, we’re all too aware of the time we spend gazing at screens. But when I think back to my early teenage years, the extent to which TV was woven into my life is equally noticeable.

I faithfully noted every programme I ever watched: Steptoe and Son, Up Pompeii!, Tom and Jerry, the Tuesday Documentary, The Wednesday Play…

The significance of President de Gaulle’s death lay only in the knock-on effect it had on TV schedules. No Houdini programme!

Bugger. I was fascinated by Houdini.

TV meant the news, and one of the few occasions when the wider world impinged on my consciousness was the neardisaster that befell Apollo 13 in April 1970: 15th April: ‘Went to cricket again.

Played quite well. Apollo disaster. Got home about 12.15.’

‘Did nothing in particular’ crops up quite regularly. So does the word ‘quite’.

Lots of things are ‘quite good’. Some things are ‘good fun’. TV programmes are occasionally ‘very funny’. More often they are – oh dear – ‘quite amusing’.

A huge burst of excitement rounds off my entry on Thursday 28th October 1971: ‘Had PE. Weights. In afternoon we had Corps and orienteering. I went with Dave Bellingham. We got 4 out of 5 points. Quite good. Very cold. Mum met us. Granny had come over. In evening not much prep and I watched Top of the Pops and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Very funny. David Hull asked me to his house. Made plans with Tim Brenton to go to the pictures. Parliament votes Britain into the Common Market!!!’

By 1972, girls were starting to feature.

On 23th January 1972, I wrote, ‘I got up at about 11 o’clock and later on Susan Packard and Karen Peters came over to borrow a record. In afternoon I had a play rehearsal with Mr Irvine, which I cycled to. On way back I went to see Suzy Perks.’

I suspect that the complexities of first love are the reason the diaries come to a halt at the end of 1972, when I turned 15.

Life is opening up in ways that I don’t think I had the capacity to describe.

On New Year’s Eve 1970, I’m at home watching Morecambe and Wise. On New Year’s Eve 1971, I’m still at home, watching What’s New Pussycat?

New Year’s Eve 1972 and I’m partying at my friend Ollie Munday’s house, and diary-keeping no longer has a place in my life. I’ve never kept a diary since.

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Jonathan Meades loves the new Pevsner guide to Birmingham – a city full of rich oddities and pleasingly bewildering contrasts

Lucky Brummies

JAMES O. DAVIES

I

n the days when the floors of two-room pubs were glossy with freshly hawked Dudley oysters and the markets sold blewits and pies, the Black Country really was black with soot, with the issue of belching chimneys.

Furnaces, foundries and forges abounded and many of the area’s buildings acquired a patina of smuts. As industry declined in the 1960s and ’70s, many of its factories were demolished while others, constructed of impervious materials, were cleaned to the point where they looked brand-new. Those faced in terracotta resemble the late Peter Bull; they take on an appearance of glaring ferocity far from the mournful mien of widow’s weeds.

My revenant grandfather (b. Oldbury, 1880) would recognise very little of what actually remains – though Edwin Bayliss’s paintings of night lit by flame and of miners and chainmakers trudging beside poison canals would be instantly familiar. So, for that matter, would Constantin Meunier’s depictions of le pays noir around the sinister Walloon city of Charleroi – destitution and pneumoconiosis are international. So is sprawl.

In the pre-penultimate entry in his revised and massively expanded version of parts of the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire Pevsners, Andy Foster notes of Shirley Golf Club that the clubhouse is the work of John Madin, the most prolific and perhaps best of the city’s architects in the latter half of the last century. The club was founded in 1956 by the Birmingham Jewish Golf Society, ‘whose members had been refused entry to clubs elsewhere’.

That was in 1956. Foster writes that Shirley is ‘a modest hamlet which has become an unending c20 suburb’. That description could apply to scores of places in this unwieldy conurbation,

20 The Oldie April 2022

Wild West Midlands: Oratory of St Philip Neri, Edgbaston

whose very boundaries are a matter of dispute.

This is a part of England that is characterised by ribbon development, piecemeal intrusions, weird struggles of scale and style, terrains vagues, edgelands that aren’t edgelands because they are near the countless centres and, of course, sprawl usually prefixed by ‘relentless’.

Should we wish to learn anything from Brum, it is that sprawl is far from uniform and is rich in clashing oddities.

Coherence is not a property of attractive urbanism; collisions are more exciting than elisions; there is pleasure to be had in bewildering juxtapositions.

There are four Iranian restaurants within a minute’s walk of the Oratory where Cardinal Newman received Gerard Manley Hopkins into the church. It is certainly at odds with most of the city’s contemporary ecclesiastical architecture.

Newman wrote, ‘Gothic is now like an old dress, which fitted a man well twenty years back but must be altered to fit him now. I believe that Gothic can be adapted … Mr Pugin does not.’ Foster calls the Oratory ‘tremendously Italian … marble everywhere’.

It is, however, Gothic that is everywhere in this surprisingly green agglomeration. The Sligo architect

Left: Birmingham City Council House (1879) and Queen Victoria. Right: James Watt (1736-1819) statue, St Mary’s, Handsworth

J M Derick’s St Mark’s, Pensnett, is a magnificent beast of a barn, in an almost bucolic setting. It is illustrated here with an engraving by James Colling, architect of another, later, High Victorian tour de force, St Paul’s, Hooton, near Ellesmere Port – and of the extraordinary Leighton Hall on the left bank of the Severn, opposite Powis Castle.

St Luke’s, Blakenhall, bears obvious kinship with William Burges’s Studley Royal. Designer: George ‘Metz’ Robinson, whose other masterpiece, Burslem Town Hall, is not Gothic. It is not even ‘Modern Gothic’. It is urVictorian and belongs to no known school. If it recalls a past, it is the past of some Hellenic/Oriental fantasy.

Robinson was art critic for the Manchester Guardian. A precursor of William Boot, he was sent to cover the Franco-Prussian War and was banged up in Metz during the siege – hence his nickname. He lived and died in Earl’s Terrace on Kensington High Street, which was known in the ’60s and ’70s as Queen’s Terrace. That’s the 1960s and ’70s – I can’t be certain about the 1860s and ’70s.

These artists were outsiders – not part of the web of local practitioners who, decade after decade, have questionably enjoyed the bulk of municipal and commercial patronage.

Its 1960s version was sharply satirised

by David Turner and Malcolm Bradbury in the BBC series Swizzlewick. The series improbably united Mary Whitehouse and the Guardian in censorious hostility and was cancelled after 20 or so episodes. It had been on the money: the city’s chief architect was jailed a few years later.

Foster’s complicated index indicates just how tight that web was – and perhaps still is. There are 60 entries for the predominantly ecclesiastical architect W H Bidlake; 50 for the predominantly domestic architect C E Bateman; 40 for Fred Beck; 80 for J A Chatwin; 40 for P B Chatwin; 50 for J H Chamberlain (no relation, though he did fine work for his namesake).

In the later-19th century, these men developed an idiom that has no peer in England (Glasgow is in Scotland).

Birmingham is unique in its creation of an arts-and-crafts urbanism – a sort of architectural oxymoron. This is hands-on arts and crafts, mostly stripped of ye olde whimsy, equally declining to rummage in the late-Victorian dressing-up box.

It can hardly be labelled a movement, but there is an undeniable accord between buildings of different types and uses. Evidently this is due to the employment of the same materials over a long period.

There is, in this tirelessly comprehensive book, a welcome double spread of photos of bricks: blue bricks, firebricks, dolerite and cast dolerite. They tend to age gracelessly. Birmingham is not a mellow sort of city.

In his introductory essay on geology and building materials, Keith Hodgkins mentions that, till about 50 years ago, blocks of slag, the by-product of blast furnaces, were ‘probably’ as commonly used in construction in the Black Country as they were in Sweden and Bristol (at the Devil’s Cathedral, Arnos Vale).

All evidence of this seems to have disappeared – which is to be regretted, for their unforgiving menace is welcome anywhere.

Brummies, collectively unboastful, have a strange habit of claiming that one of the desirable features of their city is that it’s so easy to get out of – to the Lickey Hills and the Clents, and it’s not much further to the Malverns and the Teme Valley.

They are approximately right.

Worcestershire, west of the Severn, is the loveliest part of England. And to reach it, you have to take a sort of trip into the past.

Not the past of Bournville, where whimsy was not excised from the twee saccharine cottages. Rather, the past of motoring as a pleasure, of arterial roads and arterial-road roadhouses. These stylistically varied super-pubs – Brewer’s Tudor, Good Queen Bess, Moderne – were not peculiar to Birmingham and its surrounds, but there is no equivalent concentration elsewhere.

They were a reaction to dark, smoky boozers and were supposed to appeal to the entire nuclear family: there were playrooms for kiddies and soft furnishings. Acts going back to the 1870s prohibited driving a coach and horses when under the influence. Further laws followed.

They did not inhibit the great breweries from going on a building bender, whose fruits are today recognisable by plastic banners proclaiming, ‘All Thou Can Eat Breakfast’, ‘Midweek Carvery Mateys’ and ‘Every Day Is Mother’s Day Dad’.

The Buildings of England: Birmingham and the Black Country (Yale University Press), by Andy Foster, Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, is out on 22nd March The Oldie April 2022 21

Castles weren’t just military buildings – they were opulent residences for pleasure-loving noblemen. By John Goodall

An Englishman’s castle is his home Where sheep may safely graze: Lowther Castle (1814), near Penrith, Cumbria

A. C. COOPER / PAUL HIGHNAM / COUNTRY LIFE PICTURE LIBRARY

I

n 21st-century Britain, we are deluged with imagined visions of castles – in historical novels, fantasy films and computer games.

They don’t all aim at historical accuracy, but they underline the enormous popularity of these buildings and the idea that castles are somehow special buildings with a distinct character of their own.

What were the realities of life in castles as they existed across Britain in the past, and what informs our popular understanding of them?

The second question is easier to answer than the first. Castles have long been understood as being distinctive because they were houses designed for war.

The conventional view is that they were introduced to England by the Normans in 1066 as a tool of conquest and offered a practical means by which William the Conqueror successfully imposed his rule on an unwilling kingdom.

In the aftermath of the Conquest – the same conventional view continues – these buildings created an unstable political environment because barons could resist royal authority from the safety of their homes.

Over the next two centuries, then, an arms race began between architects and siege engineers, which brought about a flowering of castle architecture in about 1300. Thereafter, however, the growing power of the Crown and the development of gunpowder rendered castles obsolete and by the close of the Middle Ages they had gradually vanished into irrelevance.

This purely military (and medieval) understanding of the castle is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Castles were introduced to England by the Normans, and they have always been distinguished by the Funerary brass of Bishop Wyville of Salisbury (d 1375) of Sherborne Castle

architectural trappings of fortification, such as turrets, battlements and arrow loops. The historical record also offers boundless evidence of their use in warfare, not merely in the 11th and 12th centuries but much later as well. There were Tudor sieges, such as that of Cooling in 1554, and there were even attempts in some Georgian and Victorian residences to create defences that might at least resist an industrial mob.

Yet castles were never merely military buildings. Almost from the first, they also enjoyed prestige as the residences of kings, nobles and knights. Indeed, castles were buildings that expressed their power, celebrated their vocation as a fighting class and reflected their wealth.

The greatest of them also commanded estates including parks – reserved for the jealously guarded aristocratic pleasure of hunting – and were commonly associated in the Middle Ages with settlements and ecclesiastical foundations including monasteries or colleges.

So while castles may have begun as fortifications, they almost The Oldie April 2022 23

immediately became something more; an attribute of nobility.

Indeed, the word noble came to be applied both to the appearance of these buildings and to the quality that distinguished the people who lived in them.

In this character – contrary to what is often assumed – castles outlived the Middle Ages. Buildings such as Belvoir Castle or Windsor Castle have carried the trappings of medieval nobility unbroken into the 21st century. No less important, every generation has enjoyed creating its own examples of this most prestigious form of residence: from the Little Castle at Bolsover in the early-17th century, to Castle Drogo in the early-20th, by way of such intermediaries as Castle Howard, Highclere and Castell Coch.

A central misconception about life in castles – which follows on from the received view of these buildings as fortifications – is that they were necessarily functional and comfortless.

Instead, they need to be understood as great residences created for wealthy and pleasure-loving owners. Externally, they made play with features such as turrets and battlements, but these didn’t always have to be functional. Internally, they were often splendid rather than spartan.

The character of medieval castles as opulent houses is one that many heritage attractions have in recent years tried to capture in historical recreations.

At the Tower of London, for example, you can visit Edward I’s recreated apartment in Traitors’ Gate, with its 13th-century tiles, wall paintings and furnishings reimagined. And in Scotland, the 16th-century royal chambers of Stirling have been splendidly re-dressed.

If all this seems too earnest, you can also find King John, dressed in his coronation regalia, relieving himself on a 12th-century latrine in the keep of Carrickfergus Castle, Northern Ireland.

Some of these evocations of castle life (though not perhaps the last) are based on the most exhaustive scholarship, but in certain ways they fail to capture the reality of what these places must have felt 24 The Oldie April 2022

Clockwise: 11th-century Alnwick Castle; 13th-century Caerlaverock, Dumfries; the White Tower (1080s), Tower of London

like. Until the 17th century, noble families travelled tirelessly between the residences they owned, carrying their furnishings with them. These displayed their wealth in a way that heritage organisations – which have never enjoyed the resources of the genuinely powerful – struggle to recreate.

For example, bullion was prominent in the furnishing of the wealthiest medieval households, appearing in utensils, jewellery and plate. It could also be woven into tapestry, the most highly prized English wall covering from the 14th century to the 18th century.

Tapestry was easily portable and brought dazzling colour, imagery and warmth to the domestic interior.

Opulence of this kind is impossible to recreate today but – in a different idiom – it’s still apparent the furnishing of some castles that remain in private possession, as for example in the art collection and furnishing of Windsor.

Added to this, noble life, even into the 17th century, was lived communally, formally and at scale. In the 1340s, Lord Berkeley maintained a household of around 300 people, including 12 knights and 24 esquires, each one accompanied by a page. All these men were liveried in a garment of ray and crimson (a type of woollen cloth with stripes), lined with different kinds of fur depending upon their degree: miniver, coarser miniver, coney and lambskin, termed budge.

The strict protocols that applied to

daily life in the Middle Ages were perhaps most clearly expressed in the rituals of dining. Meals were served publicly in carefully choreographed ceremonies involving a wealth of specialist staff in livery.

At Durham, the Bishop’s Hall had specially constructed trumpet lofts for musicians to play. And good food splendidly presented has always been an obsession of the wealthy. The scale of surviving late-medieval castle kitchens not only makes the point but brings home the industrial demands of feeding a great household.

As well as accommodating the luxurious life of the very rich, castles also had a less appealing but longer-lasting function as centres of administration and judicial proceedings. Halls were regularly used as courts, and many castles held jails or dungeons. The idea of castles as tools of arbitrary power stretches back into the Middle Ages and was particularly celebrated in fiction much later, in the genre of the Gothic novel. Lancaster was the last castle to close as a prison, as recently as 2011.

Finally, the conventional view of castles as military buildings has also persuaded us that they belong firmly to the past.

In one way, that seems self-evidently true because, in Britain today, we are surrounded by the ruins of castles.

Some were abandoned in the Middle Ages; others were destroyed in the 1640s either during the hostilities of the Civil War or in its immediate aftermath.

Nevertheless, many medieval castles survive today as occupied buildings, and many 18th- and 19th-century buildings of the Gothic Revival consciously assume the form and title of castles.

No less importantly, contemporary films and fiction create new castles in our imagination – just look at Hogwarts.

We still live with castles – and they with us.

John Goodall’s The Castle: A History (Yale) is out on March 22

Return of the bores No longer confined by COVID, they’re back – and they’re coming to get you. A bore-spotter’s guide by James Pembroke

A

ll bores are boring but not all boring people are bores.

There are plenty of innocent folk who like nothing more than to share their anxieties about the village fête with you – and they’ll do it for 20 minutes you’ll never get back.

Yet these are just ‘sweetie bores’, as Jennifer Paterson, one of the Fat Ladies and The Oldie’s erstwhile food writer, dubbed them. Their reliance on platitudinous observations has been immortalised in Robert Thompson’s Oldie cartoon, set in a typical suburban sitting room. The mandatory grotesque wife with her packed suitcase is screeching at her diminutive husband, who is pulling back the curtain to look up at the sky.

Wife: ‘I’m leaving you because you’re so BORING!’ Husband: ‘At least you’ve got a nice day for it.’

Now that we are allowed to socialise again in the confines of a rammed sitting room, here’s a quick reminder of the horror that is the boorish bore – those men (and 95 per cent of them are men) who pin you to a wall. Like me, you too will be so excited by the prospect of having a glass of warm Chilean Sauvignon Blanc indoors that you will have forgotten just what damage these people can inflict on an otherwise enchanted evening. We all know one.

What are their shameless traits?

A boring job shouldn’t act as an early-warning system. Among 120 alumni attending a recent university reunion, it was widely agreed that Aidan the actuary was by far the most

They avoid the foundation of all conversation: questions

Oscar speech bore – by Michael Heath

entertaining and simpatico of all of us.

Why? Because while all the bores were laying down hints about their wealth and success, Aidan was having none of it. He was proud to be on £16,000 a year and had long since realised life was best enjoyed by those who treated it as an ill-conceived farce. So a complete absence of self-deprecation is a giveaway.

The bore’s natural habitat is the dinner party; at a drinks party, they have learned, their prey can scarper.

‘Just going to get a refill,’ we cry, having bolted a jug-like glass in under three seconds.

Up there with childbirth is women’s other great sacrifice: that of indulging the bore at dinner while we men abandon them to their fate. A dear old friend told me once, ‘As a woman, you’ve just got to sit there and take it. One’s only hope is to let them talk about their favourite subject. I recently asked the man next to me about the origins of his signet ring. That way, there’s a chance they might appear animated.’

There lies the rub: bores have no sense of timing or delivery. If you were to ask Gyles Brandreth to read Yellow Pages, you would quickly find yourself enraptured by the names and attributes

of plumbers in Dorking. Yet, in spite of their obvious failings as after-dinner speakers, bores like nothing more than holding a table in the vice of their favourite yarn. Cave raconteur!

Many of us are in our anecdotage and we can be forgiven if we inflict stories on small numbers. But bores have a complete lack of sensitivity to the make-up of their audience. They arrogantly think one story fits all and can brook no interruption. They are garrulous to the nth degree.

But never give up. You must interrupt.

Heckle away and, lo, other bore-escapers will help you drown the bore out.

Bores love the soundtrack of their own voice. That’s why they avoid the foundation of all conversation: they never ask a question. How difficult is that? What loss of self-esteem would they suffer if they agreed to use even the royals’ alleged favourite gambit: ‘Have you come far?’

‘Great Bores of Today’, Richard Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and Michael Heath’s celebrated cartoon strip, exposed and outlawed the bore’s subject matter of the hour. Heath’s gurning grotesques would today hold forth on anti-vaxxers and beaver reintroduction.

For me, the most dangerous arrival on the bore scene has been the woke generation. Whether or not you’re sympathetic with some of their denunciations, they are in a class of their own. Their drone-like mentality and lack of original thought scares them into accepting any discussion of their faith.

They are as blind to reason as flatEarthers and Baconians, hellbent on denying the genius of the Stratford bard.

This lack of spark and originality afflicts all bores, from raconteur to latter-day JCR presidents – strangers to the twin pillars of good conversation: cynicism and sarcasm.

Be careful out there. There have been no bores for two years – now they’ll all turn up at once.

The Oldie April 2022 27

Small World

King of the Cleethorpes hypochondriacs How can the doctor cure my life-threatening knee condition? 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…

As a man with many medical problems – only some imaginary – I have been accused of putting the ‘hyper’ into hypochondriac.

My GP, Dr Nanda, once restricted me to only two ailments per appointment.

I got round this by leaving the appointment and then, Columbo-like, re-opening the consultation-room door, popping my head in and enquiring casually, ‘Did Dr Darund tell you about my fish allergy?’

There were no face-to-face appointments during the height of the pandemic. But recently the receptionist explained I could come in for one. Dr Nanda had asked that two of his medical students do the consultation, and only once they had diagnosed me would he make a ‘guest appearance’ to approve their diagnosis. Our rapprochement was a little like my left kneecap – worryingly slow to heal and still at the scab stage.

At the appointment, Kerri was going to lead the consultation and Demi was going to assist. Kerri got the chair and Demi hovered behind, chatting in a honeyed whisper of a voice, the Debbie McGee of this medical magic act.

Bespectacled Kerri got straight down to business: ‘You’ve come in because your knees ache? When do they ache? Do you smoke?’ They fired a hundred other questions at me, as if I was some daytime quiz-show contestant.

After certain questions, the rather timid Demi, without taking her eyes off me, would delicately two-step towards Kerri and whisper ideas into her ear.

Running out of questions, Kerri let out a loud sigh, utterly stumped.

I felt sorry for them, and asked, ‘Would you like to bang my knee with a rubber hammer? It always raises Dr Nanda’s spirits.’

Kerri declined with a weary hand.

‘Oooh!’ Demi piped up in delight and 28 The Oldie April 2022

rushed back to whisper something in Kerri’s ear-hole. I caught the phrase ‘body mass index’.

Before I knew it, Kerri ran two feet towards me, said, ‘Hold my hand and follow me,’ and then took me three steps in the direction of some weighing scales.

‘Get on them, please,’ she said. Then in another corner they measured my height.

After converting feet into metres and stones into kilos, they both let out a suppressed squeal, and did the tiniest of unprofessional high-fives. They were so infectiously delightful that, but for my knees, I would have joined in with the high-fives myself.

Kerri phoned Dr Nanda, who answered straight away. (Normally it takes 40 minutes when I phone him.) Suddenly he was entering the room with a smile I had never seen before – clearly reserved for colleagues, rather than the coughing, croup-ridden masses of Cleethorpes.

‘How do you find my students? Aren’t they brilliant? They are so good, I could give them my job and retire in two weeks, I think!’ Dr Nanda laughed, patting me on my arthritic shoulder. (Have 79 previous appointments taught him nothing?)

While I winced, Dr Nanda stood between the young doctors and asked, ‘Have you found out Mr Clarke’s secret?

What’s your diagnosis?’

The hitherto mouse-like Demi roared, unthinkingly loudly, ‘He’s fat!’

‘Overweight , overweight, overweight!’ corrected Kerri, looking daggers at the over-casual Demi.

Demi looked deflated – not half as much as I felt, now the fat elephant in the room.

Suddenly, Dr Nanda burst everyone’s bloated balloon. ‘No, no, no … you’re wrong.’

While the girls looked open-mouthed, their heads down, I was finally warming to Dr Nanda. My genes always leant towards lumpy but I was more regionalnews-vox-pop chubby than Discovery Channel fat.

‘Look at his notes,’ said Dr Nanda, tapping the computer screen. ‘Don’t even read them. Just look at the number of pages.’

Kerri and Demi’s young, happy faces, illuminated by the screen glow, looked like Charlie Bucket’s radiating in the shine of a golden ticket, as they gleefully diagnosed, ‘There’s nothing wrong with him!’

Dr Nanda confirmed it, glaring at me: ‘There never bloody is.’

I was speechless as I rolled up my trouser leg to indicate a swollen and discoloured kneecap, to no one in particular. But I’d lost the audience anyway.

‘He was a trick question!’ Kerri declared in delight.

Dr Nanda nodded. ‘He comes in here if his cat’s sick.’

‘That’s a lie. I was asking for a friend’s cat,’ I mumbled, rolling my trouser back down.

Since writing this article, I can happily confirm I have been self-diagnosed with bursitis – housemaid’s knee, for the un-woke. Say what you like about the malign impact the internet has on the gullible mind but, ever since switching from Dr Nanda to Dr Google, I feel like a new man, albeit one with 34 different medical conditions since Tuesday.

Pronunciation has changed dramatically in recent years – and not for the better, says elocution teacher Serena Greenslade

How to talk proper

ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY

H

ow has pronunciation and speaking in general changed over the last few years?

Let me start with a question. Do you pronounce the h in when or what or which? I do. I’m in my early sixties and I’m an elocution teacher.

When I was ten, I was taught to pronounce the h. I do not, though, ask my pupils to do so. Language lives and alters – not necessarily for the better, but it does change.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t sound posh. When I’m not teaching, I have a Dorset accent which I’ve taught myself to soften. I realised that, as proud as I am of my Dorset heritage, I couldn’t teach everyone to speak the way I do. Regional accents are much more acceptable today and I love them. If a person speaks not too quickly, and clearly, accents can be fairly easily understood.

I teach adults and children from all walks of life to speak more slowly, open their mouth and use expressive speech. I have noticed recently that there are some irritating habits of which a lot of them are now guilty.

One frequent error is the corruption of -ing at the end of words. Even TV commentators are guilty of this, which means young people think it’s acceptable.

I often hear drivin and cryin. Are they lazy speakers? Do they care?

A lot of younger people have this terrible compulsion to insert the word like into a sentence: ‘Italy was, like, full of, like, old buildings, like.’

This is very irritating for the listener.

Most people use additional words (OK, all right) to buy time. We hate silence when we speak – so we fill the spaces with sounds; my own choice is umm.

These pauses are only a fraction of a second long and the easiest way round the problem is to think the word or sound but don’t let it leave your mouth.

Two mistakes – which surprisingly seem to occur with more highly educated people – is to say t for to and 30 The Oldie April 2022

Why can’t the English learn to speak? Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) in My Fair Lady (1964)

fur instead of for: ‘I am going t the shops fur some butter.’

Along the same lines and much more widespread is the use of the word bin for been: ‘I have bin to the shops.’ The two words should not sound the same. The vowel sounds are different.

I spend most of my working hours reminding people to sound the final consonant in words, particularly t, d and l. This happens most with simple words: and, not, it, at, get, all. It is so simple to correct. Just make sure your tongue touches the roof of your mouth.

While we are talking about the l sound, how many of you say smile without your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, thereby excluding the letter l from the word?

If you read the previous but one paragraph out loud, how many syllables do you give the word particularly? Some people give it four syllables. It should have five. Squashing words makes speech too fast. One very easy way to slow down is to lengthen the vowel sound in words so they are longer.

Another problem of articulation is the th sound, which often goes missing.

Examples include the th at the beginning of words – that becoming dat. Or in the middle of words: brother becomes brover. And at the end of words, when with sounds like wiv.

It gives the impression that the speaker is lazy. This isn’t usually the case.

They often don’t realise that they aren’t

saying it correctly. To make this th sound, your tongue needs to be sticking out between your teeth before you start the sound. As it goes back into your mouth, it makes the th sound. This is really a lot easier than I’ve made it sound. Once it’s mastered, you need only the tip of your tongue to protrude between your teeth. If you look in a mirror you should be able to see the tip of your tongue.

Finally, a couple of personal bugbears.

The pronunciation of the word our is not the same as are. When you say our, your mouth should change shape to make the vowel sound. Our rhymes with flour; are rhymes with car. Something is not pronounced somefing, somethink or somefink. These words do not exist.

When young people reach their teenage years, they often communicate

by SMS, WhatsApp and emails – anything but speaking. Since the outbreak of COVID, the use of Zoom – to hold lessons and business meetings online – has made children, parents, teachers and office workers realise their spoken skills have declined.

Language changes. So perhaps, in 50 years’ time, these things will become the norm. In the future, elocution teachers will just say about the words affected by my rules, ‘That’s how they used to pronounce it.’

Serena Greenslade is a voice confidence coach

Old lags The number of over-80s in jail is booming. Duncan Campbell talks to old-timers who are still doing time

DON SMITH / RADIO TIMES

I

t is nearly 50 years since David Jason appeared alongside Ronnie Barker in Porridge, playing ‘Blanco’ Webb, an elderly prisoner doing life for murder.

Jason was only in his thirties at the time and had to be heavily made up to come across as such an aged inmate.

In those days, the character would have been an anomaly in British jails, but a recent survey by two charities found that there are more than 300 prisoners aged over 80 now behind bars. Crime used to be a young man’s game, but more than a sixth of all inmates are now over-50s.

The Blanco Webb character appeared in only a few episodes, in one of which he and Fletcher (Ronnie Barker) get into trouble for stealing Jaffa Cakes. In another episode, he is content to stay in prison rather than admit guilt of a crime he says he didn’t commit. At least nowadays he would have no shortage of contemporaries.

‘There are two prime requirements for coping with a prison sentence, however long: youth and good health,’ says Erwin James, who served more than 20 years for murder and now edits the prisoners’ magazine Inside Time. He is also the author of the book Redeemable, about his time inside (which incidentally should be read by every Justice Secretary and Prison Minister). ‘So many older people who contact us at Inside Time for help and advice have neither. Since the oversixties are the fastest-rising section of today’s prisoner population, it’s puzzling that there seems to be no government strategy to accommodate this burgeoning crisis… And we had someone in prison a couple of years ago who was 101!’

One of James’s colleagues on Inside Time is Noel ‘Razor’ Smith, a former bank robber and author of the slang dictionary The Criminal Alphabet, and a self-deprecating memoir, A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, not to mention a number of poems – one of which, The Old Lags, is about these very inmates: ‘What am I in for?/ Funny you should ask/ I’m here for what I didn’t do/

David Jason & Ronnie Barker in Porridge

I didn’t wear a mask’ (which is, of course, more relevant than ever today).

I once interviewed an ex-con who was in a care home and far from happy there.

He would have liked to return to prison because ‘the conversation and company are better’. He felt that prisoners were more honest than people in his particular care home, where some of the staff took advantage of residents with dementia by helping themselves to their pensions.

And there are, inevitably, a growing number of prisoners with dementia, some of whom are unaware of where they are or why they are there and have to be reminded when they wake in the mornings, puzzled at their surroundings.

One 82-year-old who has recently emerged from a long jail sentence on drugs charges, and is now living alone, says he knows which regime he would prefer: ‘To be honest, I would rather go back to jail than be in a care home where everyone around you is dying or vegetating.’

Not everyone would agree. ‘I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be back in prison these days – it’s 23-hour lockdown in most prisons still,’ says Noel Smith.

Many of our prisons date from the Victorian era and are grim for anyone in a wheelchair or with a walking frame.

Most are overcrowded, drug-infested and tense. One of the problems is that we have such a large prison population.

Britain currently leads its Western European neighbours in terms of inmates per head of population.

England and Wales jail 138 of their population per 100,000; Scotland 147.

That’s compared with 76 in Germany and 59 in the Netherlands and Norway. Spain with 123, Italy (101) and France (105) lag behind us but Spain now as a general rule releases prisoners over 80.

Old-timers behind bars came into the public eye with the £14 million Hatton Garden safe-deposit burglary in 2015.

Some of the burglars were well into their seventies and became known as the Diamond Wheezers or, in the French press, le gang des papys (the grandads’ gang).

Since then, one of them, Terry Perkins, has died in his cell in Belmarsh prison; another, Brian Reader, has developed dementia.

A third member of the gang, Kenny Collins, now 80, was well looked after by fellow-inmates: ‘The young prisoners treated me very well because I was old – and I was one of them [a professional criminal]. Most people my age are nonce [sex offender] cases.’

Some years ago, the photographer Edmund Clark produced Still Life: Killing Time, a book of photos of elderly prisoners in Kingston Prison, Portsmouth.

‘There will be some who feel disinclined to care about how people who have caused serious harm to others have to cope with the trials of prison life when they, the perpetrators, become vulnerable,’ wrote Erwin James about the book.

Still, as the Prison Reform Trust’s Geoff Dobson said, ‘Increasingly, we are taking people’s liberty away for very long periods. All but a small number of these people will be released eventually and it’s important they can rejoin society without being too damaged … apart from the simple humanity of the issue.’

Surely Blanco would agree.

The Oldie April 2022 31

Town Mouse

A troubled bridge over untroubled water tom hodgkinson

Wordsworth may be known as a nature poet. But one of his loveliest pieces is Composed upon Westminster Bridge from 1802, which sings of the joy of man’s creations. It’s actually less selfconscious than his quite tedious stuff about mountains and lakes.

The poet stands still on Westminster Bridge early one morning and drinks in the urban scene: Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky.

Wordsworth’s sentiments were echoed later by the great romantic of the 1960s Ray Davies, in Waterloo Sunset.

Contemplation of that sunset, he said, transported him to paradise.

For those of us locked up in the city, it’s well to remember the wonder of bridges and their startling collision of utility and beauty. They get us from one side of the river to the other, to transact commercial business. But, in doing so, they also give us the chance to pause a while, meditate and gaze on the mysterious water below and the towers beyond, and see a sight ‘touching in its majesty’.

Bridges are businesslike and romantic 32 The Oldie April 2022

at the same time. Wordsworth’s Westminster Bridge, put up in 1750, was paid for with money from lotteries, grants and wealthy benefactors.

Canaletto did a lovely painting of it – ships everywhere.

Today’s Victorian structure replaced the one Wordsworth loved in 1862 and though it’s not as pretty as its Georgian ancestor, the view it affords is still touching in its majesty.

In Wordsworth’s day, the river was teeming with ships, but these days you don’t see much boat life on the river.

Over the summer, Mrs Mouse and I took an evening cruise with our friends the Voles in their little motorboat, from Strand-on-the-Green to Richmond and back. There wasn’t a single other boat out on the water, though we saw loads of herons, mallards and even the odd great-crested grebe. Bliss for us, but it made me wonder why the river is so underused, for business or pleasure.

For many of London’s bridges, we have Bridge House Estates to thank. This charitable foundation has its roots in a tax established in 1097 by William II to maintain London Bridge. It was administered from a house on the bridge

called – you guessed it – Bridge House.

The first London Bridge was a wooden structure built by the Romans at the lowest fordable point on the river, less than 200 feet from its present location.

It was good business. Bridge House received cash from retail, tolls and bequests. Over the intervening 925 years, Bridge House Estates has grown into a large property-owner. In addition to its five bridges, which include the Millennium Bridge, it has offices and shops worth over £850 million. Add in its other investments and it has a total of £1.5 billion in assets. Its annual income is nearly £50 million.

The Millennium Bridge may have had a bumpy start when it wobbled dramatically on its first day. But since then it’s been a huge success, providing a highly pleasurable way of walking from the Globe Theatre and the Tate, in renovated Southwark, to the other side of the river.

The closest bridge to the Mouse dwelling is Hammersmith Bridge. It has become something of a disaster area. In 2019, engineers realised the cast-iron pedestals which hold the bridge up were riddled with tiny cracks. So the bridge was closed, causing a huge headache to the residents of Barnes, who’d enjoyed nipping into town with ease.

The bridge is now open to bicycles and pedestrians, but the cost of repairs is going to be immense and the burghers of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, which owns it, are looking at various proposals. One of these – the one favoured by Town Mouse – is a sort of double-decker idea, put forward by the engineers at Norman Foster’s company. This brilliant scheme would see a temporary truss put in place, allowing road traffic to cross the river while the proper structural repairs are made.

It’s cheaper than the other proposals and would get the wheels of commerce moving far more quickly.

