The Oldie December issue 407

32-PAGE OLDIE REVIEW OF BOOKS GILES WOOD

I LOVE HORNETS

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen December 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 407

Oh, Mr Rigsby!

Leonard Rossiter by Eric Chappell, Rising Damp’s creator My Garrick dinner with Boris – Stephen Glover Tragedy of Laurence Harvey – David Ambrose My favourite theatres – Barry Humphries

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Sketches of Boz pages 20 and 67

Features 13 The last commuters Benedict King 14 My debt to Mr Rigsby Eric Chappell 16 Make your will now Hilary Macaskill 20 Drawing Boris Nicholas Garland 24 My gilt-edged cuttings book Ray Connolly 26 Sleepy judges Simon Brown 29 Grey’s elegy: farewell to Lord Gowrie Professor Roy Foster 32 Laurence Harvey, forgotten movie star David Ambrose 36 My favourite theatres Barry Humphries 84 I'm the last of the Nigels Nigel Pullman

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 18 Olden Life: What were the Observer’s Books? Reverend Steven Morris 18 Modern Life: What are middle-aged millennials?

Jessica Repetti

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Laurence Harvey in trouble page 32

38 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 39 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 Letter from America Philip Delves Broughton 42 Small World Jem Clarke 45 School Days Sophia Waugh 45 Quite Interesting Things about ... December John Lloyd 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Memorial Service: The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 51 I Once Met… Stevie Smith Patric Dickinson 51 Memory Lane 65 History David Horspool 67 Media Matters Stephen Glover 68 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 68 Rant: Patronising weather reports Robert Nurden 95 Crossword 97 Bridge Andrew Robson 97 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Barry Humphries on stage page 36

Books 53 Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995, edited by Anna von Planta Richard Davenport-Hines 55 George V: Never a Dull Moment, by Jane Ridley Kate Hubbard 57 The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire, by Gerry White Frances Wilson 57 The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, by Zoё Playdon Hugo Vickers 59 How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), by Wisława Szymborska, trans and ed by Clare Cavanagh Paul Bailey 61 Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through Time, by Jenny Uglow Tanya Harrod 63 The Fell, by Sarah Moss Cressida Connolly

Travel 88 Into the Mani, in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor Dominic Green 90 Overlooked Britain: Belfast’s Titanic charms Lucinda Lambton Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

95 Taking a Walk: Burnham Beeches Patrick Barkham 93 On the Road: Ranulph Fiennes Louise Flind

Arts 70 Film: Last Night in Soho Harry Mount 71 Theatre: The Shark Is Broken William Cook 71 Radio Valerie Grove 72 Television Frances Wilson 73 Music Richard Osborne 74 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 77 Gardening David Wheeler 77 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 78 Restaurants James Pembroke 79 Drink Bill Knott 80 Sport Jim White 80 Motoring Alan Judd 82 Digital Life Matthew Webster 82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 87 Bird of the Month: Little Egret John McEwen

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The Oldie December 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes Congratulations to all these new members of the hallowed Oldie of the Year Academy.

The Oldies of the Year 2021. From left: Delia Smith; Whispering Bob Harris; Barry Humphries, receiving an award on behalf of Sir Les Patterson; Margaret Seaman; the Duchess of Cornwall; Roger McGough; Dr Saroj and Dr Mridul Datta; Sir Geoff Hurst

The Oldie of the Year 2021 ceremony at the Savoy Hotel was a rip-roaring success.

The prizes were presented by the Duchess of Cornwall.

In her speech, she said, ‘Famously, Abraham Lincoln said, “Whatever you are, be a good one, and I think we can agree that, whatever they are, today’s winners are very good ones indeed. My warm congratulations to all of them.” ’ The Duchess also congratulated The Oldie ‘on reaching its thirtieth year and for being a publication that is both original and unique – dedicated to us oldies, but with an ever-youthful spirit’.

Pictured are the Oldie winners. And what a glorious bunch they are: our Truly Scrumptious Oldie of the Year, Delia Smith; the Poptastic Oldie of the Year, Whispering Bob Harris; the Wizard from Oz Oldie of the Year, Sir Les Patterson;

Margaret Seaman, Oldie Champion-Knitter of the Year; Roger McGough, Oldie People’s Poet of the Year;

Dr Saroj and Dr Mridul Datta, Oldie NHS Angels of the Year; and Sir Geoff Hurst, Oldie Golden Boot of the Year.

Among this month’s contributors Eric Chappell (p14) created and wrote Rising Damp (1974-78). He also wrote Only When I Laugh, The Bounder and Duty Free. He was an auditor for the East Midlands Electricity Board for 22 years.

Brighton West Pier (pictured below) is one of the stars of a new book, Atlas of Forgotten Places: Journey to Abandoned Destinations from around the Globe, by Travis Elborough.

The elegiac charm of ruins is movingly evoked, from an incomplete Polish nuclear power plant to the deserted Hellinikon Olympic Complex in Athens, built for the 2004 Olympics.

Most stirring of all is Brighton West Pier (built in 1866), with its marooned lines of cast-iron columns leading to the skeletal pleasure dome out at sea, set alight by arsonists in 2003.

Nicholas Garland (p20) was the Daily Telegraph cartoonist for over 40 years. He and Barry Humphries (p36) drew and wrote the Barry McKenzie cartoon strip in Private Eye. Simon Brown (p26) was a Justice of the Supreme Court from 2009 to 2012. He was a High Court judge and a Lord Justice of Appeal. His two volumes of memoirs are Playing off the Roof and Second Helpings.

Louise Flind (p93), our On the Road interviewer, worked at English National Opera and Glyndebourne. She’s written for Opera Now, Classic FM Magazine and Sussex Life.

Peerless: Brighton West Pier

Cyril Lakin (1893-1948) was the great Renaissance man of Welsh politics: Conservative MP for Llandaff and Barry, literary editor of the Times and the Sunday Times and a BBC radio commentator during the Blitz.

The Oldie December 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Lost dog handed to Hereford police Hereford Times

Drier crumpets on the menu if carbon-dioxide supplies run low again Daily Telegraph Couple’s sunflower just kept growing Congleton Chronicle £15 for published contributions

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Barry Humphries recites the poem

In Absentia

By Sir Les Patterson – recited at the Oldie of the Year

I was in a sauna suckin’ on a coldie When I got this email from my mates at The Oldie: ‘We’re having a big lunch at the Savoy – There’ll be Royalty present.’ I said, ‘Oh boy!’

It was then that I read the bit under my thumb: It said, ‘No offence, Les, but please don’t come.’

So now I’m cancelled as if I didn’t count, Thanks to that bald bastard, Harry Mount – He probably thought I wouldn’t be missed, Or make a pass at Camilla or turn up pissed.

It’s true when I make a speech, there’s seldom much doubt That when I reach my climax, something slips out.

But when something slips out, the ladies protest: They yell, ‘Good on you, Les – now show us the rest.’

They’re shit-scared that the ladies might go into shock, But I know a few here who’ve been round the block.

Now I’ve cleaned up my act – I’m squeaky clean, I’m woke And I’d never offend with an off-colour joke.

I never use the ‘f’ word in the presence of minors And I stick up for lezzos and vagina-decliners, And there is nothing more beautiful, I have to say, Than a wholesome, sexual relationship between a happily married politician and his PA. So, my dear little Duchess, I’m sorry to trouble you – But please give Les’s love to the PoW.

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6 The Oldie December 2021

Bridget, Cyril and Vera Lakin

the car at the time, aged only 20. After 18 months’ recuperation, Bridget Lakin went on to work for the Progress Trust, the group of reform-minded Conservative MPs, for over 50 years.

Read all about this moving tale in the new biography of Lakin, Smooth Operator, by Geoff Andrews.

Sadly his life was cut short when, aged only 54, he was killed in a car crash in Burgundy, France, in 1948.

His daughter, Bridget, still happily with us at 94, was in

This 12th December marks the bicentenary of the birth of Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), author of Madame Bovary (1857), which caused a scandal when it was published.

Flaubert was prosecuted for offending public morality and, though he was acquitted, the book was banned by the Vatican and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) from 1864 until the Index was abolished in 1966. Praised by Zola, it was trashed by Henry James in French Poets and Novelists (1878): ‘Madame Bovary was spontaneous and sincere; but to read its successor is ... like masticating ashes and sawdust.’

As befits the son of a doctor, in his study Flaubert had a bust of Hippocrates ... as well as an inkwell in the form of a toad.

Diplomatic memoirs can be dry affairs.

Not so the new memoir by Lady Bullard, widow of Sir Julian Bullard (1928-2006), the British Ambassador to Germany from 1984 to 1988.

In Endangered Species: Diplomacy from the Passenger Seat, Margaret Bullard remembers the tragicomedy of the visit to Germany by the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1987, when the royal marriage was on the rocks.

Before they arrived, the couple were asked what their favourite dishes were. Charles ‘liked bits in his orange juice and her favourite foods were lobster and caviar’. When the Queen had been asked the same question before, the answer has been ‘Anything you think it appropriate to

Not so diplomatic: Margaret and Julian Bullard

Tune in to Giles and Mary’s OLDIE NEWSROUND every Friday www.the oldie.co.uk/podcasts

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Giles Wood, The Oldie’s Country Mouse, at home in Wiltshire with his wife, Mary Killen, Oldie contributor. Listen to Giles and Mary’s Oldie Newsround every week on our website

One of Ian Fleming’s less well-known ventures was The Book Collector, the literary journal he founded in 1952. The quarterly magazine still publishes articles on writing, publishing and collecting books.

When Fleming died in 1964, Nicolas Barker owned and edited the journal for over 50 years until, in 2016, ownership reverted to the Fleming family.

And now James Fleming, Ian Fleming’s nephew, the son of Ian’s brother Richard, has published Bond: Behind the Iron Curtain, under the Book Collector imprint.

James Fleming has collected Russian Communist reactions to the James Bond books. They include a hilarious 1962 review of Dr No by Yu Okov in Izvestiya, the official national publication of the Soviet Union. At the time, Dr No was being filmed in Jamaica.

Okov writes, ‘ “Some film!” the reader will say. “Who’s interested in such rubbish?”

Who is Mr Ian Fleming, the

‘Just what I’ve always … oh, it’s not a pool cue, then?’

Mincemeat-filled, baked apple with brandy cream on toasted teacake

creator of this – to put it mildly – rubbish?

‘American propagandists must be in a bad way if they need to have recourse to the help of an English freebooter – a retired spy who has turned mediocre writer.’

Ian Fleming loved the review. In 1962, he sent it to Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s brother, saying, ‘I am most amused to learn that I have been selected by the Russians as part of America’s strong right hand!’

Okov’s review must be entered for a posthumous Hatchet Job of the Year Prize!

RIP Lionel Blair (1928-2021), our 2019 Oldie of the Year.

Gyles Brandreth recalls appearing with Lionel on Give Us a Clue in 1987, on the day Fred Astaire died: ‘Wearing his great big showbusiness heart on his sleeve, Lionel immediately dissolved into tears. Overwhelmed by the passing of his childhood hero, he fled the floor and took refuge in his dressing room.’

Lionel was our Oldie of the Year, as Gyles said, ‘quite simply because, in a dark world, he glows’.

Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing 2021 How to enter Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism.

What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 51 of this issue).

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

How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 28th November 2021.

Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.

The Oldie December 2021 7

DAVID HOCKNEY

offer her, Her Majesty will be pleased to eat.’

The Bullards had to move out of their bedrooms in Berlin and Bonn because the royal couple were not prepared to share a bedroom – ‘even despite the newspaper headline “TOGETHER AGAIN” ’.

Prince Charles piloted the Bullards round Germany and won praise for his good German.

But all was clearly not well.

‘It puzzled us why all the members of the household, including her husband, treated Diana so dismissively, even in front of us,’ writes Lady Bullard. ‘The only people in the royal party who I saw speaking to her were her lady-in-waiting and her policemen (large and fat and drank a lot of gin in their bedrooms), who behaved as if they were on very intimate terms with her. She criticised their shirts and they her hair in front of the rest of us. She was not unaware that she was annoying her husband.’

What deliciously undiplomatic gossip!

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Michael Caine, king of the Muppets I so hope the unique, brilliant actor will return to the screen

What’s your favourite Christmas film?

For my parents, it was always It’s a Wonderful Life. For my children, it’s probably Love Actually. For me, since the grandchildren came along it’s definitely been The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), starring Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and the great Sir Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Caine recently let slip that, at 88, he reckons that, although he doesn’t want to retire, he’s probably made his last movie.

That’s sad news – he is one of a kind.

Once, having told him how much I admired his Scrooge, I asked our most prolific film star (170 pictures since his first in 1956) to conjure up his ideal Christmas party for me. ‘I think I would be naff enough to serve caviar,’ he said, grinning endearingly. And for drinks? ‘Absolut vodka and cranberry juice. Then we’d move on to some great clarets and Le Montrachet.’ His pictures have grossed £8 billion over the years. Happily, he’s earned a small chunk of that and likes to look after his guests properly.

Who would be on his list of Christmas invitees? ‘Stanley Baker and Richard Burton, for starters. They were both role models for me.’ Caine made Zulu with Stanley Baker in 1964. ‘In my day, everyone thought you had to be posh to be an actor. Stanley broke the mould. He was the first tough British actor who could compete with American actors for butchness.’

And it was Burton who made Caine realise the importance of having a unique voice. ‘I saw him in Hamlet at the Old Vic in the 1950s. It was the quickest Hamlet you ever saw, because in those days the pubs shut at half-past ten. Burton was out of Elsinore and at the bar by 10.20.’

Less predictably, Caine told me he wanted Noël Coward on his Christmas guest list. ‘The most British thing I ever did was go to the Savoy Grill and have dinner with Noël. He was so funny.’

Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol

Elizabeth Taylor was one of the ladies on his list, I recall. ‘And I want Shirley MacLaine at the party because she was the woman who took me to Hollywood to do a picture called Gambit in 1966. They showed her The Ipcress File to recommend the director. She said, “Forget the director – I’ll take the guy with the glasses.” ’ The guests of honour at Michael Caine’s fantasy Christmas party would be his mum and dad. ‘My mother was a Cockney charwoman. She died aged 89 in her sleep. My dad died when I was 24.

He was only 56. He died of liver cancer. He was a very heavy drinker. I look like him – so, whenever I’m shaving, I see him. And at Christmas, my mother, having had a couple of gins and tonics, would look at me and burst into tears because I look so like him.’

Michael Caine also told me about the man who made him: ‘Mr Watson, my English teacher at Wilson’s Grammar School in Peckham. All the other masters thought I was useless. He didn’t. He guided me right through English literature. I was a 12-year-old Cockney reading Kipling and Thomas Hardy.

Books were important then for kids because there was no television, no computers – so you read and you wound up with this vivid imagination.

Mr Watson gave me the works. I owe him everything.’

I think I owe everything to a teacher, too. Mr Stocks was the headmaster of my prep school in Kent. In 1960, when I was eleven and he was 81, he told me he had something important to tell me. ‘Brandreth,’ he said, ‘in my experience, busy people are happy people. Remember that.’ And I always have.

‘Busy people are happy people’ are the five words that have formed the basis of my life. ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ are the three words that brought fame and fortune to Mo Drake, who has just died, aged 93.

Drake was an adman of genius (‘Just one Cornetto’ was another of his) who spent a lifetime creating irresistible slogans that sold products by the billion. I met Mo with the TV presenter David Frost, who congratulated the celebrated adman on coming up with three words that guaranteed his place in advertising history. ‘What do you hope to be remembered for?’ asked Mo of David. ‘Ever,’ said David without missing a beat.

In last month’s Diary, I mentioned my American friend who is in the habit of kissing elderly ladies on the lips because, he reckons, they like it – and expect it. I had my doubts about this and they have been confirmed by none other than the great Jilly Cooper, 84, who tells me she is ‘allergic to being kissed on the mouth unless it involves snogging with someone you truly fancy’.

According to the creator of the Rutshire Chronicles, ‘Anything else – particularly people who kiss their children on the mouth – is awful.’

Jilly Cooper has spoken. End of story.

Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, has just been published by Michael Joseph. He will talk about the book and sign copies on 8th December at the Oldie event at the Reform Club (see page 19) The Oldie December 2021 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

A matter of park-life and death

Power walkers and happy couples bring on morbid thoughts matthew norman These many months devoted to exploring the ITV daytime schedule with my mother have, perhaps inevitably, had an effect.

Unlimited exposure to the faux bonhomie of Phillip Schofield, the winsome banter of Loose Women, and the practised satisfaction of the failed quiz-show contestant (who in defiance of all logic has had ‘a lovely day out’) caused a metamorphosis.

The ensuing inertia developed an omega male of unflinching indolence into a tripartite hybrid from Greek mythology: one-third man, one-third recliner chair, one-third remote control.

It had for a while been plain that only something far out of the ordinary could threaten the enveloping lethargy. Last week, aptly enough thanks to a jaunt to Olympus, it duly arrived.

Of the teatime quiz Tipping Point, suffice it merely to know that the show is modelled on the arcade machine into which the credulous roll coins in the outlandish belief that one more will cause a cascade.

Be further aware that last week, a contestant was asked this: ‘In his epic poems, Homer often refers to nectar as the drink of the gods, and which other substance as their food?’

The contestant helpfully chose to verbalise the internal thought process he was using in search of the answer. ‘I know he likes doughnuts,’ he posited.

By and large, affable host Ben Shepherd disguises his feelings about his guests’ more recherché musings with heroic discipline.

Recently, for example, when someone invited to give the group name for moles rejected ‘parliament’ from the three multiple-choice possibilities and plumped instead for ‘Liberal Democrat’, Ben contrived a glance of nonjudgemental neutrality.

10 The Oldie December 2021

Doughnuts, however, were too much.

His strategic display of bewilderment did its best to divert the contestant from The Simpsons Boulevard. Its best was not good enough.

‘Doughnuts,’ reiterated the chap with certainty, by way of his final answer.

‘Right, that’s it,’ I informed my mother on hearing that. ‘I can’t take it any more. I’m going for a very long walk in the park.’

Her gaze snapped away from the telly, first towards me and then towards the phone. Evidently she was contemplating a call to the GP, or possibly 111. ‘You’re going for a what?’ she eventually murmured.

‘A very long walk.’

‘But you don’t walk. And if you do, never for very long. You always say you have minimal use for your legs.’

She had a point. Though, by the strictest technical criterion, able-bodied, I have lately schooled myself to depend on the stairlift.

‘What you do is sit in that chair all day, clutching the remote,’ she went on, ‘watching telly.’

That may have been the case, I admitted, but we must force ourselves to believe in the capacity for change. Look at John Stonehouse. Check out the precedents from literature. Think of Scrooge. And the people changed into swans by Zeus.

‘I’ll see you in 20 minutes, then,’ she said as I departed.

The parks, we are taught, are more than the lungs of the city. They are places of sanctuary for the weary urban soul. On this, Blur and Phil Daniels were abundantly clear in the song Parklife.

Yet a hobble through autumnal Regent’s Park on the brink of dusk would disabuse Damon Albarn of that fantasy.

Middle-aged folk engage in what they presumably regard as ‘power walking’, as

if the mincing, elbow-swinging parody of the Olympic racewalker will somehow scare off death.

Even at this point in the calendar, the tennis courts echo wistfully to the creaking knees of Federer fantasists and superannuated Emma Raducanu wannabes who find their relentless inability to return a 17mph serve reliably hilarious.

Young lovers stroll dreamily hand in hand, grinning and laughing, as if unaware of the philosopher Larry David’s stricture that there is nothing so disgusting in this world as a happy couple.

It seems that even the swans can’t be doing with the indecent flaunting of pleasure at what should be a blessedly melancholic time of year. They were actively boycotting the park in protest.

Unless of course a dyspeptic Zeus had turned them back into people after washing down too many doughnuts with his nectar.

As Dirty Harry Callahan observed shortly before putting a Magnum .45 bullet in some punk’s head, a man – and yes, even a third of a man – must know his limitations. This gutlord’s had been clarified by the foray into park-life.

‘You must be exhausted from your marathon,’ my mother greeted me with satisfaction, 17 minutes later. ‘If the lactic acid isn’t too excruciating, will you be going for another very long walk tomorrow?’

I reclaimed the remote, reclined the chair to the preferred 50-degree angle, and rewound Tipping Point to the very moment after the Emeritus Professor of Greek had enjoyed his triumph.

‘What’s the point of going out?’ I said, quoting Homer at her – though which one is hard to be sure. ‘We’re just going to wind up back here anyway.’

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The The The Oldie Oldie Oldie December October Month 2016 2021 11

End of the line Now working from home, Benedict King says a fond farewell to commuting after 17 years

BARRY LEWIS/ALAMY

D

aily commuting, as it has existed for most of the past 150 years, looks as if it will be one of the terminal victims of the pandemic.

No more will hundreds of packed trains deposit workers in the morning and bring them back whence they came in the evening. Few are likely to mourn its passing.

I have mixed feelings about this great liberation. On the one hand, it has all come two decades too late for me, since I commuted every working day from 2000 to 2017. On the other hand, we will be dismantling a unique platform from which to view the British negotiating their collective existence.

Commuting has shaped our society and landscape and, arguably, our culture since the advent of the railways in the 19th century. It spawned the development of suburbs, and of sleepy dormitory towns in the home counties, and allowed the English to perpetuate the myth of a rural life long after industrialisation had herded most of us into factories and offices. It allowed us gardens, hedges and privacy.

But the price for the faux-bucolic idyll was a journey to work, with no space or privacy.

The commuter is a slave to the minute hand of the clock. When I lived in London, a bus or a tube would be along every two minutes. But if you’re commuting from Oxford to London, as I did, and you miss the 7.30am, you may have to wait for 15 or 20 minutes for the next train, which will make you meaningfully late for work.

At the end of the day, the process works in reverse. Getting up ‘around 7ish’ or knocking off ‘around 6ish’ is a luxury reserved for city dwellers.

The commuter’s life was tightly constrained not just by time, but also by space. These combined to throw up knotty moral dilemmas for me.

There was a constant struggle between being polite and considerate, and

8am Guildford–Waterloo train, 1976

creating a more agreeable, spacious personal environment.

The temptation was always to seek personal comfort: to queue-barge for coffee, jostle other passengers for a better seat and occupy an aisle seat for leg space.

But this quest for comfort was essentially self-defeating – it merely brought home the pains of commuting.

The moral approach – to queue patiently, to let others on first, to move to the window so others could access a seat more easily, to forgo coffee if you were late and not to stretch out your legs – left you in slightly more physical discomfort, but allowed you to rise, Zen-like, above the physical inconveniences of the situation.

Some of these moral dilemmas were not at all easy to solve. Giving up one’s seat to a visibly pregnant woman was a no-brainer – everyone was always prepared to do that. But it was harder with ‘old’ people. If you decided that someone was old enough not to be offended by your offering to give up your seat to them, you then had to ask them – in a quiet, crowded carriage. Almost invariably they would decline, leaving you feeling you had overestimated their age and embarrassed them.

A woman in very high, uncomfortablelooking heels generated a whole different level of moral complexity again.

Given the strains this environment put us all under, we were remarkably well behaved and tolerant. The tinkling of digital devices became more intrusive over time, but people were, on the whole, considerate. The most widespread antisocial phenomenon was people – usually men – talking about work in a loud voice on their mobile phones. Oddly, the more boring the job, the longer and more loudly people seemed to talk. They sounded as if they were trying to impress, but perhaps it was a cry for pity.

Remarkably, in spite of hundreds of people pouring on and off the trains at all stops to London, no one ever worried about anything getting stolen. The luggage racks were heaped with bags and Bromptons. But the only theft I ever witnessed while commuting was when I saw my next-door neighbour steal a newspaper from the shop at Oxford Station early one morning.

He wasn’t short of money, but he’d obviously run short of time and fatally tried to fight, rather than accept, the consequences, breaking his moral compass in the process.

In future, people may look back on the cramped trains pouring in and out of our major cities every day, consuming tons of carbon, and see them, like child labour and coal mining, as a barbaric, if necessary, stage on the march of economic progress.

But those of us who were there will remember the heroic struggle hundreds of us made to be polite and considerate – when the very idea of just stretching out one’s legs involved a complex set of moral choices; where our trust in our fellow citizens was of such a pitch that we could leave all our valuables in a luggage rack every day for decades and know that they would never get pinched.

It makes me proud to have been a part of it.

The Oldie December 2021 13

Rising Damp creator, Eric Chappell, adored Leonard Rossiter, a loyal, frenetic genius

My debt to Mr Rigsby I

n 1974, Rising Damp was my first taste of writing a series for TV. I was hardly prepared for the hurly-burly of situation comedy, where shows had to be written in a fortnight, rehearsed in a week, recorded in an hour and a half, and put out in 25 minutes.

A few months before, I’d been an auditor with the Electricity Board. Most people thought I was mad when I left to become a playwright, but were too polite to say. I had taken this decision on the strength of my first play – The Banana Box – which in 1973 had an all-too-brief run in the West End. The Banana Box was the play that inspired Rising Damp. Although there was a great deal wrong with it, I was encouraged by its modest success.

The idea initially came from a newspaper article. It was the story of a black guy who had stayed as a hotel guest for a year by posing as an African prince. He’d been received with a great deal of fuss and respect; it was a great story and I thought it could be developed into a comedy.

I’d originally envisaged a play along the lines of the Victorian farce Charley’s Aunt (1892) by Brandon Thomas. But, as I put pen to paper, the story took on a completely different complexion from the newspaper article. Instead of the story’s setting being a posh hotel, it became a seedy lodging house, which was more my style.

14 The Oldie December 2021

The central character, Rigsby, was an amalgam of my own thoughts and someone I knew. The real-life character wasn’t as invidious or wretched as Rigsby but, when I started working, just after the war, some people still had contempt for all things foreign. I experienced some eye-opening stories and observations and took all this old-sweat cynicism and gave it to Rigsby.

The scripts were written in feverish haste by someone who didn’t really know what he was doing, and was finding things out as he went along. I didn’t admit this at the time, even to myself.

I took the view that sitcom-writers fell into two categories: the quick and the dead – and I didn’t intend to be one of the latter!

Inspiration came slowly. I’d stare at the blank page for hours without thinking of a single sentence. I once read that Michael Frayn stared so hard at his typewriter in search of inspiration that he discovered how the tabulator key worked. I know how he felt. I never actually thought I’d finish a series. I did, however, have one stroke of luck during all of this: Leonard Rossiter (1926-84).

Len had been in The Banana Box and loved his character. He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the

driving force behind Rising Damp. I may have written the words, but he provided the punctuation. His whole body would form a question mark. The twist of his head was an exclamation, his eyes blazed italics and the open-mouthed stare was a line of dots going into infinity.

Frances de la Tour also appeared in The Banana Box. At that time, I wasn’t even sure I could write a female character.

The character I created was a little sketchy and there were gaps. Frances filled these gaps with a wonderful display of gauche innocence, coupled with an underlying sexual repression. When people complimented me on this fully rounded character, I was never sure how much was me and how much was Frances.

I do know that the more scenes I wrote between Frances and Len, the easier they became – and they were always immaculately performed. The two may have been politically opposed; they may never have kissed – but together they were magic.

King of landlords: Frances de la Tour, Leonard Rossiter, Richard Beckinsale, Don Warrington, Rising Damp, 1974. Rigsby wrongly thinks Miss Jones is the baby’s mother

We were lucky to get Richard Beckinsale. He’d already had considerable success in The Lovers and Porridge. Although not the oldest, he was the most experienced sitcom actor in the cast. Richard’s laid-back manner and his minimalist style of acting would have made him a great film actor had he lived longer – he died in 1979, aged only 31.

Those talents were not only complementary to Len’s frenetic performance; they were essential. He was able to absorb all Len’s energy and then disperse it with great naturalism. It would have been fatal if they’d both conducted their scenes at the same high pitch.

Richard was one of those actors who appeared to be doing very little while a good deal was going on under the surface.

The role of Alan was not Richard’s favourite – he told me once that he was tired of playing innocent young men. He was a victim of his youthful good looks. I always said, ‘Never mind, Richard. Enjoy

it while you can – there’s plenty of time.’

Unfortunately there wasn’t.

Don Warrington came to the play, and then the series, straight from drama school. Imagine how intimidating it must have been to be plunged into a show with three enormously talented and experienced actors. Confronted with this, Don showed grit and determination, and a great deal of savvy. He didn’t try to compete for laughs; he performed with sardonic coolness. I always felt Don and I were in the same position – we were both beginners. We had to learn quickly or we were lost.

Len – and a brilliant cast – guaranteed the success of the series. Audience ratings grew gradually and just kept growing until we had achieved six number-one slots, beating the mighty Coronation Street. The show was also the first ITV sitcom to win the Best Situation Comedy BAFTA. Our success was assured, as long as I didn’t blow up. And when I did throw down my pen in

exhausted desperation, it was Len who stood by me. He said he wouldn’t work with any other writer – and the studio had to wait.

I have been asked why we made only four series (lasting until 1978 – with a 1980 film, too) when the show was hugely popular. The reason is simple.

Len and I didn’t come from theatrical backgrounds. He worked for years at an insurance company. I worked for years at the Electricity Board. We’d both had enough of long-running shows. We knew it was time to move on – what we didn’t know was that Rising Damp would become a little part of TV history.

As I look back at the show now, it appears to have been written by someone else, from another world. They couldn’t be written now and certainly not by me. Why are they still being shown?

Perhaps because we always tried to tell a story, and people never tire of stories and, as Len used to say, ‘It’s funny, Eric – leave it in.’