Another proposal, which I made to Mr Vole, was that he and I would operate a ferry service across the river, using his small boat. I reasoned that we would make a fortune from the inconvenienced families of Barnes, who currently have to drive all the way to blasted Putney to get into town.

Sadly Mr Vole’s responsibilities to the marine insurance industry, where he toils, prevented him from considering my idea seriously.

Also, my scheme was probably illegal.

But this water-loving Mouse can think of nothing more pleasant than spending his days crossing a river.

Country Mouse

The world isn’t my oyster giles wood

Travel bans were lifted only recently. Yet many of our gung-ho friends have already clocked up not only ski holidays but also trips to Lamu, the fashionable Kenyan island.

None of the tropical travellers seemed to mind that the majority went down with Omicron on arrival in Lamu and most of the skiers shrugged off catching it on the plane back from Switzerland. It was just ‘par for the course’, they said.

Green with envy, I am desperate for a change of scene. For professional reasons, a four-day Eurostar break (with the family) is the only possibility – but something is preventing lift-off.

It’s the planning. Mary and her spad (as she calls her young secretary) refuse to help me since it’s ‘my project’ and they are too busy with Mary’s projects. Even though Mary will be coming too, I have to do the spadework.

The first obstacle is the tyranny of choice. Then, each time I settle on a destination, I’m put off it by betterinformed naysayers’ warnings: ‘Paris is over’; ‘Don’t imagine southern Europe will deliver warmth and sun at this time of year. I once went to Puglia in March and it snowed.’

One savvy traveller volunteered, ‘Only Fuerteventura, four hours from Bristol Airport, can offer guaranteed, year-round sun.’

‘That will do!’

‘The problem is,’ continued this naysayer, ‘it’s very windy, and there is no vegetation to speak of because of past deforestation and the multitudes of goats. In short, it’s a dump.’

Utrecht in Holland, which some aver is as beautiful a canal-side location as Venice, had met my stipulation for a city with a tower, good for panoramic views as well as orienteering.

But then a Dutchman of my acquaintance told me, ‘Going to Utrecht

Death works from home

is a little bit like going to Birmingham, although Birmingham might have more going for it. The city centre has been torn to pieces for nearly ten years now and there’s almost nothing to do except stroll along a few canals – and the restaurants are particularly poor.’

Finally this armchair traveller discovered Trieste. It was Lonely Planet’s most underrated destination of 2012, and I like to root for the underdog. It was good enough for James Joyce in his exile, and this year is the 100th anniversary of its becoming an Italian – rather than Austrian – city. There might be some attendant excitement.

‘The buildings in Trieste have stones on their roofs to prevent the tiles from being blown off by the infamous Bora local wind,’ I read to Mary from a website.

But as I described how ropes and chains are stretched along the pavement to facilitate the progress of foot travellers and prevent them from being blown over,

The very idea of a passenger locator form fills me with dread

Mary, who recently had her first fall, interrupted my flow.

‘I don’t want to go there.’

Even after you have settled on a destination, it appears that you ‘just have to go through’ whatever hoops and obstacles the powers that be have in store for you. The very idea of a passenger locator form fills me with dread, as does the scope for cock-ups with the COVIDcompliance admin.

Then there are the stealth obstacles.

One family we know set off for a fastidiously planned week in Rome which was to include an audience with the Pope and access to private art collections. It was going to be the highlight of the decade for them. Their secretary did all the COVIDcompliance admin for them. Yet when they reached Heathrow, it emerged that one of the party had less than six months on her passport. Who knew that, since Brexit, a six-month passport surplus is mandatory for Euro-travelling Britons?

Three years ago, we, as a family, had a most rewarding and singular jaunt to Antwerp. ‘Why Antwerp?’ friends scoffed on our return.

They changed their tune when we told them that we had stayed in Boulevard Leopold, the only intact 19th-century house in the middle of the Jewish quarter. The owner, Martin Willems, a sympathetic man with perfect taste, had repurposed himself as a bed-andbreakfast host.

In winter, with fewer tourists, there were more mussels, uncrowded museums, waffles, beer and hot chocolate than we could stomach. And there was the fascination of the endless Hasidim, in their 17th-century clothes and wigs outnumbering non-Hasidim by a hundred to one.

‘Why not?’ came my satisfied answer.

We had made the right decision – purely because we had been advised by close friends who had made the same journey and stayed in the same B&B. The more I think about it, hard-won local knowledge is the most precious commodity for the traveller.

And so it was when a friend told us that a trip to Ghent would be precisely the Euro city break to suit us. She recommended the historic hotel 1898 The Post in the centre of the city. It was perfect for access to the Ghent Altarpiece including The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. We could go by Eurostar and avoid airport stress. I went for it.

At this point, Mary’s spad went online to make the booking. ‘You’ll have to quarantine for 48 hours on arrival,’ she told me. ‘Is it worth it for a four-day trip?’

We remain in Wiltshire.

The Oldie April 2022 33

For a brief moment between the wars, Oxford sparked into life. But was it as glamorous as Evelyn Waugh thought? By Daisy Dunn

The real Brideshead revisited

DORA CARRINGTON / GETTY IMAGES

‘A

ll 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.’

So wrote Lady Pansy Lamb – novelist, biographer, Lord Longford’s sister and the artist Henry Lamb’s wife – to Evelyn Waugh, following the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945.

It was a brave letter, considering Waugh’s dislike of criticism. At the beginning of that year, Nancy Mitford had fulfilled the unenviable task of reporting to Waugh the opinions of friends to whom he had sent copies of his novel. She tempered his complaints with words of reassurance. Osbert Lancaster was ‘jealous’. Cyril Connolly disliked the ‘purple passages’ but couldn’t put the book down. Maurice Bowra bemoaned the choice of words – ‘or some nonsense’ – but was obviously much impressed.

Pansy Lamb, addressing Waugh directly, felt no such compunction to water her opinions down. It was not that he had got the era wrong in his book.

34 The Oldie April 2022

Henry and Pansy Lamb, 1929. Right: Evelyn Waugh

Rather, she felt, he had attached too much glamour to it. No one was quite as brilliant all round as his story would have readers believe.

As deflating as her words might have been for Waugh, Pansy Lamb had a point. The world of Brideshead, while it existed, was illusory exactly where it glittered most.

I have read the novel lots of times, and never more closely than when I was

researching the history of Oxford in the early-20th century for my new book. The world of Brideshead is, after all, in one part the world of Oxford in the twenties.

Waugh may have spent less than nine terms at the university before going down without a degree, but it was here that he had Charles Ryder begin the story following his prologue. That story was coloured by more than a few of the novelist’s own reminiscences.

Waugh came up to Hertford College in 1922 with an eagerness ‘to taste everything Oxford could offer’. This included the drinks. Located above a bicycle shop on St Aldate’s, near Christ Church, the Hypocrites’ Club was among his regular haunts. The club was in theory dedicated to philosophy, but in practice to beer and bawdiness.

Members adopted a hypocritical motto from an ancient Greek ode: ‘Water is best.’

One of the most enthusiastic Hypocrites was Harold Acton (1904-94). Known for his dapper silk stockings, bowler hat and Oxford ‘bags’ (preposterously wide-legged, pleated trousers), Acton was the chief inspiration for aesthete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. The classicist Maurice Bowra – ‘the most remarkable figure of his time in the university’, according to the Times, and the model for Mr Samgrass in Brideshead – once saw Acton reciting poetry through the windows of Christ Church using a megaphone, just as Blanche does in the novel.

Some of these men lived as frivolously as Sebastian Flyte. As members of the Railway Club, Waugh, Acton, Alastair

Bright Young Things…

Far left: Railway Club, Oxford, 1920s Left: Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick and Jeremy Irons, Castle Howard, 1981

Graham (the original Sebastian) and their friends would board trains from Oxford, but never alight, instead remaining in their carriages to enjoy luxurious dinners cooked by London chefs. The founder of the club, John Sutro, introduced Waugh to plovers’ eggs, the delicacy sent over from Brideshead in the book for Sebastian’s college luncheon.

As privileged and exclusive as it was, the Oxford world of Brideshead had flaws, as Anthony Blanche discovered when he fell prey to members of the Bullingdon Club. The boys piled into his room uttering accusations of ‘unnatural vices’. Blanche managed to outwit them by flirting outrageously before clambering into Mercury fountain outside.

Harold Acton did not get away so lightly. He was lying in his room when the Bullingdon bullies shattered his windows and shoved a poker through a picture frame. Homosexual students were frequently the targets of attacks.

Student high jinks peaked in the years following the First World War. As Oxford student Vera Brittain observed, many of the young men developed a ‘profound inferiority complex’ in the presence of ex-servicemen.

Bowra, who had fought on the Western Front, described the odd mixture of former officers, fresh-faced schoolboys and ‘Brontosaurs’ – students who had started studying before the war – that made up his own student cohort in 1919. The atmosphere at the university could as a consequence be febrile.

Despite his criticism of Waugh’s ‘wedding-cake style’, Bowra called ‘the Oxford part’ of Brideshead Revisited ‘perfect’. Waugh had separated the most Arcadian elements of his student days from the practical and bourgeois world Pansy Lamb remembered. His novel

Below: Hon Henry Douglas-Home (left) at Bullingdon point-to-point, Wantage, 1928

captured the magnificence of the dream world students entered as they swanned between their clubs and gatherings. Their Brideshead world was real for them – at least until the past broke in.

Even if former soldiers and war-wearied teenagers looked forward to an idyllic life in the college quads, chapels and libraries, they also found Oxford was not immune from the stresses of the outside world.

In some cases, the aftershocks of war were even magnified. In the 1920s, students were reminded repeatedly by their tutors and domestic staff of the courage and superiority of their predecessors who had served King and Country. Waugh’s portrait of the university was not unblemished – Anthony Blanche could attest to that – but the realities of postwar Oxford were in some ways underplayed.

Pansy Lamb’s words – there was ‘something baroque and magnificent on its last legs’ about 1920s society – wouldn’t have surprised Waugh or many other Oxonians by the end of that decade.

Writing in Cherwell in 1930, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, a student

journalist mourned the death of the postwar university and the arrival of an era he described, with clear vision, as ‘uninspiring’.

Looking around at the rather dour students, fun-loving Bowra asked, ‘Where are the aesthetes of yesteryear?’

The frivolities of the 1920s might have seemed vacuous – or even misplaced. But they gave a colourful veneer to a deeply scarred age. Something changed at the end of the ’20s.

The world of Brideshead, in all its contradictions, vanished so quickly that you could be forgiven for asking whether it had even existed at all.

Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Daisy Dunn is out on 31st March. The book is reviewed on page 51 The Oldie April 2022 35

Postcards from the Edge

I depend on the kindness of snowflakes

TOBY MORISON

Don’t bash the young. They’re always so helpful to Mary Kenny

I shall be – all going well – 78 in April.

One advantage of my increasing age is that young people are so nice to me.

The present generation of young people have occasionally been teased as ‘snowflakes’ – since they seem so sensitive to the cruelties of the world. But if they are, the other side of the coin is their notable kindness.

They are always stopping me to ask if they can be of any assistance, as I wend my way. I’m often dragging a suitcase containing books, magazines, an iPad and heaven knows what else, and they rush, with the chivalry of Renaissance courtiers, to help me at every opportunity.

The most eager are often young Asians, who explain, as they volunteer to carry my luggage up the many steps at Piccadilly Circus underground station, ‘Oh, I would always do this in honour of my grandmother!’ The Oriental respect for oldies shows.

Sometimes I play up to this ditzylittle-old-lady image, especially when it comes to downloading information via apps that are puzzling or annoying. At Heathrow Airport recently, a young Chinese lass spent a patient hour toiling over a very awkward check-in app. She then accompanied me to ensure I was OK with the subsequent check-in.

Young people at libraries are utterly sweet when I bewail some electronic source of cataloguing that I find complicated. They’re happy to help out, even doing the research for me.

Sometimes their solicitous attitudes are a little overdone, and there’s a slight hint that I’m viewed as a confused halfwit. But I’m willing to go along with their ‘Are you sure you’re all right, dear?’ so long as they perform all these caring courtesies.

Bless their tender hearts!

Female beauty contests have rather gone out of fashion, but County Kerry’s Rose of 36 The Oldie April 2022

Tralee – a decorous Irish version, launched in 1959 – has endured.

Any woman under 30 with an ancestral Irish connection may enter the contest, which occurs annually in August.

The original purpose was to involve the Irish diaspora. The Rose of Tralee focuses on personality and style. But contestants are expected also to be attractive, and the winning Rose is always pretty – although entrants have never been required to appear in swimsuits or revealing frocks.

It has kept up with the times. In 2014, Maria Walsh, a gay Bostonian, won the title. And this year, in the first postpandemic festival, transgender people will be accepted – the Rose of Tralee is open to those biologically born male who identify as female.

Can a person born male really be crowned a female beauty queen, taking precedence over people biologically born women? If the late April Ashley were the template, it certainly could happen: a pretty boy, a beautiful woman and a ladylike lovely in old age.

County Kerry is now officially woke!

The Eurovision Song Contest – starting in May – usually produces bland ditties indistinguishable from one another. I suppose it’s a kind of united-Europe ideal.

The last redoubt of musical patriotism is the collection of the national anthems of the 27 EU countries. Liam Murphy, a

retired Irish civil servant, has compiled them in a detailed study, The National Anthems of the EU Countries. He adds the United Kingdom as a former EU member.

National anthems lavishly praise their country’s wonderful homeland and the pride of their traditions. They suggest that the Almighty should especially bless their territory – or, as in the case of France, that the people should take up arms in its defence (‘Aux armes, citoyens!’)

‘La Marseillaise’ may be most stirring, but the author suggests the German ‘Deutschlandlied’, composed by Haydn, may be the most musically distinguished.

Germany might not have retained it after the Nazis had made such bullish use of ‘über alles’ but it was restored in 1952.

However, the second verse, praising ‘German women, loyalty, wine and song’, was considered outmoded.

The oldest anthem is the Netherlands’ ‘Het Wilhelmus’, dating from 1568. The Welsh anthem ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ (‘Land of My Fathers’) was the first to be sung at a sporting event, in 1905.

Finland, Estonia, Croatia and the Czech Republic all express proud national sentiments, extolling their beloved countries. Latvia, one of the least religious of European nations, sings ‘God Bless Latvia’. The Vatican City’s anthem, written in Latin, extols the nobility of Rome – with music by Gounod. The Greek anthem is the longest, while the Spanish has no words at all. The Polish anthem is a dance – the lively mazurka.

Slovenia’s anthem is the most international, calling for God’s blessing ‘on all nations’. ‘God Save the Queen’ is rather aggressive. Its sixth verse beseeches the Almighty ‘Rebellious Scots to crush’. In its second verse, it suggests the Lord scatter the monarch’s enemies: ‘Confound their politics/Frustrate their knavish tricks’.

A case of Brexit foretold?

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Raise a glass to Nadine Dorries I am becoming increasingly obsessed with Nadine Dorries – so much so that I’m rather hoping she gets the education brief next time.

The euphoria at the leaving of ‘Sir’ Gavin has faded, and Nadhim Zahawi has not yet really done anything either to raise or to lower my blood pressure.

But Nadine? Well, she is a gift that just keeps giving.

If you judge by social media, I am not alone in my fascination for the lovelorn gazes of our Culture (shurely shome mishtake, Ed) Secretary at her Leader.

But her latest announcement, as I write, makes us all crave her as our professional leader. In defending the Downing Street parties, or gatherings – call them what you will – she insisted Downing Street was ‘an office, it’s a workplace; it’s like a school; a teachers’ staffroom; it is a workplace – it’s not a home place. And I think that distinction needs to be made.’

She has a point – a distinction should be made between work and home. But most of us would make the distinction the other way round. You drink at home, not at work – especially if your workplace is a school. She seems to have some glorious image of the teachers of England merrily quaffing while at work.

Every time a teacher from the state sector comes back from a job interview at a public school, the same things are

breathlessly reported back: the sizes of the classes (tiny), the quality of the school dinners (delicious) and the bars in the staffrooms. I’m not suggesting public-school teachers drink on the job any more than state-school teachers.

But I am suggesting the very fact that there is a drinks cupboard in a staff room is an oddity.

In my last job, the English department would retire to the pub on Friday at lunchtime. We would ring ahead, order up a big plate of sandwiches, have a spritzer or a glass of wine each and go back and teach the last lesson as well as any other. The head knew and either didn’t mind or turned a blind eye. As long as we were back in time for registration, all was well.

The head changed and the culture changed. We were no longer trusted, and the outings stopped. At the leavers’ prom, we are allowed to drink and are even given wine with our dinner, but we are not in charge. In an odd way, we

are the children’s guests.

When we take the children on a residential trip, we don’t drink – although nothing in the world is more tiring than looking after 80 11-year-olds for three days – because we are working.

But if ‘Mad Nad’ comes in, things will change. She won’t be bothered with the curriculum, we assume, and she’ll let us alone. We’ll have drinks in the office and all will be well.

But here’s the thing. We don’t really want to drink on the job. Even the ‘thirstiest’ of us, as we used to call the over-imbibers at university, don’t want to drink around the children – not for any reason of prissiness, but because the job is hard enough when we’re sober.

Obviously it’s much easier running a country than running a classroom. But I’d still love her as Education Secretary because she would, presumably, give us the choice and give us our freedom.

And there’d be the endless joys of the TV interviews with her.

‘I thought you’d be funnier’

Quite Interesting Things about … doctors Berlioz trained as a doctor.

Esperanto was devised by a doctor.

46 per cent of US doctors regularly prescribe placebos.

In Qatar, cough mixture requires a doctor’s prescription.

In Russia, doctors earn less than McDonald’s supervisors.

In Liberia, there is only one doctor for every 25,000 people.

During a doctor’s strike in Israel in 1973, the national death

rate dropped by 40 per cent.

The Incas were twice as good at brain surgery as doctors in the American Civil War. Modern Japanese medicine was founded on German teachings. Many older doctors in Japan still write out their patients’ diagnoses in German.

Xiaoyi (‘Little Doctor’, pictured) has become the

first robot in the world to pass China’s National Medical Licensing Examination.

There is no evidence that almost half the medical procedures performed by US doctors actually work.

In 2017, a Mississippi man told by doctors he was ‘just fat’ had a giant tumour removed from his abdomen – it weighed 130lb, as

much as a newborn giraffe.

In 2019, a doctor in Taiwan found four bees living in a woman’s eye.

Another woman’s eye examined by doctors in Solihull was found to contain 27 lost contact lenses.

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia The Oldie April 2022 39

sister teresa

A small picture of Hell There is a very disturbing flier, which sometimes comes with The Oldie, from a charity drawing attention to cruelty to animals in China, with special reference to the fur trade. A photograph of the face of a caged dog carries a caption to the effect that the last thing it wants is to be let out: because it faces the certainty of being skinned alive – like the other dogs ahead of it, which it can see.

This representation of Christ on the Cold Stone (right) has the same appalling inevitability of unspeakable pain.

The genre originated in northern Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages and gradually worked its way south.

This haunting example, by John of Flanders, who settled in Spain for much of his working life, was painted in 1496-97. It illustrates Isaiah 53 – the chapter of the suffering servant: ‘A man to make people screen their faces; he was despised and we took no account of him.’

Jesus wears only the crown of thorns and the ropes by which he is tied, reminding us that part of the humiliation of crucifixion was being stripped naked.

It is not suspense but certainty that is

described: the hellish pain of actual crucifixion will take place, and probably within minutes.

Abandonment, helplessness, vulnerability and the fragility of human flesh are all gathered together in this mercifully small picture.

It measures just 12 x 11 inches, indicating that it was painted to inspire private devotion. It is not a subject that can in any way be artistically glamorised. The relative rarity of this image implies that it was too painful ever to become popular.

Jesus’s own cross lies on the ground immediately behind him and we know exactly where we are: the four impressionistic little crosses on the horizon indicate that horrible place of execution called Golgotha. The landscape

Unspeakable pain: Christ on the Cold Stone by Juan de Flandres

is dreary, relieved only by a few feathery trees. It would be easy enough to cut them down and turn them into more instruments of torture and execution. In a scene of such desolation, the blue sky is a mockery.

How many people in our time are facing such fear and agony? The numbers will never be known and it is impossible not to feel anger and impotence at what is happening daily. There is of course prayer. But we need to do more than pray. It should by now be impossible for us to allow ourselves to add to the sum of suffering by any thought, word or deed.

Lest we forget: ‘The Lord God is coming to my help; who dare condemn me? They shall all go to pieces like a garment devoured by moths’ (Isaiah 50:9).

Funeral Service

Lady Maclean (1923-2021) The former Bishop of London, Lord Chartres, gave the address at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, for the funeral of Elizabeth Maclean. The chatelaine of Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull, she was married to Sir Chips Maclean, head of the clan and Chief Scout.

Later becoming Lord Maclean, he was the Lord Chamberlain, running the Duke of Windsor’s funeral and Charles and Diana’s wedding. Lady Maclean ended her days in a large grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court.

‘She was getting ready for church when death came to her,’ said Lord Chartres. ‘Napoleon said you couldn’t hope to understand someone until you knew what the world looked like when that person was 20. In 1943, Elizabeth 40 The Oldie April 2022

was already married and she was a mother.

The wedding had been just after her 18th birthday at the Guards’ Chapel, with the bride, as someone remarked at the time, ‘looking like a young Judy Garland’.

‘Britain was at war and her husband was an officer in the Scots Guards. For Chips, it was service with the 6th Guards Tank Brigade which landed in Normandy soon after D-Day. He saw action, including the liberation of Belsen concentration camp.

‘I see her in my mind’s eye now, tenacious, outspoken, loyal, unself-pitying and, above all, full of life and love. She is the one who made delicious cakes for the children of the

Chapel Royal and befriended the lonely wives of Commonwealth High Commissioners.

‘As the mistress of Duart, she organised the spectacular that greeted the Queen on her annual cruise around the Western Isles in the Royal Yacht. As soon as Britannia came into view, there was a discharge of rockets and fireworks from the ramparts, while Elizabeth led the banging of kitchen utensils and waving of banners – even tablecloths.’

Grandson Lachlan Maclean read John 14:1-6. Grandson Alasdair Barne read 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. Alexandra Allan read If I Should Go, by Joyce Grenfell. The choir sang Psalm 23 and the anthem How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair, from Psalm 84, and William Smith’s Lesser Litany.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

My audition for Dr Death

Watch out for relations who want to harm – or kill – patients theodore dalrymple As someone who can no longer disguise, even from himself, the fact that he counts as elderly, I was naturally interested to read in the British Medical Journal an article about what is now called ‘elder abuse’.

There are many forms and gradations of it, ranging from theft to abusive over-control to outright violence, affecting (so the article said) one in six people over the age of 60. The Office of the Public Guardian investigated about 12,000 cases of possible or alleged abuses of powers of attorney between 2015 and 2021, though unfortunately the article does not say how many of these were found to be baseless.

Geriatricians are familiar with both the devoted care that many families provide for their oldest members and also, unfortunately, the greed for inheritance that sometimes motivates mistreatment of old people.

It takes every form that the ingenuity of wickedness can suggest or invent. It isn’t always easy to spot violent abuse, given that the old are inclined to fall or to bruise themselves.

To accuse carers, even only by implication, when they are innocent, is horrible, as well as unjust. But to fail to recognise and stop such abuse where it is inflicted has horrible consequences, too.

It is not by any means easy to know what to do for the best.

Until recently, the Office for National Statistics did not collect data on domestic abuse of people over the age of 74 – presumably on the grounds that it was unthinkable, or that if it did occur it didn’t matter very much. The ONS has since changed its policy and is now trying to collect such statistics, which will no doubt in due course horrify us, as statistics usually do.

The lack of a baseline makes it difficult to know whether abuse of the elderly is increasing, decreasing or remaining constant.

The BMJ also published an article not long ago citing the case of an old lady with severe Alzheimer’s disease who married her exploiter. Under English law, a marriage immediately invalidates all previous wills, and the spouse becomes, by default, the person’s legatee.

Registrars of marriages usually make little effort to ascertain that the contracting parties to a marriage both have the necessary mental capacity, and if they both look happy enough, they generally assume – no doubt often correctly – that all is well.

The mental capacity to make a decision is not the same as sound judgement, of course. Because of cases such as the one above, it has been suggested that registrars of marriages – and no doubt clergymen – should be more assiduous in assessing the mental capacity of bride and groom to tie themselves together.

The term elder abuse does not delineate a natural species. The elderly

may abuse one another, either as the continuation of a lifelong pattern, or as a manifestation of a disease. Very early in my career, I had an elderly patient who tried to kill his wife with an axe as she lay in bed. He was motivated by jealousy, believing her to be engaged in affairs.

This jealousy turned out to be a manifestation of his Parkinson’s disease.

Every case has to be judged on its merits.

The only time I have been asked to kill a patient was around the same time. The relatives were fed up with difficulties a demented patient was causing them – difficulties that were real enough. I answered lightly that such ‘treatment’ was not available on the NHS, to which they retorted, quick as a flash, ‘Can’t we go private, then?’

Notwithstanding that powers of attorney may be abused, it is advisable for every ageing person to grant them to people whom he or she trusts.

The alternative, should it ever be needed, is worse.

‘Chasing, digging, rolling, fetching … have you no experience doing absolutely nothing at all?’

The Oldie April 2022 41

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

Waugh’s explosion in court SIR: I thoroughly enjoyed A N Wilson’s memories of Auberon Waugh (March issue) and his piece reminded me of the only time I came across Waugh, which was at the committal proceedings in November 1978 against Jeremy Thorpe and three other men for conspiracy to murder the male model Noman Scott.

I was a young reporter on the Western Morning News and had gone to the committal at Minehead, with the rest of the press pack, expecting to be able to report just the bare details. We were all aghast when George Deakin, one of the accused, applied for reporting restrictions to be lifted, meaning every word could be reported.

Auberon Waugh was there to get material for his book The Last Word – about Thorpe’s full trial, which came later at the Old Bailey – and although only in his late thirties appeared to this then young hack to be already ancient.

Part way through the first day of the committal, I will never forget, Waugh lifted a cheek from the cramped press benches and let rip with a loud, rich and fruity fart. It seemed to take on a life of its own and changed in pitch and tone halfway through. All eyes were turned on him but, as one would expect, he did not bat an eyelid and simply waited for proceedings to resume. Vintage stuff!

Regards, Michael Fleet, St Blazey, Cornwall

Bron’s real father SIR: In my tribute to Auberon Waugh (March issue), I said that Goethe’s ‘There was a king in Thule’ was sung at his funeral. It was in fact ‘King of the Boeotians’ from Gluck’s Orpheus, which was Bron’s party piece.

And of course I knew his father to be not Arthur, but Evelyn Waugh!

Forgive my ‘senior moments’.

Yours etc, A N Wilson, London N6

background music accompanying many television programmes.

I find it increasingly impossible to follow the spoken word on television because it is drowned out by music. Even news reports are rendered impossible for me to follow.

The rules are simple: if programmemakers want their words to be heard and understood, they must not accompany them with other sounds.

I did not complain about this when my television licence was free, but now I am paying for it, I resent the number of times I am driven to switch off mid-programme.

Yours faithfully, Wally Harbert, Frome, Somerset

You dummies SIR: It was Joseph Cooper who was the master of the dummy keyboard on Face the Music (‘Our founding father’, March issue). Joseph Connolly is a writer.

Regards, Ian Payn, Fulham, London

A diehard fan since issue 1 SIR: Congrats to all at The Oldie – a cornucopia of articles on every conceivable subject for 30 years … to make you laugh, cry, rage, rant, snigger, deride, agree, disagree, grind your teeth, mentally applaud … and, finally, to mean you have passed your time (on beach or in Bath chair) enjoying yourself and looking forward to the next one.

I have taken The Oldie from issue 1 (first from curiosity at yet another magazine on the bookstalls) and was instantly recruited for ever. Characters famous/

Stop background music!

SIR: Carolyn Whitehead (Rant, March issue) raises the issue of 42 The Oldie April 2022

‘I’d like to see a pie chart’

infamous, damnable, beguiling have graced (or otherwise) its pages. Long life and more power to all Oldie elbows.

Beryl Fleming, Worthing

The wrong seeds SIR: Forgive my intruding on Rachel Johnson’s private recollections of the ‘unsung genre’ of ‘cover version’ music history (March issue), but Nick Cave’s original band was never really called his Lightning Seeds. Bad Seeds yes.

But memories and music, notably certain genres, do at times take original turns together.

William Keenan, Nottingham

Max Hastings’s wallet litter SIR: In The Old Un’s Notes in the February issue you refer to the film Operation Mincemeat and the contents of the descriptively named ‘wallet litter’, which prompted your correspondent David Shacklock to provide a list of the amazing items that he found in an old tweed jacket.

The hoarding of surprising contents in pockets surely starts at a much earlier age than Mr Shacklock must have been.

In 1960, as editor of The Greyfriar magazine while at Charterhouse, I decided to invite a representative sample of boys (one from each year) to empty all their pockets in order to establish what the average Carthusian might carry around with him.

The prize for originality undoubtedly went to Max Hastings (now Sir Max, the military historian and former Editor of the Daily Telegraph.) Max’s pocket contents (which I remember vividly to this day), comprised: Handkerchief (very used) – 1 Biros – 2 Drawing pin – 1 (stored in right-hand trouser pocket, perilously kept at crotch level!)

Russian Army colonel’s shoulder badge – 1 Collection of miniature books on tropical fish – 12 Toilet chain (high flush) – 1 I was as much impressed by the nature of Max’s pocket contents, as I was by his ability to store all those items about his

‘According to this, prehistoric man, three million years ago, stood only about four foot high’

person – especially the toilet chain, which must have been around four foot long, and sporting a rather chunky wooden handle!

Yours sincerely, John Eaton, Bingley, West Yorkshire

Barbadian slips SIR: The divine Lucinda’s piece on Barbados (March issue) was marred by a couple of errors. The captions for the illustrations of St Nicholas Abbey and Farley Hill were transposed. The former is a vibrant, well-maintained estate and business venture while the latter (the central illustration) is a neglected, majestic ruin amongst the palms.

As for Nelson’s statue in Bridgetown, this was officially removed in November 2020 – as I was proudly told by a Bridgetown Bajan, during our monthlong sojourn in Bim last November. For the record, the island’s only representation of the Admiral, that I know of, is at the entrance to the magnificent Hunte’s Gardens.

Graham Leckie, Colchester, Essex

Boris’s pulling power?

SIR: I was amazed to hear Mary Killen call Boris Johnson an alpha male in her recent article (March issue). Surely a more appropriate description would be a ‘slithy tove’ or possibly ‘reptile’, seeing as how he demonstrates none of the characteristics of the Duke of Edinburgh she describes earlier in the piece. None of the women I know seems in the least bit attracted to Boris, or should I be getting out more?

Yours sincerely, Rory O’Connor (retired farmer), South Devon

Archbishop’s alter ego SIR: Maggie Cobbett’s letter (March issue) apropos the innocent amusement often afforded by AI-generated subtitles reminded me of the time, some years ago, when the BBC’s news report on Justin Welby was accompanied by the words ‘the Arch Bitch of Canterbury’. Still makes me laugh!

Yours, Tony Purcell, Sheffield

Let’s not talk about sex SIR: The letter to Virginia Ironside on organ recitals (March issue) in old age illustrates one of the firmest pillars of social intercourse. In youth, we talk of sex; in middle age, we talk of our children; as oldies, we talk of our ailments. However, I fear these pillars may be showing signs of wear. Last Christmas, comparing ailments was a major source of discussion among our middle-aged children. This has made me feel very old indeed.

John Webster, Mudford Sock, Somerset

I was the Devil SIR: Like Benedict King (‘Right royal madness’, March issue), I was over 50 when I was diagnosed as bipolar.

The problem was that I thought I was the Devil. I was convinced of this when I was suddenly acutely aware that I had spent over £10,000 in one weekend on original paintings. This big spending is symptomatic of a bipolar high. (Relevantly, perhaps, three of the paintings were abstracts of Dante’s Divine Comedy.)

I was with my partner when awareness of my profligacy struck.

I nearly shrieked, ‘I’ve damned us all.

I’ve damned God. Because of me, we’re all going to burn for ever.’

‘Don’t be so silly!’ he replied.

But I believed it. I couldn’t escape what I had done even though I crouched under the stairwell. I was utterly terrified.

The next morning, my partner rang the local psychiatric hospital. They knew me of old and admitted me. Soon a kind-looking woman ushered me into a consulting room. ‘What is the problem, Susan?’ ‘I am the Devil.’ Everything else would be implied by this admission. I hadn’t the strength for eternal damnation and spirituality through beautiful paintings. ‘No you’re not. But you are a little unwell. Soon medication will make you see things very differently.’

It was then that I totally despaired.

She saw this as an illness, not a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. But she was right, of course. With loving care and antipsychotic drugs, the conviction slowly died in me. These days, I live the life of the free in spirit again.

Sue Tyson, Bramhall, Stockport

The Army’s pedal power SIR: The Waziristan campaign (1919) saw by no means the last of the British Army’s cycling soldiers (Olden Life, March issue).

Airborne forces were issued with folding bikes for D-Day (1944). Not popular with the Paras, who thought they made their riders sitting – or pedalling – ducks. Cycles were also deployed during the EOKA emergency in Cyprus (1955-60).

As a staff writer for the Army’s Soldier Magazine, I reported on the revival of pedal power in 1974 at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, which had a reserve of 650 bikes. Reacting to an international fuel crisis and possibly with a touch of sadistic glee, staff instructors soon had Normandy Company ready to ride to and from nearby exercise areas to save fuel. But not before they had mastered the proper military drills.

Before mounting ‘bicycles, officers, for the use of’, cadets had to practise these, including the formidable ‘right dress’.

This involved turning the handlebars smartly to the right and bouncing the front wheel on the ground. The resultant drumming was, perhaps, designed to have the same intimidating effect as Zulu Impi beating their shields with their assegais at Rorke’s Drift (1879).

Or maybe it was just another example of the time-honoured tradition of RMAS staff instructors taking the opportunity to poke fun at the nation’s future generals while they could.

Mike Starke, Chale Green, Isle of Wight The Oldie April 2022 43

I Once Met

Sandy Wilson It was 30th June 1998.

‘I’m sitting next to a legend,’ I said to myself as I drove Sandy Wilson (19242014) from his house in Somerset to Wells Cathedral School, where I taught.

We were rehearsing his play The Boy Friend (1953), prior to taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Sandy said, ‘Of course, some people get it wrong, you know, Mike, even after all these years. They call the show The Boyfriend when it should be The Boy Friend.

Mental note to self: as soon as we get to the school, make bloody sure the programme says The Boy Friend.

‘I’ve been very lucky, Mike,’ Sandy said, ‘because I’ve been able to live off that show all my life.’

Only a few weeks before, my wife had rung me up one evening at the school, when I was rehearsing, and said, more or less as a joke, ‘I’ve found Sandy Wilson’s phone number in Who’s Who if you’d like to give him a ring.’

‘Ha, ha! And what am I supposed to say to him?’

‘Tell him you’re doing the show and are taking it to Edinburgh.’

The school production of The Boy Friend, watched by Sandy Wilson

‘As if he’d be interested!’ I guffawed.

‘Oh, go on. He can only say bugger off – and I’m sure he wouldn’t.’

Short pause. ‘What’s the number?’ I tapped in the London code and number.

A voice said, ‘Hello.’

‘Oh, is that Sandy Wilson?’

‘Yes.’ Quick apologetic explanation for the reason for my call.

He didn’t say bugger off. The pleasant, friendly voice said, ‘Strangely enough, I have a small house in Somerset and I’m coming up in a few weeks’ time.

Your production sounds very interesting and I’d love to meet you and the cast –

but unfortunately I don’t drive. If you could pick me up from my house and drive me to the school, I’d be delighted to help.’

Gulp! Pause. ‘That would be very nice.

I could drive you.’

That’s how, on a summer evening, 74-year-old Sandy Wilson was on the stage of a music school in Somerset, showing a cast of youngsters how to do the Charleston.

In his autobiography, I Could Be Happy, Sandy Wilson wrote about being invited by Noël Coward to play him the score of The Buccaneer: ‘His last words, even if they no longer apply, will remain with me for ever: “There are three good lyric-writers today,” he said, wagging an emphatic finger, “Cole [Porter], myself – and you.”

I was overwhelmed.’

I was overwhelmed too on that day in 1998 when Sandy Wilson came to see a rehearsal of my production of The Boy Friend.

Michael Theodorou

My lucky Severn days

In 1960, I was 17.

The Aust-Beachley ferry was operating under the shadow, almost literally, of its approaching nemesis, the first Severn Bridge, then under construction a short way upstream.

I had a summer holiday job as a pier boy at a fiver a week – two pounds more than Bristol Zoo had paid me the previous year. My main task was to tie and untie the boats arriving and departing with their 15 or so cars.

One boat was captained by Charlie Palmer, an uncle, I was told, of David Broome, a 44 The Oldie April 2022

prominent showjumper. One day, he told me to look out for a salmon he thought he had hit. It took some believing, but Charlie didn’t joke much.

Sure enough, a little later, I spotted a large salmon washed up on the mud bank below the jetty.

When his boat returned, Charlie produced a long boathook and just managed to retrieve it. Waiting passengers, watching from the top of the jetty, thought he was retrieving a body.

A crew member cut up the fish and I was awarded a piece, which I took back home. It was the first time I or my parents had eaten fresh salmon.

One evening, I was told to place a notice behind the 45th car in the queue, to

indicate that later cars would not be carried that day. Some of these poor beggars had queued for hours and were now faced with the tedious journey up and down the Severn via Gloucester.

The 45th driver must have felt huge relief. It wouldn’t last: there was no space for his car on the last ferry.

He was understandably furious and raged at Ginger, who was closing the ticket office. He demanded to see the manager, a director, anybody…

‘Well,’ said Ginger, ‘thees

cusst see ’oo thees usst, but thees ussn’t get no different.’

Being local, I understood – ‘You can see who you want, but it’ll make no difference’ – but the motorist didn’t, although he sensed, correctly, that these weren’t helpful words. The ferry company cared little for customer relations. Defeated and humiliated, he stormed back to his car.

I drove through a toll booth on the new bridge some years later. It was operated by Ginger.

He didn’t recognise me, and he looked bored with his job.

By Ken Thomas, Maidenhead, Berkshire, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books Stick to the day job Eric Morecambe, Les Dawson and Harry Secombe all tried it – now Dolly Parton has written a celebrity novel. By Roger Lewis

I

have a shelf of celebrity novels.

Madonna, Sharon Osbourne, Carrie Fisher, Ethan Hawke….

They’ve all had a go – even Gyles Brandreth.

Yet though perhaps they think they are making things up, celebrities can be inadvertently much more confessional in their fictions than they are in their official autobiographies, which are usually ghosted rubbish, full of evasions and gaps and phoney niceness.

Leading the field here is Eric Morecambe’s Mr Lonely (1981), where a surprisingly harsh picture of showbusiness is presented. Sid Lewis, to all intents and purposes Eric himself, is motivated by a permanent anger. He can never shake off his early days, when he was ‘looked down upon’ and trudged, to scant applause, around working men’s clubs, summer seasons, fêtes and police stag nights.

His wife ‘never did win a verbal argument with Sid. He was much too devious’ – and his personality as a performer is that of Eric himself: his trick is ‘Never give the punters time to think’ and he would ‘walk, talk, ask, beg and shout’ – ie keep jabbering, keep everyone distracted. In time, Sid becomes a television hit, and he is killed when stabbed accidentally by an awards statuette.

What’s hard to take are the sex scenes.

46 The Oldie April 2022

Eric’s image was that of a pipe-smoking family man in Harpenden. Sid also lives in that district; has a family – but he goes off on erotic adventures. ‘Do you always do as you’re told?’ ‘Depends how big the bed is.’ We don’t really want to know Eric Morecambe’s sexual fantasies, or his philosophy: ‘Conscience doesn’t stop you from doing it. It just stops you from enjoying it.’

The formula is similar in Les Dawson’s A Card for the Clubs (1974), a lightly fictionalised account of a woebegone stand-up act in horrible northern towns. Harry Secombe’s Twice Brightly (1974) is another one, with the genial goon learning his trade in what was the Windmill Theatre, doing his no doubt hilarious shaving routine between the striptease acts.

Barry Humphries’s brilliant Women in the Background (1995), about a drag act played by Derek Pettyfer, who is ‘rich, famous, between wives’, sounds a lot like what handling Dame Edna must involve. ‘Barry Humphries’s comic novel is about a life in a goldfish bowl, in which the goldfish are piranhas,’ says the blurb.

And exactly the same may be said of Adrian Edmondson’s The Gobbler (1995), where the beloved young comedian, ‘a grotesque hero for the nineties’, doesn’t have friends; only professional enemies. Julian Mann, who may just be a portrait of Rik Mayall, or of

somebody very similar, is a drinker and womaniser with income-tax problems.

His life is one big ‘orgy of booze and young models’.

Anyway, you get the picture. Celebrity fiction doesn’t hold back on what it takes to be a celebrity – nor on the rage and hunger required if fame is to be sustained. Which brings us neatly to Dolly Parton’s offering, Run Rose Run. Her spanking new novel deals with ‘a backwoods innocent stumbling into superstardom’.

The book explores the relationship between AnnieLee Keyes (‘I turned 25 years old last week, and I’m asking you to give me a chance to sing up there on that stage’) and Ruthanna Ryder, not only the established queen of country and western but ‘one of the most successful musicians in the history of the business’, no less.

AnnieLee and Ruthanna seem identical to Dolly herself – her younger and current selves. Ruthanna, for example, ‘clawed her way to the top of her industry’. Now if she enters a hotel suite, she’ll expect to find displays of gigantic fruit baskets and trays of chocolate ganache flecked with edible gold. AnnieLee, meanwhile, who is starting out, sleeps rough in the park and seems to go for days without eating or requiring a hot bath.

Both women are ‘beautiful, talented

GARY WING

Hello, Dolly!

Parton and her co-writer, James Patterson

and mean as tobacco spit’. Frankly, I’d hoped or assumed there would be an All About Eve dynamic, with the ruthlessly ambitious youngster, intent on getting to the top, infiltrating the world of her mentor, taking over from within. Or perhaps A Star Is Born – the other template about a rise and a fall.

Alas, there is none of this sort of fruity melodrama, despite AnnieLee’s being ‘stubborn and hungry and full of nothing but stupid pride’. Drama, such as there is, involves AnnieLee’s estranged husband and his ghastly henchpersons, who track her down in Nashville and administer beatings: ‘Pain, excruciating pain, flashed on the side of her head as his foot made contact.’

The men seem to want to sell her into white slavery, and are unaware of her lucrative potential as a singersongwriter, even though ‘crazy girl finds music in everything’.

She certainly does.

‘I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,’ AnnieLee tells Ruthanna, who in fairness to her doesn’t die laughing, which is what I almost did.

Instead, concurring that ‘the demons of the past were the hardest to slay’, Ruthanna continues to dole out advice: cultivate fearlessness and shamelessness and ‘Don’t let anyone else be your boss.’

In the basement of Ruthanna’s mansion is a recording studio, fully

equipped with musicians. ‘I’m Ethan Blake,’ says Ethan Blake, a guitarist but also a former commando who served in Afghanistan and bulges with muscles and charisma. AnnieLee spends 500 pages refusing to succumb to the inevitable, despite his saving her bacon in innumerable car chases.

Indeed, men in Dolly’s fictional universe are to be feared and avoided and squirted with pepper spray. Truck drivers picking up hitchhikers will dig their fingers into a girl’s thigh within moments. Producers are predators.

Management people exist to exploit talent, making newcomers fit a mould.

Quite how Ruthanna went from singing for throw-money in country fairs, at rodeos and weddings is not divulged – perhaps the fact that ‘she had a smile that could light up a whole concert hall’ is part of it, which would make her a miracle of dentistry.

AnnieLee makes it to the top, however, because of Ruthanna’s patronage, a process taking about three days. On the Monday, she’s homeless; by the end of the week, she has a personal stylist and an entourage.

‘The bigger you get, the more people you need,’ says Ruthanna, a sentiment that would have been endorsed by Elizabeth Taylor, who had a person on the payroll to clip her parrot’s claws.

On the tapes made in that basement,

AnnieLee’s voice growls, hollers and implores; it is also sweet and affecting – in my mind’s eye or ear, I imagine a combination of Dame Edna’s squawks and Harry Secombe belting out hymns.

Radio stations play the result and fame is assured.

At this point, the baddies return and AnnieLee leaps from a hotel balcony.

‘AnnieLee twisted in the air, trying to protect herself from what was coming.’

She must be the first person in history to survive crashing from the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper with only a small bruise.

Dolly’s co-writer is James Patterson, who we are told on the back flap has written many number-one bestsellers and ‘his books have sold in excess of 400 million copies worldwide’. I’d never heard of him.

What I look forward to is the tie-in album of a dozen original songs Dolly has composed to go with her novel. The lyrics are appended. Big dreams rhymes with faded jeans; lightin’ up my fuse with breakin’ all my rules. Another line, carefully transcribed, goes: ‘Mm-mmmm, mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.’

Has the singer been bound and gagged?

Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson is published on 7th March by Century (£20) The Oldie April 2022 47

Mourning sickness FRANCES WILSON The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story

By Clover Stroud Doubleday £16.99 Clover Stroud was sometimes mistaken for her sister, Nell Gifford, co-founder and ringmistress of Giffords Circus.

Whenever this happened, Stroud would explain that her own performances took place strictly on the page: ‘I am the one without the circus; the one with all the children who writes about the way life feels.’

The Red of My Blood, Stroud’s third memoir, is about how death feels. Or rather, how life feels when death is ‘walking alongside’ life because, on 8th December 2019, Nell Gifford died.

She was 46 and being treated for breast cancer, but had been told the previous month that she had at least five – maybe ten – more years to live. Her death was so unexpected that it was as if, Stroud says, her sister had been killed in an accident.

That’s something they both knew all about because when Clover was 16 and Nell was 18, their mother, Charlotte, fell from her horse and was in a coma for two months. In her first book, The Wild Other, Stroud describes how, when Charlotte regained consciousness, she was epileptic, doubly incontinent, unable to walk, feed herself or communicate in any way. She continued in this state for 22 years, until her death in December 2013.

Stroud’s second book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, is about maternal ambivalence and she spares none of the details. A fearlessly confessional writer, Stroud describes being ‘excited’ by returning to ‘all the difficult and painful things I’ve been through in my life’, and the energy of that excitement pulses through her prose.

Framed around her first year of mourning and written as though in a single breath, The Red of My Blood is not so much raw as bleeding. You will find no platitudes here. This is an account of how a profoundly depressed woman pushed through the days of 2020, ‘slapping cheese down a grater’, ripping clothes from the drum of the washing machine and navigating a sea of Lego, while looking ‘right at the feeling of what the end of existence, the end of a life, really meant’. For once, Stroud says, ‘language failed me’, but there is no sign of that failure in these pages.

Language does more or less what Clover Stroud wants it to do. Like a magician, she puts her grief into a hat and pulls out 70,000 perfect words to describe what it is like when language fails you. To prepare for ‘the face of the pain’ that lies ahead, she compares herself to Sir Galahad or Sir Gawain, leaving the warm fires of Camelot so as to journey through dark forests. ‘I know I will go back into the dark forest, and I will walk there again but, in the knowledge that now I know the way through, I will return to my own life stronger.’

When we have lost something, we try to find it, and this is what Stroud does with Nell. ‘Whereareyou whereareyou whereareyou?’ she asks every moment of every day – the question like an alarm in her brain. She sees her in stars, robins and heart-shaped pebbles. When three black horses wander into her yard, she thinks they too might be her sister.

‘Is there another dimension,’ Stroud asks, ‘where all the dead people go?’ You might pooh-pooh this idea but other dimensions are a reality to Clover Stroud, whose world is filled with such places.

Giffords Circus was itself another dimension, as was Stroud’s idyllic childhood before the accident. Her mother, who was both alive and not alive, also lived in another dimension. ‘She’s not really around, or here, or anywhere,’ as Stroud puts it in The Wild Other.

And, in the depth of her grief, Stroud found a portal to another realm in her phone, where she lost herself messaging strangers for over nine hours a day. The internet is an addiction: while her sister ‘would always be ancient and mystical’, Stroud was ‘becoming dystopian’.

The Red of My Blood is about the impossibility of comprehending death.

Accepting the endlessness of absence, Stroud learns, is like learning your times tables: it takes practice and hard work.

New muscles strengthen in the brain; you start to see in the dark. Courageous and utterly compelling, this is a book that will wring you out, wear you down and leave you filled with wonder.

‘Can Mr Vogel call you back?

He’s hiding in the tax shelter’

Ireland’s home fires ROBERT O’BYRNE Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution

By Terence Dooley Yale University Press £25 Last September, an Irish auction house sold the remaining contents of Howth Castle, County Dublin.

The house dates back to 1180, when it was first constructed, albeit in more primitive form, by the St Lawrence family. Their descendants remained in ownership, and in residence, until four years ago, when the present generation announced the place had been sold to an investment group.

One might imagine that such news would be greeted by widespread dismay; that efforts would have been made to preserve this significant link with more than eight centuries of Ireland’s history; that state intervention might have been sought, and been forthcoming.

On the contrary, the sale of Howth Castle and subsequent dispersal of its contents was met across the land with an indifferent silence.

Terence Dooley’s new book helps explain why. Its subject is the destruction of some 300 Irish country houses in the early 1920s, during the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War. Among the first, and greatest, losses was Summerhill, County Meath, a vast mansion dating from the early 1730s which, in size and grandeur, could be considered Ireland’s Versailles. In 1879 and 1880, it was taken for the hunting season by the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. On the night of 4th February 1921, a group of at least 30 men arrived at Summerhill, broke down the back door, spread petrol around the rooms and set the place alight.

It was a pattern followed in most other such incidents, leading to widespread panic even among property-owners whose homes were not attacked. In her lively memoir, Seventy Years Young, the Countess of Fingall describes how one evening she sat in the library, wearing a fur coat and clutching a box of jewellery while her husband dozed as they waited for raiders to arrive. In fact, Killeen survived, only to be gutted by arsonists in 1981.

Dooley correctly points out that, compared with similar incidents in other countries, such attacks, while unquestionably traumatising for The Oldie April 2022 49

those who experienced them, were not, as a rule, accompanied by personal violence. In a handful of cases, owners were killed, but more often they were permitted time to gather up a few possessions, and the arsonists could be courteous, even apologetic. The Earl of Mayo judged the men who arrived to burn down his home, Palmerstown, County Kildare, in January 1923 to have been ‘excessively polite’.

What was the motivation behind these attacks? Dooley argues they were primarily, although not exclusively, manifestations of an ongoing desire among the rural population for complete land ownership. While legislation over the previous decades had encouraged the break-up of great estates throughout the country, house-owners frequently still retained large amounts of demesne land around their properties. In some cases, a hunger to acquire this land – a belief that if a house were destroyed, its occupant would leave – encouraged the incursions.

But there were other factors at play, not least the typical breakdown of law and order during a time of upheaval, which always allows for a degree of opportunism. Not only were houses burnt, but woodlands cut down, agricultural implements and machinery stolen, and sometimes livestock taken.

Although it does not sit comfortably with the image of revolutionary righteousness, looting is known to have taken place before, during and after a house was attacked.

And then there was plain indifference to the fate of these buildings which, to the vast majority of the Irish population, were alien places with which they felt no connection.

In an earlier book, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (2001), Dooley explains why there should have been so few and such tenuous links between the owners of these properties and the surrounding population. It didn’t help that indoor staff rarely, if ever, came from local families. And, during the late-19th century, the so-called Land Wars encouraged a widespread belief that these buildings were symbols of foreign oppression.

That belief still survives in some quarters, even though more is now known and understood about Irish country houses. However, indifference to their circumstances remains widespread.

Previously what became of them was of interest primarily to those who might be said to have had a vested interest in it, such as Mark Bence-Jones and the Knight of Glin.

‘So how many women do I get for my vote?’

Today, thanks to the likes of Professor Dooley, who runs the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates in Maynooth University, further research has been undertaken and published over the past two decades. But this work remains primarily academic.

It is worth noting that many more houses were lost from the mid-1920s onwards through abandonment and demolition than had been burnt earlier in the decade.

They are still being lost in the same way: at least three significant country houses in County Tipperary alone are currently at serious risk owing to neglect.

Unfortunately, academic research, while without doubt valuable, will not save them. Nor did it save Howth Castle from being sold and the contents dispersed. Even if the burnings have stopped, the losses continue.

Robert O’Byrne is author of The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland (CICO Books)

Sebastian Flyte’s dons ALEXANDER LARMAN Not Far from Brideshead

By Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 Literary representations of Oxford between the wars have been everywhere since Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945 – not least in John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960).

Humphrey Carpenter’s group history The Brideshead Generation (1989) did an authoritative job of separating mythology and legend from documented fact.

Now the classicist Daisy Dunn offers her own perspective on the subject. Does she have something new to say, or is this just another hoary wallow through well-worn tropes?

Dunn’s earlier books, including Catullus’s Bedspread and In the Shadow of Vesuvius, make classical subjects seem

fresh and vital, rather than relics of the classroom or lecture hall.

Her erudition and energy are thrillingly applied to Not Far from Brideshead. It avoids the clichés of linen -suited students punting with teddy bears.

Instead, it analyses the lesser-known (for shame!) lives of the classicists E R Dodds, Gilbert Murray and Maurice Bowra – and how they interacted with the great, the good and the wicked of interwar Oxford.

Dodds was a drug-taking Irish spiritualist and poet. He later established himself as one of the 20th century’s major historians of the ancient world, thanks to his 1951 book, The Greeks and the Irrational.

Murray was an Australian-born intellectual. Widely regarded as the leading authority on ancient Greek literature throughout the first half of the 20th century, he was at least mildly telepathic. C S Lewis called his lectures ‘the best thing I ever went to’.

And Dunn salutes Murray’s student Maurice Bowra, the most entertaining figure here, as ‘a gossip and a raconteur, a libertarian, a showman and a scholar’.

We must applaud his unceasing commitment to maintaining the gaiety of nations in his role as Warden of Wadham; to say nothing of his proudly maintained position as leader of the Immoral Front, ‘a rallying cry to make trouble’. Little wonder that he rejoiced in his pre-war visits to Berlin, which he called ‘the bugger’s daydream’.

A less accomplished writer than Dunn might have an author’s identity crisis.

Should one concentrate on the classical literary criticism of the era, and omit the scurrilous stories about Bowra and his circle? Or instead favour ribald anecdotes of snobbery and bad behaviour, to produce a highly readable but lightweight book?

Instead, Dunn steers an adroit, measured path between the two, never omitting a choice story.

The effect is both refreshing and inspiring, like the first glass of champagne of the day, with or without plovers’ eggs – ‘Mummy sends them from Brideshead,’ Sebastian Flyte says.

‘They always lay early for her.’

Dunn’s narrative begins after the First World War. In 1920, women were allowed to receive degrees from Oxford, although their colleges did not obtain equal standing with men’s colleges until 1926.

Vera Brittain called watching her peers receive degrees an ‘atmosphere tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled’.

This emancipation contrasted with the tension between the beautifully dressed, fine-lunching aesthetes who greeted one another with ‘the pansy phrase “my The Oldie April 2022 51

dear”’, in the words of Louis MacNeice, and the beer-swilling, sporty hearties.

It is easy to see into which camp Dodds, Murray and Bowra fell – although never exclusively – or, indeed, where Dunn’s sympathies lie. The story ends in the 1930s, with the vain Oxonian attempts at appeasement, as the ‘low, dishonest decade’ crumbles away into antiquity.

If this makes it sound downbeat, then rest assured that this is a witty and deeply researched book. It is full of revelations. Dunn finds the source of the tale of Hitler greeting Bob Boothby with ‘Heil Hitler’ and Boothby replying, ‘Heil Boothby.’ Maurice Bowra told the story; not Boothby himself.

Dunn has an eye for trivia. We learn that the much sought-after Regius Professorship of Greek was awarded by Queen Anne to one Anglo-Saxon specialist because she admired his bravery in undergoing a leg amputation, rather than because of any affinity with his subject.

She writes in an authoritative and hugely readable fashion and avoids anachronistic value judgements. Still, she approvingly cites Elizabeth Longford’s observation that the university dons denigrated women journalists as ‘aggressive’ and sneered that female writers such as Brittain ‘had had a memorable love experience’.

If there’s a pervasive theme, it’s the way anyone who was slightly out of the ordinary in the rarefied Oxford milieu – whether gay, from a humble background or female – would never be allowed to feel they truly belonged, however brilliant they were. Plus ça change?

Alexander Larman is literary editor of Spectator World

All hands on deck MARK BOSTRIDGE Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea

By Tom de Freston Granta £16.99 Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa made a huge impression on the young Eugène Delacroix. The moment he came out of the artist’s studio, he started running ‘like a madman’ and didn’t stop until he reached his own room.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, this vast canvas, five yards high and eight yards long, thrilled and repelled observers in equal measure. Rolled up and shipped to London the following year, the painting was displayed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, opposite what 52 The Oldie April 2022

Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19)

is now the turning into Bond Street. Forty thousand people handed over a shilling – £10 in modern terms – to see it. They’d come expecting to experience a frisson of terror and they weren’t disappointed.

Even today, standing in the Louvre before the picture, you are likely to feel some sense of giddy discomfort. The vertiginous angle of its tilted stage threatens the collapse of the divide between painting and spectator. You imagine the seawater spilling over the frame and flooding the gallery or, more nightmarishly, that the jumble of human bodies, dead and alive, is on the verge of falling forward onto the floor at your feet.

For contemporary observers, the painting was tied to a real-life tragedy that scandalised Bourbon France. In 1816, the flagship Medusa, carrying soldiers and settlers to the French colony of Senegal, foundered off the West African coast. The captain and over 200 passengers occupied the lifeboats, while 150 others were forced onto a hastily constructed raft that was quickly cast adrift and stranded on the high seas.

Almost two weeks passed before the raft was spotted by a rescue ship, the Argus. There were 15 survivors. During their days at sea, some passengers on the raft had mutinied, killing others. Many of the dying and incapacitated had been thrown into the shark-infested waters.

Cannibalism had been resorted to. At the time of their rescue, survivors were described as ‘lying on the boards, hands and mouths still dripping with the blood of their unhappy victims, shreds of flesh hanging from the raft’s mast’.

The painting has slipped history’s anchor, as Julian Barnes once memorably wrote, and in so doing it captures forms of suffering that transcend its subject matter. The black man waving towards the horizon reminds us that France’s colonial empire was built on the backs of African slaves. To a 21st-century eye, the plight of the survivors on the raft may bring to mind the refugee migrants currently risking their lives crossing the seas in small boats.

Tom de Freston, an artist in his thirties, has long been obsessed with Géricault’s painting. To him, The Raft is a microcosm of the worst that humans are capable of doing to one another, but with a glimpse of the hope offered by that ghostly ship in the distance.

His book gives us a painter’s insights into the eight months taken by Géricault, still only in his twenties at the time, to complete his masterpiece.

But Wreck also offers a modern counterpoint. De Freston writes of his own attempts to create an ambitious body of work that deals with themes of suffering and endurance. He wants to translate into a mix of paint and collage the trauma of Ali, a Syrian academic who lost his sight in a terrorist attack in Damascus in 1997.

At the same time, though, de Freston is combating the pain in his own life around his relationship with his ‘monster’ of a father, who has recently died. Géricault shaved his head and locked himself away in his studio to paint, partly to escape the despair he felt at the end of his relationship with Alexandrine, his aunt by marriage.

De Freston is consumed by a fierce desire to convey the horror of someone else’s experience, while recognising he is also being forced to confront his own.

His account burns with an intensity that’s sometimes disturbing and bewildering and, more often than not, powerfully moving. Tragically, at the end of the book, that burning intensity is literally reflected in the fire that destroys de Freston’s studio and several years’ work. Yet de Freston remains hopeful about the art he will create in the future.

In the final pages, you have an overwhelming sense of him facing up to the problems in his life and art, very much running towards and not away from them.

Mark Bostridge is author of Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend

An Author Writes

Female of the species is as randy as the male From lizards to lobsters, females enjoy multiple-mating Lucy Cooke

It’s an odd thing to find kinship with a killer whale.

Surely there’s little I have in common with a six-ton swimming torpedo. But I share a rather unusual biological trait with this wily submarine predator. Females in both our species go through the menopause.

Natural selection normally takes a brutal stance on a loss of fertility. For the vast majority of species, the message is simple: stop reproducing and you die. Just five known species buck this trend – humans and four species of toothed whale.

Grandmothers, it transpires, are the key to our shared post-reproductive anomaly. Killer whales are souped-up members of the dolphin family, with the smarts to match. These highly intelligent, highly social cetaceans live in family units of five to 20 individuals. Originally it was assumed these pods were led by the biggest male, with the smaller females forming his harem. We now understand that the leaders are not just female; they are the post-menopausal grannies.

These wise old matriarchs are living libraries for the environmental cultural knowledge that keeps their clan alive. By ceasing to reproduce halfway through their lives, they avoid competing with their daughters for the extra resources needed for pregnancy and lactation and have healthier grand-offspring as a result.

The same is true of humans. Research into hunter-gatherer societies suggests that such ‘grandmother effects’ also shaped the evolution of menopause in humans.

For centuries, female animals have been marginalised and misunderstood by the scientific patriarchy. Darwin is largely to blame. His theory of sexual selection branded females in the shape of a Victorian housewife: passive, coy, submissive creatures, whose only role was mothering.

Thanks to the rise of women scientists in the last few decades, a revolution has been brewing. It has redefined the female of the species and given her a modern makeover.

Take monogamy. It was long assumed that males are wired for promiscuity, whereas females will be choosy and chaste. But when feminist biologists started doing DNA tests on clutches of songbird eggs in the late 1980s, they discovered that each nest frequently had several fathers.

This rocked the world of ornithology and revealed a significant difference between social and sexual monogamy.

Some 85 per cent of songbirds do social monogamy very well and diligently pair up to share the parenting load. But females routinely sneak off to solicit sex with the neighbours to give her offspring the best chance of winning the genetic lottery. True sexual monogamy exists in less than seven per cent of songbird species, however devoted they may seem.

This revelation sparked a ‘polyandry revolution’. We now understand that multiple-mating is the preferred sexual strategy for males and females of most species, from lizards to lions to lobsters.

Humans included, whose tendency for social monogamy is perhaps an artefact of our culture rather than biology.

What’s more, many female animals enjoy their licentious lifestyles. All female mammals have a clitoris. For some, like the domestic ewe, it’s a rather discreet affair, while for others, like the spotted hyena, it’s a flamboyant eight-inch organ that bulges forth like a penis. A 2022 study on bottlenose dolphins’ sexual anatomy pronounced the highly sexed cetacean’s clitoral morphology sufficiently similar to humans’ that intense sexual pleasure seems a likely reward for promiscuous behaviour. Like humans, dolphins regularly engage in sex that’s not aimed at conception – it’s just for fun.

Such hedonism is thought to help maintain social bonds in their complex society. Wild bottlenose dolphins have been observed partaking in group orgies, where males and females use snouts,

flukes and flippers to excite the protruding clitorises of their cohorts. Direct stimulation has also been observed in sexual interactions between only females, which may dampen aggression between otherwise competitive individuals.

Across the animal kingdom, female competition generally revolves around access to resources related to reproduction – food, shelter or the fittest male.

Female topi antelope use their impressive horns to fight one another for the top bull’s limited sperm supplies.

Some pushy cows even charge those females actively engaged in intercourse with the desired male – behaviour you might expect to see on an episode of Geordie Shore, not in the Serengeti.

When it comes to social species like primates, status is key for determining access to the best assets. Females generally inhabit some kind of formal hierarchy.

Rank often passes down the maternal line and is therefore more predictable, and less dramatic, than male tussles for dominance.

But no less devastating. In savanna baboons, high-status females have it all: first dibs at food sources and a highranking protection racket for them and their babies. Low-status mums and their offspring are subject to bullying by those above. The resulting stress impacts their reproductive capacity and increases their chances of post-partum depression.

A low-ranking female baboon’s best chance of survival is to play a deft political game and ascend the social ladder through strategic coalitions with other females or males that protect her and her offspring.

Such diplomatic manoeuvring requires significant cognitive power. It’s probably one of the driving forces behind the increase in intelligence in all social primates – including us.

Lucy Cooke’s Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal (Doubleday) is out now The Oldie April 2022 55

History

Levelling up is nothing new

The 17th-century Levellers had radical ideas to reform the country david horspool Levelling up meant something different in the 17th century.

In the heady days of the Commonwealth, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Levellers was the name opponents gave to a group of agitators from the new Model Army who saw an opportunity to remake the political landscape.

They proposed, among other things, to give many more people the vote – all men over the age of 21, in fact, with a few exceptions: no servants, no royalists, no beggars and, of course, no women.

In some ways, with their guns and printed books, these people do seem ‘early modern’, as historians describe the period. But there can be few better illustrations of how different our worlds really are than the reaction to this programme, which looks to us unexceptionable, or too restrictive.

To many, even those who had fought for Parliament and gone along with the unprecedented trial and execution of an anointed monarch, the Levellers’ ideas seemed dangerously radical.

They had previously been summed up in the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough’s famous words, ‘I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; the poorest man in England is not bound at all in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.’

Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton, rejoined that only property – what he called ‘a permanent fixed interest’ – gave a man rights in ‘disposing of the affairs of the kingdom’.

But if the Levellers’ political ideas scared the Parliamentary grandees, the social innovations with which they were linked terrified them. I say ‘with which they were linked’ because many Levellers were at pains to distance themselves from those connections. Three Leveller leaders, John Lilburne, William Walwyn 56 The Oldie April 2022

and Richard Overton, wrote a manifesto, the Agreement of the People, republished while they were held in the Tower in 1649. In it, they declared, ‘It shall not be in the power of any Representative, in any wise, to … level men’s Estates, destroy Property, or make all things Common.’

‘Levelling’ could refer literally to the cutting-down of hedges enclosing private land, as well as to the more general idea of making all men equal, in financial as well as political terms. That was what Cromwell feared, referring to a group of politicians who wanted to ‘fly at liberty and prosperity, insomuch as if one man had 12 cows, they held that another that wanted cows ought to take share with his neighbour’.

Was that really how some people thought? Yes it was, as a new book, The Restless Republic by Anna Keay, vividly reminds us. One group called themselves ‘True Levellers’, though we know them better as the Diggers. Although their leaders were inspired by religious revelation, they had a very practical solution to what they saw as a fallen world: farming. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, thought that if the poor of England were allowed to sow crops on the country’s common land, ‘making the Earth a Common Treasury … they may live together as one House of Israel’.

Winstanley’s True Levellers are often described as communist, and they did try to hold the land they cultivated collectively. But they weren’t as threatening to property-owners as their opponents feared. Winstanley tried to put his ideas into practice twice in Surrey, where he had moved after his haberdashery business failed. But, at St George’s Hill and on Cobham Heath, the

English Levellers (1649)

areas Diggers planted were commons, not enclosed land. That didn’t stop the locals objecting, and violently driving them off both times.

So were there any Levellers who really wanted wholesale redistribution of wealth in Republican England? Cromwell certainly thought so.

But even the politicians to whom he referred – members of ‘Barebone’s Parliament’, named after one of its more radical religious members, Praise-God Barebone – were a mixed bunch, whose most radical social measure had been to restrict tithes and the rights of landowners to nominate clergy to local parishes. It was not Year Zero stuff.

For that, your best bet is the Ranters, given a new lease of life by Christopher Hill and his followers in the early 1970s.

Men such as Abiezer Coppe positively embraced the implications of levelling – up, down, in any direction really: ‘Behold, behold, behold, I the eternal God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming (yea even at the doors) to Level in good earnest, to Level to some purpose, to Level with a witness, to Level the Hills with the Valleys, and to lay the Mountains low…’

Faced with a White Paper like that, we might ask for more details.

Fortunately, this kind of Levelling wasn’t at the door. Nor, indeed, was the milder version espoused by Lilburne and co.

For that, we had to wait until the 20th century. Levelling up really is a long-term project.

The Restless Republic by Anna Keay (William Collins) is out now

Media Matters

Bring on the last days of The BBC’s evening news show has been stuffed ever since Paxo left stephen glover For as long as I have been a journalist, I have been a regular follower of Newsnight, the BBC’s nightly flagship current-affairs show. God knows how many thousands of hours I have watched, slumped on the sofa, not infrequently with a glass of wine to see me through.

Although, like many of Auntie’s works, sometimes guilty of left-wing bias, the programme was for a long time authoritative and informative. The rot set in when Jeremy Paxman left in 2014 after 25 years as its main presenter. Paxo was often infuriating but he imbued Newsnight with a sense of importance.

Grown-up politicians flocked to its studio to be eviscerated.

What a pale shadow of its old self it has become! Government ministers seldom bother to turn up these days. The nightly audience of about 300,000 is much less than half its size 20 years ago.

Several of its journalistic so-called experts appear amateurish and jejune.

Now several of its luminaries are abandoning the sinking ship. Its editor of only four years, Esme Wren, has escaped to Channel 4 News, and the queue to replace her is said not to be a long one.

Pugnacious interviewer Emma Barnett has announced that she is leaving Newsnight to concentrate on her duties on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

Most significantly, Emily Maitlis, who has worked on the programme for 20 years, is departing to join Global, a radio company which broadcasts LBC and Classic FM. She will be paid megabucks to launch an ‘innovative’ podcast with her friend Jon Sopel, also turning his back on the BBC. Maitlis is a controversial figure, whose left-wing inclinations are occasionally illuminated by anti-Government tirades on air and outspoken tweets.