The Oldie December 2021 15

Where there isn’t a will When Great-Uncle George died, he left behind a mourning family – and financial chaos. By Hilary Macaskill

TOBY MORISON

W

hen my husband, Michael, agreed to be his greatuncle’s executor, he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for.

All it involved then was typing the handwritten will (signed and witnessed), with inserted amendments, and returning it for signing.

Great-Uncle George, by then, was in a nearby care home. We loved his dry sense of humour, which survived to the days before he died, aged 90. Or perhaps even beyond. In his drawer was the original handwritten will, rendered illegible after a spillage. But the typed will, naming the executor, had disappeared. His last provisions would be invalid. In this case, the first duty of executor was to find the revised will.

We turned to the bank, his employer for 41 years, finding a deed box – but no will. We tried his solicitor and combed his papers for clues: was a cryptic note ‘Knight Security’ the key to the mystery?

It was the name of a locksmith.

We realised his jacket and wallet were missing. We rang the home. Briefly lifting our spirits, the warden reported the jacket had been found – but no wallet. He phoned again. The wallet had turned up; and the will. I drove there and bounded into the warden’s office. ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘The only thing is – it isn’t signed.’

16 The Oldie December 2021

It was hard to grasp. Great-Uncle George, a meticulous bank clerk, had carried his will in his wallet for four years without signing it.

At least it was possible to decipher the original will, and matters proceeded.

Michael, along with Great-Uncle George’s niece, took out joint letters of administration – in effect, the same as being executors. As messenger, I took both wills to the Probate Office. A clerk with drooping moustache, and drooping spirits, examined the original – the only relevant one in law – with studied indifference.

‘It seems to have had coffee spilled over it,’ I ventured.

‘Looks more like tea to me,’ he rejoined dourly.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to prove it?’

‘I should think so,’ he replied loftily.

‘We’ve had worse. Yesterday we had one in a thousand pieces.’

The will was proved. It involved writing to the four people who would have benefited, had he died intestate, to

He had carried his will in his wallet for four years without signing it

ensure they had no objections – but it was allowed as intended except, ironically, for the legacy to the executor.

Dated scraps of paper showing the many calculations of legacies – and the money in hand to cover them – were given to the Probate Office to demonstrate that the provisions in the typed version reflected Great-Uncle George’s intentions.

They also established that a legacy of £1,000 to the executor was added after the first will. He’d probably reasoned that the executor deserved recompense as the time spent would be considerable.

It certainly was. Granting of probate was just the first step. There wasn’t much involved, but the many bequests meant letters, meetings and transactions, such as the selling of shares – all with the Which guide to Wills and Probate close at hand. One fortuitous result of the delay was that the shares rose in value, which meant there was enough to cover bequests.

The main problem was tracking down the prime beneficiary, who lived in France. The last-known address yielded no response. So Michael phoned the French Embassy: ‘I’m looking for a Frenchwoman who has been left money in a will.’

‘Aah,’ said the amused lady at the embassy with barely a moment’s pause, ‘You ’ave found ’er’.

It turned out that the mysterious Frenchwoman was the estranged widow of a deceased nephew who’d left his small estate to his uncle – who wished to return it to the person he felt should have received it. Fifteen months later, she was found, and all bequests paid – even to the charities named in the will who’d made sure of their rights by writing within days of the will’s being registered. There was enough left for those who would have benefited to agree to allocate Michael the legacy disallowed by the Probate Office.

We made our own wills that year – and signed them. Great-Uncle George would surely have approved.

what were the Observer’s Books?

In 1937, Warne & Co published The Observer’s Book of British Birds.

It was a modest affair but an interesting idea; a book for children (although also accessible to adults) that could be easily carried, to help them make the most of the outdoors. Over the next 66 years, a series of 98 were published (and often republished in slightly updated editions). The subjects are as diverse as fungi, jazz and astronomy (authored by Patrick Moore).

Today they are highly collectable, with the most valuable (a black-and-white covered edition of Common Fungi) going for £400. But you can build up a healthy collection paying not much more than a couple of pounds for each of these little time capsules.

From that first book, Warne began churning out more, to begin with in dust jackets, and later as laminated hardbacks.

The story ended in 2003, with the publication that year of The Observer’s Book of Wayside and Woodland.

Some of the titles were a bit odd – Folk Song in Britain seems a strange choice for children. Paris was just a series of street maps. Eventually the series ran out of steam; one dud, the World Atlas, sold poorly and was eventually pulped.

what are middle-aged millennials?

Middle-aged millennials are the latest hybrid of old and new.

They are a banana-loaf-baking breed of mid-twenties youngsters. They may well be millennial by birth but, after months of monotonous lockdown living, they are proudly embracing their new-found middle-aged nature.

Since first dipping their toes in the soothing waters of a slower-paced lockdown lifestyle, some of them have grown so fond of exploring more senior hobbies that they continue to relish 18 The Oldie December 2021

Twitcher’s Bible: the first Observer’s Book, published in 1937

Observer’s Pocket Series Collectors Society, tells me there has been an upturn in interest in the books. Younger people want them because they have that retro feel, with their brown, red and mustard spines and period fonts. Older people love them because they remind them of their childhood – and they really are very well put together.

There is something profound and touching about these little books. They come from an age when we weren’t overwhelmed by information and internet searches. They are solid and speak of healthy pursuits – walking, bird-watching, crafts and hobbies. They also played a part in defining a nation’s interests and priorities.

I wonder if we had only the 100 Observer’s Books and no other information source what we would make of the world. Would it be one-dimensional?

I don’t think so. And if they started again (Penguin have the rights), what might we see? The Observer’s Book of Mobile Phones, Internet Searches or Cosmetic Procedures?

Richard Fuller has led the Collectors Society for ten years, collecting for 25.

His collection numbers 500 and is missing only four for the complete set. It could drive him mad, but it doesn’t. The joy is in the hunt.

They are out there somewhere.

Reverend Steven Morris

middle-aged lockdown behaviour even after restrictions have fully eased.

Middle-aged-millennial behaviour appears in a multitude of forms, from sourdough-baking to knitting, flowerarranging or discovering pockets of joy in weekend menial housework.

The Archers, says the Times, is the ‘Rolling Stones of Radio 4’: its crossgenerational appeal pulls in millennial listeners, according to the soap’s editor.

Having watched the chess-themed Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit during lockdown, one 25-year-old has rather enjoyed swapping her digital games for some good old-fashioned chess. After asking her father to explain the rules during lockdown, she now finds the game ‘really

quite fun’ and enjoys being able to play it more socially.

A love for taking long, peaceful walks is another slightly senior lockdown hobby that has found its way into modern-day, middle-aged-millennial behaviour. One 24-year-old lockdown walker continues to remain enamoured by her regular scenic strolls, and still finds comfort in the simplicity of sitting on a nearby bench ‘watching the world go by’.

Others have been embracing their new post-lockdown middle-aged-millennial behaviour while punting along serene Oxford rivers with a group of giggling friends and a glass of Prosecco in hand.

This particular group of millennials even tried to out-middle-age one another with

The bestseller was that first one, British Birds. The numbers are astounding. It sold over 65,000 copies in the 1930s, rising to 870,000 in the ’50s and over a million in the ’60s. Even in the ’70s, it sold over 700,000 copies. The books also played a part in the war effort.

Airplanes (sic) was produced during the Second World War to help people identify enemy aircraft.

What we have left are the collectors.

Richard Fuller, Secretary of The

a playful discussion of ‘What makes me middle-aged?’

Having entered the pandemic an energetic 23-year-old who wouldn’t have dared dream of swapping a Saturday night in Soho for an episode of Strictly Come Dancing, three lockdowns later I, too, have succumbed to the guilty pleasures of middle-aged-millennial behaviour. During a moment of immeasurable lockdown boredom, I decided to appoint myself Household Hoover Monitor.

I took great pleasure in striding up and down the family hallway, releasing my desperate longing to break free through one empowering Queen anthem, rigorously cleaning the carpet at the same time.

Though multiple lockdowns have passed since then, that blissful illusion of feeling like a well-put-together middleaged adult, who is able successfully to maintain a dust-free household, has not.

The joy of chess: The Queen’s Gambit converted millennials to board games

These oddly satisfying musical Hoover sessions remain a weekly source of Saturday-morning entertainment.

Though I still crave the bustling excitement of youthful London living, my lockdown attempts at mastering the art of mindful meditation have persisted. I’m also adopting healthier bedtime-reading habits. I still occasionally find a lulling tranquillity in sprawling across a well-Hoovered sofa, glued to Saturdaynight TV. In these difficult times, it makes sense that millennials find a sense of comfort and control in acting slightly older than their years. As the Queen said, in politely turning down the Oldie of the Year award, you are as old as you feel. Until the world has fully emerged from the age of COVID-19, why not act whatever age suits you?

Especially if, like me, you feel like a middle-aged millennial.

Jessica Repetti

TOS D E T IT UES M LI 0 G 12

Mr B arry Crye r h ret d ran B s yle G Mr

We are proud to present the première of….

QI’s M r John Lloyd

GANG SHOW at 2pm, Wednesday 8th December 2021, in the library of the Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall, London SW1 Doors and bar open at 2pm; the show: 2.30-3.30pm; carriages: 4pm.

Tickets: £38 per person including wine

To book, please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311 The Oldie December 2021 19

Nicholas Garland drew Telegraph journalists in editorial conferences for 40 years. And then one of them ended up running the country

My Parliamentary sketches

Sketches of Boz: Boris Johnson at leader conferences at the Daily Telegraph office, Canary Wharf, 1999. He was a leader-writer from 1988 to 2000

T

he daily leader-writers’ conference at the Telegraph was fun and instructive. This was especially true while Bill Deedes (Telegraph editor, 1974-86) and, later, Charles Moore (editor, 1995-2003) were editing.

Leaders – also known as editorials – reflect the editor’s and the paper’s view of the news. Sometimes the editor writes them but, more often than not, a group of leader-writers are given the job of writing the three leaders: usually two serious ones and a light-hearted one.

I would sit in on these conferences.

All I know about politics is shaped and influenced by what I heard.

20 The Oldie December 2021

I would sketch the editor and the leader-writers. Happy to be drawn, they were vaguely aware I was sketching them in the corner. I sometimes rolled my eyes.

The Telegraph was always home to plenty of eccentrics and oddballs. And the staff amused themselves by gossiping about them in the way schoolchildren enjoy giggling about the behaviour of their teachers.

There was the well-documented time when it was proposed to make T E Utley (1921-88), a blind man, the TV critic, ‘to get a new point of view on television programmes’. And one afternoon, a senior leader-writer missed the

conference because his office had been trashed by a furious colleague who was also his lover.

Another day, an excited featureswriter rushed in, interrupting the conference, to say he had just learned that scientists had invented a sort of wire that went up into outer space.

It was connected in an amazing way to something that would be ‘an endless source of energy for the whole world’. He said the entire editorial column should be made over to this news and that he would write it.

After he’d hurried out of the room, the conference picked up from where it had left off before he came in, without

HARRY MOUNT

another word about this breakthrough.

The more wild, comical and unlikely the behaviour, the more the Telegraph staff enjoyed telling one another about it, no doubt embellishing the accounts as they went along.

The leader-writers would compete to avoid having to write an editorial.

One might say, ‘I wonder if this leader wouldn’t be better held over until after the vote in the House’ or ‘[So-and-so] has written so wonderfully on this subject before.’ Another would say, ‘I’m meeting a chap from the City at... oh dear, in about five minutes.’

Colin Welch (1924-97), deputy editor, used to salute successful and inventive excuses by mimicking hitting a ball for a six, and the colleagues would smile and nod in approval.

For weeks, one writer turned up each day purple in the face and wearing heavy sea boots. He was just capable of walking to a chair but far too drunk to speak. He sat very still, staring ahead until the meeting was over. God knows what he did then, or where he went.

There was something about Telegraph leader-writers. As soon as one was appointed, he or she became infected by a kind of unruly spirit.

Left: Charles Moore, Lady Thatcher’s biographer and Daily Telegraph editor, 1995-2003 Right: ‘Bill Deedes defying age and gravity.’ W F Deedes (1913-2007) was the Telegraph editor, 1974-86, a Cabinet Minister and ‘Dear Bill’ in Private Eye

Boris Johnson and Nicholas Garland with Garland’s drawings – at a leader-writers’ reunion dinner, the Garrick Club, November 2, 2021. The Prime Minister praised the ‘heterodox spirit’ of the leader-writers. See Stephen Glover on page 67 The Oldie December 2021 21

Above left: Matt Pritchett, aka ‘Matt’, the Telegraph cartoonist Above: Sarah Sands, Telegraph deputy editor, 1996-2005, and editor of BBC’s Today programme, 2017-20 Left: T E Utley, deputy editor, and W F Deedes, editor, Telegraph office, Fleet Street, 1981

One was obsessed by men peeing in public – ‘everywhere you look’. His plan for a campaign against this antisocial habit were enjoyed by all until Charles would say, ‘That’s enough, X…’ Charles himself was not immune to the bug. He suggested writing a leader in support of the Taliban because they lived by the tenets of their religion – “which we all should, shouldn’t we?”

Charles’s idea was met by a polite silence, broken by the characteristically slurred, slow voice of Bill Deedes: ‘I was once in position to receive fire from the Taliban.’ Pause. ‘I for one will not be writing this leader.’

22 The Oldie December 2021

Everybody laughed in relief, delighted by this moment of daftness.

In 2002, when Iain Duncan Smith, supported by the Telegraph, was in the running for leadership of the Conservative Party, he was invited in to meet the leader-writers. He was so dull that when he left, for a long time no one spoke, everyone wondering how on earth they could write in support of the man.

At last, Bill spoke. ‘Well, he’s not going to set the Thames on fire.’

Among the leader-writers for a while was Boris Johnson. I don’t remember anything he said – just his presence, ridiculous hair and all. He and one or two

other regular leader-writers have been elevated since then to Number 10 or the House of Lords.

When Boris became PM, one exconference regular, Sam Leith, now the Spectator’s literary editor, wrote, ‘We are all doomed.’ We didn’t have Bill around any more to make us laugh about it.

I found one drawing (above) that sums up my feelings. This event really happened. The drawing shows Bill sitting with his feet on his desk, and Peter Utley sitting nearby. They are both smoking.

Peter: ‘Don’t we believe, as a paper, that everything should be real, and truthful?’

Bill: ‘News to me!’

After 60 years as a journalist, Ray Connolly recalls a regretful Elvis, a revealing Dusty Springfield and a charming Terry Wogan

My gilt-edged cuttings book

S

hould diamond jubilees exist in journalism, I would be celebrating one around now.

It’s 60 years since I first saw my byline in print. It was a pretentious film review in a university newspaper.

But from then on, Fleet Street was my calling, and I’ve kept a cutting of everything I ever wrote.

Many were interviews with the famous. Muhammad Ali told me he hoped his children would become ‘doctors, lawyers, scientists or engineers.

For me, boxing was the best thing I could have done. It was the only way I could get rich. If I could, I’d have been a great doctor’.

When I interviewed Bob Dylan in 1969, he was more interested in asking me about Elvis Presley’s comeback show in Las Vegas, which I’d just been to see, than talking about himself. ‘Did Elvis sing Heartbreak Hotel? Who was in the band?’

At that moment, he wasn’t a superstar, and I wasn’t a reporter. We were equals, chatting away like a couple of 15-year-olds.

24 The Oldie December 2021

Ringo Starr reflected on the downside of Beatles fame when he talked about an old Liverpool friend. ‘He’s only got about 30 records, but he gets so much pleasure from them. I’ve got a cupboard here with about five hundred LPs but when I want to play one, I have to close the cupboard because I don’t know which one to play.’

Rock stars were always good value, if sometimes daft. Marc Bolan insisted he’d seen someone levitate ‘about eight feet into the air’, he knew how to become invisible and he could ‘conjure up demons’. When I asked him to demonstrate levitation for me, he said, ‘I can’t be bothered.’

Pete Townshend of the Who reckoned his whole stage performance was a result of his ‘having an enormous great hooter as a kid. I was always being baited about it. So, I used to think, “I’ll bloody well show ’em. I’ll push my huge hooter out at them from every newspaper in England.”

Then they won’t laugh at me.’

Elvis Presley was surprised when I asked him why he’d made so many bad

films. ‘I wouldn’t be being honest with you if I said I wasn’t ashamed of some of them and the songs I had to sing in them,’ he said.

Such self-criticism didn’t appear in every interview, but self-knowledge was common. Leonard Cohen said he became a poet by accident: ‘I must have looked extremely absurd because I wrote all my poems to ladies, thinking that was the way to approach them. I was suddenly taken seriously as a poet, when really I was a kind of stud, and not a very successful one, because the successful ones didn’t have to write poems to make girls.’

When I interviewed Michael Caine in the Sixties, he had his own view on sex. ‘I think it’s all a bit of a myth,’ he told me. ‘Blokes come over to London and talk about the permissive society. But they’re all just balling the same girls that everybody else has been having. I’m sure the whole thing is kept going by a couple of hundred ravers.’

Dusty Springfield was the most surprising interviewee, when she decided to come out to me.

From left: Elvis, Tony Benn, John Lennon

‘I don’t go leaping around to all the gay clubs,’ she said, ‘but I can be very flattered.

Girls run after me and it doesn’t upset me.

‘I couldn’t stand to be thought of as a big butch lady. But I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. I’m promiscuous. Not often but when I am, I really am… I don’t mean that I leap into bed with someone every night, but my affections are easily swayed, and I can be very unfaithful. ‘ The truth is, I’m easily flattered by people’s attentions and, after a couple of vodkas, I’m even more flattered.’

John Lennon told me in secret that he’d left the Beatles months before the band’s break-up became public. I didn’t breathe a word about it. But when Paul McCartney let the cat out of the bag, Lennon was grumpy. ‘Why didn’t you write it when I told you?’ he complained.

‘You asked me not to,’ I replied. He wasn’t impressed. ‘You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me,’ he said.

Later, some of the most memorable stories came from politicians. Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, was fascinating in his description of life in an upper-class family before the First World War. His ‘father and mother and

four children and eight indoor servants lived’ in a house where ‘there were just two lavatories’.

Taken out in his sailor suit by his nanny to Kensington Gardens he would return black with soot from playing on the grass.

‘We forget how filthy dirty everywhere was in those days before smoke-free zones came in,’ he remembered. ‘Frightful pea-soupers and a terrible smell of sulphur everywhere.’

Then there was the rudimentary surgery of the time. Shortly before going away to boarding school, aged seven, he was taken to a doctor’s surgery for an inept circumcision to be rectified – without anaesthetic: ‘I was just flung across the doctor’s lap and snip-snip! All I remember is the humiliation, the pain and all the blood.’

Memories of the Second World War had Tony Benn recalling how he and two other British officers celebrated VE Day in a kibbutz near Jerusalem by performing Hands, Knees and Bumps-aDaisy as guests of their Jewish hosts.

Group Captain Leonard Cheshire described his role watching, as an official observer, ‘the flicker of light and then the ball of fire about 2,000ft above the ground’ when the atom bomb exploded

over Nagasaki. He spent the rest of his life working for the disabled.

His was a terrible memory, but there were many funny ones, too. Eric Morecambe recalled having a heart attack while being driven to a hospital. When they got there, he was asked by his minicab driver for an autograph ‘before you go’.

Paul Raymond remembered the first naked lady he ever saw was when, at 14, ‘I peeped through a keyhole at my schoolteacher aunt as she undressed to get into the bath’. Naked ladies would play a substantial part in his career.

Some famous people were dull, but many were impossible not to like, such as Terry Wogan, who remembered the busker outside a cinema in Limerick singing his own lyrics to the tune from South Pacific: ‘Someone chanted evening…’

Best of all was David Attenborough on the sex lives of millipedes. ‘A male millipede has his sex pouch on his eleventh ring, and he takes out the sperm with a feeler-like hand. He then has to bung it over into the female’s genital opening, which occurs on her fifth ring, and you can see him counting, looking for the opening … one, two, three, four, five… And if he misses, he has to start all over again. It’s fascinating.’

From far left: Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Marc Bolan, Dusty Springfield, Eric Morecambe, Terry Wogan, David Attenborough

The Oldie December 2021 25

When justice sleeps Former Supreme Court Justice Simon Brown recalls dozy Lord Denning and other sleepy judges

TONY SIMPSON

S

udden sleepiness doesn’t matter much – unless you’re driving.

One of the saddest cases I ever tried involved a multiple pile-up on the M1. A lorry driver fell asleep, allowing his vehicle to veer into a stationary line of traffic, queuing to leave the motorway. There was an instant conflagration and several people died.

The charge was manslaughter and the question for the jury was whether the driver knew of his propensity to sudden, compulsive sleep. They found he did and a term of seven years followed.

Ever since then, whenever the merest hint of drowsiness has overtaken me at the wheel, I have found the nearest service station or exit and stopped.

Happily, however, sleepiness was never a problem which afflicted me on the Bench. Maybe that was just my good luck. Maybe it was because I used to participate in proceedings rather more directly than I should have done, probably asking too many questions.

Some judges, however, did have a problem. Lord Denning (1899-1999) in his later years, would sleep for five minutes precisely, invariably on the dot of 3pm. He’d then wake up sharper than ever – so that only the briefest recapitulation was required. But Denning was in his eighties.

26 The Oldie December 2021

Other judicial sleepers had less excuse. By definition, they were under 75. Tom Denning was the only judge unaffected by the compulsory retirement age – the age of ‘statutory senility’, as Lord Bridge resentfully called it. Denning was appointed to the Bench before a mandatory retirement age was introduced.

It isn’t just judges who sometimes fall asleep in court. In a Yorkshire case, Judge Pickles (1925-2010), was told by defending counsel, ‘I don’t know whether Your Honour has noticed, but one of the jurymen is asleep.’

‘So he is,’ Pickles said. ‘Well, Mr Green, you put him to sleep, so you’d better wake him up again!’

Judge Pickles was a notoriously savage sentencer, as recalled by the circuit leader, Gilly Gray QC, speaking at the North-East Circuit’s 200th Anniversary Dinner: ‘Two hundred years, Mister Junior, two hundred years… [pause]. One of Judge Pickles’s lighter sentences!’

What’s the most troubling instance of sleepiness in court I can recall? It was a hot summer’s afternoon, sitting in the Court of Appeal in one of the Royal Courts of Justice’s then newly commissioned Crypt Courts. John Balcombe was presiding; Peter Gibson

and I were his wingers. I forget what arcane point of chancery law we were addressing but, around mid-afternoon, I suddenly heard a most disturbing sound.

It was John snoring loudly. Glancing round, I saw he was dead to the world.

Not only were those courts lowceilinged and hot but the Bench was unusually and embarrassingly close to where the lawyers sat facing us. Not only was John snoring loudly but one or two of the lawyers were sniggering. The situation was intolerable.

Naturally I did my best to try and wake John discreetly, initially by raising my voice and asking counsel a series of (needless) questions. Then I noisily dropped a heavy volume of law reports on the Bench between us. None of this had the least effect. Eventually, I had no alternative but to lean across, tug John’s arm and ask him whether he was feeling all right.

Finally waking up, the poor man was suffused with embarrassment, looking guiltily around like a child caught raiding the chocolate box. Nothing, however, was said and the hearing continued to its conclusion, judgment then being reserved.

John himself was to have written the judgment, the point at issue being squarely within his expertise. But given the sleeping incident, Peter and I felt this might not be such a good idea. The task fell to Peter, the other Chancery judge on the court. Writing the judgment would have been well beyond my own competence.

I have one other memory of audible snores in court. Regrettably these emanated from my elderly father on the single occasion he came to court to witness his son’s forensic brilliance.

Not all legal trials are feasts of advocacy. Nor, alas, do all sons live up to their father’s expectations.

Lord Brown’s new memoir is Second Helpings (Marble Hill, £18)

Professor Roy Foster gave this address at the Powys funeral of Grey Gowrie, politician, poet and blithe spirit

Grey’s elegy in a Welsh churchyard

JOHN VOOS/ ALAMY

O

Grey Gowrie (1939-2021), then Chairman of Sotheby’s, in 1993

ne of the first memorable conversations I had with Grey, when we came to know each other nearly 50 years ago, was while we were driving in his rakish BMW coupé to London from Dunstall, his then home in Kent.

He talked spellbindingly about the authorial voice in Henry James’s fiction, and the journey went very fast. The last conversation I had with him, via dictated email, was two weeks before he died; it was about the women in Anthony Trollope’s novels, a more recent passion.

As an aristocratic poet-politician, he himself could have starred in a novel by James or by Trollope; he was also like a figure out of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which he loved for its exact appreciation of the human comedy – a gift he shared, in spades.

He moved easily between many worlds, and zestfully inhabited them to the full: whether receiving red ministerial dispatch boxes in the yard of his Welsh farmhouse, sitting beneath an Andy Warhol portrait of Liz Taylor in his Sotheby’s office, ringmastering one of Drue Heinz’s conversaciones at Villa Ecco, giving the most ingenious and well-chosen of presents, entertaining at Riva in Barnes during truffle season, or joyfully consuming fish and chips with the barrister Jeremy Hutchinson in the Seashell Café on Lisson Grove.

As he enthralled a dinner table, the stories came and went, preceded, endearingly but not really accurately, by the announcement ‘NON SWANKS’, while featuring luminaries such as Peggy Guggenheim, a Royal Personage, Francis Bacon, Elton John or ‘my old boss Mrs T’, whom he always recalled with a kind of rueful affection. His mental energy burned up a room, and his brilliance remained mercifully undimmed to the end.

The Oldie December 2021 29

MIRRORPIX

Grey Gowrie, then Chairman of Arts Council England, at the inauguration of the Angel of the North, 1998

That was the private Grey. His public life was influential and valuable as well as high-profile. In the current era of political opportunism and short-term chicanery, the service he did the state stands out, notably regarding the two contrasting worlds of Northern Ireland and the administration and facilitation of the arts. Both subjects raised issues close to his heart which were established early in life.

He was born in Dublin in 1939 and his youth was spent in counties Kildare and Donegal (as well as – NON SWANKS – Windsor Castle, where his grandfather was Lieutenant-Governor), and he could ‘read’ the complexities of Northern Ireland with insight and compassion.

His early apprenticeship to Robert Lowell cemented his enduring commitment to poetry, and working with Thomas Gibson honed his formidable eye for a painting.

Ireland and his own Irishness remained central to him, and one reason he loved Wales so much was its Celtic dimension. In his lovely poem Marches, he evokes the wind sounding ‘like Ireland/when pulled from the west’, and ends with the words, ‘to live, live, walking against a wind/in Wales, in the mind, that lets you live in Ireland’.

He never, alas, wrote the autobiography that many of us urged him to write, but many of his later long poems evoke and circle round youth, memory and the profound sense of being part of a generation born in, and shaped by, wartime.

Though a passionate and unabashed connoisseur of the good things in life, it was the life of the mind that mattered to him. Perhaps this accounts for the

paradoxical but cheering fact that the last two decades, following his heart transplant in 2000, were probably the happiest of his full and rich life.

It’s significant that the themes of the powerful poetry he began writing while awaiting the transplant in Harefield Hospital concern resurrection and a sense of the miraculous. In the opening poem of his Harefield sequence, he refers to his wife Neiti and himself fighting his illness together – and they won battle after battle.

I once told him he was like the Knight in Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, repeatedly winning his chess games with Death, but that’s too gloomy an image.

More relevant is an invocation in From Primrose Hill (a poem about family, dedicated to his beloved grandson Heathcote, a great support to him and Neiti in the last months).

In it, Grey quotes the doctor in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, telling Milly Theale, ‘Live all you can’. He himself embraced this mantra, and Neiti enabled it: of all the gifts that the fairy godmother had given him, of all those silver spoons, he knew their marriage was infinitely the most precious.

If you said to Grey, at any point during the last 20 years, that he was astoundingly uncomplaining, he would reply, with complete sincerity, that he had nothing to complain about. The many medical complications after Harefield, his lameness, even latterly the cruel deprivation of the ability to read – all were faced with fortitude and even insouciance. He liked to quote Lowell’s remark that his favourite poets were Hardy and Pound ‘because of the heartbreak’.

However, his own poems are not

about heartbreak, but the reverse: a celebration, a new heart, a new chance, the miracle of life and enduring love. In December 2005, he wrote to me about a mutual writer friend who was suffering from depression, ‘I hope he can write his way up again – the Lowell pattern – the Muse in an annoying way likes depression: I’ve always been a bit blithe, temperamentally, for her.’

That is how we will remember Grey – a blithe spirit, as well as the most resourceful, generous, brilliant and lovable of friends. At this saddest of times, as we are faced with his loss, it’s nonetheless appropriate that at his funeral we heard a poem called Celebrate. You came away from visiting him in that room at Harefield oddly buoyed up, because he was a celebrant of life in all its vicissitudes.

I’d like to close with some lines from Gardener’s Tale, his eclogue poem about his beloved Powys home, Ty Bain, which beautifully make the point.

If big themes are tragic, happiness blooms in small corners; sunlight on a dress moving in from shadow; flood water; a call to capture the unfolding sensuousness of white nymphaeas or purple iris; absurd pleasure at the steamy pile of straw christened by horses and settling in to rot by the compost heap, good as a win at the races, and, best of all, the bright certainty that in the end sins are forgiven or rotted down themselves, season by season, and we have laughter while we have the light.

The Oldie December 2021 30

Laurence Harvey was a vulgar, insecure chancer but he was funny and honest about his many faults, says his friend David Ambrose

The forgotten movie star

KEYSTONE PICTURES USA

T

he 100th anniversary of Dirk Bogarde’s birth earlier this year was celebrated with a front-page story in The Oldie.