Her departure is nonetheless a blow to the Beeb. If Newsnight’s mainstay can walk away from a salary of £330,000 for

a better-paid though seemingly more obscure job on radio, what does that say about Auntie’s leading current-affairs programme? Kirsty Wark, a presenter for nearly 30 years, who also leans to the Left, remains to hold the fort, in the company of a bevy of part-timers.

To be fair, one or two of these are impressive. Mark Urban, Newsnight’s veteran diplomatic editor, is sometimes given a turn in the main role, where he is calm, knowledgeable and fair. I admire too the programme’s irrepressible political editor, Nick Watt, who fearlessly beards ministers as they walk up Whitehall.

A former Guardian journalist, he betrays little or no political bias, and appears to have excellent Government sources.

Nonetheless, the general impression is one of a programme in its death throes which deserves to be put out of its misery. The BBC has reportedly considered addressing this, though in public it remains loyal.

At a recent staff meeting, Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s interim director of news and current affairs, attempted to scotch rumours of impending closure, and rather implausibly assured journalists that the show is in great shape. If so, why are people, from its editor downwards, so anxious to leave?

That the BBC should have a nightly current-affairs show can hardly be doubted. Oldie-readers may recall Tonight and its formidable anchor, Cliff Michelmore. It was eventually considered tired and dated, and along came Newsnight. Now Newsnight’s turn

to be replaced has come. The BBC should launch a new current-affairs programme in which it believes, and which it is prepared to back with adequate resources.

It will need a heavyweight presenter, the absence of which has hobbled Newsnight since Paxo left. Maitlis never succeeded in fulfilling that role. The irony is that there was one BBC journalist who could have done so – Andrew Neil.

Unfortunately, he was confined to late-night or midday programmes because he was considered right-wing, and therefore in Auntie’s eyes not entirely reliable. In fact, he was forensic, well informed – and never partisan.

Alas, that ship has sailed. As Newsnight is left flailing without a respected anchor, Neil has signed a deal to present ten Sunday-evening currentaffairs shows for Channel 4. Very possibly there will be more. I hope so. Those of us who have depended on Newsnight are being forced to look elsewhere.

I may have been premature in suggesting that GB News – whose short-lived first chairman and star presenter was the aforementioned Andrew Neil – was heading full pelt for the knacker’s yard.

According to Barb (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), GB News was watched by slightly more people in December than in October, though the audience is still small.

Journalists should not kick rival media organisations when they are down. Nick Robinson of the BBC’s Today programme on Radio 4 does not observe this convention.

When interviewing the creator of the online channel Big Jet TV, which attracted 238,000 viewers with films of planes landing in high winds at Heathrow Airport, Robinson remarked that ‘they dream of that at GB News’.

My advice is not to write off the new channel quite yet.

The Oldie April 2022 57

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The joy of coupling

TOM PLANT

It was the dog that got me thinking.

Watching her streak across a field, I realised that ‘running’ was an inadequate description. Every few yards, she would take to the air with all four legs off the ground. Her exuberant flights were better expressed as ‘leaps and bounds’.

But what’s the difference between a leap and a bound? Why not just ‘leap’, or just ‘bound’? My economical instincts said one was enough, and the two together were simply a lazy cliché.

I was wrong. Sometimes a pair can be better than the sum of its parts. No one understood that better than Edward Lear, who wrote more than two dozen verses to the metre of ‘Teapots and Quails,/ Snuffers and Snails,/ Set him a sailing/ and see how he sails!’ You’ll find no clichés among the ‘Bonnets and Legs,/ Steamboats and Eggs’, ‘Puddings and Beams, Cobwebs and Creams’.

Just as pleasing to me are many familiar pairings that some might call clichés; others idioms. I like ‘rough and tumble’ and ‘slap and tickle’. I’m less keen on ‘first and foremost’ (pointless repetition) and ‘part and parcel’ (confusing), but I’m happy to believe that ‘time and again Darby and Joan were going at it hammer and tongs’.

If they were not seen out and about, they may have been using their pestle and mortar, rigging their block and tackle, or mending their rack and pinion.

On writing this, I realise that parts

Music without melody Whatever happened to melody? Songs you can sing along to?

Radio 2 is supposed to cater for us old uns but increasingly I’m tuning in to be greeted by squeaks, whistles and thudthud-thud background beats with someone speaking over the so-called tune. I believe that last one is called cap. I

may seem slightly saucy. If so, that may be because pairs are so much a part of human make-up and procreation. If you think it all started in the Garden of Eden, you can attribute ‘love and marriage’, which of course go together like a horse and carriage, to the original couple, Adam and Eve. And don’t forget that the animals entered the Ark two by two.

If you prefer a more Darwinian account, you must still believe that our existence has until recently been wholly dependent on coupling. And for some reason we have ended up with two eyes, ears, arms, legs and so on, all of which remind us of the merits of things that come in twos, and the knowledge that not many come in threes, fours or fives.

In any event, the pleasure of coupled words is not reserved for the dirtyminded. Food-lovers can delight in sausage and mash, steak and kidney or fish and chips. Some may add Lea & Perrins; others gin and tonic.

Few will refuse bread and butter.

Many can be found in the Elephant and Castle, the Rose and Crown or the Coach and Horses.

Nothing special about these combinations, you may say. But take away one half of a good coupling and you’re usually left with something less agreeable. What would the foundling Daphnis have to talk about if deprived of the foundling Chloe? Acis, a shepherd, would be lumbered with someone much

also believe they’ve omitted the first letter.

I’m not saying I don’t like music with a beat. Queen is one of my favourite bands and I love songs like We Will Rock You. The difference between then and now is that you can join in with dear old Freddie, whereas the pounding beats of many of today’s songs bludgeon you while at the same time relaying a series of notes that appear to be unconnected.

Sound effects seem to be a thing. I heard one the other day in which a horse was being murdered at regular intervals. It sounded like that, anyway. I don’t

more ordinary but for the sea nymph Galatea. And Castor would be a mere chair wheel if he weren’t linked to Pollux – and probably with no place in the heavens either.

Surprisingly, places also come in pairs. When ‘Tobago’ is joined with ‘Trinidad’, each becomes more exotic.

That’s not true perhaps of ‘Hayes and Harlington’, but both couplings bring a pleasing alliteration.

‘Ross’ too is combined with a place, ‘Cromarty’, and also a person, ‘Somerville’. ‘Dean’ is linked ¬with ‘Pearl’, in the company, and with ‘Torvill’, in the performer. Businesses are rich in partnerships and mergers, many remembered nostalgically, at least by me.

Marshall & Snelgrove, Derry & Toms, Wylie & Lochhead: these are the stores of my childhood. And look at what happened to ‘Debenham’ once it had lost ‘Freebody’, and with it its soul.

The names of pairs who join words and music seem to last longer than those of partners in commerce. Thus ‘Gilbert’ still complements ‘Sullivan’.

‘Sankey’ supercharges ‘Moody’.

‘Lerner’ burnishes ‘Loewe’ and ‘Rodgers’ inspires ‘Hammerstein’.

New couplings come along all the time. ‘Test and trace’ is one, ‘Ant and Dec’ another. But will they last? Note that few enduring couplings can be readily reversed – except perhaps ‘bacon and eggs’. ‘Cream and strawberries’ is a rarity.

know what the noises were meant to convey.

Another popular trend is screaming. The best, or rather worst, example of this is by Black Box. The din created by them is called Ride on Time and the vocalist is

SMALL DELIGHTS About to reverse out of a supermarket parking space, when the chap in front drives away.

IAN GARNER, KEIGHLEY, WEST YORKSHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

nothing less than a screaming banshee. This so-called song is far removed from anything you could call music and, heaven help me, when it comes on the radio, visions appear in my mind of longrange snipers: a single shot and blessed silence.

I still listen to artists such as David Bowie, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac. I’ve tried to like new stuff, I really have, but so much of it is repetitive, tuneless and frankly, to my ears, awful. If I wanted to listen to bam, bam, bam, I’d go and bash my head against the wall.

Some of us would like it much gentler, thank you very much.

LAURA SHERIDAN The Oldie April 2022 59

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT CYRANO (12A) What a good idea it was to choose Peter Dinklage, the Game of Thrones star, to play Cyrano de Bergerac.

In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano has an embarrassingly huge nose. This Cyrano is, like Dinklage, a dwarf. The two conditions are very different – but they produce the same acute levels of poignancy.

No one can furrow a brow or drip melancholy into the eyes as well as Dinklage. He subtly delivers the agony of being unable to announce his unrequited love to Roxanne – played by Haley Bennett with a charming display of understated, winsome sweetness. She instead falls for Christian – a dreary, one-dimensional Kelvin Harrison Jr. But why, oh why did director Joe Wright let Dinklage sing? And sing a lot – much of the dialogue is simple,

declaimed verse, much like the dialogue in Hamilton.

Dinklage is a terrific actor – and not a very good singer. But the modern cult of authenticity means he should sing badly rather than be well-dubbed.

That authenticity cult is riddled with contradictions. Dinklage recently declared that the Disney remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is unfair to dwarfs. In the remake, a Latina woman is playing Snow White, to break down stereotypes, but the dwarfs are still dwarfs, to Dinklage’s outrage. His stance against dwarfs playing dwarfs promptly led to a lot of cross dwarf actors worrying about losing their jobs playing dwarfs.

But surely, if you really want to be authentic, dwarfs must be played by dwarfs? What knots we tie ourselves up in to appear virtuous!

All that matters in a film is good acting (and singing), a good screenplay, a good director and good sets. Why wilfully deny yourself a shot at getting all these things right because of virtue-signalling?

The sets, though, are exceptional. Joe

Cyrano (Peter Dinklage): fine acting let down by a flat screenplay 60 The Oldie April 2022

Wright wisely lets the baroque buildings of Noto, Sicily, and their honey-coloured tufa stone exert their own kind of romantic magic.

Wright grew up working at his parents’ puppet theatre, the Little Angel Theatre in Islington. Perhaps thanks to that, he is visually brilliant. In one scene, Cyrano goes off to war and is pictured silhouetted in black against a white background. The disadvantages of being a dwarf, up against much taller, fastermoving soldiers, are instantly and heartbreakingly revealed.

Joe Wright also has the gift of one of the great plots in the Cyrano story. The best stories – like the Iliad, the Odyssey or Shakespeare’s plots – are protean.

They can survive any amount of bending and playing around with – as long as their strong scaffolding is fleshed out with an impressive redecoration.

That hasn’t happened here. There is no tension, humour or real romance – beyond Dinklage’s fine acting of a lovelorn man – in the flat screenplay, written by Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife.

There’s every reason to remake one of those brilliant stories. And there have been dozens of theatrical and screen adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac – not least Gérard Depardieu’s heart-stopping turn in 1990.

But a new version must bring something new with it. My Fair Lady (1964) was, if anything, better than the original play, Pygmalion (1913).

Oliver! (1968) may not have been better than David Lean’s 1948 film version of Oliver Twist – but it was still a sublime work of art, one of the great musicals and utterly different from earlier adaptations of the story.

This new Cyrano brings little to the story, except for Noto’s lovely baroque buildings. Even they can’t support such a weak screenplay.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK CATCH ME IF YOU CAN Touring nationwide This is a rather strange production of a most peculiar play. It’s produced by the great impresario Bill Kenwright, whose name above the title usually guarantees a first-rate show. Yet the performance I saw at the Theatre Royal Windsor seemed distinctly creaky. How come?

Windsor was the first stop for this show on a national tour that runs until July. By the time you read this, it will have been on for several weeks, and by then it may well be a good deal slicker. But for this seasoned cast, the main challenge is the uneven, overcomplicated script.

Catch Me If You Can (not to be confused with the movie of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio) originated in Paris in 1960 as a play called Piège pour un homme seul (Trap for a Lonely Man) by French playwright Robert Thomas. In 1965, it was rewritten

by American duo Willie Gilbert and Jack Weinstock and ran on Broadway for several months.

Alfred Hitchcock planned to make a film of it but in the end nothing came of that. It’s been filmed for TV a couple of times and has become an am-dram staple. So, 60 odd years on, how does it play today?

Awkwardly is the short answer.

Thomas was a proponent of the comédie policière school of drama, a hybrid of crime and comedy – always a tricky combination (even classics of the genre, such as Joe Orton’s Loot, have proved notoriously difficult to stage). Like a lot of humorous whodunnits, Catch Me If You Can tilts one way and then the other, leaving the audience somewhat bemused.

When should we be laughing? Should we be laughing at all? For me, the sinister stuff works much better. It’s when the cast try to play it for laughs that this oddball thriller really shows its age.

The labyrinthine plot concerns a suave, middle-aged newly-wed called Daniel Corban, whose wife disappears during their honeymoon in a smart mountain resort. The local detective doesn’t seem that bothered, but then a priest turns up, accompanied by a contrite Mrs Corban. So far, so straightforward – except that Mr Corban swears blind that she isn’t his wife.

Thomas set his play in the French Alps, but Gilbert and Weinstock relocated it to the Catskill Mountains, inhabited by a bunch of film-noir

Whodunnit? Patrick Duffy, Gray O’Brien and Linda Purl in Catch Me If You Can

archetypes (you can see why Hitchcock was keen to take it on). The script is a sixties period piece, written in salty New York vernacular, sprinkled with wisecracks that must have seemed very clever and topical in 1965. It sounds like terrific fun, but the effect is hit-and-miss.

The cast have to spend an awful lot of time explaining the endless plot twists to the audience; there are countless phone calls; characters are constantly ushered in and out…

The only way to surmount these obstacles is to play the whole thing at breakneck speed, and the performance I saw simply wasn’t quick enough. Will it move up a gear as the show beds in?

Maybe. A touring show is an evolving entity, rather than a finished product, and a few weeks can make a big difference.

I’d be intrigued to see it again in a month’s time, but right now I can’t recommend it – which is a pity because there are some fine actors in this production, and there are moments when you get a fleeting glimpse of the show it could be. The comic cameos add nothing to the drama. Hidden beneath this frivolous wrapper is a darker, better play.

Linda Purl is convincing as the hard-bitten moll who may or may not be Mrs Corban, Gray O’Brien is a suitably hard-boiled detective, and Ben Nealon is nicely understated as the creepy, loquacious priest.

But the big name is Patrick Duffy, cast against type as Daniel Corban – yes, the man who played heart-throb Bobby Ewing in Dallas all those years ago.

In the first act, Duffy seems subdued and slightly stilted. Yet in the second act, he loosens up, and at the climax of the play he reveals a remarkable range of raw emotions. It’s a courageous, heartfelt performance, even when it doesn’t quite come off. Will this bizarre psychodrama find its feet as the tour progresses? I sincerely hope so.

It’s refreshing to see a mainstream star such as Duffy tackling something so demanding, stretching himself and taking risks. Such bravery and honesty deserve a better script.

Until 2nd July. For tour dates, visit www.kenwright.com

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘Then her husband comes home – and the parrot says, “ ’Allo, Keith.” ’ How we roared whenever Barry Cryer delivered that punchline.

In Broadcasting House’s tribute to Baz, Paddy O’Connell invited listeners to send in their own favourite Baz punchlines. A mistake. You can’t tell a joke with the preamble at the end.

I winged off to BH my favourites: (1) ‘Please yourself, the hens are round the back’ (from the ‘I’ve run over your cockerel’ joke) and (2) ‘Hardly worth going home, is it?’ (the graveside joke).

These were duly read out with professional éclat by Sean Rafferty: punchline first, The Oldie April 2022 61

preamble after. But it didn’t work, did it? Sigh.

Baz fared better in a later programme, telling his own stuff: ‘A voice calls out in a train corridor, “Is there a Catholic priest on board this train? Is there an Anglican vicar? Is there a rabbi?” Finally, a voice pipes up: “I’m a Methodist minister, if I can help…” “Nah, you’re no use to us – we’re looking for a corkscrew.” ’ Kate Clanchy broke down in tears on PM, talking about her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. A dedicated teacher, she salvages her immigrant pupils from their trapped lives, using poetry. Her publishers, bullied by social media into appointing sensitivity readers, ended by cancelling her. Luckily Swift Press swooped – so we can all still read her.

Clanchy writes brilliantly. It’s a revelatory book, even more so than Lucy Kellaway’s Re-educated, about switching to be a teacher. You can’t help asking, how many of us could do this? As for censorship by subliterates – just dip into Dickens and put the Fatboy or Fagin to the test. Literate readers love ‘offensiveness’.

In another radio tribute, to Bamber Gascoigne, the children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce said he’d loved University Challenge ever since he still believed the teams sat on top of each other. (A line that was repeated by a dozen commentators.)

Boyce also gleaned that ‘Unless you study science, you will end up knowing nothing about science.’ And that, however the brain works, ‘It is still miraculous.’

On Last Word, real warmth suffused every memory of the amiable Bamber – who once told me the trick question he pulled out whenever a team was struggling: ‘If A is for Aardvark and B is for Because, C is for Cabbage and D for Dog, what is E for?’ (Answer: Elephant.

Or any word beginning with E.) Then P J O’Rourke died. (It’s been a sad season.) The most-quoted living writer in the Penguin Book of Quotations was even funnier to meet, and not a line he uttered would get past a sensitivity reader. His was the humor (sic) of New Yorker cartoons – not the more laboured humour (sic) of Punch. (As Wordle players should know, there is a difference between the two.) But then Barry Cryer said that analysing what makes things funny – which, thanks to the ghastly Jimmy Carr, there’s been far too much of lately – is ‘like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies’.

Oh dear. The BBC has become ‘our BBC’, like ‘our NHS’: ‘The BBC is something that belongs to all of us’ – and, 62 The Oldie April 2022

doubly oh dear, ‘It only exists if we really believe it matters.’ Well, we do believe in Desert Island Discs alchemy. Lately celebrated: Leslie Caron (our Oldie of the Year), full of laughter at 90; and brave Lyse Doucet, poised against the wire of a new war zone. Then I relistened to what the late illustrator Jan Pienkowski (he, too!) had chosen: a Just William audiobook by Martin Jarvis; plus a perfect eight discs, ending with a Nunc Dimittis from Quarr Abbey. You can listen again, for ever.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON My screen life has turned into Groundhog Day. Last month, I reviewed The Gilded Age, in which Bertha Russell, aspirational wife of a robber baron, tries to break into the inner sanctum of Manhattan high society.

This month, I’m reviewing Inventing Anna (Netflix), which is about the exact same thing. Except that, while Bertha is being shunned by the Daughters of the Revolution, Anna Sorokin, AKA Anna Delvey, achieved her goal in a few laughably easy moves and is now doing time for grand larceny.

Based on an article for New York magazine by Jessica Pressler, Inventing Anna begins with the disclaimer ‘This story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are completely made up.’

The joke is, of course, that everything about Anna Delvey, a penniless 25-yearold Russian posing as a German heiress, is completely made up. But why, when the material was so good to begin with, did Shonda Rhimes, the creator and producer, need to invent anything more than what Anna invented herself?

From what I can gather, most of Inventing Anna is invention, including the character of her boyfriend, Chase, and the existence of her friends Val and Nora, while sticking the knife

Queen of cons: Sorokin (Julia Garner)

into her former friend Rachel Williams, who wrote a rival account of Anna for Vanity Fair.

What might have been a timely analysis of Instagram culture, imposture syndrome and fake news is blown into a blowsy nine-hour (nine-hour) shopping trip, a porn show of product placement, a cutesy, pseudo-feminist comedy of manners, in which Sorokin is a folk heroine in oversize Celine glasses and a baby-doll dress.

I realise that everyone in New York is on the take, but it is hard to punch the air in support of a creature as utterly alien to the human race as Anna Sorokin – at least as she is played by Julia Garner who gives her, for some reason, an Afrikaans accent.

Sorokin’s creepiness is pitched against the high-fiving chutzpah of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), the pint-size, pregnant journalist based on Jessica Pressler, who pursues Sorokin’s story against the express wishes of her editor. Visiting the prisoner on Rikers Island while contending with Braxton Hicks contractions, the intrepid Viv then chases up fraudulent bank statements when she should be constructing her baby’s crib.

What is she like!

Because more time is spent admiring Anna’s handbag collection than exploring her motivation or her apparently hypnotic effect on those she robbed, we are left with questions rather than answers. Why, for example, did none of the Internet-obsessed entrepreneurs who encountered Sorokin during her onewoman raid on New York’s hotels, banks, estate agents, lawyers, restaurants and designer outlets think to Google the father who was apparently controlling her purse strings?

I celebrated the end of Inventing Anna by watching The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Netflix), about another young American female conartist, Elizabeth Holmes. Would that Anna Sorokin had been given a no-frills documentary like this.

Holmes’s appeal, we learn from those who invested in her fake multibilliondollar health-care industry, consisted in blonde hair and an ability to speak for a full hour without blinking. She also adapted her vocal cords in order to sound baritone, which means that we should never invest in young women with weird voices.

Dramatising true stories needn’t detract from the truth. Despite the fact that Norman Scott complained that he came across, in his portrayal by Ben Wishaw, as ‘a weakling’, A Very English

Ed McLachlan

‘Now that’s what I call real Northern Lights!’

Scandal, with Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe, got to the marrow of the affair.

In the same way, A Very British Scandal, with Claire Foy as the Duchess of Argyll, nailed the case for Margaret Argyll. Both dramas were character studies and the characters made sense. A Spy Among Friends, out in November and based on Ben Macintyre’s book about Kim Philby (played by the always superb Guy Pearce), promises to do the same thing.

Anna Sorokin, on the other hand, makes no sense at all: what makes her tick? Is she a psychopath? Is she a criminal mastermind? In New York magazine, she explained to Jessica Pressler that she sees herself as a version of Tom Ripley: ‘Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know? But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.’

There is no talent in evidence anywhere in Inventing Anna. Only a desire to make a shedload of wonga.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE FESTIVALS IN 2022 ‘Normal service has been resumed,’ rejoices pianist Iain Burnside, artistic director of Ludlow’s annual English Song Weekend (8th-10th April).

Being a prudent soul, he adds, ‘As I type these words with one hand, I cross the fingers of the other,

muttering fervent prayers to the gods of viral variants.’

It would be an exaggeration to say that festivals – or ‘music meetings’, as such events were called before the Three Choirs Festival set up shop in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in the 1710s – have never had it so bad. But with the wreckage of COVID and Brexit strewn all about us, inflation once again raising its ugly mug above the parapet, and theatres, arts centres and churches, all key elements in the festival ecosystem, ‘going dark’ at an alarming rate, no one can pretend that these are propitious times for the arts in Britain.

Take my own local gaff, Windsor and Maidenhead, one of the country’s most affluent local authorities, which is proposing to reduce its arts funding to zero. Zilch – not a penny. Shades of Falstaff drinking in Windsor’s Garter Inn with barely a groat to his name.

It’s a move that suggests it was no accident that the celebrated Windsor Festival, founded by Yehudi Menuhin and Ian Hunter in 1969, was allowed to wither on the vine, or that in 2006 the town’s second-richest institution, Eton College, casually threw over a long and cherished tradition of hosting prestigious (and, to the music profession, lifesustaining) subscription concerts.

Some festivals are clearly struggling to release a 2022 programme. Others that came through the pandemic, their

colours torn but visible above the fray, appear to be back with a bang.

Buxton, for instance, promises ‘the biggest, bravest, boldest line-up yet’.

(The most recent festival I visited, back in 1987, seemed pretty big and bold, but I take the point.) Operas include a rare Donizetti, Rossini’s powerful and affecting realisation of Walter Scott’s lovely narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, and Violet, a new opera on the modish theme of time running out, by Tom Coult and Alice Birch. That’s also being seen at Aldeburgh, garaged last year but returning this June, firing on all cylinders.

Our summer opera festivals appear to be in reasonably rude health. Garsington has rather more revivals than usual; a chance perhaps for newcomers to hoover up tickets from disappointed regulars. But Longborough’s Wagner Ring cycle is back, on course and on stage, with Siegfried, while elsewhere Verdi’s Shakespeare is much favoured with new productions of Macbeth (the Grange Festival) and Otello (Grange Park Opera).

Glyndebourne’s three-month season offers operas by Mozart, Donizetti, Puccini and Poulenc and begins with a rarity, Ethel Smyth’s Cornish-set opera, The Wreckers. As I wrote here in June 2018, it’s a fascinating piece – Beecham and Bruno Walter both conducted it; Mahler planned to stage it – that is both a precursor to and a The Oldie April 2022 63

objections were less to do with Dvořák’s all too personable music than with an age in which, as he put it, ‘Requiems are offered as a sort of treat, whether anybody is dead or not.’

Still, where are we going to hear the Dvořák nowadays, except at a festival?

A list of music festivals and their currently available performance and booking dates can be found on the Oldie website

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON JUKEBOX MUSICALS

LOUIS ATHERTON / ALAMY

Handlebar moustache: Elgar statue by Oliver Dixon, Hereford Cathedral

possible model for Britten’s Peter Grimes. Curiously, Glyndebourne will be reviving it in French, the language of the original libretto – despite the existence of a perfectly good English translation by Dame Ethyl herself, and a team that looks worryingly light on Francophone singers, let alone an orchestra who understand French.

No such language problems will trouble Opera Holland Park’s staging of Mark Adamo’s remaking of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which has been charming American audiences these past 20 years. It’s good news, too, that the wonderful old (1951) Wexford Festival in Southern Ireland is back, tempting true believers with operatic rarities by Halévy, Félicien David and Dvořák. (If you haven’t visited, be advised it’s better to fly to Dublin, with its many attendant delights, than risk the Irish Sea in all its autumnal hullabaloo.)

Rare Dvořák will also be opening this year’s Three Choirs Festival in Hereford.

When Dvořák declined the 1888 Birmingham Festival committee’s invitation to set local priest John Henry Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, he wrote a Requiem instead, leaving the way open for Edward Elgar to take up the idea 12 years later. Hence some bright spark’s idea to open the 2022 Hereford Festival with the Dvořák and end with the Elgar.

Three Choirs sceptic George Bernard Shaw claimed to loathe the Dvořák, amazed that ‘any critic should mistake this paltry piece of orchestral and harmonic confectionery for a serious composition’. Yet I suspect that his 64 The Oldie April 2022

Jukebox musicals have been popping up in (or should that be ‘propping up’?) the West End for what seems like ever.

In recent times, Hamilton (the Alexander Hamilton one), We Will Rock You (the Queen one), Motown: The Musical (the Detroit one), Girl from the North Country (the Bob Dylan one), Bat Out of Hell (the Meat Loaf one), Beautiful (the Carole King one), Sunny Afternoon (the Kinks one) and Mamma Mia! (the Abba one) have all been happy-customer house-fillers.

In my hunger to see something live, and cram into a red velvet seat eating sour-cream Pringles, I went to see The Drifters Girl for you.

You will need no telling that this ‘brings to life’ the story of the doo-wop supergroup a bit like a football team (the Drifters were like the Yankees, with 60 different players over six decades) – and the good news is it does just that.

It stars Beverley Knight, officially this nation’s Queen of Soul. As Colin, my

costermonger on the Portobello Road, would say, she has a pair of pipes on her, and can carry a tune. She plays Faye Treadwell and alone is worth the price of admission.

Why, though, do we go to the theatre to see these ‘journeys’ recreated? Partly because the songs in the jukebox musical tend to be solid-gold hits (in the Drifters’ case, Stand by Me, Save the Last Dance for Me, Saturday Night at the Movies, Sweets for my Sweet and Under the Boardwalk). The productions are slick, the dancing exciting, the sound pure … and loud. As with the popularity of cover bands, it shows we prefer to see the old stuff being done by unknown artists rather than see famous artists doing their new stuff.

And, let’s face it, the old stuff – there are 25 musical numbers in The Drifters Girl – is a string of belters, reminding us that the Golden Age of popular music began in the ’50s, peaked at the start of sexual intercourse in 1963 and ended with the Beatles’ last LP (Let It Be, 1970).

This is why I persevere with jukebox musicals: because they remind me of the way we were. They are a guilty pleasure.

They flood my endocrine system with pleasurable nostalgia. And even if I couldn’t (and won’t) tell you which one of the musical numbers was written by the Drifters, it didn’t matter. It was fun to hear them all, belted out by portly singers in their zoot suits and trilbies, while Beverley Knight brought the house down.

I enjoyed it so much that I’m quite tempted to go to see Tina (the Tina Turner one, in case you hadn’t guessed) and even Saturday Night Fever (the Bee Gees one) and I’ll report back if I do.

I hear they’re rather good.

There goes my baby: Beverley Knight with Tosh Wanogho-Maud, Matt Henry, Adam J Bernard and Tarinn Callender as the Drifters

Carriage trade: Train Landscape (1939), Wedgwood ‘Garden’ pattern dinnerware design and Elizabeth II coronation mug

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU EXTRAORDINARY EVERYDAY: THE ART & DESIGN OF ERIC RAVILIOUS

ABERDEEN CITY COUNCIL (ARCHIVES, GALLERY & MUSEUMS COLLECTION) / J HAMMOND

The Arc, Winchester, to 15th May ‘Cheerfulness kept creeping in,’ the artist Douglas Percy Bliss said. That is one of the reasons his friend Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is so warmly regarded.

Another is his ability to see beauty in everything. Despite the general absence of humans in much of his work – those who do appear are slightly surreal – he gives humanity and a mystical spirituality to his subject matter: not just machinery or domestic interiors, but even the Downs with their chalk figures.

Ravilious was making his name as a wood-engraver and designer when he told Helen Binyon that his ‘greatest ambition was to revive the English tradition of watercolour painting’.

He succeeded.

In a 1939 exhibition review, Jan Gordon, himself a watercolour painter, said Ravilious’s works, ‘by a combination of unexpected selection, exactly apt colour and an almost prestidigitous watercolour technique and textural variety, appear as something magic, almost mystic, distilled out of the ordinary everyday’.

There have been a number of Ravilious exhibitions so far this century.

Several, including the very popular 2015 show at Dulwich, were curated by the authoritative James Russell. Here he is again. Instead of concentrating on one aspect of Ravilious’s career, he gives due weight to design, printmaking, landscape and war work.

Even though Ravilious died in 1942, his clear, clean designs for Wedgwood have become emblematic of the midcentury decades. The Coronation mug intended for Edward VIII in 1936 was quickly recycled for his brother, and again for his niece in 1953. Similarly, Ravilious was quite at home at the Festival of Britain.

The combination of his skills

produced a technique that didn’t just build on the great past of the watercolour school, but advanced it – probably more than did his friends the Nash brothers, Bawden and Piper. Laura Cumming has called him ‘the Seurat of Sussex’, and his watercolours have a grainy pointillism carried over from wood-engraving.

Light, often silvery – unlike the blaze of Samuel Palmer – is a principal ingredient. His everyday things are given a ‘faery’ sheen. By contrast to John Piper’s ‘bad luck with the weather’ when he was working at Windsor Castle for George VI, Ravilious’s wartime watercolours dazzle.

‘I find it pays better’ The Oldie April 2022 65

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER GREAT GARDENING COUPLES Books by Margery Fish, of East Lambrook Manor in Somerset, have never been far from my reach.

During my prolonged hospital incarceration a dozen years ago, they choked my bedside locker. She was an unshowy writer but doled out stimulating paragraphs about the plants she knew and grew, gently encouraging benign covetousness in a swelling band of readers.

I passed the manor’s gates a couple of weeks ago, quietly saluting her memory while speeding to a funeral in Yeovil.

Queen Victoria ruled over us at the time of Margery’s birth in 1892, but she survived into the Swinging Sixties (though I doubt she ever swung), signing off in March 1969, when her garden – for she adored spring-flowering plants – must have looked superbly well furnished.

The first five of her eight books are the best of them, starting in 1954 with We Made a Garden. Was it the editorial ‘we’ or an inclusion of her husband, Walter?

According to Margery’s nephew Henry Boyd-Carpenter, in his foreword to the 1970 paperback edition, the book started life as Gardening with Walter, ‘but the publisher to whom it was shown took one look and declared gruffly, “Too little gardening and too much Walter” ’.

The Fishes were opposites in just about every way, except they both had Fleet Street careers. Walter was a news editor and then editor of the Daily Mail, while Margery, ‘the much softer personality’, had proved herself an indispensable assistant to, among others, Lord Northcliffe, the Mail’s proprietor.

Master of all he surveyed, Walter took a leading and dominant role in the making of the manor’s garden. His preference for summer-flowering plants,

East Lambrook Manor, the Fishes’ home

especially dahlias ‘the size of soup plates’, meant Margery had to coddle secretly her ‘tiny, unassuming, even difficult plants’, for which she had great affection.

Only several years after Walter’s death in 1947 was We Made a Garden published. By that time, ‘all the borders had been reworked to include spring and late-autumn flowers, which he would never countenance’.

Most importantly, as Catherine Umphrey (in ‘Companion Planting’ in the winter 1993 issue of the gardening quarterly Hortus) went on to record in her brilliant analyses of Walter and Margery’s years together, ‘Margery Fish’s gardening genius had been liberated.’

And that sense of liberation, a vital expression of imaginative individualism, is essential to any artist worthy of the name.

Yes, notable creative couples do succeed – think Rodgers and Hart, Flanders and Swann, Hinge and Bracket – and in today’s gardening world you’ll find countless duos (in a cocktail of gender pairings) working in double harness – though, like the Fishes, not always comfortably.

I have gardened with the same partner for more than 30 years. And rather like Harold and Vita at Sissinghurst Castle (there all comparisons must end), we play different parts. I enjoy the fabulous gifts of a talented landscaper, who in turn

allows me to run free with plants to fill an abundance of gorgeous spaces. In time, of course, couples learn from each other.

Roles mutate and lines of demarcation blur, often resulting in exchanges of exciting and fabulously unexpected ideas.

Mrs Fish’s books remain in print. They belong on every gardener’s bookcase, dusted off frequently for the sheer satisfaction of good, straightforward garden writing. Score-settling and sage-like, let the evergreen Margery, who ended We Made a Garden with these words, be allowed to repeat them here: ‘My philistine of a husband often told with amusement how a cousin when asked when he expected to finish his garden replied, “Never, I hope.” And that, I think, applies to all true gardeners.’

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD PAK CHOI Sweden produced two outstanding botanists in the 18th century: Carl Linnaeus and the slightly less-wellknown Pehr Osbeck.

Before in later life becoming a vicar, Osbeck spent time in China and brought back hundreds of new plant species, including the seeds of a vegetable now known as pak choi or bok choi.

Seed sown under glass this month (March/April) may produce enough leaves to cut after five weeks. The thinned plants may then be transplanted into the ground, or grown on in pots.

Alternatively, sow the seed outside from May onwards, and the pale green or white stems should be ready for harvesting in two to three months.

But beware of bolting. There are varieties of pak choi described as bolt-resistant, but all are in danger The Oldie April 2022 67

of running to seed if the soil temperature is too low in the early stages of growth and the plants are short of water during the long June days. Perhaps the best advice is to treat the immature leaves as a cut-and-come-again vegetable, and to wait until after midsummer before sowing seed for a mature crop.

Like other greens with a tendency to bolt, pak choi will benefit from an August sowing, as long as the soil is mulched with garden compost or horse manure and given regular watering. The plants will thrive in warm temperatures and with shortening days, and are unlikely to run to seed. One variety, Joi Choi, it is claimed, can be sown until October and is resistant to frost. But it is likely to need some protection.

As with all brassicas, oriental greens are prey to pigeons, caterpillars and cabbage root fly. If East and West are to be kept apart – ‘and never the twain shall meet’ – an attractive Chinese patch can be grown in a separate area of the kitchen garden. The seeds of Chinese cabbage, mizuna and komatsuna (spinach mustard), together with pak choi, could be mixed and broadcast over a bed of wellprepared soil that has plenty of moisture.

When the leaves are ready for cutting, they may then be stir-fried, Chinese style, with garlic, ginger and soy sauce.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD BISCUITS V COOKIES For a mouthful of sunshine on a damp spring day, raid the cookie jar or stick your hand in the biscuit tin. The difference between a cookie and a biscuit is that the first is chewy, squidgy and American, while the second is crisp, snappy and English.

As a general rule, soft brown sugar delivers squidgy and chewy; hard white sugar gives crisp and snappy. A cookie is cooked when the edges are browned, the middle still pale. A biscuit should be firm and browned all over and crisps as it cools.

Biscuits keep for ever in an airtight tin and taste best when dipped in something hot and wet. Cookies are best eaten warm, and stay fresh for a week or two in a sealed box in the fridge – a quick blast in the oven will restore the status quo.

Nancy Jenkins’s gingernuts This is the classic English dipping biscuit, even though the recipe comes courtesy of a New Englander (thank heavens for the colonies). Makes 2 dozen.

125g plain flour 1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda 1 heaped tsp ground ginger 1 tsp ground cinnamon ½ tsp ground cloves 1 tsp salt 125g unsalted butter, softened 75g granulated sugar 1 small egg 4 tbsp black treacle (molasses) To finish About 100g extra sugar for coating Toss the flour, bicarb and spices together in a bowl, and reserve. Beat the butter with sugar till soft and fluffy. Fork the egg with the treacle.

Fold the flour with the butter and sugar, alternating with the egg and treacle, with a spatula or metal spoon till thoroughly combined. This is a pastry-like dough – don’t be tempted to loosen it like a cake mix.

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth or clingfilm and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Heat the oven to 180oC/350oF/Gas 4.

Take a tablespoon of the dough, pat it into a firm ball (easiest with damp hands), then roll it around in the finishing sugar till well coated. Continue till all are done.

Arrange the balls about 5cm apart on a couple of buttered and lined baking sheets.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the biscuits have collapsed into flat discs with a crackly pattern on top.

Remove from the oven and leave them to rest on the baking sheets for about 10 minutes. Transfer carefully to a wire rack to crisp and firm. Store in an airtight tin when perfectly cool.

ELISABETH LUARD

Anne Willan’s Chocolate-Chip Cookies The classic recipe should not be ruined, advises Anne Willan in her Complete Guide to Cookery (Reader’s Digest, 1989), by a temptation to replace hand-chopped chocolate with ready-made chocolate chips. You have been warned. Makes about 24 palm-sized cookies.

150g plain flour ½ tsp salt 125g unsalted butter, softened 68 The Oldie April 2022

75g caster sugar 75g light brown sugar 1 small egg 1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda 100g high-quality dark chocolate, chopped Preheat the oven to 190oC/375oF/Gas 5.

Sift the flour with the salt in a roomy bowl. Beat the butter with the two sugars till the mixture is light and pale. Beat in the egg. Dissolve the bicarb in a teaspoon of hot water and stir it into the mixture.

Fold in the flour in three batches. Stir in the chocolate.

Drop heaped teaspoons of the mixture onto a couple of lightly buttered nonstick baking trays, making sure they’re about 7cm apart to allow for spread.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, till the edges are browned, the middles still pale. Allow to cool a little before transferring to a baking rack. Store in a plastic box in the fridge.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE FRENCH LESSONS Le Gavroche has stopped serving lunch.

For 99.9 per cent of you, this will not be a ravens-leaving-the-tower moment – but something is up. And not just because of the pandemic. Could our servitude to the hegemony of French cuisine have come to an end? Generation X has no truck with our erstwhile inferiority complex which ran from the post-Waterloo British invasion of Paris to the advent of modern British cookery in the 1990s. They know nothing of those post-war menus which camouflaged culinary tragedies with French names, or just endorsed their wares with some much-needed franglais (‘gâteau cake’, ‘fromage Stilton’, ‘fruit and crème’).

And are we Baby Boomers not a little embarrassed that we let Fanny Cradock show us how to impress our neighbours with a trolley of delights such as Oeufs à la Riga, a concoction brought to life with blue vegetable dye?

And what is French cuisine nowadays?

I went to Cigalon in Chancery Lane with The Oldie’s art critic, Huon Mallalieu; the menu was excellent but no different from those of gastropubs across the land.

If only French chefs weren’t too proud to reinvent themselves. It’s all very well for Mon Plaisir (est 1947) to drape itself in tricolour bunting, but is it any good?

For how much longer will our great brasseries fob us off with confit canard, a tin of which we can buy in a French supermarket for under a fiver?

Yet, Asterix-like, there are a few places that are holding out against the

monotony and reclaiming the palme d’or of yesteryear. If you want grandeur, head for Maison François in St James’s or Les 110 de Taillevent in Cavendish Square.

But if you’re done with the condescension of young French waiters, here are three to which I return regularly.

In third place is Cépages, a happy, openbricked wine bistro in Notting Hill. Feast on duck rillettes and saucisson while trying lots of well-priced glasses, courtesy of Coravin.

Then comes Le Boudin Blanc, in Shepherd Market. Lots of classics (Goliath-proportioned escargots and filet de veau), and very well executed. My chef accomplice, Rowley Leigh, trained by the Roux brothers in the seventies, was in ecstasy. Even more so when he found they were offering Le Grand Village, made by M Guinaudeau who makes Château Lafleur, for £49. So taken were we with the waitress, Anouk Aimée’s double, that we lost control and ordered a bottle of La Pialade, ‘a snip at £120, given it’s £180 at Berry’s’. The chef doesn’t get out much.

Yet my favourite new restaurant is Les 2 Garçons in Crouch End. With just 24 covers, this is the most brilliant small restaurant in London and the first that genius Baby Boomer chef Robert Reid has actually owned, having worked at the Oak Room and Balthazar. He and J-C, the maître d’, are the entire staff.

This is truly a bistro de quartier: the best-ever French onion soup and beef Wellington. The pear tarte tatin will blow you away, as it did Pierre Koffman when he and The Oldie’s drinks critic, Bill Knott, went there. Virgil believed a taverna was blessed by three gods: ‘innocent’ Ceres, Bromius and Amor – and here, the greatest of the three is Amor.

DRINK BILL KNOTT SWEET TALK You might suppose that the job of a wine writer offers a skeleton key to the world’s finest cellars, a never-ending ride on a gilded merry-go-round of grand cru tastings.

Sadly not, although – just occasionally – an invitation plops on the mat (or, more often, pings into the inbox) that does have a distinct whiff of luxury about it. Such was the summons to dinner with Sandrine Garbay, cellar-master of the fabled Château d’Yquem in Sauternes, about 30 miles south-east of Bordeaux.

Yquem is perhaps the most famous sweet wine in the world. It is also one of the most expensive: the great 2001 vintage, for example, will set you back around £300 for a half-bottle. In

Yquem’s defence, however, you get a lot of grapes for your money.

Because only properly rotted grapes (Yquem’s ancient vineyards are especially susceptible to pourriture noble, noble rot, a fungus that shrivels grapes and concentrates their sugars) are used for each vintage, each glass of the resultant nectar is the product of an entire vine.

Thanks to the combination of intense fruit and high acidity, vintages of Yquem are incredibly long-lived – a century or more. Madame Garbay thinks that they are most expressive at around 15 years.

Having tasted the 2007 with her over dinner, I agree. I stole one final glug just before leaving and I could still taste its amazingly rich melange of marmalade, saffron and barley sugar half an hour later.

Marketing man Mathieu Jullien, who was also at dinner, thinks ‘dessert wine’ is too restrictive, preferring to call it ‘sweet wine’. Certainly, Sauternes classically pairs very happily with Roquefort or foie gras. The menu eschewed both, but we were served the 2017 with roast chicken, and jolly nice it was, too, although perhaps not quite giving Montrachet a run for its (considerable) money.

I might not taste Yquem again for years, but I do love sweet wines. Latepicked German Riesling and Hungarian Tokaji are particular favourites, the top examples rivalling Sauternes in both complexity and price.

There are many sweet wines that won’t break the bank. At around a fiver a bottle, Moscatel de Valencia – available from most supermarkets – is cheap enough to poach pears in, as well as good to drink.

I have fond memories, too, of drinking the local Muscat during a splendid lunch at L’Auberge de L’École, an old schoolhouse in the tiny village of Saint-Jean-de-Minervois, and of sampling honeyed, floral Muscat in the dizzyingly steep vineyards on Samos.

Waitrose’s Samos Vin Doux is a steal at £8.99. And the similarly well-priced sweet wines from Saussignac and Monbazillac went down very well on an Oldie trip to the Dordogne a few years ago.

There are fine sweet wines to be had from the New World, too. Look out for Quady Wines from California; Klein Constantia’s Vin de Constance from South Africa; and numerous examples from Australia – Brown Brothers Late Harvest Orange Muscat & Flora is widely available and delicious. The Aussies, too, in their inimitably down-to-earth fashion, have devised their own solution to the problem of what to call dessert wines, pudding wines and sweet wines.

They are all known, simply and accurately, as ‘stickies’.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of a classic white from the south of France to drink as an aperitif or with seafood; a meaty, great-value claret from old vines; and a Malbec from Argentina that would perfectly partner a plate of roast beef. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Picpoul de Pinet ‘Ornezon’, Vignerons de Florensac, Côteaux de Languedoc 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Crisp, lively white with a touch more body and length than the average Picpoul.

Château Floréal Laguens, Bordeaux Supérieur 2018, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00 Once known as Château Lafitte, and much better value than its nearnamesake: classic, complex claret.

Aguaribay Malbec, Valle de Uco, Argentina 2019, offer price £11.99, case price £143.88 Silky tannins and plenty of fruit: drinking well now, and will keep for at least a couple of years.

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The Oldie April 2022 69

SPORT JIM WHITE WOMEN’S CRICKET Back in 1998, a member of the MCC objected to the idea of women’s being allowed to join him in the Lord’s pavilion on the basis that, were they granted access, ‘the Long Room would resound to the clattering of teacups’. Hardly the most alarming of prospects.

I know this happened because I’ve been round a new exhibition at Lord’s charting the evolution of women’s cricket. And for an old bloke like me, it is a chastening experience – because what I didn’t know before is that women were playing cricket almost from the time it was codified. The first recorded match between ‘11 maids of Bramley and 11 maids of Hambledon’ was reported in the Reading Mercury in 1745. Apparently, the report continues, ‘the girls bowled, batted and ran as well as most men could do in that game’.

There is a wonderful picture in the exhibition of a match between the Countess of Derby and ‘other ladies’ in 1779, in which the players are all wearing bizarre bonnets which make them look as if they are participants in the Squid Game. In those enlightened Georgian times, young girls were encouraged to play. Indeed, the exhibition suggests a woman – Christina Willes – might have invented overarm bowling when she found her voluminous skirt an impediment to the traditional method of delivering the ball underarm.

The Victorians, high-minded moralists that they were, put an end to that sort of thing. Cricket was deemed unladylike; women were not encouraged to seam and spin. Some still played, though. The exhibition has the dress worn by a participant in a nationwide tour of women cricketers in 1890. Some 15,000 people turned up to watch the women play in Liverpool, earning them a bumper payday. Unfortunately the team manager absconded with the gate receipts and they ended up with nothing.

The thief was a man, obviously.

Male distaste for women’s cricket lasted well into the 20th century. As recently as 1963, the former England captain Len Hutton announced that the very idea of females playing the game was ‘absurd – like a man trying to knit’.

When Rachael Heyhoe Flint organised a women’s World Cup in 1973 (two years before the first men’s incarnation), Lord’s refused to let her stage the final there. It took 47 years of tireless lobbying before the home of cricket hosted its first women’s game, in 1976. Since then, tellingly, only 20 more matches have 70 The Oldie April 2022

That said, the least reliable EV was the £60,000-plus Audi e-tron, followed closely by the £80,000-plus Tesla Model X and the £60,000-plus Jaguar i-Pace.

The most reliable five-star EVs were Kia’s £32,895-plus e-Niro and Suzuki’s £22,249-plus Vitra and S Cross range.

Two-star Tesla is ninth from bottom.

But if you include hybrids and extend across all age ranges, Lexus, Honda and Toyota are the three most reliable manufacturers. Land Rover, Audi, Fiat and Alfa Romeo all languish in the bottom ten.

Among used electric cars, the 2011-17 Nissan Leaf proved most reliable, with only two per cent having broken down and none of the 142 owners surveyed having had to replace a battery. But battery range degrades with time, and some of the older models may not get you more than 50 or so miles on a charge.

The 2015-onwards 30kWh battery is the best. Among used cars of all types – EVs, hybrids, petrol, diesel – Toyota and MOTORING Lexus lead the way, especially Toyota’s ALAN JUDD RAV4 and Prius and the Lexus RX. CARS YOU CAN RELY ON Considering all types of new car, they reckon the most reliable is the Honda Surveys of car reliability are big Jazz, for the second year running. No generalisations – like health guidance. owner had a single fault to report. Next We all know we shouldn’t drink too came most Toyota and Lexus models, all much, smoke or get fat, yet we may also know teetotal, smoke-free fitness fanatics benefiting from Toyota’s industry-leading warranty which, if the car is serviced by who didn’t make their half-centuries as well as overweight old soaks puffing their Toyota, is for ten years or 100,000 miles.

Would Land Rover dare do that? way through their eighties. We know too But these are big generalisations that the most reliable cars in the world sometimes break down while some of the based on relatively small numbers.

It’s also important to define terms, least reliable seem to potter on for ever. something Which? helpfully does.

Nevertheless, generalisations are ‘Very reliable’ means that an average of usually – to generalise – worth heeding.

11 out of every 100 cars up to four years Thus, the latest Which? car guide, entitled The UK’s Best and Worst Cars, is old would have needed attention at least once in the past year, with one or two worth a glance. Some of it is predictable, having broken down on the road. such as that Japanese and Korean cars ‘Very unreliable’ means that 40 out are the most reliable. But some of every 100 would have isn’t. I would have guessed needed attention, with that electric vehicles 23 needing to call out a (EVs), having many fewer breakdown service. moving parts, are the I’ve often asked most reliable, while industry insiders hybrids – because why Japanese and they’re complicated – Mr Reliable: the Honda Jazz Korean manufacturers are least. consistently make the most reliable Not so – it’s the other way round. And machinery, without getting a satisfactory how much you spend seems not to be a answer. It’s not a question of where or by reliable guide to what you get. whom they’re made, since many 48,034 drivers contributed to the thousands of Hondas, Toyotas and survey, reporting on 56,853 individual Nissans have been produced here in the cars categorized by age – 0-4, 5-9 and UK. I suspect it’s to do with attention to 10-15 years. Only 2,184 of those drivers detail, a determination to get things right were EV-owners and there was sufficient information on only 15 EV models to rate rather than ready, and intelligent motivation of staff. reliability. Such small samples can But I don’t know. Answers on a produce skewed results and of course postcard, please. most EVs fall into the 0-4 age range.

been played there. And five of those were last year.

What seems so odd – and more than a touch embarrassing – about the reluctance to allow women to embrace the game is how pointless the snootiness was. Like a child hunkering down over an essay to prevent anyone from copying, we men have spent much of the last couple of centuries doing our best to stop our female contemporaries from enjoying the game we love. Exclusivity rather than inclusivity has been our watchword.

At least until 2017, when 25,000 people filled Lord’s to watch England’s women win the World Cup. After that, we blokes have been busy telling everyone how much fun the women’s game is; how they really can bat, bowl and field with panache. The revelation delivered by the brilliant MCC Museum exhibition is that it seems it was ever thus. If only we chaps had taken off our blinkers, we might have spotted it earlier.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Google is watching you As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t watching you. And if you go online, they certainly are watching.

The problem is that it’s hard to be anonymous online. Even if we were, it would remove much of what the internet is useful for. You can’t anonymously buy broad-bean plants online. So we happily admit who we are and dish out information about ourselves. That has allowed Google, Facebook and others to reap a lot of hay.

As we know, Google is free because we are the product, not the client; our details are used to sell targeted

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk Victoria & Albert Museum vam.ac.uk The V&A has many online collections of their exhibits; click on collections and scroll down to online.

British Pathé youtube.com/c/britishpathe British Pathé has an archive of 85,000 newsreels; many of the best are on their YouTube channel. You can spend hours here.

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

advertising. But how much can it really know about us? The answer is a surprising amount – and what they don’t know they often guess, eerily well.

In the first place, your computer is a blabbermouth. It has a unique identification number which it passes to websites, along with information about your ISP, browser, operating system and more. It tells a website all this before you’ve done anything. The website can now identify you, see and remember what pages you look at, and spot you if you come back.

From all this it can start building up a profile of you. Then, once you’ve placed an order for broad-bean plants, if not before, it has enough data to sell to one of the big advertising platforms. That platform then places relevant adverts on the website you are looking at, which is when you start seeing the same adverts on different websites. They know that it’s you looking, or at least it’s someone using your computer.

This sort of thing moves into overdrive with search engines, because they have a much broader picture of you.

To find out what Google knows about you, go to myaccount.google.com and look around. From the menu, find ‘Data and Privacy’, then ‘History Settings’ and then ‘Web & App Activity’. There you can see exactly what you’ve been up to on their numerous services – searching, maps, websites visited, YouTube videos watched (Google owns YouTube) and so on.

Then go to adssettings.google.com.

This shows what Google knows, or has

guessed, about you and then uses to pick the adverts to show you. Click on each section; it will explain itself and give you a chance to turn it off.

Now, before you mutter and grumble about privacy and intrusion, please remember that it was you who told Google all this stuff, even if you didn’t know you were doing so. Google didn’t set out to spy on you; it just recorded what you did.

To be fair to Google, it makes no secret of any of this and offers you the chance to delete records and tame what it collects in future. Still, Google’s caveat will always be that if you do exclude yourself, you are hampering its ability to provide you with a smooth and helpful service. Maybe.

Companies have always collected information on how we interact with them. It would be odd if they didn’t. In fact, I think we’d be irritated if a company didn’t keep a record of our dealings with them.

However, it is the scale of what is collected these days that takes some getting used to. Every step we take on the internet is recorded somewhere – often in more than one place. You even do it yourself, because Windows keeps a record of actions on your computer.

Half of me worries that it’s too much, but the other half wonders whether it really matters. I’m not doing anything nefarious, and if what I am doing helps Google find the information I want without charge, perhaps it’s a fair price to pay.

So I’ll relax and go back to planting the broad beans.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Death and death taxes Plans to overhaul the inheritance-tax rules were abandoned late last year after the government reviewed recommendations from the Office for Tax Simplification.

There had been a hint in 2019 that the tax might be abolished altogether but it seems a complete revamp is too complicated and the government has decided not even to try. It has, though, accepted a few 72 The Oldie April 2022

suggestions from the Office for Tax Simplification: not to alter the tax itself but to improve ways in which it works.

A few changes came into effect at the start of this year that affect what are classified as ‘excepted estates’. An estate can be excepted for several reasons, broadly when no inheritance tax is due, and more estates will now fall into that category.

To qualify as excepted, an estate must total less than the inheritance tax threshold, which is currently £325,000, or up to £650,000 if it includes a deceased spouse’s allowance. That rule stays the same, but there are now relaxed reporting requirements relating to the estates of people who died on or after 1st January 2022.

Even with excepted estates, executors

‘Don’t you just dread Aeroflot arrivals?’

had to complete inheritance-tax returns, but now there are fewer forms to fill out, and up to 90 per cent of non-tax-paying estates will face no forms when going for probate.

If the deceased leaves their entire estate to their spouse, civil partner or charity, it can be treated as excepted when the value is up to £3 million; previously the ceiling was £1 million.

There is anyway no tax to pay on gifts to spouses, civil partners or charity. Anyone leaving their home to a direct descendant has an additional £175,000 mainresidence band and twice that if a late spouse’s unused allowance is included.

There are ways during your lifetime to reduce a potential inheritance-tax bill: making gifts up to £3,000 every year; numerous small gifts of £250; wedding

gifts; and regular payments out of income. You can give away as much as you like before you die and pay no inheritance tax if you live for another seven years.

You cannot, though, retain any interest in whatever you give away – so you can’t hand over your house to your children and continue to live in it. That rule benefits people who are wealthy enough to reduce their assets and still have enough resources to live on.

Inheritance tax has always been particularly disliked because it feels like double taxation. You, or rather your estate or beneficiaries, pay tax on assets that you have bought with income that has already been taxed. The other side of the argument says it helps distribute wealth, as money paid in tax goes to the Treasury and can be used to support the less well-off.

Whatever your view, inheritance tax is here to stay and it has become an increasingly useful earner for the Chancellor, largely because property prices have risen so high. It is forecast to raise £6 billion in 2021-22. With the inheritance-tax-free limit frozen at £325,000 at least until 2026, with tax at 40 per cent, ever larger amounts will flow into the government coffers.

Literary Lunch

In association with

Tuesday 7th June 2022

At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE

Andrew Roberts

THE SUN / NEWS LICENSING

on George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch

Norman Scott

On his memoir An Accidental Icon: How I dodged a bullet…

In which he gives his side of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal

Third speaker to be announced

TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am3pm). The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30

The Oldie April 2022 73

Getting Dressed

Beauty – and the brains – behind agnes b.

Kazou Ohishi

Designer Agnès Troublé has changed women’s clothes – and Paris brigid keenan What’s the story behind agnès b. – the brand name?

It’s all thanks to Agnès Troublé, the company’s 81-year-old designer and founder.

Her married name was Agnès Bourgois – hence agnès b. – but when she and her husband Christian Bourgois separated, she reduced the B to the lower-case b.

Her most recent enterprise is a collaboration with the Mayor of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. They decided to do something more useful with a large, empty site than open another supermarket. Instead, they commissioned a brave new building in which social housing and a nursery for local kids sit side by side with a gallery housing the vast agnès b. collection of modern art, including David Hockney and Basquiat. There’s also a library, artist’s studio, shop and the offices of her charitable foundation La Fab – short for Fondation agnès b.

The charity funds myriad projects in France and overseas. Tara, its ship, sails the oceans, collecting data on climate change. The charity also supports medical services in Africa – all driven, she says, by her communism and Catholic faith: ‘Like the Pope: look at how he cares about people; he loves people. If we don’t share, it is impossible.’

She married at 17, had twin boys, left her husband a year later, lived with various partners and had more children.

You could say that trouble is her middle name – except that, weirdly, it is her surname: Troublé with an accent.

Nominative determinism.

Not that she is trouble: just restless and creative. She’s always moving on to the next thing: from women’s clothes to men’s and children’s, to shoes and bags, to art, to films … and now to La Fab, her ‘dream come true’.

It was back in the sixties, before hippies had been invented, that an editor from Elle magazine spotted her hippie style at a dinner party: flowery skirt from the cheap store Monoprix, worn with an army surplus jacket and cowboy boots.

The editor recruited her as a junior fashion editor.

74 The Oldie April 2022

Troublé is her last name. Left: Agnès today. Above: In her first shop in Les Halles, Paris, 1975

She soon switched to design, working first for Dorothée Bis, the ready-to-wear house. She then became a freelance until, in 1975, she opened her own place in an old butcher’s shop in Les Halles.

She now has more than 200 shops around the world, employs 1,432 people and has dressed a very long list of people, including David Bowie.

Is President Macron one of her customers? ‘Unfortunately not, but I would LOVE to dress him – different colours, slightly looser jackets.’

Troublé has always been ahead of her time. At this moment, ‘fast fashion’ – the idea that clothes are ‘in’ or ‘out’ – is démodé, but she never believed in that anyway. Her clothes are stylish but classic. They make you look good, and last for years.

She says that she designs for people who have better things to do than shopping. She has been making her chic

snap cardigan for more than 40 years and it is still a bestseller.

This month, at the request of some of her curvier employees, she launches a new range of clothes for larger women, La Belle Ronde, with sizes up to 20.

Growing up in the fifties in a house only a few yards from the palace at Versailles gave her unusual heroes and heroines: ‘Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry … and the statues in the gardens where I played, and the frescoes on the walls inspired by the discovery of Pompeii. I was steeped in another world. It made me who I am.’

She still lives nearby, in Marly-le-Roi. ‘It is where Louis XIV went for weekends – he invented the weekend – leaving the palais on Friday and returning on Monday.’

Her five children have given her 16 grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren, whom she adores. ‘I have a very special relationship with them.

They call me Mamour, a name invented by one of them when he was very little and got confused between Maman and amour.’

Her eldest son, now in his 60s, runs her business.

She has been a frequent visitor to England – first as a young teenager sent to stay with various families to learn English, which she speaks fluently; later, because she loved shopping at Mary Quant and Biba.

But she has not been into a clothes shop, anywhere, since she opened her own.

The Egyptian Goose

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd A partridge in a pear tree is nothing compared with the sight of an Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca).

The species is pictured in the tombs of the pharaohs – and perched 40 feet up on the branch of one of St James’s Park’s 200-year-old plane trees.

It prefers to nest in holes found in old trees. The only other goose I have seen tree nesting – in the hollows of ten-foothigh pollarded oaks alongside a lake – was at Jonathan Minter’s prize-winning sporting estate in Constable country.

Egyptian geese will also perch on buildings. In St James’s, a pair can often be seen standing sentinel on top of the Guards Memorial facing Horse Guards Parade, before flying off to land on the 20-foot-thick concrete roof of the nearby Admiralty Citadel or to explore its terrace, still lawned to camouflage it from air attack. They are belligerent birds, prone to aerial fights. The husky voice, when a bird is agitated, can sound like an old banger being cranked into action.

It is appropriate to associate them with St James’s Park because this was their first British home. They were brought there to adorn Charles II’s ‘decorative duck’ lake, the first in these islands. Their brown appearance, distinguished by two ‘black eyes’, is turned exotic by usually invisible, white wing shoulders, as surprising as the white pinions of the black swan. The Alopochen (fox-goose) in its name refers to its rufous back.

It is the last extant member of the Alopochen genus, and related to the goose-like shelduck (genus Tadorna) and placed with them in the subfamily Tadorninae. Shelducks are (ground) hole nesters and both birds have a culmen or ridge at the base of the bill, albeit barely noticeable in the goose’s case.

The 18th-century age of elegance saw Egyptian geese adorn landscaped parks, most notably in Norfolk and famously at Holkham Hall. Dr Bill Sutherland has

suggested that Capability Brown parkland subconsciously imitates the savanna – scattered trees, pasture and lakes – of Homo sapiens’s earliest African ancestors.

So it is little wonder that the African Egyptian goose, which makes up the majority of the early British population imported from southern Africa, feels at home. The primordial debt to our African ancestors may equally explain the innate origins of hunting, shooting, fishing or their urban equivalent, shopping.

It has been recorded nesting in the

wild for over 200 years, as far apart as Devon and East Lothian. But its parkland reputation delayed its admission to the official list of British birds until 1971.

Today, East Anglia and Greater London are the strongholds of a burgeoning population of 6,000.

Breeding can be as early as February: the briefly dappled, black-and-beige goslings are among the first to appear in spring. It means they risk dying from cold; or from toxins in their infantile aquatic diet. As insurance, they grow sturdy in days rather than weeks.

The Oldie April 2022 77

Travel I do cry for you, Argentina

Charlie Methven mourns his ancestors – and other British adventurers who helped to build the country before its economic collapse

S

epia-tinged melancholy lingers over many parts of Britain’s former empire. From Happy Valley in Kenya to Harare in Zimbabwe, once-grand clubhouses, haciendas and cricket grounds gently subside, as the memories of grandeur dissipate through the generations.

Forty years on from the Falklands War, though, nowhere beats Argentina for a still-tangible sense of lost opportunity, luxurious times past and poignant reminders of the way things were when Britannia ruled the waves.

My ancestors didn’t fight in India, discover mountains in Africa or commit reckless acts of derring-do for the Raj. But my great-great-grandfather, an engineer at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, sailed to Buenos Aires in the 1870s to build railways. Billy Taylor was one of thousands of buccaneering middle- and upper-class Brits who emigrated in the mid-19th century to make their fortune in the Argentine, a vast and largely unexplored country which had attained independence from Spain in 1812.

Today, Kenyans of British descent number 40,000 or so, and white

78 The Oldie April 2022

Zimbabweans around 60,000, but – almost unrecognised – there are over 100,000 Anglo-Argentines still at large.

It’s why the seminal work on AngloArgentina, by legendary Telegraph correspondent Andrew Graham-Yooll, is called The Forgotten Colony, an intentionally ironic title given that Argentina was only very briefly, in 1807, an actual British colony.

Back when men were men, and expats trudged wearily to the further reaches of the world to administrate, soldier, farm or idle, the British rush to Argentina had a simpler motive: get rich quick.

And boy, did it work. Billy Taylor and his pals were so successful at making cash that within one generation of their arrival, they had transformed the hitherto hick Argentina into the fifthrichest country in the world. And it was a country in which the Brits owned more than half the economy – and more than 30 per cent of all British overseas investment was in Argentina.

With their newly acquired wealth, the Anglo-Argentines weren’t interested in fitting in with the mainly Spanish and Italian locals. Instead, they set about

recreating what the top toffs had back home – only more grandly, where possible.

English public schools were quickly erected: to this day, St George’s, St Andrew’s and Northlands educate their descendants (in English) in Victorian-style classrooms, looking out over swathes of emerald-green rugby pitches.

In 1912, Harrods opened its only other store in the world – a near facsimile of the Knightsbridge original. My Great Uncle Ralph, ‘Rodolfo Taylor’, was on its board for a while in the 1960s. Harrods Buenos Aires eventually closed in the late 1980s in the aftermath of the Fayed takeover. The last time I visited, the dusty food hall was an artisans’ market.

For the belle-époque AngloArgentines, gents’ clubs were de rigueur.

In 1897, G W Taylor was one of the 50 or so founders of the Jockey Club’s palatial first clubhouse. The plaque in the entrance hall today indicates that his co-founders included Andersons, Bells, Bridgers, Browns, Caseys, Garrahans, Lawries, Lowes, Malcolms, Murphys and Shaws.

The club opened its first racecourse in central Buenos Aires in 1907 and its astonishing country club in the suburb of

HURLINGHAM CLUB, BUENOS AIRES

San Isidro in the mid-1920s – replete with polo pitches, an Ascot-style racecourse and two golf courses designed

by Alister MacKenzie, the Scot who designed Augusta National.

While the Jockey Club continues to glisten even now, a better sense of how life was back then can be found at the Hurlingham Club, just outside Buenos Aires. Founded in 1890, this club is where polo and proper golf were first played in Argentina. It remains startlingly evocative of many mid-ranking English public schools. The solid, late-Victorian main building has a canteen-style dining room. The cricket pavilion – with its dusty corners and photographs of long-forgotten mustachioed visitors – is a homage to Eton’s Upper Sixpenny. I even found a long-forgotten fives court in one corner of the club’s buildings.

It was on the ballroom floor of the Hurlingham that my great-grandmother met my great-grandfather. New arrivals from back home were expected to put up in the small, cell-like bedrooms of the club until they settled in.

My great-grandfather, who had gone out before the First World War to manage a beef-suet business, was ‘fresh meat’ and much in demand. It was frowned on for the Anglo-Argentine girls to marry ‘dagoes’; preservation of British identity was all – even speaking Spanish in the Hurlingham was banned until a few decades ago.

Ironed, aged copies of the Times can still be found in the billiards room.

As these extraordinary tableaux of Edwardian nouveau-riche life were taking place in what was still a far-distant land, three weeks’ sailing from Southampton, Argentine wealth was reaching its zenith.

In 1913, the country was richer than Germany, France and Japan, and had almost twice the GDP of Spain.

Relatively unscarred by the lacerating Great War expenditure and loss of manpower of the other major world economies, Argentina’s wealth continued to accumulate at an astonishing rate in

the roaring twenties. But storm clouds were gathering. Too much had ended up in the hands of too few, and ‘the many’ – almost all of Spanish and Italian origin – were increasingly resentful.

Shortly after an establishment coup led by the Anglo-Argentine General Rawson – whose family had established the Welsh colony in Patagonia in the 1860s – Colonel Juan Perón came to power in 1946, accompanied by his fiery, working-class wife, Eva. Proclaiming themselves the defenders of los descamisados (‘the shirtless ones’), the Peróns set about dismantling British economic power – nationalising the railways, in return for cancellation of war debt, and booting the Brits out of a host of once-profitable industries.

Then things turned really ugly. In 1953, a torch-bearing Peronist mob charged down the street from the Casa Rosada (the Pink Palace, as the presidential residence is known) and burned the Jockey Club to the ground.

A few days later, Perón dissolved the club itself, and the state took over horse-racing. My grandmother, who was visiting her relatives, remembers the incident as being ‘like a death in the family’. Even now, Evita is referred to by Anglo-Argentines as ‘the witch’.

After Perón’s subsequent fall (another military coup, naturally), the Jockey Cub was reinstituted and relocated to a splendidly palatial building opposite the French Embassy, just down the road from the Recoleta Cemetery where Evita is buried.

In Great Uncle Ralph’s opinion, Anglo-Argentina never recovered from the post-war Perón years. It inaugurated the dominant political tradition of Peronism, which is – at its heart – antiEnglish. The Brits were the clearest representation of the oligarchy who had made, and milked, modern Argentina in a period that lasted only about 80 years, but must have seemed to last for ever for those on the other side of the divide.

Clockwise: Hurlingham Club, Buenos Aires, 1905. Hurlingham cricket team, 1911. Crowd at Buenos Aires cricket match

Now, other than the wonderfully distinctive Anglo-Argentine names – think Santiago Davidson or Alejandro Woodward – the British influence in Buenos Aires is more subtle. It is felt in rugby, which the British brought to the country and where many of Los Pumas’ more prominent players have been Anglo, educated at Anglo schools or from Welsh Patagonia. You can feel it in the Anglican Cathedral of St John the Baptist, the oldest non-Catholic church in Latin America. And it’s there in the oak tree-surrounded schools and the cricket clubs in the Buenos Aires suburbs. And in those gents’ clubs, still frequented by the great – and often not so good.

The decline, though, is continual. The English language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, closed five years ago. Only octogenarians remember the days when Brits ruled the roost in Buenos Aires business. Most Anglo-Argentines now quietly oversee their estancias or have somewhat assimilated. It’s a far cry from the bombastic self-confidence of the 1920s.

And the Falklands? Early 1982 was an uncomfortable time for AngloArgentines, who wrote despairing and pitiful letters to Maggie, imploring her not to go to war. Otherwise, the issue lingers in the background like an untreated bunion.