It’s a safe bet that no comparable tributes will be paid to Laurence Harvey when his 100th anniversary comes up in seven years’ time – born in 1928, he died in 1973, aged only 45. Yet in the only film they worked on together, 1965’s Darling, Harvey got top billing.

Throughout the fifties, they were level pegging as the two leading men of British cinema. But neither was an international star, which was something they both hankered after. Dirk took his shot at the end of the decade, going to Hollywood to make Song Without End (1960), a lavish, big-budget and saccharine biopic of Franz Liszt – which sank without trace.

Larry, meanwhile, had been in the drab surroundings of a Yorkshire mill town, making a modest little picture called Room at the Top (1959), based on the 1957 novel by John Braine. Against all expectations, it became a worldwide phenomenon, shooting Larry into the stratosphere. While Dirk returned to Britain, co-starring with the likes of James Robertson Justice in a fourth sequel to 1954’s Doctor in the House, Larry was sharing star billing with John Wayne, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda.

Nonetheless, ten years later, Dirk was one of the most-respected screen actors in the world. And Larry, as they say in Hollywood, couldn’t get arrested.

So what happened?

I knew and worked with them both. I had great admiration for Dirk but had, rather perversely, huge affection for Larry. I say ‘perversely’ because the general opinion of him was summed up by the actor Robert Stephens in his

32 The Oldie December 2021

Bottoms up! Laurence Harvey (1928-73) ‘would have had sex with a porcupine’

PICTORIAL PRESS/ALAMY

With Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959), based on John Braine’s novel. The film shot Harvey to worldwide fame

autobiography: ‘An appalling human being, and even more unforgivably an appalling actor.’

I suspect Larry would have ruefully entered a plea of guilty on both charges.

His obituary in the New York Times described him as ‘a fastidious connoisseur of antiques, food and wine.

His baronial manner, cheeky wit and upper-class British accent gave the impression that he was of aristocratic birth. But Mr Harvey, whose real name was Larushka Mischa Skikne, was born in Joniškis, Lithuania, of Jewish parents.’

Noël Coward once said of him, ‘Larry likes to pretend his parents were Lithuanian peasants, but we all know the truth is that his mother was Gladys Cooper and his father a Ruritanian prince.’

When he was six, the family emigrated to Johannesburg. Dirt poor, Larry grew up on the streets as a barely educated delinquent. At 14, he ran away and joined the army, lying about his age.

He saw active duty in Italy, winding up at the end of the war as a sergeant in an entertainment unit outside Cairo.

Somehow, he wangled an army grant – as he would wangle most things in his short life – to get him to London. There, one way or another, he got into RADA, but stayed only three months – just long enough to knock the edges off his thick South African accent. Larry wasn’t interested in learning to act. All he wanted was to be a movie star.

To that end, he used anyone he came across who might get him a few rungs up the ladder. One of the first was Hermione Baddeley, a blowsy, wellknown and well-connected actress who was 23 years his senior. After living with her for several years, he dumped her to marry Margaret Leighton – theatrical aristocracy, and only seven years his senior.

She divorced him after four years. She was by then a gibbering wreck because he was openly having an affair with Joan Cohn – the rich widow, 17 years Harvey’s senior, of the Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn, who created Columbia Pictures.

There were rumours he was gay and all these older women were just a front, but it wasn’t true. All the same, he all but admitted to me that he’d had a

relationship with James Woolf, a gay film producer who had steered him successfully into some decent films in the fifties, and finally into Room at the Top. The plain fact was that Larry would have had sex with a porcupine if it would have furthered his career.

When I first knew him in early 1968, he was living with the beautiful, 27-yearold Vogue model Paulene Stone. Later that year, they had a daughter, Domino – whereupon Larry, true to form, upped sticks and flew to Hollywood, where he married his old flame Joan Cohn.

Perhaps feeling a shred of remorse, though I wouldn’t bank on it, he decided to do the right thing by Paulene and the baby after all, setting them up in a fine house in Hampstead – at his rich wife’s expense. When Joan found out, she divorced him. Domino became a bounty-hunter and died of drugs at 35 in 2005. She was played by Keira Knightley in Domino (2005).

Finally, he married Paulene at the start of 1973, only to die 11 months later of stomach cancer, causing, I suspect, a number of people to murmur quietly to themselves, ‘So there is a god.’

The Oldie December 2021 33

ALP ARCHIVE/ALAMY

As the assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), his other major hit

As for the charge of being ‘an appalling actor’, it was a view nobody endorsed more willingly than Larry himself. I sat with him one evening on the terrace of a neo-Gothic palace outside Bucharest in Romania. He was filming a Roman epic, co-starring, among others, Orson Welles, Honor Blackman and Sylva Koscina. I had been flown out to rewrite a problematic script.

It was my first major job as a young writer. For Larry, only 14 years older, it was close to his last major role.

He had just received the reviews of a film he’d made the previous year of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

They were bad for the film and, for Larry himself, they were vicious and humiliating.

I tried to cheer him up, pouring a couple of large vodkas. ‘They just hate you for being a movie star,’ I told him.

‘You’re not supposed to do Shakespeare.’

Larry groaned and sank deeper into his chair. ‘I’m not a big star,’ he said. ‘I 34 The Oldie December 2021

never have been.’ Then, after a long pause, he added, ‘Thing is, though, if you’ve had any kind of Hollywood career, even a pissy little one like mine, you’ll always work somewhere. Road shows, dinner theatre, whatever – your name’s always worth a buck. You won’t starve.’

I felt he needed to speak the words aloud in order to believe them. I was looking at a man who knew his career was on the slide and the game was up.

Revealed beneath the swagger and the posturing that went into the performance of being Laurence Harvey – the only real performance he had in him – was an insecure chancer pushing 40 and scared about his future.

Then, as if to reassure himself further, he told me he’d been offered a tour of My Fair Lady the previous year.

‘We started talking money, and I said, “Wait a f**king minute – that’s no more than you paid Mickey Rooney for that show he did last year. Don’t tell

me I’m not worth more than Mickey f**kin’ Rooney!” ’ Then he was off, wringing his hands and pulling faces in a caricature of an ingratiating small-time producer. ‘No, no, Mr Harvey… Can I call you Laurence? … Larry, you’ve misunderstood me. We’re only talking here about what’s on the table. Let me explain about the concessions, the extras, the parts of the arrangement we don’t put on paper – you know what I’m saying?’

By dinner time, he’d cheered up somewhat. Orson and a couple of others had joined us. Larry was reminiscing about the good times, four years earlier, when he was playing in Camelot at London’s Drury Lane. As he often did when telling stories, he’d slipped into a kind of swear-laden mock-Cockney. One of his party pieces was an impersonation of Flora Robson (1902-84) on a film set, covering her ears and pleading, ‘Will you please stop using that word!’

Larry continued, saying, ‘We was off up to Buck House all the f**kin’ time.

Princess Margaret loved a party. Course, they’re queer for horses, all them royals – Queen, Queen Mum, Margaret, Princess Anne. You’d go in those royal stables and there were all these rows of horses with lipstick marks all over their bums!’

Vulgarity notwithstanding, he could be extremely funny and often had people falling off their chairs with laughter. I asked him one day why he didn’t play more comedy.

His face fell as though I’d touched a sore point. ‘I’d like to,’ he said; ‘I’ve got a pile of scripts I’m trying to get off the ground. But nobody thinks I can do it. And you know what, maybe they’re right. Every time I get up in front of that f**king camera, I freeze up. I can feel it happening. The face tightens up, the voice, the whole bloody body goes rigid.’

It was an extraordinary confession for an actor to make. But when you reflect that his two most successful roles were as a hard-faced, ruthless social climber in Room at the Top and a brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), it made sense.

But then Laurence Harvey never really was an actor. He was, for a short time, a movie star. His early death made the front page of just about every major newspaper in Europe and America – the best billing he’d had in years.

It would have bucked him up no end.

David Ambrose is author of A Fate Worse than Hollywood (Zuleika)

The show must go on As Barry Humphries returns to the stage, he recalls the joys of the 16 West End theatres he’s acted in since 1959

Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

A

m I Jewish?

That is how we all felt in the audience last night at Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, Leopoldstadt, at Wyndham’s Theatre.

As you probably know, the play is about a Jewish family in Vienna from 1900 to 1955.

It is also about Tom Stoppard’s discovery of his ancestry. And it’s also about many other things.

But over it all looms our knowledge of that incomparable crime, the Holocaust, which would soon devour Europe.

For me, it was just marvellous to sit in one of my favourite London theatres after nearly two years and see a grownup play. It was the Real Thing, if I may appropriate a Stoppard title.

Wyndham’s was designed by W G R Sprague, the other theatre architect beside the great Frank Matcham, and it has stood on its corner of Charing Cross Road since 1899. And I have trodden its boards!

With fatuous pride, I record that I have played in 16 West End theatres at one time or another, and next year I am touring the country with a new show, The Man Behind the Mask, which might, I hope, end up at Wyndham’s.

I love a theatre that has never been molested by an acoustic engineer.

Brand-new theatres are rarely satisfactory, because architects don’t go to the theatre. They go to movies and watch television. The architect of an expensive new theatre in Australia forgot to install dressing rooms, and another ‘acoustically perfect’ auditorium enabled the cast on stage to hear every word whispered by the audience in the back stalls although their own lines were inaudible beyond the first three rows.

36 The Oldie December 2021

Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Rd, 1908

Long before your parents were born, in 1963, I was in a pantomime on stage at Wyndham’s Theatre. It was by the future author of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer.

The Merry Roosters Panto was a very good children’s show with great songs

by Stanley Myers that I used to sing to my daughters.

The show was directed by the famous faux-Cockney Joan Littlewood, who saw the point of me – she cast me as a mad scientist. My wife was played by Toni Palmer, a stalwart of the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Oh, what a gifted, funny girl was Toni, and she’s still with us!

The panto played only by day, and at night I had another job. Spike Milligan had offered me a leading part in The Bedsitting Room at the Comedy Theatre (now the Pinter), a short sprint across

Leicester Square. Thus it was that, two years after arriving in England, I found myself playing in two West End theatres simultaneously!

In those days, I was a favourite of Littlewood’s and she cast me in a new play by Frank Norman, who had written the hit show Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be at the Garrick. The show never went ‘up West’.

Frank was a charming, slightly scary society jailbird. Joan loved villains and I would sometimes be invited to parties in terra incognita – remote places such as Walthamstow – and mingle with the Kray Brothers and their always affable colleagues.

At this time, my East End cronies recommended a tailor in Rupert Street, Soho, and I would sometimes climb the insalubrious stairs for a fitting, and bump into the Krays in their new, shiny, mohair finery.

Barbara Windsor was often about, and Danny Sewell, whom I knew from my days in Oliver!. He’d played the original Bill Sikes and his passport said he was a ‘florist’. They were all florists, and most of them had a razor cut on the cheek, which wasn’t due to a shaving accident.

Another villain I knew was the doorman at a strip club in Denman Street, Soho. I was playing Fagin in the 1968 revival of Oliver! at the Piccadilly Theatre, and the subterranean club was next door.

Terry (they were all Terrys or Dannys) would stand outside the entrance in all weathers, and well into the small hours, accosting the furtive punters and muttering a few words descriptive of the delights awaiting them.

On my way to and from the theatre, we always exchanged a friendly greeting, until one night he asked me, very politely, how I

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre/Victoria and Albert Museum, London Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Above left: Walter Sickert’s Gallery of the Old Mogul, 1906-07. Above right: Barry’s first London theatre job in 1959

was doing for money. Fearing ‘the bite’, I told him I was skint. It was four days before the ‘ghost walked’ (theatre slang for pay night) and I was in fact broke.

Looking slyly to left and right and coming so close to me I could smell his last lager and his current Gold Flake fag, he pressed a rosette of damp paper into my hand. ‘Pay me back whenever, Baz,’ he said resuming his vigil. I looked down gratefully at the crumpled £10 note, still damp from a hostess’s Babycham.

Not long after I had returned this unexpected advance on my salary, he asked me if anyone was giving me ‘the needle’.

Totally taken aback, I confessed that there was nobody I could recall.

Pinching the cigarette butt from his lips and with a menacing shrug inside his camelhair shoulder pads, a gesture of which Frank Norman was the master, he said, ‘Just let me know, Baz. Car doors can open real sudden. With me?’

I was almost with him – but in recent years I have wished Terry were still alive.

There were a few pedestrians I knew who were very deserving of a sharply opened car door, or of an even more chastening rebuke. They are heavily disguised yet immediately recognisable characters in my soon to be published book, You Pissed in My Soup – mostly lawyers, managers and tax advisers, whom Terry could have cheerfully ‘sorted’.

My first theatre job in London was in 1959 at the Lyric Hammersmith. I was Jonas Fogg the madhouse keeper (who else?) in Donald Cotton and Brian Burke’s The Demon Barber. It was quite an elaborate little musical about Sweeney Todd which Stephen Sondheim had never heard of. Sondheim didn’t know of this version when he composed the 1979 musical/opera Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

It closed on Christmas Eve after 14 performances. Not very long after, this exquisite theatre was demolished at a time when borough councils felt it was their duty to continue the work of Reichsmarschall Goering in the destruction of London. They brought a new ferocity to the task, and many of London’s theatres that had survived the Blitz were gleefully pulverised by the advocates of Progress.

The Lyric was cynically reconstituted,

but it was never the same. I remember there was a small doorway just off stage left, in the proscenium arch. From here, a thirsty actor could ascend by a spiral staircase to a secret ‘snug’ in a corner of the dress-circle bar, screened from the intermission audience by a panel of engraved glass. Here you could overhear the comments of the public – not always complimentary.

At another provincial theatre, one time when I was touring with Dame Edna, my dressing room was separated from the female lavatory only by a flimsy partition. So I could overhear the comments of my matinée ladies.

I distinctly remember one woman saying gnomically to another, ‘I think I like her better as a man.’

She may have been right.

Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask is touring Britain in 2022

Old troupers: Barbara Windsor and Joan Littlewood

My dressing room was separated from the female lavatory only by a flimsy partition The Oldie December 2021 37

Town Mouse

Flaming-hot tips for a roaring fire tom hodgkinson

I was lolling by my log fire in Shepherd’s Bush, enjoying the faint smell of wood smoke and the crackle of the flames, and feeling all was well with the world.

And then I came across an article in the Guardian claiming that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was proposing a ban on wood fires. There was talk of particulates in the air and the general evils of burning stuff.

This piece slightly knocked me out of my smug eco-bubble. Was I a polluter?

Should I immediately extinguish the fire and loll by a white metal radiator?

Too late: the following day a large pallet-load of wood, along with a few bags of smokeless coal, was delivered to our house and left in the street. I roped in a younger mouse to help me carry the logs and coal through the house into our backyard – and carried out this procedure as quickly as possible. I was convinced a neighbour would appear and shout out, ‘You do know that’s illegal, don’t you?’

Rather than worrying and remaining ignorant on the matter, I decided to look into the laws and consulted the Government’s website. Sure enough, 38 The Oldie December 2021

reports of the death of the wood fire turned out to be exaggerated. However, new laws about burning wood and coal did in fact come into practice in May this year.

In essence, old-style house coal will be banned, and we’ll be allowed to burn only wood that has been properly certified as ‘dry’.

Now here’s a quick note on moisture in wood. It’s a subject I became quite obsessed with when I was a country mouse. One of the first things I learned was that local log merchants liked to claim the wood they delivered was ready to burn, meaning that the moisture in it had more or less vanished – a process that for hardwoods like oak generally takes at least a year.

This turned out not to be the case.

Many was the time I sat staring at a miserably smouldering fire that never quite got going. The wood was ‘green’.

Full of moisture, it just sat in the wood stove, hissing and producing no heat.

My landlady advised that when it comes to mendacious log merchants, ‘You’ve got to get ahead of them.’ So we started to order the logs a good year

before we intended to use them and stored them on pallets outdoors under a cover. I also enjoyed foraging for fallen branches in the woods. There was something wonderfully natural about keeping warm with wood from our immediate neighbourhood.

It now turns out that, as well as producing no heat, green logs are an environmental menace. According to the puritanical bureaucrats at uk.gov: ‘Burning at home, particularly with traditional house coal or wet wood, is a major source of the pollutant PM2.5 – tiny particles which can enter the bloodstream and lodge in lungs and other organs. PM2.5 has been identified by the World Health Organization as the most serious air pollutant for human health.’

Now this sounds crazy, but it’s true.

The World Health Organization is against wood-burning and indeed woodgathering and, it would seem, wood all round. In this rather chilling attack on the old ways, the WHO says: ‘Fuel-gathering increases the risk of musculoskeletal damage, consumes considerable time for women and children, limits other productive activities (such as income generation) and takes children away from school. In less secure environments, women and children are at risk of injury and violence during fuel-gathering.’

In other words, stop wandering round pretty woods risking musculoskeletal damage and get a proper job.

Around the same time that I returned to the city from the country, my friend Joy Lo Dico moved from Soho to a wood in Dorset, where she manages 120 acres of woodland. Fuel-gathering, she says, is a win-win situation: ‘In ye olde days, not only did wood provide your heating as firewood and your security as fence posts, but also the sudden opening of the woods became a playground for birds, bees, wildflowers, insects – all that good biodiversity stuff.’

And, at The Land magazine, forester Mike Gardner says that the new regulations will have a pretty awful effect on local wood-suppliers. The cost of getting your wood certified, he reckons, could be over £800 a year. As with other attacks on the old ways, these apparently well-motivated laws, pushed by publichealth experts, will make life worse for the small people.

The message is hardly new: keep the home fires burning. Just don’t burn green wood.

Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Live in the Country (Unbound) is out now

Country Mouse

Mary must learn to love my European hornets giles wood

As a thinker, the Prince of Wales may be 30 years ahead of his time. I can boast of having once been 20 years ahead of mine.

It was 20 years ago that I wrote to our local newspaper, the Marlborough Gazette and Herald, and, as I never tire of seeing my name in print, I kept the cutting. My letter protested that Waitrose, purveyors of Duchy Organic products, were selling bee-killing, neo-nicotinoid, anti-bug sprays ‘over the counter’. Not that Waitrose has, to my knowledge, ever sold any products under the counter.

Well, blow me down, if, 20 years to the week later, I don’t spot a headline in this week’s local paper: ‘Learn to live with pests,’ says Waitrose as it bans bug spray Many great minds have been attracted to insects. Kafka, Maeterlinck, Miriam Rothschild and E O Wilson, to name but four – and wasn’t Nabokov obsessed by butterflies? But these were the exceptions that proved the rule. Until recently, most people viewed insects as pests, often with a high yuck-factor.

Call it the Zeitgeist or morphic resonance – or perhaps Dave Goulson’s plea to humanity to change its attitude towards insects, in his book Silent Earth, has borne fruit – but there’s something in the air, apart from pesticides.

‘You’re an anti-monarchist?

Better keep it to yourself’

Bug hotels are selling as well as bird boxes this Christmas. A fashionable no-dig gardener at the other end of the Vale is letting wasps nest in her wooden house for the first time.

I myself have resolved to leave an infestation of European hornets, which are nesting in the fabric of our cottage, unmolested. The handsome creatures have gained ingress via a hole in a rotten downstairs windowsill. Having given up the unequal struggle of restoring the wood with putty and car-body filler, ten years ago I surrendered the hole to the elements. Besides, in countries with stricter environmental laws than our own – Germany, for example – the European hornet’s nest is protected.

‘There is no need to call in exterminators,’ I told my busy wife when she complained after being ‘dive-bombed’ in the upstairs bathroom.

‘It requires only tiny behavioural adjustments on the part of the human, so we can co-exist in peace. Or risk Insectageddon. Just don’t leave the bathroom lights on and the windows open.’

‘Fine,’ she expostulated. ‘But how long do we have to co-exist for? Will they die off naturally in winter?’

On this question, I am just as clueless as poor old Gilbert White was about bird migration. He mistakenly thought house martins lay dormant in winter in the mud beneath the water of his garden pond.

Now let me say in their defence that hornets are the most mild-mannered and gentlemanly insects, who literally go out of their way not to sting you. I’ve been stung once – it’s double the pain of a wasp sting. It was not the insect’s fault.

It was only acting in self-defence when it came between my hair and my bobble hat.

Naturally, if they enter a lit bathroom

at night, hornets, out of their comfort zone, will turn instantly, in their stripy school blazers, into so many Dennis the Menaces, all dive-bombing the human at once.

But if, when outside, I stand directly in the hornet’s flight path, they will politely veer off to avoid me and continue their manoeuvres to do their own thing.

What their own thing is I do not know.

I explained to Mary that I am currently too busy to research the European hornet and she is welcome to do the work herself.

Stumbling on an episode of Made in Chelsea, we were briefly transfixed by the exclusively good-looking jeunesse dorée from the capital’s richest boroughs. Break-ups and make-ups form the grist to their mill. Structured reality is the format, and alcohol is the engine of destruction that causes their constantly irritated livers to manifest storm-in-a-teacup-style jealous rages which, apparently, the viewers find addictive.

‘Like social butterflies, they float above a sea of champagne bubbles,’ I muttered to Mary, unable to stop my fatuous commentary.

It’s a tenuous link, I admit, but aren’t butterflies the jeunesse dorée of the insect world? Is it wrong of me to favour them, along with the exquisite green jewel beetles, for whom I let mint run riot, and the brooch-like dragonflies, for whom I have provided a pond, above more repulsive insects such as marmorated stink bugs, horseflies, sheep nostril-flies and deer ticks, not forgetting the horrid ground-weaver?

Have I just accused myself of insect elitism?

I find myself guilty. Nature needs all insects for balance, as each occupies its own unique ecological niche, regardless of looks. Hence, in the interests of equality and diversity – and to prevent Insectageddon – I will be subscribing to the dynamic but under-supported charity Buglife 2022.

Not all insects are beautiful or can afford to live in Chelsea.

‘Bag for life?’

The Oldie December 2021 39

Postcards from the Edge

When Irish eyes weren’t smiling The radio shows of my youth loved banning saucy songs, says Mary Kenny

TOBY MORISON

When Gyles Brandreth honoured the splendid Leslie Caron for her Oldie of the Year Award at the Savoy, he remarked that the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the 1958 movie of Gigi might nowadays be cancelled. It begins, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/For little girls grow bigger every day…’

Actually, the song was banned – by Irish state radio, then called Radio Éireann.

It was considered to be ‘suggestive’.

Radio Éireann (now RTE) also prohibited ‘I’d like to get you/On a slow boat to China’ (covered by many artistes) for being ‘suggestive’. ‘Oh dear/What can the matter be’, too, came in for some disapproval, since there was a bowdlerised version, where the lyrics continued ‘Two ladies/Locked in a lavatory’. Elvis Presley’s It’s Now or Never, as well, took some time to be approved for broadcast.

Ireland was considered – and was – prudish at the time, but prudishness and our contemporary ‘cancel culture’ are remarkably similar. Slow Boat to China is perhaps a bit rapey, when you come to think of it, and It’s Now or Never is quite evidently about pressurising a lady into sexual congress without asking consent.

As for Thank Heaven for Little Girls – well, it is rather suggestive of a distinctly Lolita-type tendency…

It is so sad to read about the way the Lebanon is falling apart, as a society and as a state: no streetlights; raw sewage on the beach; abject poverty; the economy collapsing. It was once a beacon of civilisation and even glamour.

My father, who was born in 1877 (yes, Pa was quite an oldie when he fathered me in 1944), was a student in Beirut towards the turn of the 20th century. He remembered it as the most delightful of places. Beirut was known as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’.

Everything worked properly. The food and the wine were wonderful, the culture sophisticated, and the people mingled 40 The Oldie December 2021

together tolerantly – Christian, Muslim and Jew. The road to Damascus was, literally, a peaceful pathway of travelling and trading.

The Lebanese are an innovative and ancient people, descended from the Phoenicians: can they rebuild their country to what it once was?

One of my favourite shops is Poundland, which delivers pleasant service and bargain products for a quid or so. Since reading glasses are objects constantly lost or misplaced, I have a policy of keeping a pair in every room; as they are only a pound apiece at Poundland, this is no extravagance. These cheapo specs are just as good as any designer label supplied by the optician.

Marks & Spencer closed their popular store in Deal in Kent, much to the town’s chagrin, and left a visible gap in the High Street. But just in time for Christmas, the space will be taken over by Poundland: hooray for them, say I! ‘We must teach our sons to respect women’ was a comment often heard throughout an autumn of concern over violence towards women.

It is not that women and girls should be more careful in their everyday lives: men and boys should be taught to be less aggressive, selfish and savage.

Caroline Noakes, the Conservative MP (whom I’ve previously mentioned in

dispatches) and Chair of Women and Equalities Committee, most particularly emphasises that there must be a ‘culture change’ in men’s attitudes to women.

Harriet Harman, for the Labour opposition, has articulated this viewpoint many times.

We are all in favour, surely. And yet it’s not exactly the newest idea in the world.

As the incisive American thinker Camille Paglia has pointed out, the civilising of the more brutish side of males has been a humanities project over many centuries.

The 15th-century Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione established founding principles about treating ladies with respect and gentleness. Chivalry was invented because females didn’t have the physical strength to defend themselves, and it was a gentleman’s duty to observe chivalric courtesies towards ‘the fairer sex’.

The historian of European manners W E H Lecky describes how civilisation sought to soften the rough edges of the more loutish male. Although an Irish Protestant, Lecky claimed that the cult of the Blessed Virgin promoted deference and respect towards women.

Throughout the 19th century, as the Victorian historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has chronicled, respectability (and Sunday Schools) helped to refine all classes in society. When the Titanic sank in 1912, most men did observe the chivalrous code of ‘women and children first’.

And I think that the efforts to ‘gentilise’ men have been reasonably successful. There are always a few violent brutes – and the law should certainly rigorously penalise assaults and, of course, murder. But in my quite lengthy experience, most men are decent, kind and gentle – gentlemen, in fact.

Keep striving for high standards from chaps, Mesdames Noakes and Harman, but remember, these endeavours have been going on for quite a few centuries!

Letter from America

Yanks dress better than limeys

As an Englishman in New York, I’ve learnt to love American clothes Philip Delves Broughton After a couple of years in New York in my late 20s, I decided I needed to improve my wardrobe.

At that point, it consisted of little more than Gap khakis and shirts, often bought as a laundry solution on trips around the country. I had a couple of suits from London, but rare opportunities to wear them. So, after some limited consultation, I went to the menswear department at Bergdorf Goodman, and entrusted myself to a floorwalker named Tyrone.

My biggest issue, I told him, was trousers – or pants. I needed them smart, durable and multipurpose. The kind that could survive a night or two thrown in a heap on the floor or stuffed into a bag and emerge looking respectable.

Tyrone thought for a while. He seemed fascinated by the problem. He handed me a few pairs of what he assured me were just what I needed. I tried them on and looked warily at myself in the mirror.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Tyrone said, standing outside my changing room. He looked delighted when I emerged in an olive, worsted pair. ‘We have a winner.’

I bought them, and another navy pair, and went home having spent far more than I had anticipated, but confident I had entrusted the problem to a professional.

I can still hear the howls of laughter that greeted my trousers’ debut. The pointing and derision from an English friend visiting that weekend.

‘What the hell are those?’ she squealed. ‘You look like a golfer.’

By which she meant the early-20thcentury kind, Harry Vardon winning six Opens in baggy-kneed knickerbockers.

My new trousers cinched my waist and then ballooned around my thighs, as if accommodating the lower half of an Olympic sprinter. They then barely tapered down to turn-ups the width of the M25. They were pants suited to a prosperous Atlanta lawyer chairing the board of his country club. They needed a

large tumbler of bourbon on the rocks. I looked as if Christo had attacked me and wrapped me up like the Arc de Triomphe.

A couple of years ago, I faced a similar challenge when I wanted to buy a couple of suits in New York. The advice I received was various and contradictory.

One American friend told me that on no account should I go English. ‘It’s enough when you come into a room with that accent. Don’t double down with the suit.’

He advised me to get any old baggy businessman’s suit. It would make people feel more comfortable around me.

Another – a senior investment banker – said that I should go for something more ‘athletic’. He recommended a Neapolitan tailor whose suits cling in crucial places.

They give those who wear them a feral, physical presence, best accentuated by an expensive watch on a muscular forearm.

Around that time, an older American friend told me a story one evening about looking for office space in London. He described his patronising English agent, ‘wearing one of those tight little suits where the jacket barely covers his ass’, and the clippety-clop of his polished brogues, none of which could make up for the agent’s professional ineptitude.

In the end, this friend told me, as he watched me spin, it wasn’t about the clothes. It was about chivalric codes.

What does your armour say about who you are and what you stand for? As an Englishman who had spent more than

two decades in America, I knew that was my problem. Not pants.

The good news today is that the options have multiplied. With the pandemic, dress has become a free-forall. And with that relaxing of the rules has come a general smartening-up. Instead of trudging to work in wearily worn uniforms, people look happier and snappier wearing whatever they want.

The men of Midtown Manhattan look unleashed in their sneakers and jeans, instead of embroiled in some midlife moment. The modest wear Allbirds; the less modest stride around in Brunello Cucinelli, fully buying into the idea that money transmuted into clothes serves a moral good.

There are still, of course, codes, which can startle the British visitor who mistakenly equates America with informality. The professional world, certainly outside California, is still quite starchy and well-groomed, with no tolerance for floppy-haired attitude. In California, the sin is to be overweight, which suggests a lack of self-respect – thus lack of self-discipline, and thus your worth as an investment opportunity.

Los Angeles may seem casual on the surface, but there is a caste system based on the sustainability of your denim and the softness of your cashmere. In the South, seersucker suits come out on Memorial Day in late spring, and disappear on Labor Day at the end of the summer. Barack Obama’s svelte tailoring set a standard for the Washington alpha male which Donald Trump’s boxy suits could not undo.

America has never been short of men’s fashion icons, from Hollywood to JFK. Yet the idea that the British knew clothes better persisted. But just as the French still kid themselves that their food is better than Britain’s, it’s an idea whose time has passed.

‘Oh, you’re such a romantic, Philip! Yes, of course I’ll divorce you’

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph The Oldie December 2021 41

Small World

My fight with Mother left me panting

Why does she insist on ironing my smalls? I prefer non-stiff briefs jem clarke

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…

STEVE WAY

This is a time of year I can do business with.

What a joy to be between early autumn and ‘hard autumn’, with a potential job on the horizon – just when I think a job looks most beautiful.

Mother once supported my ambition to be a weatherman as I had, in her opine, all the necessary attributes – short; shiftylooking; suit never troubled an iron. But recently her position has shifted: ‘He’s more a fantasist than forecaster.’

She’s referring to my broken femur, which, ever since it healed, gives me a two-hour warning before impending rain. During a period on pain-killing medication, I had vivid but accurate dreams each night of the next day’s weather.

Unfortunately, by the time I had woken up, crutched up and got downstairs, the day’s weather was already upon us. So my predictions landed a little late to sway my parents I was onto something. Still, Father referred to my paisley dressing gown as ‘the Technicolor dream coat’ for a couple of unfunny months.

What’s put my now cross-seasonal joblessness into sharp relief is that my long-time friend Stefan has got a job after

42 The Oldie December 2021

searching for two whole days. I explain this by saying to Mother, ‘Stefan’s got four functional limbs and the strength of a maddened ox – of course he’s employable’. Mother counters with ‘But he’s just come out of prison!’

Stefan, or to give him his unsubtle – and as it turned out chillingly accurate – nickname, Crazy Stef, surprised us all by emerging from prison way earlier than we ever expected.

During a catch-up in a Wetherspoon’s beer garden, Stef explained that his new job was in a food factory. I imagined that if I hired an ex-con with a King Kong-like frame, I’d have him breaking down really large cardboard boxes, or lumping blocks of ice, using all the skills he’d learnt on the chain gang.

Instead they’d apparently handed him a thimble-size plastic jug, from which he had to sprinkle a line of mayonnaise across passing pasta. Perhaps the factory-owners keep old lags away from any large objects. Still, I imagine a tiny plastic jug could in the wrong hands soon be re-tooled as an eye-gouger, should quality control come a-knocking about the consistency of his ‘drizzle action’.

I shared with Stef about my static job search. He even said he would put a word in at the factory. He said that, because of a tougher enforcement of certain right-to-work-in-the-UK small print,

they were ‘down a couple of Slavs on the pizza-slicing table’.

I spent a few nights wearing a borrowed blue hairnet to bed, to see if I could stand it for seven-hour spells. (I have a sensitive scalp after overdosing on caffeine shampoo during a last-ditch attempt to reverse male pattern baldness.)

Then Stef measured the height of the pizza-slicing table and the game was up. I couldn’t reach.

It’s probably for the best, as my sole factory experience when I was a student ended in a brutal dismissal owing to a horrific medical condition, repetitive strain injury. In summer, my veins make an audible creaking noise. Some days, it happened just before we entered a heatwave. When I was actively pursuing my weather-predicting career in the noughties, that was something of a boon.

It also meant Mother has taken over all shirt-folding duties ever since. An unintended consequence of this is that she will constantly try and steal my underpants for a quick iron, by secreting them within my shirt pile. I have resisted her underwear-ironing; not just to do my bit to save the planet, but also because I just prefer a more relaxed brief.

I was explaining to Stef that sometimes, if I catch my mother at it, we will end up playing tug-of-war with my boxers, like some suburban ‘squid game’. If I win, she yells viciously, ‘Suddenly someone’s RSI has gone away, hasn’t it, you twerp!’

The word ‘twerp’ triggered Stef and he clutched his Guinness tightly, as if resisting some darker urges, muttering, ‘You shouldn’t have to take that from your mother. We’ll have to find a solution.’

I nodded, grateful for anyone supporting me in my endless parental Cold War. But eight hours later, I shot up straight in bed, wide-eyed with terror, reflecting, ‘Have I inadvertently hired an ex-crim to kill my mother?’

Thankfully Stef turned up a day later, with a shirt-folding machine he’d made for me from a YouTube tutorial video, and the sort of make-and-mend manufacturing skills Her Majesty’s Prisons could be proud of.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

My pupils are free at last – on Dartmoor I’ve just found myself on a bus to an outward-bound course.

A hundred children, many of whom had never spent a night away from home before, were in a state of unequalled excitement at the thought of two nights in a converted railway station, surrounded by friends.

Mobile phones were banned (girls ring their mothers and sob; boys take pictures of each other in the shower). So the journey into Dartmoor was not in the numbed silence of screen zombies we have become used to on school trips.

Instead there was a hysterical level of noisy joy and a great deal of questioning.

The first shade fell on the joy almost as soon as we arrived. A walk down to the park for a picnic lunch was ‘too far’ for some of the children – but at least for this first meal they’d provided their own lunches.

What, out of interest, do children eat nowadays? Every meal we were offered was bland and child-friendly – sausage and mash and pizza. And yet there were children who refused to eat. Even the cooked breakfast, a classic of its kind, was deemed unacceptable by some children.

I asked one child what she ate at home – toast for breakfast and chicken nuggets for supper. Every single day. The cook offered to cook some nuggets specially,

but I turned down her kind offer and gave the child the same lecture that I had been given, that I gave my children and that my daughter gives her daughters: think of the starving children in Biafra.

Biafra may be out of date, but you get the picture.

In the end, not wanting the child to starve, I gave in and made her some toast. She wanted no butter or jam – just toast. She pierced it on a fork and nibbled around the edge, as though it were a toffee apple. Offered water to drink, she said water was disgusting and made her ‘hurl’; she ‘could’ drink only squash. I told her the difference between ‘could’ and ‘would’. I don’t think she liked me very much.

The food was only the beginning of the problem. The activities were vigorous – gorge-scrambling, high ropes, long walks in the dark. I had made it clear that

‘...and here, at the front of the bus, we have another wheel’

owing to my advanced age and concept of my own dignity I would not be getting into a wet suit, but would attend in a loving and supportive capacity.

With another member of staff, I wrestled a keen but massively overweight child into an adult-size wet suit. I cajoled a terrified child into taking the first step off the ground at the high ropes – and cheered as she reached the top.

And then there were the nights. I don’t think I have ever been more tired. I had wangled myself a room on my own (most of the staff had to share) and was in charge of a corridor. Not very successfully.

One girl kicked off and had to be sent home in the middle of the night.

But I am glad I went. I now know more about my tutor group: which are the braggarts; who is truly brave. And, much to my surprise, I had one of those unexpected, unsolicited moments of pure joy that suddenly strike you and stay with you in a Wordsworthian way.

We were bicycling along the Granite Way. The sun was out; a rainbow hung faint against a washed-out sky. My breath caught in my throat and I felt sudden tears in my eyes.

In the months and years to come with these children, I will have some tricky moments, but I will hold on to the memory of that bicycle ride as the real beginning of our time together.

Quite Interesting Things about … December The best time to look for a new job is between 10am and 11am on a Tuesday in December.

The Panama Canal has been closed for only two days since it opened in 1914 – once in December 1989 and once in December 2010.

During the whole of December 2017, the sun

shone in Moscow for just six minutes.

bat. It wasn’t till 1980 that the Laws of Cricket specified that the bat had to be made of wood.

3rd December is International Baboon Day.

In the First Test in Perth in December 1979, Dennis Lillee used an aluminium

On 9th December 2012, 12,323 people in Taipei City, Taiwan, broke the Guinness World Record for the largest tambourine ensemble.

On 10th December 1905, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became the first person to be titled the Prime Minister.

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

The Oldie December 2021 45

sister teresa

Pray for those in peril on the sea After I had written two articles for The Oldie, an angry reader berated Alexander Chancellor, then the editor, for employing a contemplative nun: ‘Nuns are lazy women who don’t pay taxes.’

At the time, I stuck my nose in the air and maintained a dignified silence. Seven years on, I think I would be less feeble and might well tell him that I should like to see him try to live as we do for a couple of weeks; his chances of lasting the full fortnight would be slim. We are, incidentally, fully up to date with our payments to the Inland Revenue.

An antidote for this disagreeable missive arrived on the same day: an appreciative and charming letter from a retired rear admiral. (Needless to say, this was not published.) We have been corresponding ever since, though we have never met.

The rear admiral joined the Navy in 1945 and was a submarine commander for 25 years. With such a dangerous and demanding job, he could not fail to understand what St Teresa of Ávila wrote in The Interior Castle: ‘Neither the ship

When we cry to thee: burial at sea, 1942

herself nor her pilot and sailors can at their choice control the fury of the sea and stop its carrying the boat where it will: far less can the interior of the soul now stay where it chooses…’

St Teresa’s advice never fails to be practical, even when she is at her most spiritual. She knows from experience that everything is in God’s hands.

I have never been inside a submarine, but it is easy to imagine the sense of claustrophobia brought about by stale air and the pressures of being confined under

water for months with the same several dozen men and no means of getting out.

This is a very far cry from rural Norfolk, with its fields, woods and a lake, which offers the occasional excitement of a kingfisher. When I think of the very high levels of obedience and charity that must be essential for submarine crews, I realise that an enclosed Carmelite nun has it easy.

Humour is another vital ingredient in an enclosed life. The naval jokes in the rear admiral’s letters always make me laugh. ‘A directive from the powers that be concerning the correct attitude at a sailor’s funeral. It should be one of subdued joy: joy because your colleague has gone to a better place; subdued because he failed to pay his last mess bill.’

The basis of the rear admiral’s life has been loyalty inspired by profound Christian thinking. His care for the men under his command, and his love for his family, Queen and country are not outdated qualities but the stuff of which quiet heroes are made.

Memorial Service

The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020) Lindy Dufferin, painter, conservationist and châtelaine of Clandeboye House, County Down, was remembered at St Margaret’s, Westminster. In 1964, she married the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (who died in 1988) next door in Westminster Abbey.

Thomas Pakenham, the historian and tree expert, led the tributes: ‘Her talents were astonishingly diverse. She was hyperactive: first and foremost a painter, but also a successful tycoon, with her own brand of yoghurt, and a generous host to numerous good causes. A masterly châtelaine and creative gardener.’

He told of the time in the 1990s when Lindy invited some stuffy dendrologists to Clandeboye. He decided to improve the 46 The Oldie December 2021

young handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata) with the contents of a packet of Kleenex.

‘Look!’ I cried. ‘The handkerchief tree has begun to flower.’

‘Lindy was completely fooled,’ said Pakenham. ‘Her eyes shone with excitement – then the penny dropped.

She flew at me, knocked me to the ground and we rolled over and over down the bank. The dendrologists couldn’t believe their eyes. Behaving like a teenager – and she a marchioness!’

Lindy’s brother William Guinness

read from 1 Corinthians 15: ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ Rupert Sheldrake read Afterwards by Thomas Hardy.

Ailish Tynan sang a Bach aria: ‘If you are with me, then I will go gladly unto my death and to my rest.’

Godson Harry Mount read a passage from her 2017 diary: ‘I wanted to be a great artist but I did not have what was necessary. But I’ve helped indirectly by loving beauty and now I have Clandeboye to cherish. It’s [her late husband] Sheridan’s legacy – that magic man who used to live by my side right here in this room.’

Princess Dora Loewenstein and Sir Ian Huddleston read prayers.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

You can be fat

fit

Taking exercise is more important and effective than eating less theodore dalrymple By now, everyone is aware, or believes, that obesity is not a sign of prosperity, as it was for much of human existence.

Instead, it’s a sign of ill health and, despite efforts to persuade us that it is an illness like any other, of weakness of will.

There has been a two-fold increase in obesity in 70 countries since 1980, thanks no doubt to the increased prosperity that allows human weakness of will to express itself in this fashion. It has been estimated that by 2030 some 50 per cent of Americans will be obese.

The number of people who are trying to lose weight has increased, pari passu, with the number of obese persons.

Unfortunately, attempts to lose weight by dieting are usually unavailing, and lead to an infernal cycle of weight loss followed by weight gain – a cycle that is itself said to increase mortality, as well as being a cause of misery and feelings of guilt.

Actually, the relationship between obesity and mortality is more complex than is often supposed. Even when statistics are controlled for smoking,

which both reduces weight and increases mortality, thus increasing the mortality rate of those neither overweight nor obese, the relationship between weight and mortality is not straightforward. And Mrs Wallis Simpson was wrong to say that you could never be too thin.

The very word ‘overweight’ is ambiguous: should it be defined by aesthetic preference or by life expectancy? If the latter, then the recommendations for a healthy weight might have to be revised upward slightly.

Moreover, physical fitness and exercise can greatly attenuate or even abolish the excess mortality associated with obesity. It has been suggested that, since no medical treatments for obesity – except bariatric surgery – work, the obsessive focus on weight alone should be abandoned. It should be replaced by a focus on cardiovascular fitness and exercise.

Whether it will be easier to induce fat people to take exercise than to get them to give up food is another matter.

Human weakness of will is protean in its manifestations.

However, it has been found that fat people who take exercise suffer little excess mortality in comparison with those people of lower weight. There is no weight at which cardiac fitness and exercise do not exert (or at least are associated with) a beneficial effect.

If, then, you are overweight – as, statistically speaking, many readers of this publication must be, though not as many as readers of a publication chosen by a lower social class – you are probably better off trying to exercise than trying to lose weight, at least if it is easier for you to take exercise regularly than to refrain from second helpings and the like.

But how much exercise? Moderate or strenuous; in short bursts or in long? A survey of more than 80,000 Britons suggests that strenuous effort is no better than the moderate variety, and that it does not matter whether you take exercise in one long bout or little and often. You should take strenuous exercise because you enjoy it, not because you want to prolong your life.

Neither should you expect to lose much weight if you exercise. It is not by weight loss that exercise improves mortality among the overweight and obese. Weight loss as a result of bariatric surgery improves the mortality only of those above the median age of those operated on.

That’s perhaps because follow-up has not yet gone on long enough to reveal a prolongation of the life expectancy in the younger obese operated on, whose death rate even before operation is already low. But, in any case, the effects of bariatric surgery are not only on weight but also on metabolism, which may be more important.

We are so used to hearing about the horrors of obesity that the very idea of the healthy fat now strikes us as a contradiction in terms. But it is not, provided that the fat are not sedentary.

The Oldie December 2021 47

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

Blackie’s real story SIR: I must applaud William Cook (Who was Blackie the donkey?, October issue) in maintaining the tradition of never allowing the facts to mar a good story.

Don Mackay arrived at Jarandilla de la Vera first, not in the wake of Hugh Whittow of the Sun. Don and his bilingual monkey (slang for photographer) were greeted by a large group of youths calling into question the parentage of the whole of Fleet Street and threatening to kill the English.

Don, a man slightly more Scottish than a Cairngorm, understanding the mood, immediately put up his hands and shouted, ‘Glasgow Rangers.’ He was then taken to the bosom of the town and bought Blackie from his owner, certificated by the local Mayor.

In gratitude, Don recommended that all the farmers in the area sell anything with four legs to anyone offering money, especially any red-haired Welshmen from the Sun. He then retired to the local bar with his new friends and they watched Her Britannic Majesty’s press crawl through the olive groves trying to beat each other to the donkey.

Don then called King Juan Carlos…

In Blackie’s honour, a donkey was our maid of honour.

At Don’s funeral, Mirza Tahir Hussain, or Mac Hussain as Don called him,

carried a sheaf of ‘Stargazer’ lilies, Don’s favourite flower. Three of Don’s editors and the widow of the fourth were there, but not the one who put the story of Tahir on death row on half of page 38.

Yours faithfully, The Lady Mackay of Clash Head

My hero, Sam Kydd SIR: It was a great pleasure to read (November issue) about our old friend Sam Kydd. My father and I used to go to the Odeon in Camden Town during the late forties and early fifties and got to know Sam on screen. When he started to appear on television, it was a great game to say, ‘There’s Sam Kydd!’

Anthea Apps, East Farleigh, Kent

Lancashire Angels SIR: Much as we in Audley in Staffordshire (Stoke postcode, but actually Newcastle-under-Lyme) might have wished for the devoted services of the estimable Dr and Dr Datta (Oldie award-winners NHS Angels of the Year) attributed to our community ‘in Stokeon-Trent’ (sic) in the November issue, I fear that you really meant their Audley clinic in Blackburn (in Longton Close in that city, unhelpfully echoing one of Stoke’s six towns).

Mind, if you would like a nomination from our own much-admired clinic staff, I think that I could oblige.

Best wishes, Philip Morgan, Audley, Staffordshire

P G Wodehouse’s Arcadia

‘Are you sure your husband doesn’t suspect anything?’

48 The Oldie December 2021

SIR: Perhaps I am becoming hypersensitive in my old age, but I thought your reaction (Old Un’s Notes, November issue) to John-Paul Stonard’s ‘I’m in Arcadia’ was rather brutal.

‘Et in Arcadia ego’ – a reminder of the inevitability of death – is hardly an appropriate reaction to someone saying, ‘The fountain was playing; the house was lit by the evening sun.’ Better to have quoted P G Wodehouse’s observation about fate lying in wait with the old lead piping.

David Culver, London SE9

‘I think I might work from home today’

Dorset’s best landlord SIR: Delighted to read about the Square and Compass, Worth Matravers, and its landlord, Charlie Newman, in Bill Knott’s column (October issue). Renowned poet Elvis McGonagall was an erstwhile barman in said establishment, and once told how, during some interminable football internationals, Charlie displayed a sign that read ‘SEE THE FOOTBALL HERE’. Inside, hanging from the ceiling by a piece of string, was a football.

And the cider is wonderful.

Jon Sims, Rownhams, Hampshire

Windsors at the wheel SIR: A small correction, if I may, to the detail given in ‘Diana’s first Escort’ by Roderick Gilchrist (September issue).

The car in which the Windsors were driven into exile was not an American Buick. It was a McLaughlin-Buick, built in Canada in 1936. McLaughlin had produced carriages since the 1860s at Oshawa, Ontario, and when they began to produce automobiles in 1915, they sourced their engines from Buick, and sold them as McLaughlin-Buicks.

They were right-hand drive, which suited potential buyers in other parts of the Empire such as Australia and South Africa, as did the preferential duties applicable to Empire-produced vehicles.

By the time the Windsors’ car was produced, the company was owned by General Motors Canada.

Yours, Stuart Wilkinson, Esher, Surrey

Kim Philby’s exposure SIR: Wonderful photograph to accompany James Hanning’s article ‘A traitor and a gentleman’ (October issue).

The photographer included both Philby and some of the assembled press.

Among the usual Speed Graphics taking 4x5-inch images, there was the gentleman on the left holding a rare Newman-Sinclair 35mm clockwork kinematic camera. A Herculean feat to hand-hold one of those.

Regards, Chris Cooper, Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway

The real Morse SIR: Martin Vander Weyer’s requiem for ‘cultivated intellectuals’ among bankers (October issue) made no mention of Sir Jeremy Morse (1928-2016), chairman of Lloyds from 1977 to 1993, and undoubtedly the most intellectually gifted banker of his generation.

Arriving at Glyn, Mills in 1953 with a double first in Greats and a prize fellowship at All Souls, Sir Jeremy began his banking career, seated on a high stool, doing ledgers by hand. You had to make sure everything balanced before you went home – a reminder, he said, that in banking the depositor comes first.

Neglect of this principle, he believed, was behind the crash of 2008.

Sir Jeremy had a substantial hinterland. From the age of eight, he wrote poetry, latterly specialising in haiku, and knew stacks of it by heart, in Greek and Latin, as well as English. Very keen on chess, he wrote what is still considered the definitive book on chess problems.

But it was his mastery of another intellectual pursuit, the solving of cryptic crossword puzzles (which he also set), that made him a household name, albeit at one remove. He regularly won the Observer’s notoriously challenging Ximenes puzzle, and so, less frequently, did the author Colin Dexter.

When Dexter conceived the idea of a ‘fiendishly clever’ Detective Inspector, he named him Morse – ‘because Jeremy was the cleverest man I ever met’.

Yours, Michael Barber, London SW20

X-rated Hitchcock SIR: Roger Lewis’s DVD selection (Christmas Gift Guide, November issue) of Hitchcock’s Frenzy (plus DVD cover of the terrified woman) notes the graphic

‘Do you sell cars?’

close-up of Barbara Leigh-Hunt slowly being throttled by Barry Foster (he grunts, ‘Lovely! Lovely!’) – a scene that challenged the BBFC and was earnestly queried for the video version.

In today’s society, more aware of sexual violence in the real world, one wonders if we have become more blasé about such cinematic imagery.

Mike Bor, BBFC Examiner 1984-2000, London W2

Joy of petrol stations SIR: I enjoyed Robert Jackson’s description (Memory Lane, November issue) of his experience as a petrol-pump attendant in 1968. I did the same job, also aged 15, in the school holidays, from 1971 to 1974. In addition to the experiences Mr Jackson describes, it was interesting to observe human nature.

In particular, owners of large and expensive cars never tipped, no matter what additional services were provided, such as checking tyres (I was paid only to dispense petrol). The only people who tipped were the drivers of modest cars, usually buying only a gallon or two.

I recall that 2-star was at first 32p a gallon, but it more than doubled within three years.

Yours faithfully, Simon Cockshutt, London W5

Stoned me!

SIR: I enjoyed Duncan Campbell’s article about drug-dealers, ‘Dopy Groupies’ (November issue), but was startled to read the headline on the adjoining page: ‘Joints? Bay leaf formula

… the new hope!’ I was momentarily ready to uproot my garden bay tree in anticipation of a visit from the local constabulary – until I realised it was an advertisement concerning pain relief for arthritis-sufferers.

John Layton, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

Co-op’s intoxicating deals SIR: Liz Hodgkinson’s Co-op-phobia (November issue) needs addressing.

Our nearest supermarkets are a vast Tesco and a smallish Co-op. The Co-op is friendly, small enough to nip into and find things quickly, and most of its products are labelled clearly regarding country of origin (unlike Waitrose, Tesco etc, whose weasel words include the intended-to-mislead ‘packed in the UK’).

The key differentiator as far as oenophilic oldies are concerned will be the superiority of the Co-op wine offering, especially from France. There are at least five proper cru bourgeois clarets (including Margaux), decent Burgundies, as well as a number of £8 wines from château-bottled properties in the Languedoc, Loire and Beaujolais, for example. Try finding those in the megastores with their ‘special offers’.

And, for Christmas, there is the peerless Les Pionniers Champagne, made

by Piper-Heidsieck and a snip at £19. My ‘divi’ now stands at £16 – so Christmasmorning bubbly will be bought in November. It will wash down the superb teacakes very well.

Yours bibulously, Richard Bush, Colyton, Devon The Oldie December 2021 49

I Once Met

Stevie Smith There was something of a craze for poetry readings during the 1960s. Poets were in high demand up and down the land and one of the most popular performers on the circuit was Stevie Smith, whose fame was at its zenith. With her idiosyncratic voice (a kind of nasal drawl), her birdlike movements and her childlike mode of dress, she was a riveting sight. She died 50 years ago, in 1971, aged 68.

In 1965, when I was 14, I attended one such event at the annual arts festival held in my home town of Stroud. Smith and her fellow poet Patric Dickinson (after whom I had been named) were appearing there together on a Saturday afternoon before embarking on an Arts Council tour of the south-west.

My principal reason for going along was to hear my namesake, whom I had yet to meet, but, like everyone else, I was mesmerised by his companion on the rostrum. She enthralled the audience as she recited, intoned and even sang her verse. As she was best known for her concentration on the morbid and the melancholy, it was perhaps inevitable that she should include Not Waving but Drowning, already her signature piece.

There was a tea party afterwards, to which I was invited. Other luminaries

Far left: Stevie Smith. Second right: the other Patric Dickinson. Far right: Michael Tippett

from the world of the arts were present: Ursula Vaughan Williams (the composer’s widow, who had presided over the reading), the poet Clifford Dyment, the composers Michael Tippett and Edmund Rubbra, and Eric White (Assistant Secretary of the Arts Council and biographer of Stravinsky).

I collected all their autographs and took a group photograph, which I still have.

The image it captures is very much of its time – most of the men in jackets and ties, several of the participants smoking, Stevie the only woman in the group.

In this exalted company, a schoolboy in his early teens was doubtless an unwelcome presence. But Stevie Smith was very sweet to me, sat me down and with penetrating eyes asked me about myself

– what I was studying at school, what I enjoyed doing and other such questions but not (as far as I can remember) what poetry I liked. In the photograph I took, she is clutching a cigarette and wearing (as she often did) the collar of a white blouse over the top of her dress. But for some reason it is her knitted stockings of which I retain the most vivid memory.

Patric Dickinson (1914-94), aware of Stevie’s popularity with audiences and happy to acknowledge it, tended to cut his own recitations slightly short so that she could command the lion’s share of the time available. It was he who wrote the introduction to her final collection of poems, published posthumously in 1972.

It was the first of many encounters I had with my namesake (who was no relation, my parents having merely seen his name in Radio Times in 1950). But it was the only time I met Stevie Smith. She returned to the Stroud Festival to give another reading in 1970, a few months before she died. By then, I was away at university and therefore missed a second bite at the cherry. But I have never forgotten her kindness to a schoolboy all too clearly a fish out of water, something that she perhaps always felt herself to be.

Patric Dickinson

Jimmy Jewel vs Hylda Baker

In the late ’60s, I worked as a junior studio manager in the BBC’s radio drama department.

I was a sound-effects boy.

Roger Delgado was often cast as the villain, like The Master in Dr Who. He told me that as the Demon King in a Palladium panto with Charlie Drake, he had to disappear through the stage trap in a puff of smoke in the middle of a sword fight. One day, the mechanism didn’t work. The smoke cleared and he could still be seen wielding his sword. They both realised that, very slowly, inch by inch,

the trap was being lowered manually by stagehands.

They kept up the pretence of the swordfight, with Roger eventually so low below stage that only his sword could be seen poking up, while Charlie Drake got on his knees to keep the fight going until Roger completely disappeared.

I also worked with two great comedians, Hylda Baker (1905-86, pictured) and Jimmy Jewel (1909-95).

This was on a radio version of a TV series called Nearest and Dearest. Nobody warned me the two of them loathed each other so much that they would talk to each other only when they had to, as characters.

A rehearsal seemed to be going well. The pair were standing next to each other at the mic and I stood

opposite, ready with whatever sound effects were needed.

Suddenly, Jimmy Jewel stopped, looked at me and said, ‘Will you ask Miss Baker if she is really going to say that line like that?’

I had to address Hylda Baker and say, ‘Miss Baker, Mr Jewel would like to know if you’re really going to say that line like that.’

Only when I had said it did Miss Baker react as if she had been smacked in the mouth – not when she heard Jimmy Jewel say it. She exploded and said to me,

‘You can tell Mr Jewel that I will say that f**king line any f**king way I f**king want.’

I then turned to Jimmy Jewel and said, ‘Miss Baker asks me to tell you that she will say that f**king line any f**king way she f**king wants.’ Like her, he didn’t react at all when she said it, but went ballistic when I repeated it to him.

It was like working with children. How they ever produced good performances together remained a mystery to me.

By Brian Empringham, Ilfracombe, Devon, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie December 2021 51

Books Highsmith’s low point RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995 Edited by Anna von Planta

GARY WING

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30 Patricia Highsmith was recently described by a leading American literary critic, Terry Castle, as ‘everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope’ and a ‘mind-blitzingly drunk and hellacious bigot’.

She was also the novelist who achieved early acclaim with Strangers on a Train (1950) and later made the murderous sociopath Tom Ripley into the quasi-hero of five novels.

The existence of intimate diaries is a surprise, too. In her lifetime, Highsmith defended her privacy with fearsome aggression. She lived in Switzerland in a brutalist bunker with arrow slits for windows. Interviewers seeking intimate admissions were repelled. She unpicked other people’s efforts to thread her novels and her personal life together.

Yet it now transpires that the reticent and covert Highsmith left 56 identical, spiral-ringed cahiers, totalling some 8,000 pages and written over more than half a century, secreted at the back of her linen cupboard, to be found after her death. These comprised the working notebooks of a professional writer, written almost entirely in English, intermeshed with the intimate diaries of a conflicted and increasingly irritable malcontent, which were written, at different times, in French, German, Italian and Spanish as well as English.

These literary leavings have now been abridged and arranged by a conscientious and admiring Swiss editor, Anna von Planta, who knew Highsmith well.

The text sketches Highsmith’s rackety,

emotionally chaotic youth in New York during the 1940s, her next phase of transatlantic restlessness during the 1950s, her settling in Suffolk in 1963, her life in provincial France from 1967, and her last 15 years in Switzerland.

Nearly a thousand pages of unpublished writing by the killer-clawed, raging Highsmith sounded an exciting prospect. But if her eager aficionados hope to be absorbed by this book, to understand and sympathise with her or to make new sense of her literary work, their disappointment will dawn swiftly.

The diaries are not only morbidly self-absorbed, but monotonously so.