These days, the inexorable disintegration of the economy is more pressing. It wasn’t just Anglo-Argentina that never recovered from Perón’s reign of terror.

Even as the Jockey Club burned in ’53, Argentina’s place at the top table of global economies also went up in smoke.

As the Hurlingham’s dusty photographs have faded over the years, so have the lingering memories of the stylish, elegant, fizzy country Billy Taylor and his intrepid mates made great.

The Oldie April 2022 79

On the road for 40 years Since 1982, Eland Books has published lost travel classics by writers from Martha Gellhorn to Norman Lewis. By William Cook

In the cosy attic flat of a Dickensian terraced house in London’s Exmouth Market, an amiable, middle-aged couple called Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring are doing something slightly daft and rather splendid.

They’re running a publishing house called Eland Books, which champions the golden age of travel-writing.

Modern publishing is a numbers game: pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.

The big firms gobble up the smaller ones, and the marketing men decide what sells.

Subject matter? Something topical or sensational (ideally a bit of both).

Authors? The younger, the better, preferably already famous for something apart from writing, with a large following on television or (even better) social media.

Eland does none of these things.

Compared with most publishers, they’re tiny, and most of their writers are knocking on a bit – indeed, quite a few of them are long dead. They shun the TV tie-in and the celebrity biography.

Instead they specialise in reprinting classic travel books that have been published elsewhere and have drifted out of print.

‘Publishers are so fickle,’ says Barnaby, over coffee in a café across the road from his attic office. ‘You’re very soon remaindered and forgotten.’

But that doesn’t mean readers have lost interest in these abandoned books – far from it. Big publishers are often 80 The Oldie April 2022

looking for the latest thing, the new sensation. Eland, on the other hand, are more interested in books that last.

‘I felt very proud, in the backstreets of Damascus, seeing a second-hand bookshop with lots of Elands that had clearly been read dozens of times,’ he recalls. ‘Publishing is great, but I’d be equally happy running a very selective second-hand bookshop that helped travellers on their way with old maps and postcards.’

It sounds hopelessly romantic but somehow it works, and this year Eland celebrates its 40th birthday.

I started buying their books a few years ago. The first few were by authors I already knew (Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy), but I soon moved on to writers I’d never heard of (The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley, Borderlines by Charles Nicholl) and I’ve never started one I didn’t finish. Their elegant cream-and-burgundy livery is a sign that you’re in safe hands, a guarantee you’re in for a good read.

Eland was founded in 1982 by author, entrepreneur and intrepid traveller John Hatt. Have you read his book, The Tropical Traveller? I’d heartily recommend it.

What prompted this rash venture was his discovery that the works of Martha Gellhorn and Norman Lewis were out of print.

Hatt thought this was outrageous. He was quite right to feel put out: Gellhorn was one of the finest war-reporters of the

last century. Check out her Travels with Myself and Another. Lewis was one of the century’s finest travel writers – A View of the World is a good place to start.

Hatt set up Eland (named after the street where he lived in Battersea) and republished them himself.

‘Until John dug my books up, I had been forgotten as a travel writer,’ said Lewis. Not any more. Lewis died in 2003, at the grand old age of 95, but his books are still published by Eland.

Thanks in no small part to John Hatt, he’s now firmly established as one of the all-time greats.

As Hatt added other classics to his list, Eland went from strength to strength. It turns out there’s an appetite for vintage travelogues, written by writers who can really write. Who knew?

Contrary to what the marketing men say, readers don’t mind if a book was written yonks ago. They don’t care if a writer is out of fashion, or even whether they’re still alive.

After 20 years or so, Hatt decided to hand over to Rose and Barnaby. Hatt’s still one of the owners – still going strong, still travelling – but nowadays they’re in charge.

Like all the best handovers, it was rather accidental. Barnaby had written to Hatt fresh out of university, asking for a job. Hatt said no. ‘It doesn’t pay me, let alone anyone else,’ he said. But they met up and stayed in touch.

Barnaby and Rose, who’d met at

Travellers’ tales: some Eland books and publisher Barnaby Rogerson, with Bianca, in the office, Exmouth Market, London

university, both became prolific travelwriters. But when children came along – they have two daughters – they knew they had to settle down. When they decided to start a publishing house, they told Hatt about it. After a long series of lunches, they ended up running Eland.

Today, Eland’s backlist reads like a Who’s Who of 20th-century travelwriting, but the imprint’s 40th anniversary begs a broader question. Is the golden age of travel-writing over? Is Eland merely a museum for a literary genre whose time has passed?

During the second half of the last century, British travel-writing blossomed as never before. For the first time, a lot of us had the time and money to travel, yet travelling was still a novelty.

A good travel book took you somewhere you’d never been but might want to visit some day.

Since 2000, travel has become more common and the world more homogenised, shrunk by cheap foreign flights and the internet. Every corner of the globe is just a click away, and

globalisation has made our fragile planet a lot more samey. The English language is ubiquitous; American chain stores are everywhere.

Eland books take you back to a time when the world still felt uncharted, and travel writers led the way.

So is there a future for travel-writing?

Of course, but the next generation of travel books won’t be the same as those of yesteryear. Now that you can hop on a plane (COVID permitting) and head off almost anywhere, or simply sit at home and scroll through exotic locations on your smartphone, travel-writing looks set to become a lot more local – ‘More particular, more anthropological,’ as Barnaby puts it. And maybe that’s no bad thing.

I’ve been around the world as a travel writer, but some of my most exciting journeys have been closest to home.

Walking the Essex Way, right across the county, from Epping to Harwich, felt more intrepid than flying off to Bali or Canada or Australia or wherever.

One of my favourite Eland books is

Tony Parker’s The People of Providence.

It’s set on a council estate in Sarf London, yet it feels like a journey into the unknown.

‘Travelling has irrevocably changed,’ says Julian Evans, author of Transit of Venus, a wonderful book about the South Pacific, republished by Eland.

‘Morally hazardous, flying long distances in the era of climate emergency; politically hazardous, in that lots of places that you used to be able to go to, you can’t go to with ease or much safety any more…’

And yet the thrill remains. Being grounded by COVID these last two years has taught us how precious it is to travel, and anything that precious will inspire great literature, so long as people can be bothered to read.

Julian Evans puts it best: ‘As our world has become more civilised, there remains within us a desire to find places that have the ability to surprise and maybe challenge us.’

Even if those places are right outside your front door.

The Oldie April 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

Surrey’s oriental delight

RUSSELL CLARK / ALAMY

lucinda lambton In 1889, Britain’s first purpose-built mosque was erected in Woking – and it’s pure joy

The mosque at Woking is the first purpose-built mosque in England, constructed in 1889.

Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘sincere and dignified’ – yet quite dancing with the architectural gaiety of the Indo-Islamic style – it is a very great surprise to come upon when run to ground in Woking! It quite knocks you for six.

Standing in Oriental Road, it was built

by Dr Gottlieb Leitner, a distinguished orientalist and linguist from Hungary, and was partly funded by Begum Shah Jahan, the female ruler of what was to become, in our time, the benighted Indian state of Bhopal.

Built in the ‘Art Arabe’ architectural style, it is replete with a wealth of geometric patterns and Arabic calligraphy, inspired by decorations from 82 The Oldie April 2022

the India Office in the British Library. It has a fine, exhilarating architectural delight at every turn.

In the early 1880s Leitner bought the former Royal Dramatic College building in Woking, where he was to establish the Oriental Institute to promote Eastern literature and learning. He also set it up as the institution for awarding degrees from the University of Punjab in Lahore in India.

The architect he commissioned for what was to become this little eastern jewel in England was William Isaac Chambers – designer of a number of fanciful Irish houses – who chose Bath and Bargate stone for the main body of the building that supports the dome and the minarets.

The first formal place of Islamic worship to be built in the country, it has

been listed Grade I. Important visitors were legion: a berobed Emperor Haile Selassie came here in 1936 and Queen Victoria’s secretary, Abdul Karim, was a frequent worshipper from nearby Windsor Castle.

By 1917, Woking’s Shah Jahan Mosque had become the centre for Islam in Britain, when the incumbent Imam, Sadr-ud-Din, arranged that a nearby piece of land be used as a burial ground for the 19 Indian soldiers who had been in the Indian hospital established in Brighton Pavilion.

Woking’s mosque is still in vibrant working order today. Better still, it has recently been meticulously restored, with umpteen modernised facilities, such as video tours on its extensive, wellinformed website, welcoming visitors and worshippers alike.

With a capacity for 600 and five prayer meetings a day, it is a most actively running concern.

There are many Shah Jahan Mosques.

One, known as the Jamia Masjid of Thatta, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, displays the greatest triumph of 17th-century decoration. Every inch is smothered in brilliant cobalt-blue tiles, swirled through with turquoise, ‘manganese violet’ and white tiles. They are arranged in stellated patterns to represent the heavens. It is considered to be the finest display of tilework in South Asia. As for the building’s laying of geometric brickwork, your heart races with excitement at its convolutions.

We must, though, return to Woking.

The charming mosque’s creator, Leitner, was a Jewish-Hungarian scholar with a remarkable gift for languages, who by the age of ten had mastered Turkish, Arabic and most European tongues.

At only 15, he was appointed Interpreter (First Class) to the British Commissariat in the Crimea, with the rank of colonel. During a tour of Muslim countries, he adopted the Muslim name of Abdur Rasheed Sayyah – sayyah is Arabic for traveller.

By just 23, he was the Professor of Arabic and Muslim Law at King’s College London. Later he became Principal of the Government College in Lahore. He founded many schools, public libraries and literary associations, as well as writing academic journals and umpteen books, including a scholarly work in two volumes on the History of Islam which he wrote in Urdu!

Alongside the architect, Chambers, other equally colourful geniuses were associated with this eastern delight. A Lord Headley was one. A convert, he wrote copiously on Islam as well as laying plans – which sadly never materialised – to build a grand mosque in London. In 1937, a plot was chosen near Olympia, and the foundation stone was even laid, by the heir to the Nizam of Hyderabad.

All to no avail.

Headley became a championship boxer and also a newspaper editor, as well as a successful civil engineer with a passionate interest in coastal defence.

Meanwhile, throughout all these activities he was undertaking long

An Islamic place of worship, created by a Jewish Hungarian, funded by a female Sultan

Drawing by the mosque’s architect, William Isaac Chambers, 1889

journeys to Egypt and India, for the cause of Islam. Elected the President of the British Muslim Society, he was, his obituarists wrote, ‘a true son of Islam …

May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon his soul.’

There were many more heroes who brought the Woking mosque into being, including William Henry Gwilliam (1856-1932), who changed his name to Shaykh al-Islam Abdullah Quilliam. He was born in Liverpool, where, thanks to a donation from Nasrullah Khan, Crown Prince of the Emirate of Afghanistan, he bought three adjoining houses which were the first in the country to be converted into a functioning mosque, also in 1889. (The Woking mosque was purpose-built.)

The Ottoman Caliph gave Gwilliam the title Shaykh al-Islam for the British

Isles, while the Emir of Afghanistan recognised him as the Sheikh of Muslims in Britain. What an assembly of characters, to be sure!

This Eastern addition to the Surrey countryside in a Persian-Saracenic style, with a dome, four minarets and a central courtyard, is a most marvellous treasure.

Unexpected fame came to the building in 1898, with the publication of H G Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which it is set on fire.

As an added colourful root, the mosque was partly paid for by Sultan Shah Jahan, Begum of Bhopal.

This Islamic place of worship, created by a Jewish Hungarian, funded by a female Sultan, built in the English countryside and patronised by renowned Muslims far and wide, is as strange a discovery as can be imagined.

The Oldie April 2022 83

On the Road

All the world’s my stage Soprano Renée Fleming has sung everywhere, from the Met to Hamburg – and has the perfect cure for a cold. By Louise Flind

How do you look after your voice when travelling?

I really have refined my position from being worried about everything as a young singer – this pillow is wrong; I’m feeling allergic to something; it’s too dry – to scarcely ever thinking about it.

I don’t eat in restaurants very much unless they’re quiet. I stay hydrated and that’s about it.

How has your voice changed as you’ve got older?

It’s more comfortable in the top, but on the other hand I’m choosing repertoire that is a wonderful fit. At the Met next year, I’m doing a new opera composed for me which is really quite high.

Certainly, stamina isn’t what it was 15 years ago and I have to be very careful about tessitura.

Do you find you can’t sing as much as you could?

No. I sing all the time. I just did a tour when I was singing in performance every two or three days.

What sort of music do you like to sing best?

I’ve always loved new music. I have a new album out called Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, a combination of art songs from the late-19th century and new things commissioned for the album.

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

There’s a reason my luggage is 150lb – the gowns alone take up two large suitcases. Some people say there’s very little I can leave at home…

Is there something you really miss?

My friends and family. This is the bane of our existence as performers, as we don’t get to have the life that other people have when they sleep in their own beds and never have to leave their children.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

We didn’t travel that much so it was typically at home. We thought we were extremely wealthy children and of course we weren’t. My parents were schoolteachers.

Which parts of Pennsylvania and New York, where you grew up, do you like most?

I was born in Pennsylvania and moved as an infant to upstate New York. Rochester is a lovely city, but it’s not known for its weather.

Which opera couldn’t you live without?

I’m absolutely blown away by Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades – I never sang Lisa.

Which opera house do you love most?

I spend most of my time in concert halls.

I just had a fabulous experience in Hamburg at the Elbphilharmonie. I can’t speak for my own performance because I don’t know how it sounded, but I’ve never heard any orchestra sound that spectacular in the Bruckner symphony in the second half.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

Which one? With my second husband, Tim, we didn’t take a honeymoon but he was travelling constantly with me.

So we would steal a day here and there, and jokingly say that was the honeymoon.

Do you go on holiday?

I went to Vietnam with my husband and I took a Western tour with my daughters a few years ago through all the canyons.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be in a spa in the Virginia mountains.

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away?

On performance days, I’m quiet.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I’m not adventurous but I do love interesting vegetables. Sugar is my downfall – if it’s around, I can’t resist it…

Do you have a go at the local language?

I had a Fulbright Scholarship. So I studied in Germany and speak fluent German. My French was very good when I had an apartment in Paris, and I’ve developed decent restaurant and taxi Italian – and operatic, of course.

What’s your biggest headache?

If I don’t have a view that makes me happy, then I’m not going to be comfortable in the hotel because on a performance day I’m typically sitting in the room at my computer and I want something nice to look at.

What are your top travelling tips?

I try to keep a suitcase and a carry-on bag always ready to go – with all necessary toiletries, electronics and so on. So I need to own two of all those things.

What is your best cure for colds?

Steam is absolutely the best if I’m really sick, and ginger tea is wonderful. I haven’t had a cold since the pandemic, running around wearing masks all the time. It works.

On 6th April, Renée Fleming will appear at a gala at the Paris Opera, directed by Robert Carsen. On 22nd April, she will be at a London Philharmonic gala conducted by Enrique Mazzola The Oldie April 2022 85

Taking a Walk

Lundy – a treasured island

GARY WING

patrick barkham

I imagined a stroll around Lundy might take an hour. A chunk of Dartmoor towed into the Bristol Channel, this ostensibly barren island is half a mile wide and three miles long.

Arriving on the ferry from Ilfracombe felt like being transferred from one boat to another. After straggling up the steep track from the jetty to ‘the village’, I was marooned on the high bulk of the island, surrounded by glorious blue water but seemingly unable to reach it, the sheer cliffs of Lundy plunging down for 100 metres without much sign of beach or path.

And while life on Lundy is not dissimilar to being on a cruise ship, with a seasonal ‘crew’ of islanders running the pub, shop, holiday cottages, farm and campsite, the island is far more complex and interesting. Over the years, it has been a hermitage, a pirates’ nest, a king’s retreat, a convict settlement and a refuge for an assassin.

And a walk around it can take a whole day or, ideally, a week.

Lundy (‘puffin’ in old Norse) boasts 42 scheduled monuments, three stone walls, no hedges and almost no trees.

Its residents include sheep, sika deer, feral goats, puffins, pygmy shrews and one very rare plant (of which more later). It has the first written record of nesting peregrines, the world’s oldest private postage service and Britain’s first ‘no take’ marine nature reserve.

Leaving the village, where house sparrows chuntered peacefully in numbers long lost from the mainland, I headed over dinky green fields to the south-western corner. Here I found an indentation through a vertiginous, sweet-scented meadow and followed it on a zigzag down. Lundy is all about the reverse summit. Two seals bobbed like bottles amongst the waving kelp below.

I cautiously descended the Montagu Steps, a series of decrepit stone steps and stumps of rusted metal leading to the rocks where a great multitude of

ships, with names like great-greatgrandparents – Ethel, Belinda, Mary, Francis Anne, Charles and Millicent – were once wrecked.

I halted above a final drop – ten yards down into the Atlantic, whose swell dispensed great slaps to the granite base of the island. For a while I sat, stunned by the ocean’s power, and then I began to feel perhaps calmer than I had ever felt before. Time passed in a

way that bore no relation to a clock.

Small-island magic was asserting itself.

Eventually I dragged myself away and continued up Lundy’s western flank, passing the Old Light, the disused lighthouse on the highest point of Lundy.

Like Britain, Lundy is long and thin and more edge than middle. Its coastline is so crenellated that it serves up endless little rocky theatres. Each one has a name and echoed with a spectacle of seabirds – the grumbles, moans and cries of fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills and Lundy’s celebrated puffins.

Further north, there were no trippers; only Soay sheep clashing horns with a headache-inducing crunch.

I disturbed a family of sika, who gazed at me with moist eyes, and then encountered a magnificently saturnine billy goat loitering with his nannies.

The island’s northern tip – called John O’Groats, of course – felt every bit as remote as the bigger version.

Returning down the east coast, I wandered beside slopping banks of bracken, foxglove and thousands of Lundy cabbages – a primitive, yellowflowering brassica found nowhere else in the world.

By the time I returned to the village, I had been gone all day. I stayed for three – and met a pair of campers who explored Lundy each summer for four weeks. ‘Cancel your ticket home and we’ll show you springs, copper mines, mesolithic flints in rabbit burrows, Queen Mab’s grotto cave, basking sharks, sunfish…’ they promised.

So if you ever follow in my footsteps, one piece of advice: allow yourself a bit of time for this walk.

Lundy is open from 29th March to 28th October in 2022; book day trips from Ilfracombe or longer stays via the Landmark Trust: www.landmarktrust. org.uk The Oldie April 2022 87

Genius crossword 411 el sereno T represents one or more of a kind Across

Down

1 Area of ship that may be occupied by a fed up T? (4,3) 5 Parley about one type of T (7) 9 Appropriate European vote on a nation’s borders (5) 10 Revolutionary principal first applied to Paine regularly (9) 11 Students of T dressing to do works across line (13) 13 T initially expecting to be accepted by theologian, must be frustrated (6) 16 Dire Straits keeping time at last for dancers, say (8) 18 Natural boundary offering advantage in hotel dispute (8) 19 Unusual Monday sort of person full of energy (6) 24 T’s case accepted by equine enthusiast (5,8) 26 T type that’s always common? (9) 27 A ship attached to line with old rope (5) 28 Get going as sun’s set to the west (5,2) 29 Device for measuring time by female (for example) worker (7)

1 Told off, having lost love for American getting burnt (7) 2 Sticks around at home, seeing these may bite (7) 3 Ali perhaps may get T with the queen (5) 4 Faulty relay - why broadcast frequency? (6) 5 Plates for warhorses (8) 6 Mother producing essential requirement? (9) 7 Contrasts requirements for fencing (5) 8 Creature subsequently switching ends (5) 12 T must underpin middle of the wheel (4) 14 People run to the bottom for T (4) 15 Look at clever plant (9) 17 Hope 12 sacked domestic!

(4,4) 20 State of mind upsetting men in continent (7) 21 Military settlement’s unfashionable job (7) 22 Drinks outside hotel generating complaints (6) 23 Force lacking uniform apparel (5) 24 Animal that’s holy without and venal within (5) 25 When up, soundly defeats T (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: 6th April 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 411 Across 1 Decorative moulding on wall (6) 4 Soft fruit with stone (5) 8 Kingdom; sphere (5) 9 First; sign (7) 10 Hip scan (anag) (7) 11 Dole (out) (4) 12 Organ; attention (3) 14 Recognise (4) 15 Enthusiastic (4) 18 Objective (3) 21 Effortless (4) 23 Withdraw (7) 25 Ply, commute (7) 26 Legal defence (5) 27 Recover; mobilise (5) 28 Adjournment (6)

Genius 409 solution Down 1 Woodland (6) 2 European language (7) 3 Rhodesia now (8) 4 Bucket (4) 5 Similar (5) 6 Divided by 2 (6) 7 Former church tax (5) 13 Clothing industry (3,5) 16 To list (7) 17 Incense burner (6) 19 Desiccated (5) 20 Moral values (6) 22 Cranium (5) 24 Remain (4)

Winner: Jeff Retallic, Crowthorne, Berkshire Runners-up: Morag Niven, Monifieth, Angus; Colin P Boyce, Heathfield, East Sussex

Moron 409 solution. Across: 1 Cough, 4 Hiccup (coffee cup), 9 Climate, 10 Renal, 11 Even, 12 Digress, 13 Try, 14 Arch, 16 Test, 18 Axe, 20 Aimless, 21 Sent, 24 Duvet, 25 Deliver, 26 Paling, 27 Maybe. Down: 1 Cachet, 2 Unite, 3 Heat, 5 Irrigate, 6 Confess, 7 Polish, 8 Needy, 13 Threaten, 15 Removal, 17 Laid up, 18 Aside, 19 Starve, 22 Envoy, 23 Clam.

The Oldie April 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO We all know the story of Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus raised from the dead four days after his entombment, the last of the miracles (according to the gospel of John).

Given the diamond blockage on this month’s lovely conundrum, the North dummy hand appears to be in a similar moribund state.

West leads the king of hearts and you duck. You win West’s queen of hearts continuation (unable to afford a second duck). Take over the reins and see if you can resurrect the dummy. Remember, the bidding has marked East with all six missing spades.

Dealer East Both Vulnerable

West ♠♥ K Q J 10 4 ♦ 10 8 5 4 ♣J 9 6 2

North ♠ J652 ♥95 ♦QJ732 ♣8 5

South ♠ Q43 ♥A763 ♦ AK ♣A K Q 3

East ♠ A K 10 9 8 7 ♥82 ♦96 ♣ 10 7 4

The bidding South West North

Dbl Pass 3♦ 3NT(2) end

East 2 ♠ (1) Pass

(1) Weak two.

(2) Settles for game as North could have nothing. Crucially for notrumps, he holds a stopper in East’s spades. Swap the queen and knave of spades, and South would bid Three Spades, asking North for a spade stopper; North would (holding Queen-lowlow-low) bid three notrumps.

You must hope East holds no more hearts, and no more than three clubs. You cash the ace-king of diamonds and the three top clubs (discarding a diamond, not a spade, from dummy), hoping to have extracted East’s clubs. With East following all the way, you know East’s last six cards are spades. It is still not easy to spot the solution, for if you lead the Queen of spades, East will duck.

What you must do is duck a spade in both hands (key play). East wins cheaply and must lead a top spade (if East leads a low spade, you run it to dummy’s knave in order to enjoy the diamonds). You deposit the queen under East’s top spade, and now East can do no better than cash his other top spade and lead a fourth spade, enabling dummy to win the last three tricks with the knave of spades, and queen-knave of diamonds. Nine tricks and game made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 277 you were invited to write a poem called Morning Sounds.

The entries were vivid: half domestic, half outdoor. Tim Lloyd observed that ‘A bin lorry approaching in reverse/Sounds like an asthmatic seal.’ Liz Piper remembered, during lockdown, ‘I run along the white line/Down the middle of the street,/No one else is near me – /Just the pounding of my feet.’ John Robinson reviewed the strategies for confronting tinnitus and concluded, ‘It’s not a scourge to dwell upon:/Acknowledge it, then carry on.’

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Tony Douglass’s single-mindedly warlike birds.

A fleet hweet-hweet redstarts away As camouflaged owls hoot the day.

Almost silent, steel-hulled high, A heron rattle-ships the sky.

Abaft, the pied woodpecker now Bofors into a beetly bough.

Way forrard, gannets thud the sea.

A pheasant klaxons now-hear-me.

Marine-troop dunlin trill and yaw.

Cur…lew – landmine-probe the shore.

Yellowhammer, from the trees Shout pass-the-ammunition-please To harbour-hissing cygnet-carrier.

Blackbirds tannoy cruising harrier.

Carrion crow with medical caw Tends fallen from the night before…

Tony Douglass Two sounds awake me: first, a drowsy bee Caught in the curtains – then you calling me.

I feel your touch, your warm breath in my ear – But reaching out, my fingers close on air.

Elusively, it seems, you’ve slipped away – Beneath the cherry tree, where once we lay.

Loving the sudden sun, your chest is bare – With easy grace, you bask in mellow air.

The fragile cherry blossom’s shining white – And glowing, round you pools a golden light.

‘I’m here!’ – but then a soaring skylark flies, Pouring liquid music from the skies.

Upward we gaze – I turn to your loved face – But you have vanished. In your empty place, The skylark carolling, the dappled tree, With snow of falling petals, floating free.

Fiona Clark The sounds of the farmyard to herald the day

Unwittingly issued from him where he lay A trumpeting blast as the wind sallied forth Followed swift by another (but not from the north) The creaking and groaning were not from the trees Nor timbers nor floors, but ankles and knees Spontaneous moans and expletives were said Announcing the imminent rise from the bed Darkness enveloped the trip down the stairs Till stark blinding light caught his eyes unawares.

The water that gushed in the kettle increased, The urgent requirement for pressure released.

A spoon stirred the tea; the reverse trip was made With a tinkling sound in the bathroom replayed.

And at last he arrived whence his journey began With the drink to her bed, a heroic old man.

Terry Carroll Travelling mornings, and each city wakes To its own soundscape, giving memory A portal to the past. Those squealing brakes Are Naples, reaching gridlock, and the sea Still pearly. Backstreet Rome’s the jar Of metal shutters rattling up, and then The weight of clattering cups along the bar And chiming coffee spoons, lined up for when The early workers pause. Or Istanbul Where Bosphorus ferries hoot, and where The slender trees are loud and sparrowfull And dawn comes with the muezzin’s call to prayer.

Then, back in London. Overhead the jets, Stacking and circling, give the date its mark While at street level a lone drunk duets With the first blackbird singing from the dark.

D A Prince COMPETITION No 279 I was surprised to break a bottle of wine a few days ago.

Please write a poem, in any connection, called Broken Bottle. Maximum 16 lines.

We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 279’, by 7th April.

The Oldie April 2022 91

Fifty years ago, a study investigated teenagers’ ecstatic moments.

Are they sadder now? Christopher Woodward asks

Testaments of youth

T

he majority of adults believe they become better people as they grow older. So said the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, in his excellent study The Seven Sins of Memory (2001).

But that process, he adds, requires us to mark down our younger selves. Or – worse – to rewrite who we were in order to fit with who we have become.

In one scientific study in 1960s America, teenagers were asked, ‘Is religion helpful to you?’ Some 70 per cent replied ‘yes’. Thirty years later, the same teenagers were asked the same question but put in the past: was religion helpful to you at the age of 15? Only 25 per cent said ‘yes’. Those who had become atheists could not believe their youthful credulity.

It’s easy to compare ourselves with faded snaps taken when we were six. It’s harder to look at adolescent snaps, red-eyed from Prontaprint. What! That jacket, that haircut, that music… But we distance ourselves also because we are afraid of what we were. We do not know how to negotiate with our opinions when we were 16. Or with the idealism.

I thought about this recently on the train to Cornwall, when three teenagers jumped up at that moment after Exmouth when Brunel’s line flashes between sea and cliff. It’s a homecoming ritual: they compete to gob the furthest out of the window.

‘Gross,’ I muttered. But it was harder to react to what came next. One of them said, ‘I can make a difference to another person’s life. That’s all I want to do.’

How often, as adults, do we say things with such directness?

That was the question put in Inglorious Wordsworths: A Study of Some Transcendental Experiences in Childhood and Adolescence by Michael Paffard (1973). The title came from John Ruskin’s line: ‘I much doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards; but I am very sure of there being many Wordsworths resting there.’

92 The Oldie April 2022

When we were young: St Elmo’s Fire (1985)

Remembering his own moments of ecstasy as a teenager – cycling to rub brasses or collect flowers, and listening alone to records – Paffard, an English teacher, wondered if Ruskin was right.

And were these poetic moments universal in youth, but rarer and rarer as we rub along with the world?

He handed out a questionnaire to 455 young people – undergraduates at the University of Keele, and sixthformers. The questionnaire was in a plain brown envelope. For all the young people knew, the survey could have been about the bomb, Elvis or cereal. But inside there was a passage from W H Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago, where he confessed to a quasi-spiritual relationship with the trees at his parents’ ranch in Argentina: ‘The sight of a magnificent sunset was sometimes more than I could endure.’

Have you, asked Paffard’s questionnaire, ever felt such moments of elation? Slightly more than half said ‘yes’.

They were asked to turn the page and, under condition of anonymity, write what they felt.

‘I have had this experience several times,’ wrote Robert, who lived on a housing estate. ‘For some moments, a spring bulb in flower seemed the magnificent centre of the whole world.’

Jane sang in the church choir: ‘If a wild wind is blowing on a moonlit night, the desire to be wild and tear the grips out of my hair and really “let it down” is quite intense, plus a longing to float or

fly in the air.’

When the clouds broke up a sunset on a mountaintop in Switzerland, John thought ‘that there will be no more beauty, no more truth, no more love in the world’. On holiday in Northumbria, Rachel walked nine miles after dinner.

At midnight, she telephoned from a stranger’s house to tell her furious parents that she’d counted 15 shooting stars. Mark, a Communist, was embarrassed that, in a world of ‘capitalists exploiting, and machines getting the other hand’, he was at peace on rugged moorland.

In Paffard’s analysis of the responses, science undergraduates were as susceptible as historians, and Rachmaninov rivalled Elvis as a source of elation. The biggest discovery was that ancient nature was more potent than scenes of modern industry, and music more potent than art or books. Beyond that, Paffard confessed, he was as puzzled as before.

Paffard wrote only one more book: an official history of the University of Keele.

And, for Inglorious Wordsworths, the young people were asked for their first names only. Now, nearly 50 years on, I wonder how many are still alive.

What happened to the socialist who started on seeing wild flowers on the moor, or to the chorister who wished to fly? And if I found John or Jane, would either of them admit to such extremes of teenage emotion? After all, what is the use of such elations now?

No one knows in which attic or filing cabinet Paffard put the 455 envelopes. If they survive, that cache of secret raptures is as precious as a cargo of oils and spices discovered intact in the amphorae of a Phoenician galley sunk at sea long ago.

And that treasure would help us to understand that question: do we get better as we get older – or worse?

Christopher Woodward is Director of the Garden Museum in London

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Climate anxiety

I’m worried about my grandson.

He’s 11 years old and every time he comes to see me he gets terribly upset. He’s so anxious about climate change and is convinced the world is going to end. I have tried to reassure him, but it’s not helped by his parents who are very eco-minded and don’t seem to worry about the effect it’s having on him. His school thinks he should see a psychiatrist, but it’s taking ages to get an appointment, and in the meantime he is suffering so much. How can I help him?

B F, Derby Your grandson is suffering from a very common condition among children, particularly boys for some reason, of that age. It’s called separation anxiety. When he was around 12 my son suffered in a similar way, woke up at night with appalling nightmares and used to ring me secretly from school in a dreadful state. It can occur just as the child’s hormones are changing and be accompanied by a great fear of growing up and therefore separating from parents.

If you can explain this to his parents, surely they will understand. He just needs to be told his parents will always love him and always be there for him.

Again and again and again. The anxiety won’t go away immediately, but should lessen as he grows older.

A

My lovely, stupid boyfriend

Q

I’ve just met a really lovely man of 50 and we get on in every way you can imagine. I’m in my sixties so I’m very lucky. The only problem is that he has a tendency to be really stupid, thinking it’s funny. He hero-worships Spike Milligan, and he’ll suddenly do old

Goon Show voices, thinking he’s being hilarious. I don’t mind if we’re alone, but dread his doing it in front of other people.

I’ve tried to tell him, but he just says I’ve got no sense of humour. He holds down a good job and when he’s serious, he’s great. But I’m finding it all rather cringeworthy. Am I just being prudish?

Alison Porter, Carlisle I remember a friend of mine had a boyfriend who apparently not only kept doing Tommy Cooper impressions but occasionally used to put a pair of underpants on his head and do the sand dance with no clothes on. He once gave her a huge, stuffed toy hippopotamus for Christmas. I often envied her being with someone so full of spontaneity and joyfulness, to be honest.

I’m sure your boyfriend won’t disgrace you in front of your friends – and even if he did go a bit far, they’d probably be highly amused. There’s a child in all of us.

As the saying goes, ‘Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness’.

A

Trapped by my family’s fear

Q

I live with my brother and father, both of whom have been shielding for the last two years as they both have chronic lung conditions – an inherited thing. I, on the other hand, have escaped the problem, and have always led an incredibly busy and sociable life. My problem is that even though all the restrictions have been lifted, my brother and father are terrified of getting any kind of infection and have decided, as far as I can see, to isolate themselves for ever. I have been feeling more and more trapped and frustrated, to the point of feeling extremely angry and inhibited because, effectively, I am imprisoned in my own

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98 The Oldie April 2022

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home as a result of their illnesses. If I’d lived alone, my attitude to the pandemic would have been very different. I would have behaved cautiously, but gone out more, socialised more. It seems I’ll never break free from the constraints of this situation, whatever virus is or isn’t around, and I think I might go mad if it continues much longer, because I just can’t see a way out. I love my family, but they are ruining my life.

Hilary G, Exeter I’m afraid lots of people seem to be trapped in a cycle of fear – even perfectly healthy people.

They’re like those budgerigars in cages.

Open the cage door and invite them to fly free and they shake their little feathered heads and hop back to the security of their cuttlefish and bottled water. My view is that life is for living, and a life of permanent shielding is no life at all. All you can do is either move out or live your life separately by dividing your home in some way – or else, very gradually, by starting to socialise more and, drip by drip, persuading them that though there is a risk in socialising and getting out and about, there always has been and there always will be a risk. Life without social contact is barely worth living – at least that’s my view. Your brother and father aren’t going to change – so the onus is on you. The biggest change will be in accepting that if by any chance they do catch something and fall ill, it will not be specifically your fault. You might need to go and see a counsellor to help you come to terms with this – it’s a big one to cope with on your own.

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GUIDE TO GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY Sponsored by

Having fun keeps one young, says Taki Rage against rewilding Alan Titchmarsh Put on your ballet shoes Henrietta Bredin The best things in life are free Simon Courtauld April 2022 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Guide to Growing Old Disgracefully April 2022 Sponsored by

Cover: Quentin Blake Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jamil Popat For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

Among the contributors Marion Shoard couldn’t find straighttalking and comprehensive advice when her mother fell ill, so she decided to write a guidebook for older people and their relatives. Her previous three books (including the award-winning A Right to Roam) examined countryside conflicts. She is on the Alzheimer Society’s Research Network and Kent Healthwatch. Her latest work, How to Handle Later Life, is published by Amaranth Books.

After more than 30 years as a journalist on the Sunday Times, David Mills now spends his time walking his Lakeland terrier on Hampstead Heath and in the Suffolk countryside while ‘working from home’.

He has discovered that having to look after a dog provides the perfect excuse to get out of all kinds of annoying invitations and social obligations.

Henrietta Bredin is a writer, editor, deviser of song recitals and (very) late-starting singer. Her narrated recital Gounod and Georgina has been filmed at and streamed by the Wigmore Hall.

She is deputy editor of Opera magazine and recently co-authored Labour of Love, a book celebrating 10 years of BBC Television’s Call the Midwife.

Page 6

04 Taking the knee Praying in church Christopher Howse

17 Socialising Ways to keep young Taki

06 Stop and think The consequences of rewilding Alan Titchmarsh 09 Carry on working The many rewards Liz Hodgkinson

18 Carers Unpaid saviours Valerie Grove 20 On the town Tips for theatre-goers Helen Hawkins

10 Classic cars Romance and glamour Stephen Bayley 13 Good companions My dog and me David Mills 14 Plundering the past Good and bad times Virginia Ironside 16 Learning It’s never too late Henrietta Bredin

23 Beekeeping How to get started Nicola Reed 24 Gadgets Pieces of wizardry Marion Shoard 25 Kitchen garden Foraging for all Simon Courtauld 27 Pension planning Women and wealth Garry White 30 Funerals Sad but satisfying David Fraser Jenkins

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 3

Praying in church

Taking the knee

Christopher Howse likes his femurs perpendicular

I

’ve never got the hang of hassocks – those hard square cushions so carefully embroidered with corn and grapes or sheep or coats of arms, and with names of local voluntary bodies. I suppose they are stuffed with horsehair – the hassocks, not the voluntary bodies.

My knees mean a great deal to me, and they have to be kept from seizing up by careless kneeling, but hassocks have never been part of my tradition, as people these days call it. Hassocks often seem too thick, accommodating those who lean forward in prayer, their bottoms on the bench, their legs bent to meet the hassock at an angle.

For me, kneeling means keeping the femur perpendicular and the knee on a low kneeler, softened, one hopes with more than a covering of hard linoleum. And it’s a great error to think it more comfortable to kneel leaning forward, hands joined beyond the bench-back in front of you. That plays havoc with the back.

No, bring the hands back and kneel upright to humour the column of vertebrae.

I mention kneeling as a technical part of churchgoing that changes as age increases. Parents of young children might go to church, not exactly dishonestly but mindful of their offspring’s chances of education at a church school. Once of a respectable age, one finds the most regular social occasions are funerals. Some of the nicest are held in old churches in the country in summer. A pity more people don’t die in summer.

Funerals at least break the barrier of unfamiliarity that churches present to the long unaccustomed. It’s like entering a mosque. What are you supposed to do? Do you really take your shoes off? Are there no-go areas? What about hats? And women?

In England at least, churches form part of that unexplained portion of daily life, like buses, supermarkets, betting shops. By unexplained, I mean that there are

no instructions for use. You’re expected to know how to pay, how to get the bus to stop, how to place a bet.

Just as some people go to betting shops to get out of the rain and watch the racing in undemanding company, so some go to look at churches because of their old architecture. In most villages the church is the most distinguished building. There are about 10,000 medieval parish churches in England.

Church-crawlers come for the architecture but seldom stay for the services, which are a bit of a nuisance, preventing proper

The Missal (1902) by John William Waterhouse

inspection of the sedilia or nodding ogees. There’s some black and white footage of Philip Larkin wheeling his well-oiled bicycle to the door of an old church and (without removing his bicycle clips as specified in his poem Church Going) having a look around, the gibbous moons of his heavy spectacles raised towards the roof timbers.

‘A serious house on serious earth’, Larkin calls a church, but I think he might have underestimated the strong combination of the trivially everyday and the timeless transcendent that coexist when

4 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

churches are used for what they are, as he puts it.

I’ve seen this in Westminster Cathedral, which I live near. On one row of seats people queue up for Confession. They wait to kneel on one side of a grille and tell their sins to the priest on the other side of it.

It’s not really the priest they are telling but God. He of course knows about the sins better than the penitents do, but they’ve come formally to say sorry for them and receive forgiveness.

That’s even more serious than Larkin might have reckoned on. Yet at the same time, the queue is like a supermarket checkout. Old ladies park their rollators, I think they’re called. Young mothers keep little children quiet, or not. An old man asks for his place to be kept while he nips outside to the popular new lavatories, much missed when closed during lockdown.

While they’re busy queueing to get their souls scrubbed, there’s a lot going on. It’s rather like sitting down in a wood and becoming aware of the coming and going of birds, and then of beetles and insects around your feet. In the cathedral a knot of family and friends gather around a baby being baptised, then disperse in a flurry of photographs, leaving the cathedral even quieter than before their excited voices interrupted the silence.

Someone comes and lights a candle before a statue of the Virgin Mary and stands in prayer. A steady ant-trail of visitors comes and goes to the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. Someone puts money in the box for the homeless centre. It’s not at all like Adlestrop station on a June day. It’s a house of prayer and a gate of heaven.

That’s how it seems to me. You notice how other people suddenly age, and one day are there no longer.

It’s impressive if they have taken to coming to church, not so much to prepare themselves for that day as to be patiently prepared by the ordinary but transcendent habits of the place.

Alan Titchmarsh cannot understand the current enthusiasm for rewilding

Stop and think W

hy do we push consequences to the back of our minds without a thought for the future? Impetuosity?

Impatience? Arrogance? Whatever the cause, consequences never fail to make themselves felt, however uncomfortable. Ask any party-goer.

In the garden they often sneak up quietly, but gardeners, more than most folk, are painfully aware of the consequences of our actions. After all, we are always planning ahead: spring-flowering bulbs are planted in autumn. Seeds of summerflowering bedding plants are sown in spring. Winter cabbage is planted in summer. We live a life predicated on consequences. It is for this reason that I am at a loss to understand the excitement and avid enthusiasm for rewilding. For a start, the use of the prefix ‘re’ implies that something was that way before when, in the vast majority of cases, it certainly was not.

Let’s be clear: there is hardly a square inch of the British landscape which is not managed – whether that be for the cultivation of crops or for wildlife. Humankind has managed land (for good or ill) since we stopped hunter-gathering and built fences to contain livestock and

prevent other folk from pinching our Brussels sprouts.

Rewilding is not simply a matter of ‘letting it go’, and I suspect that if land were just ‘let go’ those who espoused rewilding as a way of beautifying our countryside and improving the breadth of our flora and fauna would be the first to complain at the resulting scene that would turn out to be a far cry from the Arcadian idyll they imagine.

Dominant species would force out those of a lesser constitution and prove Herbert Spencer’s belief, expounded in 1864, in the survival of the fittest. In the botanical world, the fittest are seldom the most beautiful. The grave danger of passive rewilding is that it will result in a reduction in biodiversity rather than an increase.

Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I love with an undying passion our native flora and fauna. My first memories concern the great outdoors. I joined the Wharfedale Naturalists’ Society at the age of eight and am still a member.

Later in life the passion has not diminished. I have created and cultivate a three-acre wild-flower meadow and a large wildlife pond

We have been managing our land for centuries: Longhorn cattle free-ranging at Knepp Wildland in West Sussex

around our current dwelling. The native marginal aquatic plants that occupy the edges of the water are cut back annually. Left to their own devices they would march across the pond causing it to silt up and turn into a bog; the roach who have made a home here (not introduced by me) would fail to survive, as would the frogs, toads, newts and dragon flies.

Eventually brambles would claim an exclusive hold on the terrain.

The hay is cut from the meadow just once in late summer to ensure that the mixture of perennial wild flowers continues to thrive. The spectacle begins with cowslips in March and April, journeying through a seasonal patchwork of vetches, marguerites, field scabious 6 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

and knapweed culminating in the purple haze of marjoram in late summer. I have planted, in my lifetime, tens of thousands of trees, for myself and for others. This is not rewilding; this is the management of land with wild flowers, invertebrates, amphibians, birds, mammals and all other wildlife in mind. Oh yes; and humans, too.

It is intriguing that when so much is talked about mental health, that the effects of having and being in a garden are so underrated. Cultivated flowers feed the soul and are enjoyed by pollinating insects every bit as much as native species.

Recent tirades have been directed at those who like stripes on their lawn (mainly men, it is claimed).

They are derided as being irresponsible and diminishing the resources available to wildlife. But what of the improved mental health

of the gardener who takes much pleasure in creating the stripes and will have the joy of doing the same next week and the week after?

Where’s the harm in that?

Not that all the benefits of a close-mown lawn are reserved for the proud gardener. When did you last see a blackbird digging for grubs in long grass? You didn’t. When did you see a flock of starlings pecking for leatherjackets in a meadow?

Never. Where else, other than in a close-mown lawn, can birds find moss to line their nests?

Should you wish to vent your

‘When did you last see a blackbird digging for grubs in long grass?’

spleen on those who are squandering our natural resources, might I suggest you look in the direction of those who have purchased an ‘environmentally friendly’ electric car and blockpaved their front garden to accommodate it. Putting aside the consequences of dead battery disposal (yet to make itself really felt) what about the loss of carboncapture where once plants grew, and the subsequent increase in flashflooding now that more and more front gardens are being paved over?

The pragmatist who is aware of the real consequences would have kept the old car until it finally conked out and cultivated plants in the front garden. It is, you see, all a matter of balance.

There. I feel better now. And that is the consequence of getting it all off my chest.

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 7

Retirement Get out of your pyjamas and stop twiddling your thumbs, advises Liz Hodgkinson

F

Carry on working

or all of his working life, my late father-in-law had eagerly looked forward to retiring, which he did at the earliest opportunity, aged 60.

Ah, what bliss, he imagined, to have nothing to do all day rather than rise at seven and catch the 8.10 into the city. He would have all the time in the world to himself. But, in common with many others, he soon discovered that retirement was not all it was cracked up to be. Before long, he became ill and instead of spending all day at leisure doing crosswords and sudoku, he was in and out of hospital.

He died without really ever enjoying his retirement at all. And he is far from being the only one.

For it is my belief that when people have nothing to do, nothing to mark their day out other than planning the next meal, illness sets in to fill the gap. When your day has no structure, when you can choose whether to get up and dressed or slop around in pyjamas and dressing gown, you soon start to get old and every ache and pain becomes magnified into a serious condition.

By contrast, if you continue to work, to remain active and engaged in the world, aches and pains mysteriously go away and you stay young, often to an astonishing degree. I have friends in their late seventies and eighties who are still doing a full day’s work and they have a spring in their step. They even walk like much younger people, and their voices remain lively and enthusiastic. My 80-year-old artist friend is always ringing me up to talk about an exciting new project and is certainly not hanging up his brushes and easel to sit around staring into space.

Similarly, actor Richard Wilson, of One Foot in the Grave fame, has no intention of putting the other foot in the grave just yet. At 85, he has no plans to retire and says he still feels young. He has just branched out into a new career

Going strong at 80: Miriam Margolyes

directing plays and says he would be totally miserable without work.

Miriam Margolyes is still going strong at 80, as is Eileen Atkins at 87.

You may say, it’s different for actors, artists and other creative people as they have exciting careers which can go on for as long as they are able to tread the boards and are in demand. But what if you have been stuck in a boring office job for 40 years and cannot wait to get out?

Isn’t that a bit different?

Well, yes, but even then, if you retire at 60 or 65, you could easily live for another quarter of a century, and that is a long time to be twiddling your thumbs and waiting for The Archers. There is plenty of time to embark on a new career, or to tweak the former one so that you remain useful to society. One friend trained as a counsellor at 68 and now, in her mid-70s, has a busy practice advising clients who can take advantage of her wisdom and experience. If you were a teacher

‘If you continue to work, aches and pains mysteriously go away’

and you retired because you’d had enough of school politics and rowdy schoolkids, you can always offer tutoring in your subject, either online or going into people’s homes.

There is huge demand, so why let your skills rot away unused?

I also believe that, as you age, it’s important to keep in touch with young people, to hear their views, and not get stuck in your opinions, which may be way out of date.

Becoming a private tutor after retirement can be an excellent way of retaining an enquiring mind.

Young people tend to be cheerful and optimistic and they also remind you of when you were young. Their lively chatter can perk up an otherwise miserable day.

There is also the very important matter of being able to earn money.

Even if you retire with a generous enough pension, which is increasingly not the case these days, there is nothing like being paid for your work to give some status and a feeling of achievement. I have known many retirees who are as pleased as punch when they can earn some money from their labours. A retired accountant, for instance, could always put in a few hours working for a charity. A keen gardener could advise on garden design, even if not fit enough to do actual gardening.

Carrying on working after standard retirement age may take a little bit of initiative and a soupçon of courage, but it’s worth it for the many rewards, and not just the financial ones, that it brings.

It’s all a matter of wanting to contribute, to be an active member of society rather than a passive consumer. True, work is challenging and if you continue to work you may face rejection and setbacks. But to me, that is part of life and I would hope I could bounce back for some time to come.

I am always delighted to be asked to do some work, and long may it continue.

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 9

The Alfa-Romeo 33-2 Stradale Scaglione Coupé, as seen in the 2018 Concorso d’Eleganza, Villa d’Este

Romance and glamour

Stephen Bayley has no truck with modern electric motors

YANKO MALINO

R

age, rage against the dying of the internal combustion engine. For those not yet ready to succumb to a mobility scooter, there are still alternatives.

But hurry.

I had breakfast with a friend of mine, a garrulous North American, to celebrate a significant birthday.

He said to me, moodily pushing a piece of haddock around his Connaught plate: ‘Do you know, Stephen, as I get older, I am reassessing the priorities in life?’

I was expecting an earnest confession of enthusiasm for Advaita Vedanta, non-duality, veganism, breeding llamas and petit-point.

Instead, he told me: ‘And I am more than ever convinced that these priorities are sex, drink and fast cars.’

Sex and drink we will leave for another day, but let’s enjoy the car while we can. The great complexity and fascination of the motor-car (1886-2026 when use of petrol will surely be criminalised) is not in engineering or technology, but in psychology, values and meaning.

Tesla may have its champions, but it is no more emotionally interesting than the circuit boards it

largely comprises. Besides, electric motors are boring. A petrol engine has about ten thousand calibrated parameters, meaning almost infinite ranges of character are possible in its design and execution. Electric motors are all the same, differing only in size.

Our grandchildren will not feel any nostalgia for the Teslas that surround them, like silent witnesses to collective guilt. At least, not the sort of nostalgia I felt this week when I saw for sale a 1956 Austin Healey 100/6 in beautiful two-tone Old English White and metallic blue. The details said it was the very car that took part in the famous Bahamas Speed Week. I read that and fell into a helpless reverie of Jet Set nonsense.

Nor will these same grandchildren feel any nostalgia for the racing-driver Lewis Hamilton, exceptional human being that he is.

Hamilton is a disciplined, buffed, toned, austere athlete and vegan. By contrast, just let me tell you some of the names of the drivers and cars that competed in that same Bahamas Speed Week, held in Nassau between 1954 and 1966.

Here is accidental poetry. Masten Gregory (Ferrari 375MM), Stirling

10 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

Moss (Maserati 300S), Lance Reventlow (Scarab), Innes Ireland (Lotus Climax), Roger Penske (Chaparral Chevrolet), Mark Donohue (Lola T70). Who knew that mere nominatives could be so deliriously evocative of a lost world ?

The classic car movement offers an escape from the regime of legal restrictions, punitive taxation, potential criminality and moral stigma that now compromises everyday use of a car. Classic cars confirm that just as there was once a world with ashtrays, so once there was a world where road travel involved beauty and romance.

Two recent examples from my own experience. Sitting on the terrace of the Splendido in Portofino, I was wondering what to choose for lunch, trofie alla Genovese or a carpaccio of raw shrimp dressed with a sauce made of Vecchia Romana brandy. All the while, lulled by the nicely soporific plopping noise of tennis balls gently returned in sunshine. And then I was raucously interrupted and elbowed by a suite of explosive feral howls as the Lamborghini Drivers’ Club made its Saturday outing to this lovely hotel.

The contrast was exquisite and

perfect, with all the coordinates of pleasure aligned.

Or a couple of years later on the other side of Italy, I was a judge of the Lamborghini Concorso d’Eleganza in Trieste. I will know I am dead when the sight and sound of astonishing cars under hot sun no longer affects my tear-ducts and pineal glands. And, while I have never doubted that fine cars are a proxy of ‘art’, that night it was confirmed when Lamborghinis gathered at Duino castle. Here Rilke wrote his harrowing Elegies and the mixture of poetry with petrol did not seem incongruous, but all of a piece in mankind’s yearning for meaning in a random Universe.

The locus classicus of the classic car movement, at least insofar as actually driving them is concerned, was the Cannonball Run which began as a clandestine, illegal and very dangerous event in 1971.

Starting at Manhattan’s Red Ball Garage, drivers did as drivers do and drove the 3,000 miles to Redondo Beach in Los Angeles, lubricated on the way by beer and cocktails as much as by sophisticated motor-oil.

The organiser, Brock Yates, had a proud boast that, in the course of his professional duties, he had received speeding tickets in every single state.

Cannonball has imitators now all over Europe. And there are replicas too of the great rallies of the Fifties to the Seventies where you and I can take part and pretend to be Paddy Hopkirk or Erik Carlsson: the Safari, the Acropolis, the deadly fatiguing Liege-Rome-Liege, the Tulip Rally, the Tour de Corse and, inevitably, the Monte Carlo Rallye Historique. This last features reps of the classic stage

Sterling Moss (left) with Innes Ireland at the 1961 Dutch Grand Prix

from Burzet to Saint Martial, via the Ray Pic Cascade and LachampRaphael. It ends with drinks and dinner in the Salle des Etoiles of Monte Carlo Sporting Club. Lines overheard here will include: ‘I hear Toby’s running a lighter crankshaft this year.’

But there are new ‘regularity’ runs too: the Ypres-Istanbul, the Vintage Dolomites (Innsbruck-Cortina d’Ampezzo-Trento-Bolzano), the Carrera Espana and the AlaskaMexico. My own breakfasting friend has created a Rallye de Grappa where the driving tends to be curtailed after lunch. Since even the most impassioned classic car connoisseur is nowadays cautious about recklessness on public roads, the sporting discipline here is to drive with precision: a typical brief will be to complete a stage of 50km at precisely 47km/h in a time of exactly 63mn 49secs.

But the excitement of classic cars involves money as well as speed and

A pair of Mercedes-Benz 300 SLs on display

glamour : the mix of romance, nostalgia and investment is a potent one. The cars running through the Gavia pass in Lombardy, a singletrack First World War military road no more than 2m wide, rising to 1,828m and not much contaminated by protective parapets, may be worth millions which, of course, adds to the delicious thrill. For example, a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL, a fine, but not specially rare car, recently reached $1.7 million at the RM/ Sotheby’s auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. The sale was celebrated with gallons of margaritas at The Bootleggers’ Modern American Smokehouse.

The financial performance of classics cars has since 1994 been tracked in a formal index by the elegant Simon Kidston, nephew of a thirties adventurer who once dated Barbara Cartland. Kidston is set up in Geneva as a ‘broker’, a term which suggests a status-significant and conceptual connection to art more than to the motor-trade. Similarly cars are not so much sold as put on ‘consignment’. The ‘Kidston 500’ tracks, like NASDAQ or FTSE, the day-to-day saleroom prices of five hundred classics, from the Bugatti 57SC Atlantic at one end to a humble Fiat Cinquecento at the other.

It clearly establishes the classic car as a new financial asset class.

And since the price of an AstonMartin DB5 has increased thirty-fold since 1994, it’s an asset-class with more capillary-busting highperformance than most dreary financial instruments.

JG Ballard once predicted that by about now, the use of cars would be restricted to private ‘motoring parks’ where drivers could exercise their vehicles under psychiatric supervision. We are nearly there, but the reality is more benign than Ballard’s dystopian vision.

Sex, drink, fast cars, their carburettors, their colours, their noise, their ashtrays, their romance and glamour, their altitudinous value, their unashamed connection with cupidity, desire and pleasure, these are powerful specifics against the disembodied dissatisfactions of the digital world. I don’t want a Non Fungible Token, I want a set of metal keys on a leather fob, a hex-drive and a starting handle. And a paper map to navigate my long and thrilling journey.

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 11

Pets

Good companions With his children gone and now working from home, David Mills decided to get a dog. He was not prepared for Tatty

O

kay, I admit, I screamed.

At the other end of her lead Tatty was finishing off the biggest, fattest rat since the Black Death.

Owning a dog turns out to be quite eventful. That was her third rat to be notched up alongside the multitudinous other vermin and game she has despatched in her short life. I had pictured myself strolling through the countryside with faithful hound padding alongside. It hasn’t been like that at all. It’s more like being with an endlessly curious, easily distracted, hyperactive toddler with astonishing physical capabilities.

There are breeds that produce militarily-obedient animals, but Tatty is a Lakeland terrier and there’s only so much direction they’ll accept. It amounts to Sit! (‘Okay, there’s a treat here’) and sometimes Come! (‘I might, if what I’m doing isn’t as interesting as a treat’). We chose a Lakeland because there had been a fox terrier in my childhood.

Looking at old family snaps should have given us a clue: the dog doesn’t properly appear in any of them, just his rear end as he trots out of shot.

Sometimes he’s just a blur.

We got a dog primarily because we walk a lot: why not give purpose to our daily wanderings over Suffolk and Hampstead Heath? Inevitably, because our children had just left home, everyone said the dog was a substitute. It isn’t: it doesn’t empty the fridge, or touch the gin.

A dog makes you look differently.

In the countryside, I prickle with alertness, looking out for recent deer tracks or hares. If I miss the signs and Tatty picks up the scent, she is off, bounding over the fields, deaf to all entreating. She plods back ten or 20 minutes later, exuding a satiated air of ‘this is what I exist for’. There’s a joy in that for me too – as there is in watching her play with likeminded dogs, chasing each other in chaotic pursuit until exhaustion sets in.

In my more pretentious moments (there are many), I muse that a dog enlarges one’s connection to the world. And she makes me laugh a lot too, sprinting over the furniture, or trying to tunnel into the sofa, or sleeping sprawled on her back with her legs in the air in the most undignified manner. The greatest thing about dogs is their lack of inhibiting self-consciousness which means they are ever enthusiastic with an appetite for life that can only lift yours. Tatty might be lying on her bed, but pick up a coat and she is next to the door, tail wagging, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go! I’m ready! I’m ready!’

Every dog expression has an exclamation mark and how much better is life with that! This does not mean, however, that once outside the door she is always ready to walk.

If she suddenly remembers she’s already done her 20,000 steps for the day, she’ll collapse dramatically and refuse to budge.

Then there’s the unexpected things I’ve learnt, such as what children’s names are out of fashion.

Alan, Frank, Colin, Kevin, Vincent, Dave... no little boys have these names now, but dogs on Hampstead Heath do. It’s demeaning both to Colins (and Daves) and the poor

Tatty: a law unto himself

dogs, who have obviously been named with some comic intent.

I wanted to call ours Nobby. My wife objected that it would make people look at us oddly. I argued that posh people have the most ludicrous nicknames and if you shout in fruity and commanding tones you can get away with a lot. We were milling about in the crowd before a concert at Snape Maltings, so to prove my point I shouted, ‘Nobby! Nobby!

Come here!’ No one blinked.

Emboldened I tried, ‘Titty! Titty!

Where the hell are you?’ Not a single head turned. I had several more to try but the children were getting embarrassed.

I’ve learnt that the world’s most bizarre dog owners gather on Hampstead Heath, such as the people who think, ‘It will be wet and muddy, so I’ll wear white Prada trousers and a full-length Gucci suede coat,’ and then stuff their pockets with dog treats and become enraged when every muddy hound leaps up at them.

Having a dog leads to scrapes on all fronts. Tatty is two and a half and has had three lots of emergency treatment. She brings back memories of our children’s younger years – not that they ever dug up a nesting bumble-bee, got stung, suffered anaphylactic shock and consequent internal haemorrhaging.

(The first recorded case in Britain – how thrilled we were to learn that.)

Like the children, she is a fetter on our social life (or handy excuse for avoiding other people, depending on how misanthropic you’ve become) – no, we can’t stay for drinks, we have to get back for the dog; no, we can’t come for the weekend, unless we bring the dog; city break in Berlin? Only if your brother will have the dog. Then again, who wants Paris when you can watch a Lakeland terrier tearing across the common in a game of tag with some bouncing spaniel?

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 13

Old age Virginia Ironside on the pluses – and minuses – of being in her eighth decade

Plundering the past

I

used to hate it when contemporaries would say: ‘At our age…’ This observation always preceded some gloomy admission – that they could no longer dance the night away, get a good night’s sleep, enjoy sex, get a man to look at them twice or perform a Downward Dog without doing their back in.

But then I was in my sixties and real old age hadn’t started to strike.

There’s a wonderful golden period, in my experience, between 60 and 70 when you’ve got it all. ‘Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait’ goes the old phrase, and in one’s sixties we savait and we pouvait, as it were. Being able to do mostly everything but without the disadvantage of inexperience, the world seems our oyster. But after 70 – but maybe I’m an early maturer – sometimes it does feel as if there are clouds on the horizon.

I used to say that going downhill was a great experience – and for a while it is. You’ve sweated your guts out getting to the top of the hill of life and now you can relax, enjoy the view and then amble down without getting out breath. But, as Mae West so famously said, ‘Old age is not for sissies’, and these days – and I’m 78 – going downhill feels more like clinging to a tin tray, clattering down at tremendous speed, breaking bones and terrified as we hurtle towards – what? We lose our glasses (I found mine mysteriously in the fridge the other day), confuse June with July and miss all kinds of arrangements because of failing sight; we can’t drive at night or hear anything at a gathering consisting of more than two people.

The grandchildren – ‘the reward for not killing your children’ – with whom I used to spend so much time in my sixties making brandysnaps and playing Snakes and Ladders, are now more

interested in experimenting with magic mushrooms and spending weeks with their girlfriends than visiting their old gran. The old friends I used to treasure – you can never make a new old friend, after all – have started to drop off their perches or call me ‘Veronica’ in their confusion, and repeat old stories again and again. My hairdryer is starting to feel heavy; I

‘I can’t tell which day it is without consulting my pill organiser’ can’t read the instructions on boxes of pills, let along push them from their plastic prisons; I can’t open smoke doors without using both hands; and I can’t tell which day it is without consulting my pill organiser.

And yet … and yet… there are some very bright moments that I didn’t experience in my sixties. And I didn’t expect them. About once a month I will get a strange flashback to the past: walking in an autumn wood in Kent; standing on a bridge in Venice; looking at the River Wye from the churchyard in Ross-onWye; feeling my grandmother’s presence and smelling her scent.

Intense experiences that are just as

14 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

good – if not better and more vivid – as actually being there. And with no airports or lateral flow tests involved.

And now your have a longer past than you do a future, you can plunder it and enjoy wandering down memory lane. Our memory lanes are as long as the M1; young people’s only a short stroll down the front path.

I’ve also experienced the kindness of strangers. Not only have some people asked if they can help me with my suitcase or across the road, but now, instead of being rather irritated as I used to be, I am exceedingly touched and grateful for their help.

I have more pleasure in small things. And nothing matters as much as it used to. We’ve seen it all. I may not be exactly looking forward to death, but there’s relief in knowing that it’s on its way.

Nature has brilliantly organised it so that life gets more and more confusing and irritating every day.

I’ll never understand how to book a theatre or train ticket online without my heart racing. I’ll never enjoy talking to a ‘Chatbot’. I don’t want to press a series of buttons and retrieve a special code from my mobile before I can access my bill. I don’t want to understand how to access strange channels like Netflix or Disney. Cancel culture, extinction rebellion and draconian pandemic rules all terrify me. I’m not certain what algorithms or ‘memes’ are. And I’m sad, too, when young people look at me baffled when I mention, say, Cyril Connolly or debutantes or Fats Domino.

I’ve lived my life. I can’t change anything now. And I can’t help feeling real sympathy with the man who apparently, on his deathbed, looked out of his window and said, cheerfully: ‘Another lovely day.

Thank God, I don’t have to get up and enjoy it.’

Learning

Yes you can

Fancy being a ballet dancer or trapeze artist? It’s never too late to have a go, says Henrietta Bredin

G

uess what, you can teach an don’t do anything foolish. To my old dog new tricks. What’s surprise I greatly enjoyed it and more, you should. Learning remembered seeing a leaflet for a new tricks as an oldie can be circus skills school so I booked in for thoroughly surprising and a trapeze session. All you have to do enormously enjoyable. Over the past to start with is stand on a thick mat two years of unwilling confinement with a trapeze that is about the and social distancing, the height of your head and see if you opportunities to learn new things can get your leg up and over the bar have even expanded, thanks to – let’s be clear I’m not talking about a zooming and online streaming, flying trapeze, this is static. although there is nothing better than ‘Anyway, I could do that and have the live experience. been going ever since. Progress is Only last week I sat opposite a glacial but I wasn’t hugely fit when I man in an almost empty tube started so anything is an advance. carriage who was knitting what My horror has always been losing looked like a highly complicated cognitive function and the only thing pattern, involving a number of that has been shown to make a different coloured balls of wool. I difference is getting more exercise. I asked him what it was and he told walk a fair bit but needed to do me that it was a jumper for his something resistive and aerobic and grandson and that he’d only recently definitely didn’t want to go to a gym learnt to knit, by following YouTube and bore myself senseless on a tutorials, and that it had become treadmill – this is hard work, and something of an obsession. very good fun.’

Sewing is definitely back in For the less energetic, there are fashion, if the BBC’s strangely top-notch lectures on every subject compelling Great British Sewing imaginable offered by numerous Bee programme is anything to go by. different organisations, both online At the Stitch Festival in London’s and in person. At Gresham College in Business Centre in early March there London, for example, recently you were workshops galore where you could have heard Chris Whitty on couldvc learn how to follow paper infections which use the respiratory patterns, control the overlocker on route, Anna Whitelock on King your sewing machine and master the James I or Marina Frolova-Walker techniques of brioche knitting, wet on Prokofiev – coming up in April felting, mirror embroidery and there’s John Mullan on villains in the specialist buttonholing. novel, Christina Banks-Leite on In Newcastle, retired GP Dow Smith has not only restarted playing the clarinet after 35 years – he now plays with two amateur orchestras in weekly sessions – but he has also become an enthusiastic aerialist. A few years ago a friend had a spare ticket for a session with Go Ape, a set-up where a group of professionals takes over bits of woodland and rigs up wires and nets in the trees.

‘It’s extremely safe,’ he says, ‘with harnesses and helmets and people making sure you Enthusiastic aerialists: Dow Smith (left) and friend 16 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

preventing the extinction of tropical species. All these lectures are public and free of charge.

The playwright Mark Ravenhill saw the Royal Ballet’s film of The Tales of Beatrix Potter as a sevenyear-old, fell headlong for Jemima Puddleduck and decided immediately (dropping his previous ambition to run a chain of bakeries) that he wanted to be a dancer.

Shamed by a self-righteous aunt into thinking that it wasn’t something a boy should be doing he gave it up for the next few decades until around four years ago when, wanting to get fit, he thought, ‘Right – I’m going to give it a go. Strength, flexibility, musicality, it’s all there in ballet. I searched “male ballet classes” online and the City Lit in Holborn popped up.

‘It turned out that for an all-male class you had to have some experience but there was a mixed beginners class so I joined up. I was the only man and the women were on the whole older than me.... Some of those women were rather flexible.

‘Once I’d decided not to be competitive and just do it for me it was a good psychological lesson – very releasing. And the great joy was that the music was all the big 19th-century romantic stuff’ – not normally Ravenhill’s favourite period of music but when concentrating at the same time as being enveloped by the ‘surging’ music, he ‘loved it’.

A conductor friend wrote two-and-a-half novels in lockdown; a retired barrister is dabbling in oils, taking piano lessons and honing his Italian conversational skills; three people I know have done bee-keeping courses and I’ve moved on from solo singing for beginners at Morley College in Lambeth to classes on oratorio and Lieder. There is no age limit on learning.

Socialising

Young at heart A new generation of friends, exercise and a sense of fun are what Taki recommends

A

s everyone knows, older men are better and far more caring lovers than the young.

There is only one trouble, and that is that women are far too distracted to realise it. I have been pursuing the fairer sex throughout my life and have only recently understood it: the fairer sex prefers the young to the old, the ignorant to the wise, and the beautiful to the wrinkled. So what am I to do now that I’m 85? Give up chasing women, give up sex altogether – it’s like giving up on life itself. The answer is of course not.

The solution to this particular problem is to have a whole new bunch of friends who are far younger than myself. It’s elementary, my dear Watsons.

But before I go on about new and younger friends, an observation about age and its problems. There are only two of the latter, physical deterioration and fear of death. Both are easily treated. I’ll start with the grim reaper. Basically it’s a fear of the unknown, of Hamlet’s ‘undiscovered country’. Prospero got it right about death: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ There’s no set formula for getting over one’s fear of death, everybody has to work through it alone. I have never, but never feared the man in the white suit, as I call him, and will insult the bum until the day or night he visits me.

Physical destruction is what I fear, but then I’ve got it by the you-know-what also. Exercise before breakfast, however short, is a must. Fifteen or 20 minutes of brisk walking every morning, followed by two sets of 20 push-ups, and 20 knee bends are de rigueur. I also do my karate exercises on the day I don’t have a class – three times a week – and hard sparring with other martial artists. Which means exercise has kept me healthy although I drink and smoke and at times do even worse things.

No fear of the ‘man in the white suit’: Woody Allen in Love and Death, 1975

Never mind, having fun keeps one young. And as all my childhood friends are dead, I have now replaced them with younger ones. It may sound crass but it’s not. Michael Mailer, the son of novelist Norman Mailer, is my closest buddy now that Jimmy, Aspers, Aleko, Gianni, Yanni and others have gone. Michael is a filmmaker, director, producer. In other words he knows many young women who want to be famous. For some strange reason their ambition suits me fine, as it does Michael.

Nothing wrong with trying to help our fellow human beings as we take them out to dinner, wine them and then escort them to late night activities. Mind you, it sounds much worse than it is. Women are far more forgiving than men when it comes to socialising. They don’t mind me being old and they treat me with kindness. And I don’t make a fool of myself by jumping on them à la dirty old men.

I think the trick of late life is a sense of humour. Laugh about your age and everyone will laugh with you. I have a horror of those terrible old men who show themselves with younger women and openly touch and flirt with them. If only they knew how ridiculous they look and how no one really believes they actually do anything with them. No, when one goes out with younger people, especially with younger women, one should try to act and

look like the odd man out. Younger people appreciate that and it also makes for a more relaxed atmosphere. Never try and pressure a woman is a good policy to follow, and never but never try and pressure a much younger woman is the best policy of all.