Who else but a hopelessly vain egocentric could write – with complacency or indignation it is not clear – ‘God is completely indifferent as to whether I behave well or badly’?

Her sexual affairs with other women are tempestuous, but her intensity often seems histrionic and self-regarding, as if she is admiring herself playing a rather

ham part. As a lover, she sounds like Donald Sinden or Robert Hardy rather overdoing their lines.

A lot of callow political opinions are blurted out, to the evident embarrassment of von Planta. Once again, they are stagey, combining the obstreperousness of Russell Brand with the obstinacy of Laurence Fox. Through the years, Highsmith notes meetings with interesting people – Margaret Atwood, Stephen Spender, William Trevor and Gore Vidal – but seldom assesses or describes them. One rare exception comes in 1952 when she visits Ischia, where she calls on a barefoot W H Auden. They talk mainly about a subject of consuming interest to them both – money. There are, indeed, many uninformative references to accountants, tax liabilities and graduated earnings in Highsmith’s diary.

On another occasion, she goes to bed with Arthur Koestler. ‘A miserable, joyless episode,’ she records.

The Oldie December 2021 53

‘Absurd and blush-making to set down.’ Koestler, however, is not the inexperienced sexual partner to whom she sent an egg-timer with a covering note reading, ‘The best things in life last at least three minutes.’

‘I am the drunken bee wandering into your household,’ Highsmith wrote in 1962. Drunken bee is about right, for she was an alcoholic who had whisky for breakfast, and latterly limited her solid intake to peanut butter.

The journals brim over with the over-emphatic, incomprehensible and rambling ruminations of an old soak, along these lines: ‘Beauty, perfection, completion – all achieved and seen. Death is the next territory, one step to the left. I don’t want to see any more, to feel or experience any more. Anything else would be a lowering; would put me into the vegetable category.

I have known beauty, dear boys, more than I – or if the truth be told, anyone else – would ever expect or extort by worldly ransom for worldly good behaviour.’

There are some reasonably evocative descriptions of a visit to North Africa, but most of the travel writing is holidaypostcard stuff. In Lisbon, she records that she bought a gold chain for $30, using American Express cheques, that the taxis are all Mercedes-Benz and that ‘mostly the people look well-off’.

Von Planta has made an incomprehensible decision to preserve the anonymity of people mentioned in these mainly banal journals, most of whom are long dead, which lends a factitious mystery to the proceedings.

She has also used a cryptic footnoting system of symbols such as ¶ and †, sometimes doubled as §§ or ‡‡ (though mercifully not ‼), which gives unnecessary trouble in deciphering.

George the Dull KATE HUBBARD George V: Never a Dull Moment

By Jane Ridley Chatto & Windus £30 For a man so often described as ‘dull’, George V has attracted some very un-dull biographers – Harold Nicolson, Kenneth Rose and, now, Jane Ridley.

Ridley last turned her hand to Edward VII (Bertie), father of George, and in many ways a more congenial subject. You could hardly have two more different Kings. Where Bertie was worldly, charismatic and a man of extravagant appetites, George was unsophisticated and uxorious and practised moderation in all things, bar smoking.

Ridley is good on the telling detail – George had a habit of hitting people when he spoke to them, in a ‘friendly but painful way’ and this book is every bit as lively and unstuffy as Bertie. Yet you can’t help feeling that writing about George was probably not as much fun. George’s diary – a meticulous record of pheasants shot, hands shaken, miles walked, with no evidence whatsoever of an inner life – is not a rewarding source for a biographer.

Ridley’s decision to put Queen Mary, a more layered and intelligent character, at the centre of her book, perhaps has something to do with George’s limitations. At times, this reads like a joint biography, but then George, as he acknowledged, would have been utterly lost without his wife.

‘Miserable, puny little children’ was Queen Victoria’s verdict on the progeny of Bertie and Alix (Alexandra), which was true enough of George’s older brother, Eddy, Duke of Clarence, and his sisters, though less so of George, who was small, but robust.

Bertie was an affectionate father, unusually for the Hanoverians (George reverted to type), while the beautiful Alix, known as ‘Motherdear’, infantilised her children, still addressing letters to her ‘darling little Georgie’ well into his adulthood. Nobody seemed to think that education, or preparation for kingship, were important. George had a useless and creepy tutor, Mr Dalton, before being packed off to the Navy, who did little to further his emotional or intellectual development.

George would never have been King at all were it not for the death, in 1892, very possibly from syphilis, of Eddy, a limp and feeble-minded youth, generally considered not up to the job. George not only became heir but, in a neat sideways move, married Eddy’s fiancée, Princess May (later Mary) of Teck, a much more satisfactory outcome both for May and for Britain. Opinions vary as to whether Mary managed her husband, or was terrified by him, but Ridley favours the former. George ‘[has] come on enormously the last year’, May wrote

‘I’m sorry, Roger. “Possibly” isn’t good enough. Will you or won’t you?’

in 1909, rather as you might of a problem child.

For 17 years, as Duke of York, George ‘did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps’, wrote Harold Nicolson.

Shooting pheasants – as many as 1,000 in a single day – and stamp-collecting were his passions. When he became King, in 1910, aged 44, George finally grew up and, four years later, the First World War brought his first great test.

Stamps were not abandoned. Indeed, according to George, they ‘saved his life’ – but he and Mary played a public role, diligently visiting hospitals and factories, inspecting troops, pinning medals, as never before. The war years ‘witnessed a transformation of the monarchy’, which continued after the war, with royal tours of mining communities in South Wales and so on.

The great stain on George’s character was his insistence on withdrawing the offer of asylum made by Lloyd George to the Romanovs in 1917. Ridley points out that the Romanovs would never have been allowed to leave Russia, but George would not have known that. He was ‘ruthless in his concern to protect the Crown’ from the threat of republicanism.

And so ‘dear Nicky’ and his family were readily sacrificed.

Ridley makes no attempt to excuse George’s treatment of his sons, whom he bullied and intimidated. David (Edward VIII) once burst into tears before his father even spoke. Prince John, who suffered from epilepsy and autism, was well cared for but kept out of sight, visited by his parents no more than once or twice a year. George viewed his death, at the age of 13, as something of a blessing.

Whatever his very real failings as a parent, George, says Ridley, became a genuinely ‘statesmanlike sovereign’, peacemaker and arbitrator. Successfully suppressing his ‘inner Tory’, he promoted the first Labour governments. He took on the role of mediator during the Irish Home Rule crisis. Whether or not he was acting constitutionally by instigating the National Government in 1931 has been a matter of debate. Ridley considers his intervention justifiable – it helped restore calm and confidence at a moment of economic panic.

Contemporaries, especially the intelligentsia, were patronising about the King – ‘a nice, jolly little man’ being the general consensus. Ridley persuades us that there was more to him than that, even if she doesn’t entirely succeed in debunking ‘the myth of George the Dull’.

But dullness can surely be a virtue in a sovereign presiding over turbulent times.

The Oldie December 2021 55

London’s burning FRANCES WILSON The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire

By Jerry White Bodley Head £30 Jerry White has a unique relation to London and Londoners. More than a historian, he is the city’s witness, champion and town-crier, tolling his bell through the streets, oyez, oyez, oyez, proclaiming the latest chapter in the life of the metropolis.

White’s method is to describe the growth of this ‘great and monstrous thing’, as Daniel Defoe described the capital, by weaving statistics and figures into the reflections of shopkeepers and street-sweepers.

His books unfold a grand narrative in small voices. London in the Eighteenth Century gives us a glittering phoenix rising from the ashes of the fire of 1666; in London in the Nineteenth Century, the now-maturing city goes in search of law and order; and in London in the Twentieth Century, the citizens turn their attention to privacy.

The Battle of London should be read, however, as a companion volume to Zeppelin Nights, in which White described how London during the First World War became ‘one of the greatest killing machines in human history’. The city has now, however, become ‘the biggest bombing target on earth’.

Her size (London was compared by Churchill to ‘a tremendous fat cow’) is no longer a strength but a vulnerability.

London, says White, ‘was the unmissable bullseye’. Between September 1940–May ’41, when 19,788 Londoners were killed in 261 air raids, and December 1943–March ’45, when a further 9,238 citizens lost their lives, the rockets hit their targets.

Virginia Woolf described wartime London as ‘a great, dumb ox, lying couchant … the streets tunnels of gloom’.

The gloom is illuminated in these pages by the thoughts and reflections of Londoners taken from Mass Observation, diaries and private papers stored in the Imperial War Museum.

On 7th September 1940, for example, Thomas Pointer, a clerk at the Royal Victoria Docks, saw ‘over fifty aircraft at a rather low altitude with gunfire bursting in front and around them’. The planes, he noted, flew in a tight diamond formation, so close to one another that he could ‘see them rock from back to front … as they

released their bombs’. Within minutes, the Thames was ablaze and the Big Blitz had begun.

The theme of The Battle of London is darkness, literal and metaphorical. White describes an underworld of blackouts, dug-outs, coal cellars and Tube stations, while the overworld teems with mobile canteens, cab-drivers, curfews, class hatred, sirens, rubble and looting.

The mood is one of hysterical fear, boredom and strange exhilaration; the new words include doodlebug and jitterbug, V-1 and V-2.

The city is defined by homelessness, sleeplessness and a peculiar new emptiness, due to the evacuation of its children and the extermination of its pets. An estimated 400,000 animals were killed in London in September 1939, by owners fearing that they would be left to fend for themselves as food supplies ran out.

White does not rehearse the cliché of the Blitz spirit. Instead, by giving the narrative commentary to the bit players in the drama – those who are grumpy, prosaic and generally fed-up – he presents a more complex, bleak and confused tale.

Eighteen-year-old Joan Wyndham begins her journal for 1940 hoping that the coming year ‘turns out to be a bit more exciting than 1939’, recalling Louis XVI’s diary entry of ‘Rien’ for 14th July 1789.

Gladys Langford complains that she is now largely surrounded by ‘fat females and lean hags in trousers’. An article in the South London Press notes that women are ‘neglecting their hair’. There is indeed, confirms White in a statistic that typifies his style, a drop of 50 per cent in the takings of south-London hairdressers. Over in west London, Godfrey Clarke, who lives above the seed and pet-food shop on the Golborne Road, is having difficulty with his plumbing. ‘As cold as ever’, he writes

‘I have one indulgence – myself’

on 12th January, ‘& still no water in the kitchen or lavatory.’

The city that rose from the air war lurched to the left. The unions and working classes had a louder voice, discussion groups spawned and the NHS was born.

But the collectivism and optimism did not last. The war, White concludes, was a disaster for Londoners ‘that had consequences for forty years to come’.

The damage to lungs, limbs, brains and buildings has been slow to heal. TB became rampant. All but 50 of the city’s schools were in need of repair. In east London, it was possible to walk for half a mile without seeing a single standing structure.

But the most devastating effect of the postwar reconstruction was the decentralising of London’s newly displaced people and once-thriving industries.

One Londoner, Katherine Tipper, had seen this coming. ‘As I looked around the tram on VE Day,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘I realised that we all looked as grim as ever.’ It was as though they knew that London’s war, as White concludes, ‘had in fact been lost’.

He’s a Lady HUGO VICKERS The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

By Zoë Playdon Bloomsbury £20 This is an ambitious book, weighing in at more than 400 pages. It is advertised as ‘the untold story of Ewan Forbes (1912-91) and the landmark case that rocked British society and transformed the trans experience to this day’.

I thought I was being asked to review a book specifically about Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet, who, as his Daily Telegraph obituary put it, ‘was born on Sept 6 1912 and baptised Elizabeth as the third and youngest daughter of the 18th Lord Sempill’.

In fact, this was originally a ‘lengthy research report’ on the whole subject of transgender issues, including how they touch on the laws of inheritance. But the author was advised to focus on the Ewan Forbes case, to disguise a complicated, quite political survey and make it more approachable to the general reader.

The general reader (me) would have got lost in such a complicated book. So I commend the author for turning much of it into an absorbing, interesting, poignant and at times alarming family saga.

Still there are times when Ewan has been woven into the story in places where he doesn’t quite fit. The author The Oldie December 2021 57

resorts to ‘he might have read … he must have known…’, when I was not convinced that he did. I did wonder what this shy, retiring figure would have made of his long-ago case study, placed under the full spotlight of 2021 examination.

We are told that this story lay hidden for generations. It was not hidden from me, however. I heard about it in the early 1970s from an elderly friend of mine, Helen Lloyd, who actually knew Ewan Forbes. She spoke of him with great affection, as a discreet, gentle and very private person who by and large eschewed publicity. The author accepts that he was not a prominent campaigner on the fraught issue of trans rights and that, after the court case, he lived quietly, in general happily, with his wife, far from the public gaze.

The Forbes part of the story has been researched in impressive detail. This is roughly as follows. The 18th Baron Sempill (1863-1934) had one son and, seemingly, three daughters. The two older daughters were Gwendolyn (1897-1910), who died of appendicitis aged 12, and Margaret (1905-66), who later shared her life with Joan Wright, Company Commander of the 15th Banffshire Company, and was killed in a motor accident.

Then there was the youngest one.

Ewan was originally registered as a girl, Hon Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, but by degrees he changed his gender and in 1952 he married his housekeeper, Isabella (Patty) Mitchell (who died in 2002).

The elder son, William (1893-1965), succeeded his father as 19th Baron and 10th Baronet in 1934. When he died, his daughter became Baroness Sempill, but she could not inherit the baronetcy or the considerable estate in Scotland – since that was entailed to the men of the family.

At this point, Ewan relinquished any claims to property but assumed that he was now the baronet. This led him into a three-year legal battle, heard in camera, in which he defended his gender against the claim of a first cousin, John ForbesSempill (1927-2000), a grandson of 17th Baron Sempill (1836-1905), and an actor-manager whose many projects in life invariably failed (including this one, eventually).

The case involved a humiliating physical examination and a long court case, in which intimate details were discussed, a shocking experience which makes painful reading. The wretched John did inherit the baronetcy when Ewan died in 1991.

One of the significant revelations is

that Elizabeth/Ewan’s mother was acquainted with forward-thinking medical experts on the continent, all of them a long way from the Scottish baronial towers of Craigievar in Aberdeenshire, where the family lived.

By degrees, young Elizabeth, having been a reluctant debutante, was allowed to dress as a man and smoke a pipe. She/he became a doctor, and eventually changed his identity.

It was interesting to read the full story of Ewan at last, and alongside it some more widely publicised cases, such as that of April Ashley.

Clearly there are many sensitive issues at stake here, though I was a bit surprised to find the author dismissive of The Danish Girl, the 2015 film with Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe (1882-1931), a Danish painter and one of the first sex-reassignment recipients. It’s described as ‘a soft-porn exercise in simpering prettiness’.

I recommend instead the wisdom of Mercedes de Acosta, the American poet, who wrote, ‘To the outward form of sex which the body has assumed I have remained indifferent.’ She was concerned only with love and the spirit in whatever form it came.

From Pole to Pole PAUL BAILEY How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)

By Wisława Szymborska Translated and edited by Clare Cavanagh New Directions £13.19 From 1968 until 1981, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1996, worked as a kind of agony aunt for the magazine Literary Life, which was based in Kraków.

She took turns with a colleague to give advice and practical criticism to the many readers who wrote in with requests for advice and criticism. The majority sent examples of their writing – often only a few pages; occasionally an entire novel or collection of short stories or poems – to be considered with a view to publication.

Szymborska’s anonymous contributions to the column Literary Mailbox, collected in this valuable little book, are notable for the common sense – some might call it worldly wisdom – they display. She has no patience with such matters as poetic inspiration and sentimental versifying. When A B from Bialogard writes in, ‘I sigh to be a poet,’

Szymborska replies, ‘We groan to be editors at such moments.’

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), sub-titled Advice for Authors, is all of a piece with the resonant poetry Wisława Szymborska produced in the second half of a long life that encompassed both Nazism and communism. She knew – and continues to know in her enduring work – whereof she wrote.

The tone is light-hearted, but never flippant. There is no doubting her seriousness, as she reminds novices of the virtues of hard work and selfdiscipline. ‘Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?’ she urges the ‘inspired’ Grazyna from Starachowice. To Ewa from Bytom, she observes, ‘Being “poetical” is the reigning sin of novice poets. They fear simple sentences; they make things difficult for themselves and others.’

She is briskly dismissive of poor Amaba, from an unnamed location: ‘These poems should remain in your desk drawer. The moon has bejewelled the heavens already. Madonnas have ridden carousels before. Poems have previously been woven into garlands. You’ve done your homework. And it shows.’

But she can be helpful, too. She and her colleagues like the literary personality revealed in the pages submitted by M K of Lublin, detecting a dormant talent behind the routine plot of an otherwise moderately interesting short story: ‘We’re glad to have made your acquaintance. Please send us more stories.’

The recipient of this encouraging message would have had no idea that it was coming from the celebrated poet who had often experienced difficulties getting her finest, deeply ironic poetry published, thanks to the ever-present censor. She had made innumerable false starts and frequently despaired of ever attaining her own high standards. Even after she had achieved international recognition, she told interviewers that she always kept a waste-paper basket close at hand.

Szymborska was sceptical about the usefulness of creative-writing courses in schools and universities and refused invitations to teach them. (‘No course, however scrupulously attended, creates talent. At best, it fosters a talent that already exists.’)

To someone with the identity A Seeker from Kudowa she answers, employing the customary ‘we’, ‘No, we don’t have any guides for writing novels.

We hear such things appear in the United States, but we make bold to question their worth for one simple The Oldie December 2021 59

Cacofonix the bard and Dogmatix. From Asterix and the Griffin by Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad (Sphere, £10.99)

reason: wouldn’t any author who possessed a fail-proof recipe for literary success rather profit from it himself than write guidebooks for a living?’

The truth is that How to Start Writing is better than any guidebook, in that it illuminates by means of gentle mockery and its refusal to raise invalid hopes and expectations. The very best advice she gives, in my opinion, is when she stresses the importance of reading well. ‘People speak of incompetent writers, but never of incompetent readers,’ she reminds a correspondent whose attempts to find a publisher haven’t been successful.

She consoles P D Z with the suggestion that he or she might become a reader of the highest calibre – disinterested and free from the envy that writers often feel when they read each other’s books. ‘A splendid fate awaits you,’ she assures the person from Chorzow.

I liked these examples of Szymborska’s approach to the art she was devoted to.

First: ‘Even boredom must be described with passion. This is an iron law of literature that no -ism can supplant.’ And then: ‘Talent isn’t limited to “inspiration”. All of us get inspired at times, but only the truly talented spend long hours over a piece of paper struggling to improve the muse’s dictates.

Those who are unwilling to take on such labours have no place in poetry.’

Elsewhere, she’s in skittish mood. To

Welur, from Chelm, who asks if her enclosed prose ‘betrays talent’, she replies, ‘It does.’ To Mr G Kr from Warsaw, she says, ‘You need a new pen.

The one you’ve got keeps making mistakes. It might be foreign.’

An unstoppable writer is advised to decelerate, chew the end of his pencil and stare out of the window for at least an hour.

This delightful collection of literary home truths is delightfully illustrated by Wisława Szymborska.

Rare cuts TANYA HARROD Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through Time

By Jenny Uglow Faber £20 The artists Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power made monotypes in the early 1930s when no one in Britain was interested in the genre.

Very few of their daring experiments survive, though there is a fine example by Power in the British Museum, La Coupée, Sark, together with a less successful print

by Andrews, Woman of Benin.

A monotype is a ‘singleton’, a print reproduced only once. The artist paints onto a zinc plate and passes the plate through a press under pressure. Unlike the majority of prints – monochrome

or stylised into flat areas of colour – monotypes can look almost like paintings.

The printing process transfers what is in effect a freely executed painting on a zinc plate onto white paper, the whiteness of the paper miraculously allowing in light and space and air. It amounts to an unusual braiding of art, craft and accident.

Andrews and Power are far better known for their colour linocuts, to which they were introduced by the eccentric and charismatic Claude Flight, a late convert to pre-First World War Futurism.

Flight fostered what amounted to a vibrant colour-linocut movement at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. He taught there from 1926 till 1930, inspired

by Italian Futurist artists and their declarative manifestos focusing on speed and dynamism and mechanisation.

Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power were his best pupils and had in fact jointly written their own manifesto in 1924 before they met Flight. Unpublished, their Aims of the Art of To-day is a touching potpourri of recent avant-garde thinking from Futurism to formalism.

Marinetti declared in 1912 that London was a Futurist city, with its red buses, electric advertisements and constantly expanding Underground system. Sybil and Cyril made London their primary linocut subject, creating stylised, The Oldie December 2021 61

abstracted images of the city in darkness and light, taking in concert halls, rowing on the river, workmen grappling with cabling and, above all, the Underground whose potential symbolism was not lost on them.

Here was a functional people-carrier whose corridors and escalators could conjure up visions of Hell. No one, save a few filmmakers, better captured the Underground’s strange beauty and claustrophobia than Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power.

That the distinguished biographer Jenny Uglow should write a full-dress double life of Andrews and Power might appear puzzling. Aside from their justly admired linocuts, they were hardly artists of the first rank. Both were skilled etchers, decent watercolourists and unconvincing painters. Sybil was a fine embroiderer. Cyril was a capable if impecunious architect, good at recording historic buildings, and author of a nicely illustrated history of English medieval architecture.

But Uglow has done us a service with this empathetic account of their activities, showing that any ‘art world’ is a complex system.

The careers of Sybil and Cyril take us into the multiple modernities of the interwar years. Although they were strikingly apolitical throughout the troubled thirties, they were interested, variously, in early music and its musical instruments. They also took in the outdoor life, viewed through a pagan anti-industrial lens. So-called primitive art was mediated through the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

They covered child art, as proselytised by Roger Fry and Franz Cižek, and puppetry, the forgotten avant-garde art form of the early-20th century.

Uglow reminds us that ‘being an artist’ is an all-embracing, all-consuming activity, quite aside from any reward or recognition. Sybil and Cyril come to appear as worthy of our attention as any of their more distinguished peers, such as David Bomberg or Barbara Hepworth.

It helps that Uglow is also recounting a love story – of a kind. Both Sybil and Cyril, in their different ways, were religious. But for them, the pursuit of art meant leaving things behind. That was shockingly so in the case of Cyril, who in 1922, at the age of 50, abandoned his wife and children for a life in London with the 24-year-old Sybil. They both enrolled at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, before moving on to teach and administrate at the newly formed Grosvenor School. They shared suitably arty studios, sketchbooks and ideas.

In Cyril’s case, he was embarking on a second youth. He left his eldest son to shoulder family responsibilities.

Some 20 years later, in 1943, Sybil was doing war work in a shipyard. She met and swiftly married a carpenter, emigrating in 1947 to a remote corner of western Canada. Cyril returned to his apparently forgiving wife and made no more linocuts. It is a puzzling finale.

In Uglow’s final chapter, Sybil is ‘rediscovered’ in her seventies by the bustling, brilliant dealer Michael Parkin.

She becomes mildly famous and correspondingly nervous, assuring Parkin that her relationship with Cyril was platonic – simply an artistic collaboration.

We might wish to imagine that she had been more daring. Best to go back to the pair’s glorious linocuts, those rare monotypes and their accidental beauty.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Black Moss CRESSIDA CONNOLLY The Fell

By Sarah Moss Picador £12.99 If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would ask all my students to read the chapter called Zanzibar from Sarah Moss’s previous novel, Summerwater.

Its first sentence is ‘They are trying to have simultaneous orgasms.’ From this startling premise, it establishes character and setting with utter precision and a wicked humour. John Updike would be writhing with envy.

It’s a tour de force which any aspiring author would do well to study.

Summerwater is altogether one of the finest novels of the Brexit period: slyly political, beautifully observed and as tense as a thriller. Hard on its heels comes The Fell, set during the lockdown of November 2020.

At first glance, it’s a simple enough tale. A woman called Kate gets fed up with being cooped up in her terraced house and strides out onto the nearby hills, leaving her teenaged son, Matt, at home. The trouble is, she’s meant to be self-isolating. A single mother who supports the household by working in a café, she has seen her income plummet, along with her morale. If she’s caught out of the house, she could be liable to a £10,000 fine.

Is she simply craving fresh air, or is a darker and more permanent escape in her mind? She’s taken her knapsack, with its thermal blanket and torch. But,

contrary to the advice she’s given Matt all his life, Kate has left her mobile phone in the house and omitted to tell anyone where she’s going.

Readers who relished Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (about the disappearance of a child on the moors) will find The Fell a perfect companion piece, with its jeopardy, harsh landscape and deceptively direct prose. The Fell, too, is told from a number of perspectives: those of Kate, her son, their elderly neighbour Alice and a member of the mountain-rescue team, who is sent out to look for Kate once it is established that she is missing.

Women who walk out of their own lives are always fascinating. Why? How? Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years and Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette tell such stories, of women at the end of their tethers. Here, the suffocating conditions of a COVID lockdown provide the final straw that propels Kate onto the fells.

It’s not only the virus that confines Kate. As in Summerwater, Moss presents a community strangled by a kind of misplaced nostalgia, ‘the English passion for imagining ourselves always in World War Two’. And Kate is stuck in a number of other ways: in a low-income job, she suffers from actual poverty, as well as the poverty of aspiration brought about by her background. Moss uses the lens of the pandemic to skewer the ills of our time: isolation, consumerism and inequality.

Death – the fear of it and how we might behave in the face of that terror – is not far below the surface of this tale.

Moss is brilliant at creating a feeling of mounting peril; if she’s ever strapped for cash, she’d be an assured thriller-writer.

Her humour is so black it’s treacly.

She’s also one of our best writers on the natural world and weather: no one is more accurate at describing kinds of rain.

All her books are set in especially wet parts of Britain.

If this book has a flaw, it is perhaps that it has been rushed into publication, presumably in order to be among the first COVID-era fictions. It’s about 40 pages too short: the male characters, especially, aren’t sufficiently fleshed out. Young Matt in particular could have had his narrative expanded.

The Fell isn’t quite as strong as Summerwater – few novels are. But it confirms that Sarah Moss is a writer of remarkable power, control and deftness.

She’s funny, observant and very much of the moment. Most novels are far too long for their own good. If this one errs in the opposite direction, it’s a testament to its author’s very considerable skill.

The Oldie December 2021 63

History

The dark side of the White House

Presidential slip-ups, from the fall of Saigon to the Afghanistan scuttle david horspool Not many people in this country, I would guess, grow up wanting to be Prime Minister – apart from the present incumbent, who at the age of five declared that he wanted to be ‘World King’.

In the United States, the story is different. An annual holiday around the time of George Washington’s birthday (22nd February 1732) is popularly known as Presidents Day, and every American child knows that (as long as they were born in the USA) they can grow up to be president. Presidents are engraved on the currency and carved into rock faces.

Iain Dale, who previously edited a collection of essays on the British prime ministers, has compiled a new collection on the US presidency. Our eyes light on some of the starrier choices of contributors and the presidents they have written about. George Osborne tackles Lyndon Johnson. If LBJ – civilrights champion, architect of the Great Society – seems an odd choice for a former Chancellor remembered mostly for austerity, who was part of a government that initiated the ‘hostile environment’ policy on illegal immigration, Osborne reveals why.

LBJ’s presidency, Osborne writes, is a ‘timeless study in politics. Weighing his often gross methods against his enormous achievements, you are confronted with a perennial question: when do the ends justify the means?’

It’s a question that those politicians not in possession of a faultless moral compass – ie most of them, like most of us – must ask quite often. Osborne, known as the canniest political operator in government, also clearly admires Johnson’s legendary powers of persuasion and mastery of personal manipulation: ‘Visit his Texas ranch and he’d manoeuvre you into the deep end of his pool, where he could stand, and have you tread water while he negotiated with you.’

At six foot three and a half, Johnson was the second-tallest president in

history (after Abraham Lincoln, who in this, as in everything else, overshadows his rivals). In his contribution on Harry S Truman, the economist David Blanchflower treats us to a short disquisition on the importance of height to winning the presidency, where the taller candidate generally beats the shorter.

For anyone looking for patterns and precedents among the presidents, they are certainly there, and often among the less celebrated. If you think the last two elections were the most bitterly contested in US history, consider the one in 1876 that put Rutherford B Hayes in the White House – a Republican who had to rely on a Democratic concession to break a deadlock when three states returned competing results.

The compromise was one of the most far-reaching – and pernicious – in post-Civil War history. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south, thus ensuring that Reconstruction, the process by which the gains of the North’s victory in the war were being shored up, ended. The result was segregation, Jim Crow laws, black-voter suppression and the promotion of the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which still bedevils US politics today.

The Vietnam War is another precedent that continues to preoccupy the minds of those in the Oval Office. Osborne gives Johnson, and his escalation of the war, the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that foreign-policy interventions are always hard.

Colleen Graffy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, writes that George H W Bush’s limited intervention in Iraq was planned ‘with Vietnam in mind’. However, she doesn’t say how that squares with his ill-advised call ‘for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside’.

Bill Clinton, Poppy Trowbridge tells us, initially resisted intervening in the former Yugoslavia because he was ‘not going to go into my own Vietnam.’ Andrew Adonis’s essay on Joe Biden doesn’t make the specific parallel between what he calls the ‘scuttle’ from Afghanistan and the fall of Saigon, but Biden, an opponent of the Vietnam War as a young man, cannot have been unaware of it.

Some precedents might seem to be missing. Spanish Flu, the pandemic that killed nearly as many Americans as has COVID, is mentioned in the essay on Woodrow Wilson by Roy Hattersley, only to say that the President may have contracted it in Paris.