When I’m in Europe I pretty much take it easy as my wife Alexandra does not like to go out late. We attend dinner parties at friends’ houses, and sometimes I drop her at home and head for Lulu’s when in London, or some after hours club in Gstaad. But that is rare. When in New York, I am mostly without her because she hates the place and finds New Yorkers loud, aggressive and very dull. I agree, but for my good friend Michael and his merry band of friends.

Ridiculous people are at this moment trying to change the world by inventing non-binary people, whatever that means. I stick to the old type of men and women and it is amazing how well that works. We meet, go out to dinner, drink and eat well, and laugh a lot. The latter is all-important. Then we go back to someone’s house, drink some more and take it from there. It’s a fun life and I try to keep it fun by not taking things too seriously and always conducting myself as a gentleman. It keeps me young at heart and keeps me going. Try it and see.

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 17

Carers

Saving graces A new book on caring reveals some rivetingly candid stories, as Valerie Grove discovers

W

emmick’s Aged Parent in Dickens’s Great Expectations, beaming by the fire and enjoying his son’s jovial banter despite being stone deaf, remains the template for a contented and cared-for old age.

But we read few such scenarios today. We read only of the high cost of care, the scarcity of carers and a post-pandemic picture of lockeddown loneliness.

‘Who cares?’ has become a huge question. Richard Bates, having cared for his own father, has edited a collection of carers’ tales, Who Cares?: The Joys and Challenges of Unpaid Carers. Most unpaid carers are spouses or offspring and Bates asked a dozen of them to write their stories.

They are rivetingly candid. They tell tales of small tyrannies, bathroom horrors, mulish sulks and nocturnal needs, twice as demanding as child-rearing. But also of the gratifying aftermath: guilt assuaged, duty fulfilled.

Diana and George Melly, the ebullient jazz musician and writer, had an open marriage for 45 years.

In 2005 George was diagnosed with lung cancer and vascular dementia.

Behind that gregarious, smiling public personality, he had always been difficult, deaf and demanding.

George never learnt to drive and did no domestic chores or childcare.

‘I heard all his jokes a million times and got very fed up with it,’ Diana writes. ‘When George was alive, I felt eclipsed by him. At parties people would say, “Hello Diana – where’s George?”.’

As dementia struck, George carried on performing. He filled the 100 Club in Oxford Street a month before he died, in aid of Dementia UK. ‘I’ve got something beginning with D,’ he would tell his adoring audiences. If Diana accused him of wandering off, he would say: ‘I’m not wandering off, I’m just looking for the pub.’

George’s decline – including the moment he asks Diana, ‘Who are you? Where’s my wife?’ – can be followed in a graphic film, George Melly’s Last Stand, on YouTube.

Diana supervised the filming till the end – and invited all his former lovers, including Molly Parkin, to visit him and say their goodbyes.

Susan Hampshire’s husband, the impresario and philanthropist Eddie Kulukundis, was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2007. They had been ‘joined at the hip’ for more than 30 years. She gave up acting, not to become a carer but ‘Selfishly,’ she writes, ‘I was relieved and happy to have him more to myself.’

One day he swallowed two of his teeth. Once he got dressed over his pyjamas and was found at the front door saying, ‘I’m late for a meeting.’

One day they fell out of the shower together, and she laughed so much that it took her 70 minutes to extricate herself from her 17-stone husband, slippery as a seal. She learned the rules of caring: never raising her voice or questioning his paranoid hallucinations. No longer did he read four books a week, nor play competitive bridge. When Eddie’s long-lost love-child, now in

Great Expectations: Wemmick and his Aged Parent by Sol Eytinge, Jr

18 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

his sixties, turned up, he became a welcome visitor.

Susan Hampshire’s caring role lasted 12 years, until his death last year, and he remained ‘a sweetheart’. When Eddie no longer recognised her, she was sure he was still comforted by the sound of her voice. She could have put him in a care home ‘but I knew I was happier having Eddie with me at any time of the day or night.’ When the Covid pandemic struck, the couple had to isolate. ‘Sometimes I would sit down and think, phew! This is tough. But when I put it all into perspective, I have had my day in the sun and it was a privilege to care for Eddie.’

Kate Levey contributes a fine essay about her mother, the socially austere writer Brigid Brophy, and the care bestowed by her father, Michael Levey, the art historian and director of the National Gallery, after Brophy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her 50s. Levey looked after Brophy until he found the broken nights unendurable and fell into a state of collapse. A splendid residential home in rural Lincolnshire named Fir Close (Brophy, who hated the country, called it ‘Foreclose’) provided excellent care, with a chef preparing Brophy’s vegan regime. But Kate recalls ‘grim’ visits: she would hold a cigarette for mother to puff at, and was upset by Brophy’s cruel indifference to her father who visited daily. ‘Brigid had altered beyond any semblance of the mother I knew.’

Brophy herself wrote of her frustration at having to write more slowly. ‘The time-lag is unimaginably magnified by the delays of crippledom. All that has happened to me is that I have in part died, in advance of the total event.’

Not all the book’s contributors are well-known. Georgina HunterJones’s mother, known as Van, was

Carers

P. G. CHAMPION

Two-cigarette George Melly: ebullient jazz musician and writer

an impressive horsewoman who liked to amuse. Her storytelling was legendary, so the pre-dementia onset of vagueness – arriving at parties a week early, or wandering from home (which her family saw as her trying to replicate the excitement she felt ‘when driving her horse at unjumpable fences’) – gave her good tales to tell.

The companionship of her dog Ozzy meant she could walk out, meet people and stay social, much preferable to the care home where she lived briefly, where she seemed somehow ‘reduced’ and institutionalised. Lucidly, she recognised this and said: ‘If the carers do too much for me, I will forget how to look after myself.’

Like many daughters, Georgina had to wrestle with exasperation.

‘One day I called her “Mummy”.

“Why do you say that? I’m not pregnant.” ’ Then Van decided Diana was her sister. ‘If you are not my sister, who are you?’ ‘Your daughter.’ ‘Impossible. I had boys.

Known for it,’ she replied, adding, ‘I would have liked a girl though.’ She insisted on wearing a fur hat in July for her 90th birthday, declaring, ‘My guests will expect it.’ Georgina relished these ‘crazy moments’ — and never regretted her caring days.

Such reminiscences are tragicomic. Brilliant minds dwindle, sweet natures turn acid. This book

suggests to me that it is good practice to be an amanuensis. (As Nora Ephron’s mother told her daughter on her death bed: ‘It’s a good story. Take notes.’) The American novelist Edmund White, at 82 still alive after multiple heart attacks and strokes, is attended by his husband Michael Carroll, who kicks off this collection by logging White’s every word, in loving and fascinating detail.

‘Brilliant minds dwindle, sweet natures turn acid’ Edward Thorpe, ballet critic, relates how he looked after his wife, the novelist Gillian Freeman, for 23 years following her stroke at the age of 66. Gillian never recovered normal speech, but with stoicism and humour she managed, typing with one finger, to publish two more novels. Thorpe still took her to the ballet and on Saga cruises. Only when they were flying back from Vienna, having attended the premiere of Mayerling, which Gillian had written for Kenneth Macmillan at the Royal Ballet, did she ask why they had been there. It was the onset of Alzheimer’s.

‘I cannot pretend that it was

anything other than heartbreaking to watch her decline into a shadow,’ writes Thorpe, ‘a husk of what she had been.’

Nobody pretends that being socially isolated, on-call 24/7, paid a derisory carer’s living allowance, is an ideal modus vivendi. And as Kate Levey writes, appealing to social services can be ‘enough to threaten one’s sanity’.

But until some future day when dementia is treatable, this is life, for most people, at some time. The genders muddle – delightfully dotty or irascible old men, crabby or dear little old women: gender makes no difference, and kindness is unisex.

Diana Melly discovered how much she liked being the looker-after. ‘I like organising things.’ She also looked after George’s writer friends Francis Wyndham, Jean Rhys and Bruce Chatwin. ‘I worked my socks off for them,’ she writes. ‘Bruce stayed two years and never even made a cup of tea.’ When the artist Teddy Millington-Drake insisted on dying on Patmos, Diana went out to Greece and prepared his room: he died the next day.

Today, funeral eulogies often pay tribute to end-of-life carers. And even obituaries acknowledge their indispensability. Elisabeth Renouf, for six years helper and companion to the racehorse trainer Ivor Herbert, was quoted at the end of his recent obit: ‘All his carers found him impossible. He wouldn’t eat something as simple as a plate of baked beans, even if he was hungry.

He had to have a properly cooked meal, properly served.’

One contributor, Astrid Hilne, points out the continuum we take for granted: carers assume or hope that one day they will be cared for themselves. Also, they are amazed to discover what they can get used to. She used to wonder, in her youth, how her carer mother dealt with her grandparents’ commodes.

‘Well, now I know,’ she writes. ‘You just do.’ The cover of the book, as if to deter potential readers, shows a wheeled commode. Shock, horror.

But Richard Bates says it saved his father’s life.

Who Cares? edited by Richard Bates is published by Discript at £9.95

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 19

Going out

On the town

Helen Hawkins offers some advice on how to prepare for an evening at the theatre

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allet, keys, tickets, something to suck’ …the familiar checklist of the artsgoer. You may still go through this ritual, but nowadays with an impending sense of doom. At the start of the year, a poll of theatregoers of all ages by Purple Seven suggested the gloomiest group about their arts lives returning to normal this year were the over-70s – just 21 per cent could foresee a life sans masks, sans hand sanitiser, sans everything.

Is it really that bad out there? Of course not, but who knows how fast things will return to the old normal; meanwhile, the new normal can turn on a sixpence. I advise Going Out as if it were a foreign holiday in preplague days.

The tickets Many venues now prefer ticketless online ‘e-tickets’. But you need to have either a home computer with a printer, or a smartphone. This is probably the biggest headache for those of us who don’t regard their smartphone as a fifth limb – or perhaps don’t even own one. Arts venues are now deeply digi: they prefer cards to cash and assume anything – tickets, programmes, bar orders, covid passes – can live on a phone. (They can, but not always without difficulty.) Other than printing out tickets and passes and carrying the copies around in a weather-proof plastic folder, there aren’t many options.

Once you have resigned yourself to an e-ticket, you still have to find it. My home laptop can search for the right email very simply, but my phone seems to inhabit a parallel universe where I haven’t booked any tickets for that venue at all since

Queen's Theatre (now The Sondheim) showing Les Misérables, running in London since October 1985

2016. Most emails confirming a ticket purchase will be headed boxoffice@... etc, so even if you have put all your ticket emails in a special ‘folder’ in your mailbox (highly advisable), it’s still a struggle to find the right one. And when you finally find it, click on the attachment and hold up the bar code for the usher to point at with a magic laser gun… you may be asked to make the screen brighter so the magic gun can work properly. To prevent a massacre in the queue, you are strongly advised to be on top of all this before you leave home. Or take paper copies.

The passport Before you show your e-ticket you may be asked for an up-to-date NHS covid pass – assuming some venues decide to keep this system going, even if the government doesn’t.

20 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2021

Apple owners can put it in their ‘wallet’ facility; sensible people either print it out just before they set out from home; sneakier ones take a screenshot of the pass that is easier to display.

Even if the passport does go away entirely, you may still need to show an e-ticket while you wait in line outside the venue. Note to ushers doing these checks: smartphones with fingerprint-touch logging-on don’t work in the rain, however many times you stab the little button. Why not wait till we all are safely inside – or provide golf umbrellas to shield us while we get our phones out?

Your neighbours Whether coaxed in by watching loads of performing arts streams during lockdown or just thinking, ‘Hey, cheap tickets!’, there may be more under-30s at our old cultural haunts than before. English National Opera actually gave away a chunk of free Valkyrie tickets to the under-30s, and discount theatre ticket websites are feeding their new habit.

Before the curtain even rises, their presence can be felt when you find you can’t walk down the centre aisle for young people snapping themselves against the backdrop of the theatre’s historic decor. At least they are enjoying their surroundings. And one small ray of light – in the past two years the selfie stick seems to have died.

Another sign that a yoof audience is ‘in’ will be the decibel level in the house, which will have risen a couple of points. These are Broadwaytrained people, it seems, who like to clap a lead when they enter, even in a ballet; and they are definitely going to leap to their feet to applaud at the end, even if it’s dire, which is sort of

Going out sweet, though infinitely annoying if they block your view of the curtain call. As is the habit of acting as if they were on a cinema date, heads locked together.

Audiences need new life blood.

What they don’t need are people so addicted to their phones that they have to sneak a peek at them every five minutes.

The play A less obvious sign of the yoof factor, one that has been building for over a decade now, is that casting is increasingly becoming colour- and gender-blind, so that Hamlet can be played by a woman of colour, as Cush Jumbo – brilliantly – showed at the Young Vic last year. Nothing that new there, really, as women have been playing lead male roles since the late 19th century. But Jumbo’s Hamlet was also an accomplished rapper and dancer, another sign you are at a post-Hamilton, yoof-facing show.

WHAT’S ON OFFER Theatre Straight Line Crazy David Hare and Ralph Fiennes collaborate again in a play about Robert Moses, the master planner who created modern NYC. Bridge, SE1, 16th March-18th June Jerusalem Jez Butterworth’s mega-hit about rural England returns, with Mark Rylance reviving his award-winning role as Johnny Rooster Apollo, W1, from 16th April To Kill a Mockingbird Rafe Spall plays southern lawyer Atticus Finch in a dramatisation of Harper Lee’s novel. Gielgud 10th March-13th Aug The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams’s poignant drama stars A-lister Amy Adams.

Duke of York’s, WC2,

The bar There will be no overpriced interval drinks at some venues unless you have preordered them online. These may be ferried to your seat, or you may still have to collect them yourself. No, bar prices have not gone down while you were away.

The loos If you visit the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, you may be taken aback – as I was – by a little wall graphic of what looks like Munch’s Scream redrawn by Michael Craig Martin… or maybe it’s an eyeless monkey screaming? Welcome to the New Loo Order: it’s the sign for the urinals – the familiar cutouts indicating Ladies and Gents both gone. The choice is now between queuing for a stall or for a urinal.

How delicately this sidesteps the vexed issue of naming just two genders.

The unisex loo hasn’t hit the West End yet, where toilets with stalls are like hen’s teeth anyway,

from 23rd May My Fair Lady Bartlett Sher’s New York production hasn’t announced a cast yet, but

if the leads are as good as the original’s (here’s hoping for the NY Higgins, Henry HaddonPaton), this will be a treat.

Coliseum, 7th May -27th Aug Oklahoma! But not as you know it. Another New York import, but this is an

but it is starting to appear in the more modish of our theatres, like the Young and Old Vics.

Women (of all ages), already shortchanged for loo provision in most venues except very recently built or revamped ones, can now be even worse off. We can also forget using the Ladies as a sanctuary where a wardrobe malfunction can be repaired or a glamorous outfit changed into. These activities will have to be confined to a cubicle typically no bigger than a phonebox.

Golden oldies Let none of the above deter anyone from going out. The good news is that, after a couple of dire years for the theatre, producers are now having to play it safe with some much loved favourites and triedand-tested hits from the past.

Helen Hawkins is former editor of the Sunday Times Culture magazine

off-Broadway, strippeddown, colour-blind production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, that arrives trailing rave reviews.

Young Vic, SE1, from 26th April -25th June Opera/Dance The Forsythe Evening William Forsythe, 72, is a living advert for the benefits of oldie dancing – one of the greats of choreography, whose Playlist (track 1 and 2) is a playful masterwork.

Now he has expanded it to six tracks and added two more pieces to the bill. Prepare to be exhilarated. Sadler’s Wells, EC1, 31st March10th April Like Water for Chocolate Christopher Wheeldon creates a narrative ballet from the 1992 film hit. Royal Opera House, WC2, 2nd-17th June

Parsifal Opera North’s new production stars Nicky Spence and Brindley Sherratt. Leeds, 1st-10th June, then touring Otello Verdi’s masterpiece, with Elizabeth Llewellyn, Simon Keenlyside as Iago.

Grange Park Opera, 19th June-9th July Art Raphael at the National Gallery, 9th April -31st July Van Gogh SelfPortraits at the refurbished Courtauld, WC2, to 8th May Cornelia Parker, the exploding shed lady’s retrospective is at Tate Britain, SW1, from 18th May-16th October Comedy tours Barry Humphries 7th April-5th June Sandi Toksvig 20th April-30th June

April 2021 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 21

Beekeeping

Rule of the BEEEs

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Nicola Reed offers some practical suggestions for would-be apiarists

lot of folk smell spring and ask me: ‘How hard is it to keep bees? I want bees!’ I reply that it is easy…but if you fail to prepare then prepare to fail.

Preparations must begin well before you start to smell the honey. I like to think about it as the rule of the BEEEs: bees, education, equipment and environment.

bees again I would be extremely tempted to go down the Warre route.

Environment

Bees

The oldest bee fossil dates from about a hundred million years ago and bees can manage happily without us – unless you want a little bit of rent in the form of honey. In that case, it’s time to get educated.

Courses

Most practical courses – and they don’t have to be expensive – run between January and May, though there are online ones too. Each county has its own beekeeping association. When I started out I found Bill Anderson’s The Guide to Idle Beekeeping invaluable.

The first time I opened a hive, on a weekend course in the Cotswolds, I knew that I wanted to be a host for bees. The smell, the hum and their fascinating ways entranced me. I remember observing the waggle dance: a dancing bee waggles back and forth as she moves around, to show the other bees where the best flower patch is located. From that moment I was hooked…

What type of hive?

I have ones designed by William Broughton Carr in 1890 – and I believe they are the prettiest. The WBC has pagoda-like stages, topped with an apex roof. One benefit is that it has an outer layer that works as a form of insulation.

The National hive is basically a series of neatly fitting wooden boxes stacked up. Although it’s not as attractive as a WBC, it is easier to open and a great deal cheaper. Both work in the same way. The bottom box, the brood box, is where the

queen lives and lays her eggs. The upper boxes, the supers (short for superstructures), are where the honey is stored. Dividing the two is a queen excluder, a sort of grille-like sheet that prevents the queen from travelling between the brood box

‘If I were to begin again I would be tempted to go down the Warre route’ and the supers, and keeps the honey separate from the baby bees and all the excrement etc.

The Warre hive, a French hive designed by Emile Warre, tries to emulate the bees’ natural habitat by not excluding the queen from any part of the hive by using bars and not frames. As a result the honey is not separated from the brood. But unlike the other two hives, you can’t open the Warre one to check up on your tenants, only opening the hive to collect honey in late spring. Be warned, though, that there is more work for the beekeeper when it comes to collecting the honey because the honey has to be filtered more thoroughly.

If I were to begin my journey with

Find a suitable home for your hive.

Bees can travel up to four miles from the hive to gather what they need.

They collect four things: pollen for protein, nectar for energy (ie, for conversion to honey), water and propolis from leaf buds to use as an antibacterial glue around the hive.

During early spring, when the hive grows, a lot of pollen is needed and bees should have access to an assortment of foraging potential. At other times of the year, although the bees have honey stores, it is good to have snowdrops and other winter foliage for them to forage on.

Hives can be on a roof, or at the bottom of a garden. The countryside is probably preferable to urban areas – there is more room for your bees and if they swarm you are less likely to run into problems with neighbours. I have plenty of friends with bees in London, though. My husband has two hives on his office roof that have produced prizewinning, extremely complex-tasting honey, which I have put down to window-box foraging… He likes to imagine it’s because his bees are foraging in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, less than four miles away.

Bees shouldn’t be housed in direct sunlight and must be sheltered from the wind and rain by walls or hedges or even trees. A hive should be elevated as it will be damaged if rainwater is soaked up from the ground.

I love the gentle hum of bees all around me during spring and summer and if you – young or old – are looking for a relaxing hobby, beekeeping just might be for you.

Nicola Reed runs a one-day course on beekeeping in May, with Bill Anderson and The Idler Academy; beeble.buzz is her website

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 23

Gadgets From dashing walking sticks to vibrating gizmos, ingenius pieces of wizardry are there to help us, says Marion Shoard

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Outsmarting infirmity

n his essay A Christmas Present, GK Chesterton explains that the gift of a walking stick presents him with a dilemma: its splendour offers an image to the world at odds with his own. Might the resplendent walking-stick, with its shiny handle and silver bands, come in a few days of his company to take on a more dingy, battered and comfortable look? Or will the stick transform him into its image? One thing’s for certain: if he walks down the street with it at present, ‘Most people will mistake me for a tramp who has stolen a gentleman’s walking-stick.’

Nowadays, what many people fear about being seen with supportive equipment is that it will proclaim them to the world as inadequate. I have known several older people who, weeks from death and barely able to stand, refuse to be wheeled out along the prom in the sunshine lest their acquaintances should see them in a wheelchair.

One grandfather I know, given a stick, dragged it behind himself in protest when anyone was about.

What a shame. For a host of largely unsung inventors have created ingenious pieces of wizardry capable of mitigating the practical challenges arising from conditions ranging from a tremor, dizziness or general weakness to an unsteady knee, an arthritic hip or sight or hearing problems.

Whatever your impairment, there will almost certainly be something, if not a dazzling range of equipment which could help. Hard of hearing? A flashing light or vibrating gizmo can alert you to a ringing doorbell or the danger of fire or smoke. Amplifying devices can improve phone conversations, while specialised clip-on mics with neck-loop receivers allow you to enhance the speaker’s voice in a group discussion, while also reducing background noise.

Different pieces of equipment to aid mobility – whether two-,

three- or four-wheeled walkers, with or without a seat or basket – suit different people and different situations. Similarly, three-wheeled mobility scooters are more agile, but less stable than four-wheeled, while only the larger (class 3) vehicles can be taken on roads. Get a sense of the full range of disability gadgetry from the Disabled Living Foundation, a long-standing national charity, whose website provides information on over 10,000 products, as well as specialist charities such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) and Action on Hearing Loss (formerly the RNID).

It’s tempting to think you know what you need, but this is a complex field and it’s well worth consulting an occupational therapist on which aids would best suit you. The Royal College of Occupational Therapists keeps a list of private practitioners.

Or ask your local authority social services department, which has its own OTs and provides disability equipment free (regardless of means) to those it assesses as needing it. The NHS also provides a wide range of equipment free, from hearing-aids to wheelchairs.

Usefully, wheelchairs can be hired short-term from the British Red Cross and other agencies (last summer I hired an excellent one from Skipton and Craven Action for Disability).

If you’re buying aids directly yourself, don’t be fooled by retailers who imply they’re giving you a special deal by not charging you VAT: the rules state that equipment designed exclusively for disabled people should be zero-rated. Bear in mind that it can be dangerous: an unmaintained ceiling-track hoist could cause catastrophic injury. So pay careful attention to safety, repairs, maintenance, and contingency arrangements should equipment fail. The Research

24 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

Institute for Disabled Consumers gives advice informed by customer reviews on anything from the suitability of different cars to how to choose a stairlift, which includes provision for its aftercare.

Yet there’s no getting away from the fact that being seen to embrace such boons will mean acknowledging an element of infirmity. How will you overcome innate resistance to doing so? Even harder perhaps, how will you persuade your stubborn parents to do so?

One way is to flaunt your ability to confront inevitable realities from which lesser mortals shrink. Look for gadgets whose design is infused with an element of dash and glamour and to which you can add your own stamp. Paralympians customise their chairs and their blades. You could paint or add stickers to your walking-stick and give it a twirl, as if about to launch into Putting on the Ritz à la Fred Astaire.

Glasses can be seen as a style asset rather than an imposition, revamping a weary face. Fifty years ago, everyone sported the same NHS spectacles: now even youngsters who don’t actually need them use them to express their personalities. How much more fun to be swung across a room not in a stark, white hoist signalling only medical need but one which resembles a classy hammock emblazoned with monkeys and tigers performing outrageous acrobatics, Quentin-Blake style. A young woman chatting to me at the bus-stop confirmed that humour helps the user adjust and can cheer everyone up: her grandfather, an amputee, had painted a smiley face on his leg stump.

Marion Shoard is the author of How to Handle Later Life

Kitchen garden

Free for all Simon Courtauld finds delicious pleasure in foraging

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hile I have been growing vegetables at home for many years, I have also been attracted to what can be found growing wild in fields, hedgerows and along the coasts. Richard Mabey’s Food For Free is an admirable, and very comprehensive guide to edible wild plants that I have dipped into over the years.

Whether I have become more appreciative of nature with advancing age, or because I am more reluctant now to spend money on expensive, and often imported, produce, there is something very satisfying about foraging. And during this pandemic it has made more sense to gather food outside whenever possible, rather than spend time in possibly infected supermarkets.

Blackberries, sea spinach, sloes and horseradish are all easily found and will improve an autumn diet. I have been picking mussels from the rocks on the Cornish coast since childhood, and was doing so again last month. Limpets are not worth the trouble, as the meat is tough and rubbery. Razor clams, however (called spoots in Scotland), give enormous pleasure, both in catching and eating them. They can be found in sand which is exposed only at the lowest spring tides, and are tempted to the surface by pouring salt into their holes. This may involve bending or kneeling down to grab the razor shells as they appear – better done by a grandchild to protect oldies’ creaking knees.

My knowledge of the various fungi is very limited, but I did once spend a morning in Savernake Forest, Wiltshire with a distinguished mycologist. The forest has no ceps or chanterelles, but we picked a poisonous-looking purple specimen called amethyst deceiver, which our expert assured us was both safe and delicious. I know where to find the highly prized St George’s mushroom on Salisbury Plain in the spring; but the whereabouts of truffles in Savernake

Forest are a well-kept secret.

One of the delights of spring is to see the tall plants of cow parsley, with their clusters of tiny white flowers, lining paths and roadside verges; but it would never occur to me to treat them as edible. Mabey describes cow parsley as a herb related to chervil, though he warns that it should not be confused with

‘Delia says nothing about lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing’

hemlock. I don’t think I shall be adding it to soups or salads. He also goes a bit too far, I think, in recommending that invasive weeds such as goosegrass and ground elder may be gathered and cooked like spinach. I tried nettle soup years ago, but once was enough.

‘Land equals food’ is the mantra of the people of Croatia, according to Monty Don’s television programme in January on the gardens of the Adriatic. During their history, and in the most recent Balkan wars, many Croatians have had to grow their food to survive. My own kitchen garden is, of course, no more than an enjoyable hobby, but it is a proper and constructive use of land, which cannot be said for the modern vogue of ‘rewilding’ (see page 6).

A friend who was staying with me years ago commented sarcastically,

‘I tried nettle soup years ago, but once was enough’

when I dug and brought some muddy leeks into the house: ‘Tesco sells leeks already cleaned, you know.’ That, of course, is not the point. My leeks were home-grown, fresher, tastier and healthier than any bought in a shop.

My experiments with unusual vegetables – asparagus peas, salsify, puntarelle – have not always been a huge success, but one learns...

Golden beetroot and yellow French beans, rarely found in shops or markets, are so delicious that I would hate to be without them.

Ditto orange cherry tomatoes, ideally when just picked and wrapped in a basil leaf.

Of course, kitchen gardening has its challenges: my peas failed last year, so did the turnips. Was it the weather or the soil temperature, or were the seeds eaten by mice?

Perennial problems in this garden are the pigeons and the caterpillars of cabbage white butterflies. And we are plagued by a weed, mare’s tail, with such a long tap root that it is almost impossible to get rid of.

But I am not going to be deterred from growing old creatively. Of the annual herbs, I have learnt by experience that coriander is best sown in July or August, because it is less likely to bolt towards the end of the season, and it also seems to have a more pungent flavour as the weather turns colder. (The same can be said of rocket.) Fresh dill is indispensable for making gravadlax and adding to so many fish dishes.

I am sometimes asked which vegetables I would always wish to grow, so long as I am fit enough. My answer is broad beans, picked small, runner beans, picked when crisp and thin, and new potatoes. When the late Duchess of Devonshire was interviewed for Desert Island Discs and asked to name her luxury, she said she would like a continuous supply of new potatoes, of the variety Home Guard. My own favourites are Foremost and Charlotte, and it will soon be time to plant them.

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 25

Money talks Garry White stresses the importance of retirement planning now

Women and wealth

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omen control a greater share of the UK’s wealth than ever before, with more than 60 per cent of the UK’s assets predicted to be in female hands by 2025. This rising financial power is to be celebrated, but it is also something for which women and their wider families need to prepare.

There are numerous reasons for this structural change. It is driven by biological fact (women outlive men so there are twice as many women aged 90 years and over in the UK) and a fact of life (42 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce).

The rise in female financial power is also a result of changes in society (more women than men now enter higher and further education). These changes freed many women to succeed in areas in which they were once disadvantaged or excluded.

The post-war period saw a surge in female entrepreneurship.

Although women still make up only about 15 per cent of the world’s ultra-high net worth individuals, defined as people with net assets above $30 million (£22.1 million), the proportion that are part of the world’s super rich is significantly higher in younger age brackets than the cohort as a whole.

Gender attitudes of previous generations meant it was the male role to take charge of household finances. As a result, too many women found themselves a widow without a thorough understanding of their future income.

Thankfully, this is now less common, but it is still a significant issue globally.

A 2019 study by the wealth

Cleopatra: woman of means

management arm of UBS discovered that, although 85 per cent of women control their family’s day-to-day finances, most women worldwide (58 per cent) defer long-term financial decisions to their spouses, putting their future financial security at risk, particularly in widowhood.

After a period of asset-price inflation in the UK in terms of investments and property, women are now inheriting sums that are likely to be significantly ahead of what they may have expected – or planned – earlier in their life.

This does not mean there is an entire generation of ‘merry widows’ enjoying wealthy golden years and lavish lifestyles – or that women can now rest on their laurels. A study released by Age UK in September last year found that the proportion of female pensioners in the UK living below the poverty line had risen by six percentage points in less than a decade. This means that one in five female pensioners in the UK – 1.25 million people – are living below the breadline.

Whatever your age or gender, everyone wishing to prevent a significant drop in income in later life needs a financial plan today.

Long-term plans need regular monitoring and updating to keep them on track as the world changes.

To deal with the financial challenges that increases in longevity have caused the pensions industry, there has been some significant changes that can impact women detrimentally in later life. Women reaching their pension age after 5th April 2016 fall under the new state pension rules.

These are based on the national insurance (NI) contributions of the individual rather than on rights derived from a late spouse. Women who have stayed at home to raise a family and have a limited record of NI contributions may risk being in the situation that when their partner dies, so does their pension.

Another trend that has an impact on a retired woman’s potential income is the slow demise of generous defined-benefit (DB) pension schemes. The number of private-sector defined-benefit and hybrid pension schemes continued to fall in the 2020/21 financial year, according to the Pensions Regulator. The shrinking of these ‘gold-plated’ schemes means that new pensioners are going to see smaller defined-benefit pension rights and need to plan accordingly.

Women who inherit DB pensions from their husbands need to know that they are unlikely to be as generous in the future.

The proportion of the estate that is liable to be given to the taxman can be mitigated by proper inheritance tax (IHT) planning.

Charles Stanley’s IHT calculator aims to provide an estimate of IHT liability on death. If you are unsure about how much of your estate the taxman has already earmarked, it provides an easy way of establishing whether plans need to be drawn up on this front too.

Assets such as property have seen their value increase significantly over the last few decades, which raises the prospect of inheritance tax bills that could compound the grieving process for those left behind. Women and men, both old and young, can give their retirement a real boost if they make or update a financial plan sooner rather than later.

Garry White is chief investment commentator at Charles Stanley Wealth Managers

April 2022 GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY The Oldie 27

Health

Personal

Wanted

Mobility

Care

To advertise, contact Jamil Popat on 0203 859 7093 or via email jamilpopat@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 21st March 2022

Care

Funerals Despite the sadness, David Fraser Jenkins finds a certain contentment in the rituals

Last word

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h, to see one’s fellow pre-baby-boomers disappear one by one – so sad, but it certainly awards some recognition to all of us chosen to stay on to offer our farewells. And with these departures also vanish those memories of some equivocal remark or touch that will never now be shared again.

Before and after the funeral there is a gathering, an occasion to see so many friends and greet them on neutral ground. Beforehand, very briefly, just a nod, a little furtive, as you scurry to occupy a favourable place. And then after the service comes the time to slowly warm up, relax, speak more loudly, begin to laugh out loud, and shuffle off, maybe drive, or share a car, to a full-blown party, so kindly provided.

But this is a party to which no one was individually asked. Anyone on the network could invite themselves, as the message was radiated through tentacles of old friendships and memory. We look over and speculate – who are those among that group of people, how were they known? And what about the previous partners and lovers, how do they look now, and will they dare to come? And that lot there, are they the carers, or the cousins?

It is as well a pop-up fashion parade, on the scale between

Farewell to Rudolph Valentino, 1926

formal-new and charity shop. Our smug delight is allowed, as we enjoy finding that dark coat, the chance to wear a suit, find some heirloom tie, and dust the dark shoes.

And what ironic pleasure to witness history constructed in front of us, as the encomium from the pulpit puts on stage some miraculously phoney character of our late acquaintance, who turns out to have had such presentable employments in so many creative cul-de-sacs (explaining some of the congregation here who seemed before simply to have mistaken the timetable). What a relief to have found nothing enviable in these careers.

Look around and we can see a parade of ancient monuments and their dedications, with inscriptions in a range of lettering, and sometimes even with sculpture that’s better than at the V&A. All mentioned await some resurrection, they tell us…

‘What about the previous partners, how do they look now, and will they dare to come?’

30 The Oldie GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY April 2022

The speciality of funerals is evident, that they take place in a building of a certain kind, often rather pompous architecturally, that has as an essential a central nave, leading to and from a decisive entrance. In front, often only by implication, a long axis leads out into the town and country. Some funeral sites, admittedly, are entered on their side, but that always looks a mistake, as if the movement down the nave was collapsing into the end wall; the same entrance and exit gives a sense of that long journey ahead.

For what marks the start of the funeral domain is the point at which the long body of the coffin is turned through 90 degrees, like the turn of a key in a lock that opens the door into a special dimension. The coffin-turning opens this space for all of us there and allows us to tread into the semi-world of final departures, an echo of the journey of the soul into the body at the instant of conception.

For as we witness from the stalls or pews the passage of the coffin along the nave, we share the space at the edge of the world, a strange touch of nothingness, and come alone to the threshold of animate life. It is the most rewarding pleasure, unique to these occasions, to briefly savour and then escape from this bungee-jump into nothingness.

With luck, afterwards, we will walk away through a grove of headstones, so enchanting, leaning like semi-quavers, worn flat, with a surface of patches and time-spots rather too familiar, their text like fading voices. They still show unusual English names, as if fallen from the catalogue of the London Library.

And as you walk away, you may overhear, or be able to question, the chosen psychopomp, the last conductor of the deceased, and usefully revise your own plans for the last chapter.