In fact, the American response to the outbreak, which include familiar measures such as mandatory maskwearing and business lockdowns, was enacted mostly at a state and city level.

One reason is that, for the last 18 months of his presidency, while the flu raged, Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, which also put paid to his attempt to promote the League of Nations.

The overall impression, when one considers the American presidents en masse, is that for all the great men who have occupied the role, there have been as many – if not more – duffers. Honesty might have elevated some (Washington, Lincoln and John Adams), but dishonesty wasn’t a bar (Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Clinton and Trump).

With few exceptions (Taft), they became president because it was what they wanted to do above everything.

And, as the journalist David Broder said, ‘Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organising and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.’

Iain Dale’s The Presidents: 250 Years of American Political Leadership is published on 18th November (Hodder & Stoughton, £25) The Oldie December 2021 65

Media Matters

A golden age for serious journalism

Fleet Street is still appealing to new hacks – and veterans like Boris stephen glover John Witherow has been a newspaper editor for a quarter of a century, first at the Sunday Times, and since 2013 at the Times. He has been round the block a bit, and seen a few things.

We don’t hear much from him.

Indeed, I don’t suppose more than one person in a hundred has the faintest idea who he is. With his 70th birthday approaching – and hacks at the Times feverishly expecting him to stand down soon – he recently permitted himself a few public thoughts about the future of the press.

What he said at a conference in Lisbon in November would a few years ago have encouraged the men in white coats to lead him away. Even now, his remarks will seem startling to many. According to Witherow, ‘good journalism’ is ‘thriving’ and ‘this is a golden age for serious journalism’. He added, ‘When young people ask me whether they should go into journalism nowadays, I say, “By all means, now is a great time.” ’ Have so many years in an editor’s chair rotted his brain cells? It does happen. Most freelance journalists are paid significantly less for articles than they were 15 years ago. It’s all right for Witherow, some of them will say, with his chauffeur-driven car and massive salary, which is probably not far short of a million pounds a year. Yet the foot soldiers are having to get by on increasingly short rations.

That’s true, of course. But, although pay rates have been squeezed on all newspapers, and there have been cutbacks on most titles, Witherow is on the whole right. Note that he asserted that this is a golden age for ‘serious journalism’. He would have been wrong if he had claimed that these are happy days for all journalism, but he didn’t.

Despite the devastating effects of the internet on the printed press, most quality titles have adapted successfully

by attracting digital subscribers, who now outnumber buyers of physical papers. The Financial Times is as profitable as ever, while the Times, which has lost hundreds of millions of pounds over recent decades, is now in the black.

Although the Daily Telegraph may never again make the bumper profits of the recent past, it is a solid business.

Meanwhile, the BBC continues to provide jobs for several thousand journalists, though few of them will feel well paid. The Guardian is loss-making, as always, but employs nearly a thousand hacks, and with a war chest of over a billion pounds it isn’t going to disappear.

The Daily Mail still makes good money, while Mail Online is on the verge of becoming highly profitable, though some may wonder how much it is in the business of ‘serious journalism’.

And then, of course, there are magazines such as the Economist, the Spectator, Private Eye and The Oldie.

They are thriving – in some cases as never before – though, being smaller than newspapers, they obviously provide fewer opportunities.

So the prospects for most, if not all, serious publications are sunny to an extent that few would have predicted three or four years ago. To the question should you encourage young Jack or Matilda to look for employment in what

‘Why do you always take the fish’s side?’

used to be called Fleet Street, my answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

With one caveat. From his eyrie, John Witherow does not concern himself with the sorry plight of the red-top tabloids.

The Daily Mirror and the Sun have a fraction of the circulation they enjoyed 20 years ago. They have been unable to make much money either out of digital subscriptions or by building up vast worldwide audiences in the manner of Mail Online, which makes its money from advertising.

The Sun and Mirror are the main casualties of the internet revolution, and it is hard to see how their decline can be reversed. Erring bishops and dodgy politicians will be relieved, but I find it sad.

If Jack and Matilda are yearning for the irreverence, gusto and iconoclasm of the old red-top press, they should think again.

It is a melancholy truth that whenever one finds oneself on the inside of a story, it is often misrepresented in the media.

My friend Neil Darbyshire and I recently organised a dinner for journalists who have over the years written leaders for the Daily Telegraph, which took place at the Garrick Club in London. An eccentric idea, perhaps, but surely a harmless one.

Some newspapers reported the event in lurid terms. They complained that Boris Johnson flew down from the COP26 climate-change powwow in Glasgow to attend the dinner, omitting to mention that almost every leader arrived and left by plane. In other words, Boris wasn’t the only hypocrite.

Much was made of the presence of climate-change sceptic Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph. By some accounts, it was virtually a coven of climate-change deniers. In fact, Boris and Charles were two among over 30 guests at an innocent occasion that had nothing whatsoever to do with global warming.

The Oldie December 2021 67

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Call a spade a spade

TOM PLANT

Every generation likes to think that, unlike its predecessors, it is honest, candid and bold in calling a spade a spade.

Of course, there are snowflakes who cannot face some of the ugly realities of life, and require warnings before being subjected to passages of Homer or Shakespeare, but they are a minority.

Most of us are straight and blunt.

Or are we? Look around and you will see that euphemisms thrive.

Over the past year or two, we have heard much about ‘shortened lives’. That, of course, is a reference to those who have been killed by COVID. All such people have contributed to another unfamiliar term, ‘excess mortality’, used to describe the COVID victims who pushed the number of deaths to greater heights than would have been expected in a normal year. Some of them will have been given a ‘public-health funeral’. That used to be a ‘pauper’s funeral’. Many will be said to have ‘passed away’ or just ‘passed’.

No reasonably sensitive person wants to give unnecessary offence, so I don’t condemn all euphemisms. But I don’t think ‘die’ is an offensive word, whereas ‘passed’ is simply ridiculous. Your ‘loved one’ (another horror) has passed? Really?

Like a driving test? Or a ship in the night?

Or an inadvertently swallowed prune stone?

Many diseases used to be forbidden territory in conversation. In the 1950s, it was considered improper to say someone had cancer. That taboo has gone but others

Patronising weather reports Why do weather forecasters make their predictions in downwith-the-people language, which serves only to confuse?

On Radio 4’s Today programme, I heard the ridiculous expression ‘rattle the windows’. Seconds later came ‘wet and windy fare’ and finally ‘How do I break this to you gently?’

Within days of hearing that 68 The Oldie December 2021

have appeared. Men are now said to suffer from ‘erectile dysfunction’, not ‘impotence’.

If that is unsayable, I recommend men refer to their ‘flat tyre’, which I read is the euphemism of choice in Trinidad.

Social workers use the ‘dys-’ prefix too.

They deal with ‘dysfunctional families’.

We don’t hear much about ‘functional’ families, who I guess fall into Tolstoy’s category of happy families, which are all alike. Families tend not to be ‘poor’ these days. They may, however, be ‘vulnerable’, and their children ‘receive free school meals’, a proxy for ‘poor’.

Disabled children have ‘special needs’, though Sir Tom Shakespeare, a professor of disability research, has pointed out that their needs are usually far from special, being the same as yours and mine.

Children who have witnessed or been victims of an attack have had an ‘adverse childhood experience’. And now one school forbids its teachers to describe children’s behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, it must be called ‘skilful’ or ‘unskilful’.

Officialdom has always liked euphemisms. It uses marshmallow terms to disguise ugly or unpleasant activities, things or people. The police still seek a ‘person of interest’ to ‘help with their inquiries’. Once convicted, he becomes an ‘offender’. ‘Prisoner’ is indelicate, never mind its neutral connotations in terms like ‘prisoner of war’. Victims of crime are ‘survivors’, as though they have all been fished from the sea in a shipwreck. And

tsunami of nonsense, I’d added more to my list of informal gobbledygook: ‘plume of cloud’, ‘get out and about after tea’ and even this one: ‘13 to 14 degrees? No way, Jose! More like three or four.’

The culprit was often weatherman Phil Avery.

You’ve got it wrong, Avery.

Your evangelical drive towards colloquialism has nothing to do with trying to make the weather more intelligible. I suspect it has everything to do with you, as a fact-filled meteorologist, using the airwaves to bend our ears with your brand of repressed lyricism. How dare you foist this obfuscating drivel on us!

all those killed in the Twin Towers in New York 20 years ago are ‘heroes’.

The Pentagon does not say American soldiers ‘kill people’; they ‘service the target’. Its practice of sending suspects to a country where interrogation or torture can be freely conducted is known as ‘rendition’. Lord Steyn, a former Law Lord, called this a ‘fancy word for kidnapping’.

Business and the professions are just as keen on obfuscation and sugar-coating.

Airlines still practise ‘involuntary boarding denial’ (bumping passengers off overbooked planes). Cancelled trains are ‘paused’.

Shoddy work in the building industry is ‘value engineering’. My fuel supplier is ‘updating’ its prices. Cornish fishermen have renamed spider crab ‘Cornish king crab’, and pilchards are ‘Cornish sardines’. A stoat-eradication programme in Orkney is called ‘biosecurity’.

As for fornication, an activity that often gives rise to a euphemism, new terms are seldom lacking. ‘Ugandan discussions’, dating back to 1973, has been joined by ‘watching badgers’ (Ron Davies, a Welsh politician, 2003), ‘slipping my moorings’ (David Petraeus, ex-head of the CIA, 2013) and ‘technology lessons’ (Boris Johnson, 2012-16).

Politicians, of course, never tell lies; at least they cannot be said by their colleagues in Parliament to tell lies. Sometimes they use ‘terminological inexactitudes’, but mostly they tell ‘whoppers’. Now that’s a good euphemism.

I wonder if, deep in the bowels of the Met Office, they hold seminars on how to soften the impact of unpleasantweather predictions by aping the style of the proverbial, mealy-mouthed vicar – a kind of curate climatologist.

SMALL DELIGHTS Waving randomly at a passing train and seeing someone waving back at you.

IAN GARNER, KEIGHLEY, WEST YORKSHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

I’ve also heard ‘The wee small hours of Monday’, ‘Lovely day – wish I’d seen some of it’, and ‘Let me get you out of the door first’. This weather-lite school of approachability is nannystate encroachment.

Leave us alone! We’re British and we’re used to hearing about nasty weather. We’re quite capable of putting up with a bitter wind. We don’t have to be told that ‘cold air will slump down and whistle through the rigs on Friday’ or that ‘five to eight should just about cover it’. Abandon your woke, snowflake language and just tell us – simply – what the weather is going to do.

ROBERT NURDEN

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

LIFESTYLE PICTURES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Contrary to some reports, Sir Michael Caine, 88, hasn’t yet given up acting. He recently said, ‘I haven’t retired – and not a lot of people know that.’

Thank God, there’s still time for him, then, to make another film about London – over half a century after his two great London films, The Ipcress File (1965) and Alfie (1966).

Last Night in Soho tries to capture London in the sixties – and fails miserably. You’d be better off watching Caine as Harry Palmer and Alfie – or Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films, which brilliantly spoof swinging London.

In Last Night in Soho, Eloise (a convincing Thomasin McKenzie), an ingénue fashion designer from Cornwall, arrives in modern London to launch

herself in the daunting world of student fashion. Through some magical time portal – that’s never explained – she is transported back to the 1960s. There she meets Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, a nuanced beauty), a gorgeous singer in the mould of Sandie Shaw. Poor Sandie is drawn into the murky world of Soho prostitution thanks to her boyfriend/ pimp Jack, a pleasingly menacing Matt Smith. The bleakness doesn’t stop there – Sandie’s predicament gets so bad that gory murder is the next step.

Director Edgar Wright and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns try in vain to combine bloody Grand-Guignol with a dash of ironic Hammer Horror, all dressed up in Carnaby Street period flavour.

The time-travel device might have worked if the script and acting were brilliant enough to accommodate the fantasy. They aren’t. The screenplay is so clunky and the plot’s twists so ludicrous

Not one of the great London films: Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Jack (Matt Smith) 70 The Oldie December 2021

and serendipitous that you can never suspend disbelief. Even a fantasy – especially a fantasy – must have its own internal logic; otherwise it’s as boring as listening to someone telling you about their dreams.

Terence Stamp and Rita Tushingham are airlifted into modern Soho to provide a living link to the sixties. But their characters are such cardboard cut-outs – the wicked old Cockney and the charming, worried yokel granny – that they add nothing to the film. At least Diana Rigg, in her last film, as Eloise’s Soho landlady, manages to take a rubbish script and make it compelling.

The film’s violence has no terror or thrill to it – which you get in, say, Carlito’s Way (1993). That heavenly Brian De Palma film takes the same sort of period detail and gangster thuggery and mixes them with Al Pacino’s genius and Sean Penn’s comedy to take it to heights this film can’t dream of.

Soho could be such an ideal film set.

Even today, the neighbourhood – which lies just south of The Oldie’s office – has its own little unchanged corners. Francis Bacon and the Colony Room Club may be long gone, but the 18th-century buildings remain, a few of them yet to be tarted up.

But none of Soho’s charm comes across here, even when the director points his camera at those pretty buildings. It shouldn’t have taken much to make them come alive.

The one consolation is the soundtrack.

It includes Starstruck by the Kinks; Land of 1000 Dances, performed by the Walker Brothers; and the eponymous Last Night in Soho, performed by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Music is, as ever, the best time-travel device of all.

To get a real feel for the sixties, you’d be better off staying at home and listening to these songs on your Dansette record-player, rather than slogging your way to the cinema to see this film.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK THE SHARK IS BROKEN Ambassadors Theatre ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat.’

It’s nearly 50 years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) but it still plays as well as ever, and now it’s spawned a fascinating behind-the-scenes drama, co-starring and co-written by the son of the film’s fiery star, the late great Robert Shaw.

Ian Shaw was five years old when his father made the movie, and he was only eight when his father died, aged just 51. Ian, a renowned actor, is now 51.

In 2017, when he was 47 (the age his dad was when he did Jaws), he wrote an outline for a play about Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider killing time between takes on the set of Spielberg’s blockbuster.

Ian subsequently teamed up with the writer Joseph Nixon and wrote The Shark Is Broken. Directed by Guy Masterson, their play was a hit at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival. It was all set for a West End transfer before COVID rudely intervened. Now it’s finally arrived – and was it worth the wait?

Yes indeed. A play about three Hollywood stars chewing the fat while they wait for the director to shout ‘Action!’ sounds like a most unlikely (and most unproductive) premise, but Shaw and Nixon turn this static, self-referential subject into a drama that’s absorbing, amusing and very moving.

How do they do it? By delving beneath the surface of the film, to uncover the true characters of these three actors.

Dreyfuss is ambitious and precocious, Shaw is angry and world-weary, and the generational battle between them is a classic father-and-son tussle, with Scheider (a rock-steady performance

by Demetri Goritsas) intervening whenever they look like coming to blows – which is fairly often. It’s their combustible relationship that drives the drama, and Scheider’s steady hand that keeps it on the rails.

In this respect, The Shark Is Broken isn’t all that different from the film that inspired it, but the play goes deeper.

Dreyfuss (played by Liam Murray Scott) is an intriguing, infuriating mixture of self-confidence and insecurity, but it’s Robert Shaw (played by his son Ian) who is the focus of the play.

The writing is brave and honest, confronting Robert Shaw’s selfdestructive drinking, and Ian Shaw’s heartfelt performance is extraordinary.

Don’t go in the water! Ian Shaw plays his father, Robert Shaw, in his play about Jaws

The familial resemblance is uncanny, but it isn’t mere mimicry. Alluring and intimidating, his portrayal is full of nuance and human detail – a British thespian stranded in Hollywood, yearning for the emotional intensity of the theatre.

How much of this is true to life? Quite a lot of it, by all accounts. Ian Shaw was too young to remember much about the making of the movie (although he did visit the set as a boy) but he did loads of research, and Spielberg has spoken freely about what he calls ‘the great DreyfussShaw feud’.

‘In private, he was the kindest, gentlest, funniest guy you ever met,’ recalled Dreyfuss, in the documentary Jaws: The Inside Story. ‘On our way to the set he was possessed by some evil troll, who would then make me his victim.’

Yet the play does far more than simply replay these old spats.

The central conundrum of this drama is: why did Robert Shaw try to drown himself in alcohol? This key question remains unanswered (do we ever really know why someone becomes an alcoholic?), but along the way we learn more about him than a documentary could ever teach us. This is what theatre does best – even better than the movies.

It reveals a personality in the round, and Ian’s portrait of the father he lost so young is profound.

And what about the title? Well, salt water played havoc with the workings of the robotic shark (an unwieldy automaton nicknamed Bruce,

after Spielberg’s lawyer) and this forced Spielberg to improvise. As it turned out, this was a blessing in disguise – as anyone who’s seen the film can confirm, the scenes in which the shark doesn’t appear are actually far more frightening.

Nowadays they’d do it all with CGI, the movie wouldn’t be half as scary and the actors wouldn’t have spent so much time sitting around kvetching. So hats off to Bruce, the unsung star of Jaws. If it hadn’t been for the shark’s cranky mechanics, everyone would have got on a lot better, and this perceptive and affecting play would probably never have seen the light of day.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘Prime Minister, stop talking!’ may have been the most controversial broadcast line of this rather dismaying year. But, as Feedback discovered, just as many listeners applauded Nick Robinson for stopping Boris from rabbiting on – ‘There’s no, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no … supply of young people in this country planning to be truck drivers’, he was saying – as were shocked by Robinson’s rudeness.

Possibly we’ve all heard too much wittering and blethering on the airwaves this year. Our age group still clings to the habit of listening to actual programmes, at the actual time of broadcast, and enjoys shouting at the radio to shut up.

Nobody else cares what Robinson said to the PM. Or bothers much with live radio (except news and sport).

The Oldie December 2021 71

By questioning a select sample of young men – aged 22 to 32, named Joe, Roberto and Kiran – I discover that none of them ever listens to a radio set at all.

Kiran Moodley – Cambridge graduate, now with Channel 4 News – is a fan of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time but not at 9am on Thursdays. He listens to the podcast, on his phone.

Podcasts now dominate ‘audio’ (no longer ‘radio’) websites and columns.

Critics commend multi-episodic yarns, heavily into true crime, mysteries from long ago and spooky ghost stories. Not my scene. But I enjoy the podcast from the magazine Slightly Foxed, which recently told the story of graphic novels, from the Victorian Ally Sloper, the feckless dodger created by Marie Duval, through Spiegelman’s Maus, Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows and brilliant Alison Bechdel to the genius Posy Simmonds. Posy said she’s working on a new graphic novel. ‘I may be some time,’ she said. ‘Like Captain Oates.’

Diana Gayford, who produced the first Woman’s Hour in 1946, is still sharp as a pin at 104. Interviewed on WH’s 75th birthday, she contrasted the earliest programmes – a presenter called Alan Ivimey, peddling advice on cookery, recipes, hairdressing etc – with today’s, which are ‘more about asking women how they feel about things’. WH’s unhappy birthday survey found women still don’t feel equal, especially in the home. And top of their wish list: ‘universally available and free childcare’.

In Diana’s day, women sent in scripts and had to rehearse before recording their talks ‘if their voice was all right’.

Today any voice, however gormless, monotonous, upwardly inflected, babyish, glottally stopped, narcissistic or shouty American, is foisted on us, often down the line, inflicting further pain. Can nobody advise guests not to say ‘So I’m like’ and ‘y’know’ 50 times a minute? I am, like, driven to distraction. I must stop taking notes of broadcast parlance: ‘I’m known for my cuck bucks, bu’ you know wha’? This is the first time I’ve wri’en a children’s buck…’

My ally is Stephen Fry. When Alex Scott was commentatin’ on Olympic fencin’, boxin’, kayakin’, weightliftin’ and swimmin’, he pointed out that diction matters. Otherwise, society can never be levelled up – as Dame Eileen Atkins, from the Tottenham council estate, reminded us.

At last Amol Rajan, incorrigible gabbler of the Today programme, admitted his fault when a guest spoke about needing subtitles on TV shows. ‘A useful reminder to me to slow down,’ 72 The Oldie December 2021

said Rajan, ‘which is written, with a swear word, on a large piece of paper in front of me.’ Good. They all need reminding. Slow down, speak up and, please, do tell us the name of the last speaker.

Enough griping; seek laughs. My favourite talk-in of the year was What’s funny about…? And now what’s funny about the unconvincing new God Squad sitcom? Nothing. I like The Skewer, splicing together news soundbites. But my only LOL came from a Kipper Williams cartoon in Private Eye, featuring a radio set, centre stage. ‘Come quick!’ a bloke calls to his wife.

‘Bernardine Evaristo isn’t on!’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON ‘I dropped a bomb,’ says Kendall, the would-be patricide who passes for the moral centre of the Roy family in Succession (Sky Atlantic). ‘The whole world is watching for my next move.’

He’s not wrong. We’ve been watching Kendall’s every move for five weeks now.

So let’s pause for some mid-match analysis. Is season 3 as sublime as seasons 1 and 2? Will anything actually happen? And – most importantly – will the Roy siblings ever, as Roman puts it, ‘like, talk to each other about stuff?

Normally?’ The answers are no, because nothing possibly could be; probably not; and please God, never.

Logan Roy is still feeding on his adult children, and Kendall, Shiv, Roman and Connor continue to talk to one another from dawn to dusk without ever saying anything.

While Kendall prepares for civil war in his bunker, or rather his ex-wife’s Manhattan apartment, Logan and the rest of the clan are strategising in various hotel rooms. Can they secure enough alliances to keep the king on the throne? Will Kendall win over his siblings?

‘A JaggerTarzan’: Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) in Succession

Everyone is bitching, as ever, about everyone else and how unfit they are for power.

‘Roman is a knucklehead, Shiv is a fake and Kenny is screwy,’ opines the dunderhead Connor, bypassing the battle to become CEO of Waystar RoyCo by running for President of the United States instead.

Meanwhile, Tom, who told Shiv at the end of the last season that ‘I just wonder if the sad I’d be without you is less than the sad I get from being with you,’ is sadder than ever and preparing for jail by eating in all-night diners. Cousin Greg, his seven-foot body bent in half as he scuttles behind the others, still speaks English as though it were a foreign language.

The dialogue between Tom and Greg is almost as good as that between the ‘slime puppy’ Roman and the ‘stone-cold killer-bitch’ Gerri, which came dangerously close to romantic when Roman imagined a future together in which he was ‘a kind of a Jagger-Tarzan fronting things up, swinging through trees with my little dick’ while she, the ‘mole woman,’ was ‘back home, cooking us soup and making sure the numbers are right’. The biggest disappointment of the season so far is that Roman has not yet jerked off to Gerri’s molewoman scolding.

Just as I was hanging my head in shame that all the BBC had to offer this autumn was the feeble Hollington Drive, along came the blazingly brilliant Showtrial. Based on the Meredith Kercher case and made by the same team who brought us Line of Duty, this has as its lead characters two Oxbridge rejects whose titanic sense of entitlement makes the Roys look like the Waltons. Bristol University, where Showtrial is set, should sue for damages.

Talitha Campbell, aka Lady Tease (played by Céline Buckens) is the ghastly daughter of a billionaire construction magnet and his it-girl wife. The kind of child that only her mother could love – only even Talitha’s mother can’t stand her. Meanwhile, Dhillon Harwood (Joseph Payne), the snivelling son of a shadow Cabinet Minister, is the creepiest boy on campus. Their friend Hannah Ellis was last seen serving Negronis at the university ball.

‘The mum’s in bits’, says Dhillon’s mother when Hannah is reported missing.

‘So’s her daughter, probably,’ says Dhillon, who later admits to disposing of her body.

There is no lingering

John Lightbourne

‘Hell’s bells! Have you seen our latest energy bill? Let’s switch energy providers now’

over Hannah’s corpse; the focus is on privilege and prejudice rather than crime-scene porn and we’re currently locked in a he-said, she-said, with Dhillon and Talitha both denying murder, each pointing the finger at the other.

To cleanse the palette, Mary Berry is back. In Love to Cook, Mary meets other people who love to cook and in doing so goes beyond her comfort zone. ‘When I was growing up,’ she says, her bright eyes flashing, ‘no one had heard of vegetarianism, but times are changing and I’m keen to explore.’

A heavily tattooed vegan introduces her to scrambled tofu.

‘It smells like wartime dried egg,’ she cautiously suggests.

‘That’s a great memory, isn’t it!’ the vegan replies.

In search of ‘a taste of Nigeria’, Mary heads not to Lagos but to Brixton, before

returning home to rustle up one of her comforting puddings. ‘When I was growing up, no one knew what a passion fruit was,’ she reveals as she gamely separates the seeds from the juice. ‘Now I’m passionate about passion fruit.’

What a gal.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE A LEGEND REBORN: RESTORING THE ORGAN OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Here’s a question you might like to use next time you’re in charge of the Fridaynight quiz down at the Dog & Trumpet.

What, aside from the clock, is the most complex mechanical instrument developed in the age before the Industrial Revolution? Answer: the organ.

And if you watch Steven Benson’s remarkable filmed documentary about the removal, rebuilding, and reinstallation of the organ of King’s College, Cambridge (Fugue State Films), you can see how extraordinary these instruments have always been.

The first King’s organ was built in 1605-06 by Thomas Dallam, who six years earlier had created a mechanical organ-cum-clock for Sultan Mehmed III in Constantinople. ‘A Great and Curious instrument that will scandalise other nations, especially the Germans’ was the judgement of one Elizabethan courtier.

Not that the Germans were in awe of any English organs much before Henry Willis appeared on the scene in the 1840s.

The present King’s organ is a 1934 rebuild, by the legendary Arthur Harrison, of a mid-Victorian Hill instrument. It’s superbly engineered, but after 82 years of continual use it was in need of an overhaul. Accumulations of dust and fluff can coat pipes and flatten pitch; leathers can wear; the larger lead-tin pipes can begin to buckle under their own weight.

On the morning of Christmas Eve 2015, the organ’s regular tuner and nursemaidin-chief, Stephen Allis, was on his knees, not only fixing minor problems but praying that nothing would go wrong when millions across the globe tuned in to hear that afternoon’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

The brief from the then Director of Music, Stephen Cleobury, was that the sound of the instrument should remain largely unchanged. And necessarily so. In terms of its technical finish, and the blend and refinement of a sound that is itself closely matched to the chapel’s fabled acoustic, it’s long been regarded as a Rolls-Royce among English organs.

The usual turnaround time for such a renovation would be two years, but the King’s year is bookended by those annual Christmas Eve broadcasts. Nine months was the limit to the time the organ could be out of the chapel – for a Herculean task that was achieved by dint of two years’ meticulous pre-planning by Harrison & Harrison.

Modern technology helps. Where the blueprints for the 1934 organ are relatively simple, the rebuild was done from a computerised plan which to the naked eye looks like a small solar system.

Since any organ is, in effect, a giant kit, much of the work can be done off site.

However, getting this particular organ out was a challenge in itself, given the narrowness of the space and the proximity of all that priceless stonework and stained glass.

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recording of over 100 minutes of music played on the rebuilt organ by a group of seven former scholars, he gives a brilliant demonstration of how well the instrument is suited to the many tasks it’s asked to perform.

Meanwhile, back in the Dog & Trumpet, which important breakthrough in British agriculture owes its invention to the organ?

Answer: the horse-drawn seed drill.

It was the retraction mechanism on the organs he played that gave Berkshire-born and Oxford-educated Jethro Tull (1674-1741) his eureka moment.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON The organ at King’s College, Cambridge, under the fan vaults

With soundboards weighing half a ton each, and several huge organ pipes needing to be lifted clear of the 50-foothigh Jacobean organ case, it was the fervent hope of everyone present that the engineer in charge of the scaffolding and the hoists had got his sums right.

One of the principal joys of the documentary is the insights it offers into old-established crafts – work in wood, leather and metal – that go hand in hand with such latter-day innovations as computerised control systems and the attendant 65,000 yards of fine wiring that chief electrician Colin Palmer was charged with installing.

Equally time-consuming was the checking, revoicing and in some cases remaking of the organ’s 4,500 pipes.

Reinstalled, the instrument would still need a further six weeks of round-theclock voicing and tuning to complete the process. Without that, as Head Voicer Andy Scott amusingly demonstrates, even this instrument sounds no better than a fairground organ that’s been left in a barn for 20 years.

The vast majority of Harrison & Harrison’s craftsmen come from the Durham area; some of them fifthgeneration workers who can trace their lineage back to the firm’s founding in 1861. Soundboard-maker Geoff Pollard’s grandfather and great-uncle both worked on the 1934 organ.

Not the least of the joys of this meticulously created set of films and sound recordings is the narration by David Briggs, former King’s organ scholar and one of the leading organists of our age. As well as making two magisterial contributions to the 74 The Oldie December 2021

ADELE’S BREAK-UP SONGS A young woman with a big, beehivey barnet gives a meaning look around a dusty interior, as crows caw. The camera pans to a smeared windowpane. She puts on shades, picks up suitcase and strides out of her marriage and back into the spotlight.

This video was viewed tens of millions of times in the hours after its release – and for why?, as they say in Wales.

This is the first Adele track in six years, during which time the British superstar shed several stone and a husband. She put these losses to profitable use, appearing on the cover of both US and UK Vogue, and writing her forthcoming album, 30, to celebrate her new status (except I’m not sure she’s that happy about it all, wisely saying at one point, ‘The bigger your career gets, the smaller your life is’).

Thank God for Adele. And Ed

Sheeran. Not just for their music, either.

These two talents are the biggest solo stars in the world. As I like to see it, this means a scruffy ginge and a creamy cover star are propping up the trade figures as our exports to the EU die on their arse.

Before we turn to Adele’s new album, I can’t resist bragging I was once invited to a private gig with Ed Sheeran at Winfield House, the private residence of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James.

We’ve all been summoned to ‘intimate’ or ‘private’ dinners that turn out to be 400 guests and a silent auction, but this one did what it said on the tin.

Ed Sheeran and a guitar, and around 30 people. Later I bounced up to him asked him why one song was called A Small Bump. He explained it was in tribute to his girlfriend who’d had a miscarriage at four months. She was sitting next to him on the sofa at the time.

Awks, as Oldie-readers don’t say.

Moving on, then, to Adele’s single – Easy on Me, the only taster so far of an album that will explain why she got married at 30 and then left.

‘I wanted to explain to him (ie her son, Angelo), through this record, when he’s in his twenties or thirties, who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness,’ she said.

This is quite some ask of an album, which came out on 16th November.

The new song? It’s not Hello. It’s not Someone Like You. It’s not even Skyfall.

It’s a solid six out of ten.

Still, Adele’s divorce album will sell and sell, everywhere.

And the Treasury must be relieved that the global market for our break-up ballads is so hot.

Adele’s new album, Easy on Me, was inspired by her divorce from Simon Konecki

EXHIBITIONS

Above: Harvesting by John Nash, 1946.

Left: Sea Holly and Sea Bindweed by Nash, 1938

JOHN NASH THE LANDSCAPE OF LOVE AND SOLACE Compton Verney to 2nd January LATE CONSTABLE Royal Academy to 13th January After so many months when it was impossible to know whether you could visit exhibitions, even if they had actually opened, there is now a glut of good things to be seen.

I cannot recommend John Nash: the Landscape of Love and Solace highly enough. It’s at Compton Verney – with the bonus of the Grinling Gibbons show, which continues there until 20th January.

John Nash (1893-1977), like Gilbert Spencer and perhaps Anna Zinkeisen, has suffered as an overshadowed younger sibling, although he was his own man and equal to his brother Paul.

Fellow artists rated him highly, but this is the first major show since the RA retrospective in 1967 – then unprecedented for a living artist.

It includes not only the major works from the World Wars and powerful landscapes, but prints, drawings and watercolours that testify to the versatility and sensitivity that made him a great illustrator. Particularly touching is his dust jacket for Paul’s posthumous autobiography, in which he presents his brother’s motifs without intruding himself.

Ironically, as a corporal in the Artists Rifles, before he became an official war artist he was not allowed to sketch. So works such as Over the Top relied on a strong visual memory.

He was one of just 12 survivors of 80 in the 1917 attack it depicts, in which ‘we never got to grips with the enemy but were stopped in sight of them. We had to “hole up” in craters and shell holes till nightfall and then got back to our original line.’ For a fellow survivor, the painting ‘immediately recalled in every detail the early morning scene at Welsh Ridge’.

Next to Over the Top hangs The

Cornfield, Nash’s hymn to peace, painted in tandem with it in late 1918.

The other Cornfield, that plate-mat idyll of a disappearing rural world, is honoured in Tate Britain’s ‘Late Constable’ – but do not be deceived by the show’s title; this is one of the most modern and exciting exhibitions you might hope to see.

It demonstrates exactly why French artists were bouleversés by Constable at the Paris Salon. There is a run of sky oil studies here that are not just climatic observations and records of clouds, but little dramas (especially Rainstorm over the Sea), which become full-blown epics in works such as the 1836 watercolour Stonehenge.

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Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY Nature allows for little or no real dormancy.

In the shivering northern hemisphere, in the midwinter, everything above ground may look asleep but – to quote wise old Rumi, that celebrated 13th-century Persian poet and mystic – ‘Don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots down there are riotous.’

Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī died on 17th December 1207. Karol Szymanowski’s Song of the Night, his third symphony, of 1914-16, sets one of Rumi’s poems to music for tenor, choir and orchestra. The words celebrate the exceptional beauty of Eastern nocturnal hours. That’s when such fragrant flowers as jasmine and damask roses, and the smouldering bark of the aquilaria tree (the Arabian perfumer’s indispensable ingredient, oud), scent the balmy air with sweet smells we in the UK can only dream about at this time of year.

Dreams become reality, however, for those of us blessed with a heated conservatory or warm rooms with wide windowsills, for there are many winterflowering exotics that will flourish in frost-free conditions.

To my nose, gardenias, bearing cute, white, waxy-looking double flowers over glossy, dark, evergreen foliage, emit an overpowering scent that is perhaps a bit soapy – more Oxford Street than Bond Street or, as I like to classify men’s colognes and aftershaves, more Magalouf than Mayfair.

And I note too that the Royal Horticultural Society damns gardenias as ‘difficult’. They are, though, stocked by almost every florist and garden centre in the land and make a sumptuous present.

Plumeria (national flower of Nicaragua), better known as frangipani, emanates from Central America and the Caribbean, and is a night-time wafter of

mysterious scents. Some olfactory sensors detect rose (and roses themselves have many different notes), plum, citrus, ripe banana, grape, coconut, ginger… Its flowers have been used in the manufacture of perfume since ancient times and continue in its homelands to decorate coffins, fabricate garlands and placate deities. It wants to be a large shrub or small tree – so not one for the front porch.

Along the Côte d’Azur and in numerous Moroccan gardens, I’ve pushed my nose into many yellow and black upright panicles of Senna (or Cassia) didymobotrya, smelling strongly and unmistakably of popcorn or peanut butter – although less charitable noses perceive wet dog or vermin. I haven’t seen one in an English greenhouse or conservatory, but it ought to thrive here under glass.

Unbeatable, perhaps, and longflowering (fruit-bearing, too) are the numerous citrus species. Breeders have miniaturised some kinds, enabling those in the most restricted of (warm) quarters to indulge themselves in classy, exotic fragrances. Flowers of some – notably Citrus sinensis, the greengrocer’s orange – have been accorded aphrodisiac properties (of no use to the readers of this periodical!) or are hailed as (of some

Multi-fragranced Plumeria or frangipani

certain use to oldies) bringers of good fortune. Adventurous cooks, especially enthusiasts of Middle Eastern cuisines, find orange-blossom water indispensable.

Lemon trees have similar small white flowers, with an equally strong scent, which have also found their way into both the perfume and the gastronomic industries. Cultivation offers little challenge to the modest gardener.

I pity people deprived of their sense of smell. And I worry for people with no space for plants at home or who are allergic to them. Fear not – succour is at hand in the shape of The Star-Nosed Mole: An Anthology of Scented Garden Writing, newly compiled by Isabel Bannerman. No pruning required. No watering. No repotting. No deadheading.

Eternal fragrance guaranteed.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD CABBAGES I am surprised to discover that after writing 75 columns on the kitchen garden, I have yet to mention the common cabbage. It may be unfair to call it common – it is, after all, known as the king of the vegetable patch. But I still have distant memories of overcooked cabbage at school, foul-smelling and probably reheated.

The French use the word for cabbage (chou) as a term of endearment, which I used to find puzzling, until it was pointed out that chou is also a sweet pastry bun.

However, the cabbage’s romantic association does appear in the name of the pointed variety, sweetheart cabbage, which modern chefs, for some unknown reason, now prefer to call hispi.

The cabbage has an ancient history, probably going back to the Romans, and all brassicas are descended The Oldie December 2021 77

from it. As if to welcome visitors to England, it can still be found growing wild on the white cliffs of Dover.

We are approaching the season of the January King, a Savoy type of cabbage which, it has been said, ‘compares with an ordinary cabbage as a sole with a whiting’. It is also the hardiest of cabbages and will happily survive bitterly cold winters (which seem to have become a thing of the past).

Cabbages grow best in fertile soil that has been dug over the previous autumn.

Seeds of most varieties can be sown outside in spring, then moved to their final position, 15 inches apart, when the young plants are about six inches tall.

You can best avoid the dreaded club root by never growing brassicas on the same site two years running, while collars round the base of young plants should protect them from cabbage root fly.

A so-called spring cabbage is sown in August to be ready the following May, while summer cabbage, sown in early spring, should mature in August – not the time of year when I think of eating these greens.Wait for winter, however, for the monarch of cabbages, January King, with a purple tinge to its outer leaves.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD CHRISTMAS IS COMING! Stir-up Sunday, the last before Advent, falls on 21st November, marking the traditional start to the Christmas preparations. Skip the plum pudding this year, with a chestnut, raisin and brandy bombe to tuck in the freezer. And ask your friendly neighbourhood butcher to pop a good-size joint of beef in the brine pot right now: once jacketed in spices, it’ll keep for a month (or two or three) in a cold larder, improving every day.

Spiced beef

The Irish way with the Christmas joint that works in a cold climate. Buy your spices from wherever they sell them loose by weight – you need plenty. Serves 6-8

ELISABETH LUARD

3kg joint uncooked salt beef 12 tbsps ground allspice 6 tbsps ground cinnamon 4 tbsps grated nutmeg 2 tbsps ground cloves Dry the meat thoroughly. Mix the spices and rub them all over the cut surfaces of the meat. Place the joint in an earthenware or china dish and pile on the loose spices. Turn the meat every day or so at the beginning, patting down the spices; it will soon develop a thick crust.

78 The Oldie December 2021

stir in a large knob of butter, reheat, simmer till it thickens a little and add a generous splash of brandy. For the shortbreads: use your fingertips or a knife to blend three parts flour, two parts butter and one part sugar till the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs; bind with an egg yolk, then roll, cut into rounds and bake at 180°C/ Gas 4 for 20-30 minutes till golden.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE DICKENSIAN DINING When you are ready to cook – say 2-3 days before Christmas – scrape off the spices (save them for an oxtail stew or post-Christmas cottage pie), tie the joint up neatly and bring it to the boil in plenty of unsalted water. Lid loosely and simmer for 2-3 hours until the meat is perfectly tender. Serve with grated horseradish in cream plus the usual festive accompaniments. Serve it hot or cold.

Christmas-pudding ice cream

A deliciously light and creamy replacement for the traditional pudding.

It sits happily in the freezer till you’re ready to serve on the day. Serves 6-8 300ml single cream 4 egg yolks 2 tbsps caster sugar 100g roughly chopped marrons glacés (could be toasted almonds) 175g sweetened chestnut purée (if unsweetened, you’ll need a bit more sugar) 4 tbsps raisins soaked in brandy to swell 1 tsp powdered cinnamon 300ml double cream, whisked till stiffish Whisk the single cream with the egg yolks and sugar and stir with a wooden spoon in a heavy pan over a gentle heat (or in a bowl set over boiling water) until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon.

Remove from the heat and mix in the chestnut purée and cinnamon. Fold in the marrons and the brandy-soaked raisins (drain, and save the extra brandy for the sauce). Allow to cool completely, fold in the whisked cream, pour into a pudding basin, cover with foil or greaseproof paper, and put it in the freezer. When you’re ready to serve, remove from the freezer to the fridge an hour ahead, run a knife dipped in hot water round the edge to loosen and tip it out onto a pretty plate.

Serve with a jug of brandy-laced butterscotch sauce and crisp shortbread biscuits. For the sauce: gently caramelise 175g white sugar in a heavy pan (don’t stir); dilute with 450ml water and a squeeze of lemon juice, simmer for about 20 minutes,

‘If the law supposes that, then the law is an ass, an idiot! If that’s the eye of the law, then the law is a bachelor.’ So replied Mr Bumble the beadle, in Oliver Twist, to kindly Mr Brownlow’s suggestion that ‘your wife acts under your direction’.

And now you can sit on the very spot where Dickens set the incident, in the Old Sessions House, devouring a plate of panisses.

London is awash with new openings, and the Sessions Art Club is the hottest ticket in town. Launched by Jon Spiteri of St John and the artist Jonny Gent, this not-actually-a-club teases you from the word ‘go’. And not just in the search for the entrance – on the north side of the building, opposite Dans Le Noir (that place where you eat in pitch darkness).

Mr Bumble would have been grateful for the lift, which takes you to the fourth floor. A curtain is pulled back and there you are in a cathedral-high speakeasy, looking up to a mezzanine floor under the distressed ceiling.

Order a cocktail at the bar; then take it to one of the three roof terraces, all of which have fireplaces. The infinity pool will be closed this Christmas but your hipster friends will be too impressed to care. Our table was in the banquettes on the mezzanine floor yet we weren’t neglected for a moment, especially not by the delightful sommelière, who is going for gold at the next swearing Olympics.

With the vocabulary of a jolly jack tar, she charmingly guided us through the hidden wines of the old world and the new world, and a whole new section which could be called ‘Risk board’, given that it encompasses countries one is surprised to learn can grow a turnip: ‘We’ve got a cheeky orange wine from Kamchatka.’

The menu is Florence Knight at her best. (Declaration of interest: she is married to Richard Beatty, part-owner of The Oldie and Polpo.) There are about 12 dishes before the puddings. So share everything – not because you have to, but so you don’t miss all the treats. Have a crab croquette each and pray that Florence’s petit aioli, radish, Pink Fir, anchovy and

egg is on the menu. Don’t let anyone share this with you. Then suggest that your neighbour have the hake in its very, very green sauce while you have the lamb, fennel and orange. Then share all four puddings and ask for another round.

I want to go back every week.

En route to staying with my Token Welsh friends near Lake Vyrnwy, I was told I must stop at Hereford – not to see the Mappa Mundi in its proud cathedral but to check out the décor in the revamped Green Dragon. Such is the philistine shallowness of my address book. Well, I ignored the advice and stopped instead at the Greenman, which is well worth the 20-minute detour. What a beautiful pub. It’s even survived its own renovation and is still utterly recognisable.

I sat in the sunny garden with the most delicious lamb burger, and would love to return this winter and lose an hour or two under those oak beams. The clocks have just gone back as I write this … the bewitching season of dark merriment is launched.

Sessions Arts Club, 24 Clerkenwell Green, Old Sessions House, London EC1R 0NA; tel: 020 3793 4025; www.sessionsartsclub.com; main courses £18-£22 The Greenman, Fownhope, Herefordshire HR1 4PE; tel: 01432 860243; thegreenman.co.uk; thegreenman.co. uk; main courses £15-20; bedrooms

DRINK BILL KNOTT RAKI, A TURKISH DELIGHT What did you do during the Great Plague? I grew a few tomatoes, baked an awful lot of bread, perfected the art of making pâté de campagne, drank too much home-made blackberry gin, and failed miserably at about a dozen other projects, including learning Italian and picking up my clarinet, an instrument that has lain silent for a decade. At least the neighbours are still talking to me.

My friend Mehmet Gürs, being of a more dynamic bent, started a new drinks brand.

Mehmet is the son of a Turkish father and a Finnish/Swedish mother, and he is the chef/proprietor of Mikla, a rather fabulous Istanbul restaurant, whose rooftop terrace overlooks the Bosphorus.

Starved of customers last year, he set about redefining raki, the aniseed-rich spirit that is Turkey’s national drink.

Or is it? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s aggressively abstemious President, thinks not. Instead, in 2013,

he proclaimed that ayran, a salty yoghurt drink, deserved that honour. He also introduced sweeping measures preventing the promotion of alcohol, even banning journalists from writing about it, simultaneously touting the merits of ayran by swigging it ostentatiously at news conferences.

He stopped short of closing the meyhanes, however. These bar/ restaurants are the classic places to drink raki and feast on meze, small plates of food that partner raki very well. White cheese and melon is the traditional way to start a meal, with a glass of raki mixed 50/50 with chilled water and maybe an ice cube. Raki also goes very well with fatty fish, especially hamsi – anchovies – from the Black Sea, in season from November until February.

Raki turns cloudy and milky when water is added: as with pastis and ouzo, this is caused by the non-water-soluble anethole, from anise, dropping out of the solution and forming an emulsion. When the same effect happens to raki’s thoroughly disreputable cousin absinthe, it is known as ‘the louche’.

Mehmet’s new raki is called Prototip, and the recipe will change each year, depending on the anise harvest and the grape harvest. The spirit in the 2020 version is made entirely from Öküzgözü grapes grown in Eastern Anatolia, but Mehmet does not rule out using other grapes, raisins or other dried fruits.

Historically, raki was often made with figs as well as grapes.

Despite the ban on alcohol promotion, word of the new raki soon spread around Istanbul, and Mehmet has almost sold out, with plans to ramp up production of the next vintage. He did, however, kindly send me a bottle, and it is a revelation: complex and characterful, long on the palate, and smooth enough to drink – as Mehmet suggested – neat, as a digestif.

A proportion of the suma (distillate) for Prototip is from a classic copper pot still, the sort used for brandy, rather than the more efficient, ubiquitous column still, which gives a more aromatic result: ‘Several people have told me that it’s like the raki their grandfathers used to drink.’

Raki is invariably drunk in company, and is famous for provoking good conversation. ‘And there’s no class system with raki,’ says Mehmet. ‘It inspires depths of emotions, it makes people contemplative, and whatever is said at the raki table stays at the raki table.’

What of his President’s contention that ayran, not raki, is the national drink? ‘Actually, tea is probably more of a national drink than ayran. But raki also turns white, so what’s the problem?’

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The Oldie December 2021 79

SPORT JIM WHITE STOKES’S GENIUS Even as the England team are thrashing about in the World Twenty20 in the UAE, we cricket fans are thinking ahead.

What we cannot wait for is the contest that comes next: the Ashes. Historic, meaningful, resonant … this is proper cricket. This is the real thing.

It is also the scrap that results in more lost hours of sleep than any other in the sporting calendar. When I was young, keeping up with the Ashes when it was played Down Under entailed sneaking a transistor under the sheets and tuning in to hear commentary that, in its every fizz and crackle, appeared to be coming from within a washing machine mid-spin cycle. As we listened to Jonners and Blowers through the hiss and sputter, it seemed so exotic, far away and distant.

These days, every ball is available in crystal clarity on the television. But frankly that only makes the lure ever more compelling. From the middle of December, when the first test begins in Brisbane, we addicts will be stuck in front of the box at some ungodly hour, telling ourselves we’ll just watch one more over and then head to bed – only to discover we are still there as dawn is breaking.

And the good news for England fans is that at least now there promises to be a pay-off for all that bleary-eyed commitment. When the squad was first announced, there was a huge, Ben Stokes-shaped hole in its middle. The finest English player since Ian Botham had made himself unavailable for the Ashes tour. He needed time away from the game, not least to have an operation on his finger. Frankly, without him, we had already acknowledged, there was absolutely no chance of lifting the urn.

With his Botham-like ability to raise his game against the old enemy, this was the man the Aussies feared.

And then – with a glorious, theatrical flourish – he unexpectedly declared he was fit and up for the Ashes challenge.

His finger had recovered more quickly than expected. As a space was rapidly cleared for him in the squad, you could almost hear the groan of disappointment emanating from the Australian ranks: their assumed advantage had been lost.

England, with Stokes back in harness, have been transformed, able to offer a genuine challenge. In cricket, there is no such thing as a one-man team. Unless that man is Ben Stokes.

As a result of his pre-eminence, he will be the focus of everything the Australians 80 The Oldie December 2021

can throw at him. Well, almost everything. In the past, the Aussie spectators would do their best to undermine players like him, targeting them with virulence and disdain, prepared to do anything to shake them from their stride. They even, on one occasion in the nineties, brought a piglet to the stadium to make fun of the out-of-shape England spinner Phil Tufnell.

Sadly, such is the authoritarian approach to COVID Down Under, it appears unlikely the crowds will be allowed to watch this series. And with such draconian suspension, a huge part of the fun will be removed. If it seems odd that Aussies are keen to impose restrictions on themselves, it is worth remembering what Clive James used to say of his fellow countrymen: never forget that while half the nation’s immigrants may have been descended from criminals, the other half were the progeny of prison officers. Lockdown is in the national DNA. Not that Stokes will mind. With or without a crowd, he will be up for this.

Will the finest cricketer in the world make the difference we in England crave?

Over the next couple of months of sleep-free nights, we will find out.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD DASHBOARD’S BIG BROTHER If you buy a new car model from May 2022, or any current model from May 2024, you’ll find it programmed to spy on you.

It will monitor your speed via GPS data and traffic sign recognition cameras, and then bombard you with aural and visual warnings until you heed the legal limit. Later it may also use ISA – Intelligent Speed Assistance, weasel words for an electronic speed-limiter – to slow you down, whether you like it or not.

Volvo and the Ford Focus have already gone halfway towards this, capping your maximum speed at 112mph, with Renault and Dacia due to follow. For the time being, it will be possible temporarily to override the warnings – ‘to aid public acceptance at introduction’, say its progenitors – but how long before it is further programmed to report your speed? The next step could see the fine deducted from your account and points on your licence before you get home. The technology for doing it is all there. We call it connectivity.

Just like your mobile phone, it will broadcast your location and could be tweaked to record anything you say.

Already it is said that sophisticated,

state-backed eavesdroppers could, if they wanted, use your car’s electronic footprint and high-energy batteries to blow it up. No need for drones.

This high-tech Big Brotherhood is courtesy of the EU’s General Safety Regulation. Post-Brexit, we don’t have to adopt it, of course, but the Department of Transport has confirmed that the UK will ‘utilise’ the technology, without going the whole hog. ISA will be deployed in new cars to ‘give drivers feedback when the speed limit is exceeded, rather than limiting the speed’.

Is this a problem? Surely it’s a Good Thing to keep to speed limits and save lives? The EU reckons that, over 15 years, ISA will reduce collisions by 30 per cent and avoid 25,000 road deaths. As well as that, most of us will appreciate a warning that we’ve strayed accidentally over the limit (as we all do), saving ourselves money and points.

And surely such developments are inevitable, with increasing connectivity such as autonomous braking systems, lane-keep assist, data-loggers, fatigue detection and other safety systems.

If ISA means that Mr Toad can no longer drive as if he’s King of the Road, then shouldn’t we all welcome it? It could also aid the investigation of serious crime almost as much as mobile phones do now.

So no fuss, then. But perhaps there should be, at least, a bit of one. The civil liberties and data-protection crowd seem strangely quiet, perhaps because they see this leap in high-tech surveillance as benign. As indeed it probably will be, most of the time. So long as governments are acceptably democratic and multinational corporations effectively regulated, allowing them to monitor our freedom of movement is not intrinsically an evil.

But governments and corporations cannot be guaranteed to be reasonable for ever; nor is it only our relatively benign governments that will be able to access such information. High-tech surveillance such as ISA has no respect for borders, with the result that the Communist Party of China will also be able to monitor you, just as they do their own people – as they can now, via your phone.

So far, the main objectors to ISA are those no government will heed – enthusiastic drivers who see it as yet further erosion of their ability to enjoy the open road. They’ll just have to buy older, high-performance pre-electronic cars. It won’t trouble me much – my 1993 Land Rover knows not the semiconductor and struggles to reach 70mph, let alone exceed it.

invites you on a unique reader trip

Join us at Trasierra for a stay in Andalusia 26th to 31st May 2022

Oldie publisher, James Pembroke, writes: ‘I recently visited Trasierra (Trasierra.com), a former monastery north of Seville that Charlotte Scott restored in 1978. It is absolutely delightful – the perfect retreat in which to restore post-winter bones. Set in 500 acres of its own land, it offers plenty of opportunities to wander off on foot or on horseback. Charlotte has been hosting groups like ours for years.

‘It’s the perfect base from which we can visit Seville, Cordoba and the Extremadura. And we will have a local guide for each excursion.

‘There are 11 bedrooms available, four of which we have set aside for single guests. So, please book as soon as you can. Email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311. Guests will be

given a full refund if there is any requirement to quarantine either during or after the holiday or if flights are cancelled. Please find the prices below.’

Full itinerary and terms and conditions at: www.theoldie.co.uk/tours

Thursday 26th May – arrival Depart Gatwick at 10.40 with easyJet; arrive at Seville at 14.35 Dinner at Trasierra.

Friday 27th May – visit Carmona and Cordoba Dinner at Giaconda Scott’s house.

Saturday 28th May – visit Extremadura Morning trip to Extremadura; afternoon at Trasierra followed by dinner at Trasierra.

Sunday 29th May – day at home A day of relaxation by the pool or whatever activity

Trasierra you might enjoy; buffet lunch and candlelit Flamenco night at Trasierra.

Monday 30th May – visit Seville Day trip to Seville with early supper there.

Tuesday 31st May – fly home Free morning; lunch at Trasierra; then catch 16.30 easyJet flight from Seville which lands at 18.10 at Gatwick.

Price for guests sharing a double/twin bedroom: £1,950 per person or £2,450 for single usage. This includes all transport (apart from the flights), site entrances, all meals and all wine with all meals. All we need is a deposit for £500; the balance will be due by 26th February

‘I’m sorry, but it looks as if your wife made a reservation for a party of only one’ The Oldie December 2021 81

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Podcasts? The shorter, the better I like podcasts – or at least I like notion of them and how they are delivered to us, and I am a fan of a few specific podcasts.

If you have not explored podcasts, I recommend that you consider doing so.

A podcast is a just like a radio programme except that anyone can publish one online for anyone else to listen to. The word was coined in 2001 as an amalgam of iPod and broadcast. The term has stuck, even though you certainly don’t need an iPod. You can listen on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop or ‘smart’ speaker. I listen to podcasts at my desk, in the car, or walking the dog.

It works like this: you need a bit of free software to find them, but you may already have it. It is already built into Spotify and iTunes, for example. I use

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

www.buzzsprout.com Fancy making your own podcast?

This is one place to start, and free if you don’t do much. Lots of help videos. https://books.google.com/ngrams Google Books – this site helps you discover when a word first appeared in print, and how often it’s used over time. Astonishing.

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

PocketCasts. It’s very neat and synchronises my phone and my computers: if I start listening in the car, my desktop will pick up where I left off.

Many players will do this; PocketCasts makes it very easy.

Who creates podcasts? Anyone can, and beyond the rules of the platform you choose to publish them on (they will try to prevent illegal or offensive material), there are no constraints, restrictions or national boundaries. The technical side is easy and cheap; you don’t need a licence as a radio station does, there is no limit to the number or length of podcasts you can publish and they stay available, on demand, for as long as you like.

That, of course, is the problem. There is a doubtful theory that everyone has a book in them. It may be true, but in almost all cases that’s where the book should stay. Similarly, I suspect that too many people already think that they have a podcast in them, especially if they like the sound of their own voice. However, if you are selective, there is much to enjoy.

The challenge is finding the podcasts worth listening to. They are like any other form of publishing: there’s an awful lot of rubbish out there. A safe way to start is to see what respectable publishers are promoting; the BBC, for example, or most national newspapers and many magazines (The Oldie has a new podcast from Giles Wood and Mary Killen).

There is another option. There are thousands of fine amateur podcasts and if you share the creators’ enthusiasms, they may be winners. All podcast producers can list their work in podcast directories, and your podcast player, if asked, will search them for you and make

suggestions. You might perhaps search for opera, stamp-collecting or rugby; you’ll be astonished how many podcasts you can find. Most won’t be much good, but you may well uncover a gem.

Once you do find one you like, you can ‘subscribe’ or ‘follow’. That means that every time a new episode is published, it will appear on your system. Most are free; some make efforts to generate income by accepting advertising, and an increasing number are available only if you pay a subscription, but not many.

I must advise you of Webster’s First Rule of Podcasts: The shorter a podcast is, the better it is likely to be.

Perhaps you remember the story of the vicar who begins a service apologising that his sermon is going to be a long one, because ‘I have not had time to write a short one.’ The same applies to podcasts.

Everyone benefits from some editing.

So let brevity be your guide, or you are liable to end up listening to a couple of verbose bores droning on and on, and life’s too short for that.

‘Of course it’s necessary. My Porsche isn’t going to pay for itself’

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Fight back against the scammers An anti-fraud emergency phone number has been launched. It will help protect customers from fraudsters trying to steal money from their bank accounts by pretending to be someone they are not.

If you receive a suspicious communication out of the blue – a phone call, text message or email – you can dial 159 and 82 The Oldie December 2021

be put straight through to your own bank’s fraud department. They will tell you if they believe the call to be genuine.

It is a trustworthy and secure number that works in the same way as 101 for the police and 111 for the NHS. Calls cost the same as the national call rate.

The scheme has been launched by

Stop Scams UK, which chose 159 because it is easy to remember – the three numbers go diagonally across a phone keypad, mobile phone or landline, from top left to bottom right.

The likelihood of being targeted by criminals is high and rapidly increasing.

In the first half of 2021, £754 million

was stolen through fraud, 30 per cent more than in the same period the previous year.

Conmen – and conwomen – sound plausible and trustworthy. They will impersonate not only your bank but any authoritative organisation you might expect to have dealings with, such as the police, HMRC, parcel-delivery services or your solicitor.

If anyone contacts you, insisting you transfer money or make a payment, even one you are expecting to make, do not do so without checking 159 – and checking out the person you really want to pay. Do not disclose any personal details. Be even more concerned if the caller tries to rush you into action or tells you it isn’t necessary to check. You will not offend genuine bank staff: they understand that customers need to be careful.

At the moment, this is a year-long pilot scheme involving banks, telecoms and technology companies, but so far only nine banks are taking part. These are Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank, Santander and Starling Bank. That is because to get through to your own bank, you press one

‘He followed his dreams, but they were all pretty boring’

digit on the phone keypad – and only nine digits are available.

So at present you cannot use the service if you bank with HSBC, Virgin Money, Monzo or Nationwide, though Nationwide does have its own 24/7 scamchecker freephone number. Next year, 159 will move to voice-activated software when more banks will be able to join in, including TSB – the only bank that guarantees to refund innocent customers who have been defrauded.

You also need to use a telephone-

provider that’s signed up to the scheme.

At the outset, the providers are BT, EE, Plusnet, Gamma, O2, Giffgaff, TalkTalk, Three, Virgin Media, Sky and Vodafone.

If the pilot is successful, Stop Scams UK will ask Ofcom to make 159 a universal number available to everyone.

Fraudsters are always one jump ahead. If anyone contacts you saying they are from 159 and your bank’s fraud department, put the phone down immediately. That call will definitely be a fraud because 159 will never contact you.

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The Oldie December 2021 83

Last of the Nigels

The ancient name, meaning ‘champion’, has almost disappeared.

Nigel Pullman salutes his namesakes

W

hen my fellow 13-year-old new boys in the dormitory of my first boarding school discovered my middle name was Reginald, they hooted with derisive laughter.

‘I think it’s a jolly good name,’ I bravely said.

Their response was ‘Fine then – Reg it will be.’

I was not called by my first name, Nigel, again for the next five years. The moment I left school, I was happy No more Nigels. Clockwise from top: enough to drop Reg and revert to this Molesworth, Kennedy, Benn and Mansell now deeply unfashionable forename.

It may be some consolation to my But, alas, new data from the Office for National Statistics reports that, yet again, fellow Nigels that we are not the only ones to have fallen out of fashion. There in recent years Nigel did not even reach the minimum three registrations in 2020 were fewer than three Carols registered to merit recording. Where does that leave last year, and many other once-popular names face extinction.

Formula One star Mansell (b 1953), top Oldie-readers will remember Take It classical violinist Kennedy (b 1956), from Here, the BBC Home Service hit of boxing champ Benn (b 1964) or youthe Fifties, featuring the Glums. June know-who of Brexit fame (also b 1964)?

Whitfield’s ‘Oh, Ron…!’ – and Ron (Dick Or indeed me (b 1947)?

Bentley)’s vacant reply, ‘Yes, Eth?’ Unlike Benn and Mansell, I cannot Well, sad to report, there were just claim nominative determinism – the three Rons brought into the world (or the Gaelic word niachas means champion, UK, at least) last year, and 17 baby Ethels, and this is a possible etymology of the which puts them both firmly in the name. Another Gaelic word, nél, means bottom ten today. cloud, which doesn’t seem to get us very And what of Gary? He too now barely far, or, in Latin, Nigel derives from niger, registers, notwithstanding the daily meaning dark or black.

Today programme racing tips from Thatcher’s Chancellor Lawson (b 1932) is now probably better known for long-time BBC sports reporter Richardson – but he’s Garry, like the his domestic-goddess daughter Nigella – cricketer Sobers. Sadly, for footballers clearly he liked the name! Unfortunately, Lineker and Neville and Take That singer not many others seem to – Nigella didn’t Barlow, the shamed and convicted Glitter make the ONS records either. has tarnished the name.

My own favourite Nigel is the steam Wikipedia tells me of more than locomotive inventor Sir Nigel Gresley 30 Nigels in film and fiction. To my mild (1876-1941) – another champion. And, shame, I was familiar only with him of St with a surname like Pullman, I like to think that maybe it was Gresley’s Mallard Custard’s prep school. N Molesworth, ten years old in 1950, hated the name. ‘Chiz loco setting the world speed record of chiz chiz chiz,’ Molesworth said if people 126mph just nine years before my arrival called him Nigel. I like the sound of that prompted my parents – Cecil and Nigel, a ‘sadistic, sulphur-crested Désirée (wonderfully old-fashioned cockatoo’ in the children’s cartoon Rio. names) – to choose my Christian name.

84 The Oldie December 2021

But back to real life, and now sadly death: we should not forget TV gardener Monty Don’s golden retriever, perhaps the most recent and popular Nigel.

What has gone wrong? Monty Python may have started the rot with their Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch, which features Nigel Incubator-Jones – ‘His best friend is a tree and in his spare time he’s a stockbroker’ – alongside Simon Zinc-Trumpet-Harris – ‘He’s an old Etonian and married to a very attractive table lamp.’

More recently, 10 Things I Hate About You, a popular teen film, also did Nigel PR no favours. In the offending scene, a few school nerds are having a small drinks party, unaware that it’ll soon be invaded by hundreds of raucous, cool kids. When the gatecrashers ring the doorbell, the unaware host dashes to answer with the immortal line ‘That’ll be Nigel with the Brie.’

The Australian alliterative derogatory slang Nigel No Mates (then reduced to just ‘a Nigel’) cannot have helped. The shortened version Nige seems especially ugly, but my old friend David (never Dave) loves teasing me at Christmas with his lame and oft repeated joke ‘Nige – Noel!’

Despite all this, I have been pretty content to live with my name – but I won’t be overly disappointed if any yet-unborn grandson is not another Nigel.

Maybe we need not mourn the loss of Nigels, or the similar demise of Kevin and Tracy, now barely registering in the charts, and should welcome instead the continued popularity of the Olivias and Olivers at the top. They are joined by Noah, Muhammad and Leo in the top ten for the boys, and Isla, Ava and Mia for the girls.

Coming up fast are 189 boys called Kylo, 142 called Kacper and 64 called Cai, and I guess the 86 children named Aadam will always be top of the class.

Little Egret by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

CARRY AKROYD

Priory tower – the stepping egret pokes the saltmarsh Matthew Paul (b 1966); Christchurch Priory, Dorset, overlooks the Stour estuary and Stanpit Marsh When so many birds are in decline, it is a joy that the beautiful, snow-white little egret (Egretta garzetta) has reestablished itself in Britain, having been once common and then non-existent in modern times.

One thousand little egrets were part of the banquet after George Neville’s enthronement as Archbishop of York in 1465. Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), master wood-engraver and author of A History of British Birds, prototype of the modern field guide, commented, ‘No wonder this species has become nearly extinct in this country.’

Extinction elsewhere was enthusiastically encouraged in the 19th and early-20th century by the feather trade. Calvin Taylor Lee’s photograph, taken at Tophill Low reserve, Hull, this July, of a little egret with its drying plumes spectacularly fluffed in fronds and spikes, showed why heron plumes (in Provençal, aigrette is a diminutive of aigron, meaning heron), especially those of egrets, were the fashionable rage in Victorian and Edwardian times for ladies’ hats and stoles.

There were egret farms, where adults could be plucked four times a year. But wild-bird feathers were thought superior – so the majority were harvested through shooting.

The slaughter of decorative birds was global, but egrets bore the brunt. Over 11 months in 1906, London showrooms sold over 2,000lb of bird feathers; 1,000 little egrets’ skins weigh 2lb. Two female protest groups amalgamated in 1891 to form the Society for the Protection of Birds, and the feather trade declined.

In James Fisher’s 1951 Bird

Recognition 2, the little egret was listed as an ‘extreme rarity’. European expansion began in the 1950s. A colony was established following the bird’s arrival in Brittany in 1960. Winter migrants appeared along the south coast of England from the 1980s.

In 1996, the first successful British breeding was recorded at Brownsea Island, Dorset. Since then, the little egret has shown the greatest range expansion of any wintering species, with an annual migration of over 10,000 and a permanent population of over 1,000. It is resident from Norfolk to Cornwall, coastal Wales and the east and southwest coast of Ireland; it remains only an occasional visitor to Scotland. How badly it was hit by this year’s harsh spring

(Mark Andrew found several corpses at Deepdale Marsh, North Norfolk) is yet to be revealed.

Egrets nest in tree colonies, sometimes with grey herons, and fish balletically, white wings folding and unfolding. Like grey herons, they eat anything from a fish to a small rodent or bird. This September, Alan Dean reported a little egret in a West Midlands alder tree, apparently feeding on lichens and catkins. If you see a larger egret, it will be a great white egret (Ardea alba) or a cattle egret (Bubulcus ibis). Both UK rarities, they are now breeding here, if only in both cases hovering on double figures.

The 2022 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie December 2021 87

Travel In the footsteps of Paddy Leigh Fermor Dominic Green joins an Oldie readers’ trip to the great travel-writer’s enchanting Greek home and heads deep into the Mani

O

wing to unavoidable complications, The Oldie’s tour of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Greek haunts arrived at Kalamata airport 18 months late.

Double-jabbed and triple-delayed, the fearless travellers followed the curve of the Mani’s coast to Kardamyli, the little town where, in 1964, Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) and his wife Joan built a home on a promontory overlooking the sea.

The house fell into disrepair after Leigh Fermor’s death, but its inheritors, the Benaki Museum of Athens, have restored it and turned it into a unique holiday rental. It may be the nicest Airbnb in Europe.

I cannot confirm this, as I was sleeping next door in the Kalamitsi Hotel. But we did join the oldies on the spectacular terrace for drinks at sunset.

At dinner, I had an odd sense of déjà vu, and not because I had been there before. Then I remembered Richard Linklater’s film Before Midnight (2013), the third in his trilogy about the perpetually protracted romance between Jesse and Céline (Ethan Hawke and Julie 88 The Oldie December 2021

Paddy’s trunk at his house in Kardamyli

Delpy), much of which had been filmed at Leigh Fermor’s outdoor dining table.

That table should not be confused with his indoor table. This was of Italian marble, designed by the man himself with reference to a church in Verona, and made by Venetian craftsmen. It stands in the centre of the large, book-lined room that John Betjeman called ‘one of the great rooms of the world’.

The books, now catalogued and fumigated, are still there on the shelves – some now protected by a wire trellis.

The drinks are still waiting on the tray by the door. You have a feeling that you

might be trespassing, or that Paddy is about to walk in and ask you some impossible question about the medieval Franks who, carving up the winnings of the Fourth Crusade of 1204, built castles in the Mani.

Three peninsulas hang off the bottom of the Peloponnese. The Mani is the middle one. The terrain varies from rough, rocky but surprisingly green in the north, where Kardamyli is, to very rough, entirely rocky and utterly dry everywhere else. The intrepid oldies set off for the baking interior the next morning, after pausing to meet our guide, Ruth Hackney, at the café in the plaka.

Ruth force-marched us uphill, through the village of Old Kardamyli to a spring marked by carvings of the Dioscouri, the twins Castor and Pollux.

Their tombs, according to Strabo and Ruth Hackney, are located further uphill, at the village of Agia Sophia.

Even further uphill, we could see the Neolithic acropolis, the flattened hilltop which bears the earliest traces of settlement in the region. In only a few minutes, we had travelled back to the origins of civilisation.

JOHN MURRAY PHOTO ARCHIVE

Clockwise from top: Paddy’s bust, with his writing room behind; the writer on his terrace; Dominic Green at Messene; quiz night on the terrace, with Merope, the island Paddy swam round every day, beyond

Mercifully, Ruth refrained from making us climb up there, and instead directed us to a miniature citadel, the fortified redoubt of the rather violent clan who used to run the region. As it was now too late for a refund, that evening I subjected the group to a lecture on Leigh Fermor’s life and times.

The next morning, we set off southwards on a day tour of the Mani.

We met Ruth at medieval Areopoli. It was here that the local uprising that turned into the Greek War of Independence began in 1821 – the bicentenary was celebrated this year.

Areopoli is a pretty town, but the relative affluence brought by tourism cannot fully mask the harshness of a dry region where fortified towers arise like cacti – most notably at nearby Vatheia.

The entire place feels as if it is on the edge of desolation, and that only nearsuperhuman effort has prevented everyone from leaving and the terracing and houses from tumbling down the rocky slopes.

An entire castle has been mislaid in the Mani: the Franks built three of them, but one, Grand Magne, has disappeared.

In Mani, the 1958 travelogue in which Leigh Fermor introduced the Mani to the world, the missing castle is located by the salt pans of Tigane. We pondered

these, wondered if the wide bay of Limeni might have made more sense, and meandered down to lunch at Gerolimenas, a tiny settlement in the bowl of a horseshoe bay.

We were back in time for a dip – a swimming pool has appeared in Paddy’s olive grove, and steps lead down from the terrace to a private cove. At dinner at Lela’s, the restaurant founded by Paddy and Joan’s housekeeper and run by her son Giorgos, there was talk of emulating Paddy’s habit of swimming around Merope, the island in the bay.

Our next expedition took us north, back through Kalamata and up into the hills to ancient Messene. Messene was founded in 369 BC by the Theban general Epaminondas. Having defeated the Spartans at the 371 BC Battle of Leuctra, he liberated the local helots and developed trade and political links with the coastal city of Pylos. That’s where Telemachus encounters Nestor, who had fought alongside Odysseus at Troy.

That inveterate Roman tourist Pausanias visited Messene sometime in the first century AD, and not much has been done to the place since. The excavations are extensive – Messene was host to a shrine to Asclepios and had two theatres. The site is impressively intact, but surprisingly unvisited.

The remains of Epaminondas’s five-mile fortified wall still snake along the ridge that sets the city inside its own, natural amphitheatre. The Arcadian gate still stands across the road to the north, and the road from the north still runs through it. Pausanias does not mention jumping aside to avoid being run over by a taxi. It was only by luck and youthful adroitness that the full complement of oldies made it to lunch at a restaurant in a village above the site.

At some unreasonable hour the next morning, Ruth dragged us up into the foothills of the Taygetus Mountains to inspect the remote villages that cling to the edge of the Viros Gorge. Prophet Elias, the highest peak in the Taygetus, lowered overhead.

It was here that Leigh Fermor’s Mani begins, as Paddy and Joan stagger out of the gorge and into the village of Kendros, and it was there that our odyssey ended – almost.

Many literary-historical exchanges have taken place on Paddy and Joan’s terrace, but few have reached the Empyrean heights of quiz night with the oldies. The party divided into two teams, the Spartans and the Corinthians, pitting husbands versus wives. The Corinthians won, and brushed off Homeric accusations of cheating and marital betrayal. Dinner was a Homeric affair too: lamb was roasted, and the oldies impressed our hosts by despatching every bottle of wine in the house.

The Byronic mood was contagious. On our last morning, I rose to discover that a handful of oldies were at sea, midway through a mad attempt to swim around Merope. Fortunately, the only sirens we heard were mythical, and not those of the ambulance service from Kalamata. The tales told over our last lunch were tall.

The Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor House costs 6,000 euros a night for the whole property, sleeping 10 people; Ariahotels.gr

Kalamitsi Hotel, Kardamyli, costs from £79 a night for two; kalamitsi-hotel.gr

Flights to Kalamata from Gatwick, from £84 return with easyJet

Dominic Green edits Spectator USA The Oldie December 2021 89

Overlooked Britain

Belfast’s Titanic charms

LUCINDA LAMBTON

lucinda lambton ‘Linenopolis’ is crammed with treasures, from the UK’s loveliest pub to memorials to the 1912 tragedy From the moment you breathe in the air of Belfast, your senses are stoked up with the rich spirit of the place; with the uncommon charm and cheerfulness of the people – ever heartening and helpful – along with the beauty of so many of its buildings. As a bumper bonus, it has the most beautiful public house in the United Kingdom.

Once the linen capital of the world, the city went on to harbour a great shipyard, as well as the largest rope works and tobacco factory in the world.

My heart quickens with the memory of it all – with the buildings from the 1700s onwards, all proclaiming the prosperity of ‘Linenopolis’, while Victorian and Edwardian palaces of commerce still holler triumphantly at one another in the very centre of the city, across Donegal Square and the City Hall, the domed symbol of civic pride.

The 1st Marquess of Donegal was largely responsible for the laying-out of the elegant architectural foundations of 18th-century Belfast. He built many of the first public buildings, as well as the churches. He gave the land for the Poor House of 1774, as well as the White Linen Hall of 1783.

The Poor House was for ‘the employment of idle beggars … and the reception of old and diseased poor’.

Children were later admitted and it was thanks to their being ‘employed’ with spinning wheels that Belfast’s first cotton mill came on the scene. With its evergrowing success came the full-scale production of cotton and linen – and with that the blooming and booming of Belfast.

The White Linen Hall – where linen was bought and sold – was the symbolic centre of this success. It was built where the City Hall stands today. Building after building proclaimed the new affluence of the city. In 1844, Thomas Jackson designed a feast of sugary stucco, seemingly dripping in great pendants from the ceiling of St Malachy’s Roman Catholic church in Alfred Street. What fancy finery this is, to be sure!

90 The Oldie December 2021

Queen Victoria gave Belfast a city charter in 1888. Sir Charles Brett, in his book The Buildings of Belfast, tells us of a positive pearl of a poem that was written in her honour at the time: She came in the grace of her Womanly love, An Irishman’s ardent Affection to move A richly carved representation of the Queen swathed in lace once sat in Durham Street. She was, I fear, demolished but was afterwards rescued by the National Trust and now sits waiting for a new home in a stable yard, somewhat unsuitably clad in lace from top to toe.

There are hauntingly mournful memorials commemorating the 1912

sinking of the Titanic dotted hither and thither throughout the City.

Sir Thomas Brock’s fine woman in front of the City Hall takes a lot of beating: with her barely-clad body honouring a drowning passenger being held aloft amidst the waves by two sea nymphs. You catch your breath at their beauty in bright, white shining marble.

I met an old gentleman there who could remember him and his mother waving handkerchiefs – he took his own out to show me – to bid the Titanic farewell.

No one made a greater architectural impression on the city than Charles Lanyon, the architect, engineer and politician, who had a host of Belfast’s

Sugary stucco: pendant vaults at Thomas Jackson’s St Malachy’s Church (1844)

JON ARNOLD IMAGES

buildings under his belt. The Crumlin Road Courthouse and jail and the public library, as well as the Custom House, are but a few magnificent mentions. His Tudor Gothicry at the Lanyon building, Queen’s University, has a great splendour, as does the Palm House in the Botanic Gardens.

To my delight, I discovered my great-great grandfather exhibited there, with a giant, 22lb bunch of black grapes.

It earned him a prize at the 1874 Great International Fruit and Flower Show.

The Tropical Ravine, then the only man-made one in the world, was an exhilarating excitement. It was created

by Charles McKim, the Gardens’ curator.

It was said that his fingers were so green that he could raise a prize bloom from a seed planted in an empty flowerpot.

Stepping into the Ravine’s red-brick building is like finding yourself in a fairyland. Suddenly steeped in boilingly hot climes, with air that is heavy with humidity, you are surrounded on all sides by banana, cinnamon, coffee, sugar cane, aloe, ivory nut, rubber, bamboo, guava and grapefruit.

There is a small chain hanging amidst the leaves which, with one tug, activates a waterfall to roar through the palms, the mosses and the great ferns.

The City is particularly ennobled by its surroundings, with the mountainous crags of Craig Hill framed by the grand old buildings. Stand beneath the green domes of the City Hall and you see the full majesty of nature flanked by the Linen Hall Library – a more delightfully old-fashioned institution would be hard to find. On the other side of the street, the towers of the vast Providential Society rear up into the sky. Cave Hill, with its silhouette of a colossal human countenance, has all the appearance of a sleeping Napoleon – it is known locally as ‘Napoleon’s nose’.

Above: the Crown Liquor Saloon (1885).

Right: Sir Thomas Brock’s Titanic Memorial (1920), with nymphs cradling a drowned sailor

In all the world – I do not exaggerate – there are few more splendid spots to drink than the Crown Liquor Saloon in Great Victoria Street. If there was ever a symbol of the bravery and beauty of Belfast in times gone by, this surely is it.

Again and again, the Saloon was beset by ‘the Troubles’, and again and again it arose glitteringly afresh from the ashes.

How I yearn to be surrounded by its splendours, as I write these recollections of the place, with its astonishingly elaborate decorations of 1885.

The Saloon is a beacon of Belfast. It burns bright in the heart of all who know it, with its etched mirrors painted in vivid hues that rise up from behind the sweep of the marble- and ceramic-covered bar.

With sumptuously carved, wooden screens, adorned with gilded Corinthian columns which shelter the imbibers, every inch of the place is encased with ornamental splendour. Heraldic creatures bearing such mottos as ‘Fortune favours the brave’ and ‘Love your country’ guard these entrancing ‘snugs’, into which customers can plunge for picturesque privacy.

Belfast is still marching forth with architectural gusto. The historical

slipway that once sheltered the Titanic is now filled with a new and quite glorious exercise in modernism with the sensational tourist attraction, Titanic Belfast. The yellow cranes of the Harland & Wolff Shipyard still reign supreme where the great ship was designed, built and launched in 1912.

Exact replicas of the cabins have been recreated, along with the dining rooms and of course the staircase, all thanks to the Civic Arts, Todd Architects and the America-born architect Eric R Kuhne and Associates. A wealth of sights, sounds and smells tell the sombre story.

It is a modernistic marvel which took three years to conceive, design and create, resulting in a five-storey atrium, concealed by four 90ft-high hulls gleamingly clad in 3,000 individual silver and anodised aluminium shards.

It is a triumph.

When I first came here, I saw the hauntingly lonesome but always fresh bunch of flowers left every day on the Titanic’s quayside. With such resilience and courage in the troubling times of the past, what triumphs must lie ahead today in times of peace.

The Oldie December 2021 91

Taking a Walk

Paradise by way of Slough Trading Estate patrick barkham

The air was soft and still, the light was low and the only sound was the gentle patter of beech mast falling on a carpet of dry, dead leaves. Heaven must be a woodland on a fine autumn morning, and it is a peculiarly English miracle that you can find paradise a couple of miles from the Slough Trading Estate.

The woes of a sleepless night in Slough Travelodge – if John Betjeman had stayed in a Slough hotel where the card key to the room didn’t work and the bathroom door wouldn’t close if the toilet seat was down, he might have been even harder on the place – evaporated within seconds of my stepping into Burnham Beeches.

I arrived at 7.10am to dewy spiders’ webs, blackberries, the distant cackle of a green woodpecker and shafts of sunlight arrowing through the oaks, birches and rowans, dripping with red-orange berries. Even the planes stacking for Heathrow only moaned quietly.

As its name suggests, this dry, wooded common is famous for its ancient beeches. The usually short-lived beech was for centuries regularly pollarded for firewood, at about the height a local person could reach. This kept the beeches at a stout, sturdy height, and bequeathed them near-immortality and tremendous character.

The Victorians were the first to picnic under the trees and give them names – the Elephant Tree; His Majesty – and today there is Druid’s Oak, an 800-yearold which boasts the biggest girth in the forest, as well as the spindly Ballerina beech and the Cage Pollard.

Ancient trees suit our individualistic age. They are relatable celebrities of the natural world, brimming with charisma and meaning, and I was eager to encounter them.

Meeting your heroes is supposed to be dangerous, but Burnham’s beeches did not disappoint. The first marvel had a tremendous, stout trunk that revealed itself to be completely hollow. Beech trunks are usually smooth, as if designed for our graffiti, but this one’s bark was as gnarled as an old oak, and no wonder – this slender skin alone was holding up the tree without the help of any heartwood. Further on were trees grown into fantastical curves: writhing eels, human-like limbs, face of green men.

Two hundred years ago, the spread of a coal-based affluence meant the pollarding paused and the stout beeches’ new limbs grew too tall, and these immortals tore apart. When cattle-grazing stopped too, the forest grew in around the pollards, further imperilling them.

Since the 1980s, we have sought to save our celebrities, clearing ‘halos’ of forest around them to give them light, and fencing them off to protect them from our understandable desire to pay homage to, touch and be blessed by the ancients.

Burnham Beeches is a landscape under plenty of people pressure, but there is another scourge of the celebrity trees. I’d never seen so many in my life.

Rustle. Scutter. Scratch. On this quietest of autumn days, the dominant noise of Burnham Beeches was the scratch of grey-squirrel claws. The Corporation of London, which manages this National Nature Reserve, apparently ‘controls’ them to lessen their barkstripping, branch-chewing hooliganism but it seems futile. They chased each other in helter-skelters down trunks.

They rattled and squeaked like broken toys. They had the temerity to build dreys in the ancient trees.

Squirrel fuss loomed large, but I didn’t let it spoil what was becoming a deeply spiritual experience.

I found an ancient pollard without security fencing and sat beside it, enjoying an hour of bliss. An oval-shaped hole in its trunk was like a benign, green eye. After a period of blissful silence in this glade, the fallen beech carpet rustled and a wood mouse ran straight towards me. Encountering my rucksack, it somersaulted and sped back to the safety of the ancient beech.

When I returned to suburban civilisation, a red kite circled over Pets At Home on the Slough Trading Estate. It seemed a sign. Whatever ugliness we build, we have also created and protected great beauty. Often, thankfully, it can be found in the same neighbourhood.

GARY WING

Burnham Beeches National Nature Reserve car park (8am to 4.30pm in winter), Lord Mayor’s Drive, Slough SL2 3LB. Or X74 bus (15 mins) from Slough bus station, beside the railway station 92 The Oldie December 2021

On the Road

From pole to pole – with a dog Ranulph Fiennes has slept at the South Pole – and outside the Albert Hall in his car. By Louise Flind

Anything you can’t leave home without?

Anti-itch cream.

How would you describe your job?

Breaking polar world records, normally against the Norwegians. We’ve broken 40 per cent of those we’ve gone for.

And the coldest place?

In the ionosphere, 400 miles into Antarctica, we lived in snow-covered cardboard huts. Oliver Shepard, who’d been trained scientifically, went out four times a day to record the wind and temperature and got a wind-chill factor of minus 122 degrees.

Why do you think Britain is more interested in cold expeditions than in hot?

It’s a national craving to hear about people getting really, really cold.

Do you prefer being too hot or too cold?

Too cold – although I don’t like it. At night, we’d sometimes lose 2,000 calories while sleeping…

Is there something you really miss?

My wife and 15-year-old daughter. My late wife, Ginny, instigated every expedition and initially came with me.

What do you eat on the expeditions?

Professor Michael Stroud plans our rations with about 68 per cent fat because you get more calories for less weight. Each day, he’d dole out the rations in a small tent – and my home-made flapjack always looked smaller than his.

How did Ginny plan the expeditions?

First, she’d make sure nobody had done it before. No one had ever been from pole to pole without flying. So we spent seven years without pay, working at weekends in pubs, and got 1,900 sponsors together and an ice-strengthened vessel.

Didn’t you have a dog on that expedition?

Bothy got into The Guinness Book of Records as the only dog ever to have peed on both poles.

Do you have another expedition planned?

We’re in discussion but we’ve learned never to announce anything. If the Norwegians hear, they’ll quickly get a gang together.

Where would you most like to explore?

I loved South Africa, where I lived aged one to 12 – and Dhofar, southern Oman, when I joined the Sultan of Oman’s army. Back then, we moved mostly by night; now I love going back and moving pleasurably by day…

How did your expeditions first start?

The Army asked me to lead the first complete journey up the Nile.

What’s the hottest place you’ve been to?

Shisr, near Iram [Oman], where Ginny and I found the lost city.

What’s the worst place you’ve been to?

The Northwest Passage in an open boat.

And the best place?

When we reached the Saint-Tropez area in our Land Rovers before going down to Antarctica by ship.

Does it get more difficult as you get older?

Now, aged 77, I have to do daily squats twice a day and press-ups, 25 at a time.

How much money have you made for charity? £18.9 million.

Where did your adventurous side come from?

Your dad was in the army; was your mum adventurous?

Yes. Mum went with Granny to South Africa after my father was killed. My grandad was Governor-General of Antigua, and a neighbour and teenage friend of Winston Churchill. They were in the Yorkshire Yeomanry together: during the Gallipoli campaign he was Churchill’s personal assistant. I hope I have some of his DNA.

How easy was it to function with frostbitten fingers?

That was at the North Pole. In the dark, I fell in and the sledge pushed me down a ten-foot slope of ice into the sea – about minus 48 degrees; 50-knot wind; deadly if you get wet – and I hit a quick release on the front of my belt so the sledge didn’t drag me under.

I was pretty frightened. If I wanted to live, I had to get the little tent with the cooker – the heat source – off the sledge, which was in the water. I used my left hand to get the ropes. So I had a very wet glove and got half the tent up with one hand, which gave me wind protection to start the cooker. I pumped it too much and there was a tent fire. I used my sleeping bag to put out the fire and you couldn’t see for feathers.

What’s it like sleeping in a car in London?

Near the Royal Albert Hall, there are residents’ parking permits. Somehow the newspapers heard about it and I got a letter from my cousin Ralph Fiennes, the actor, asking what all the fuss was about. It makes good sense to sleep in the car – it saves £300 in hotel bills.

How often do you see your famous Fiennes cousins?

I went on an expedition up the Nile with another cousin, Joseph Fiennes, and we’re working on another journey.

Are you really frightened of heights?

I’m still very frightened of heights and if I get anywhere near one, my balance goes.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We went to the Everest base camp – at the wrong time of year.

Shackleton by Ranulph Fiennes (Penguin, £20) is out now The Oldie December 2021 93

Genius crossword 407 el sereno Across 1 Imagine being 12 without one thing to puzzle over! (6) 5 Most obscene earnings before tax set to be adjusted (8) 9 Go back to Paris after university doctor gets cover (8) 10 Still cold wearing tartan (6) 11 Serious condition when top seaman starts to interest surgeons (10) 12 Bewildered son comes into fortune (4) 13 Moving abroad, protected

by British Standard in Caribbean island (8) 16 Gloom of a daughter attending demonstration (6) 17 Able to move having discovered files on disorderly crowd (6) 19 On the way there could be something to eat (8) 21 Crucial tests finally finding openers (4) 22 Fish eat mainly plastic at first? Nonsense (10) 25 Capital must be returned in case of mandatory recall (6) 26 Male lies about after appearance, getting reward points (3,5) 27 Certified press boss after attending trial (8) 28 Volunteers with spirit and energy offering such a dish (6)

Down 2 Identifies millions hoarded by revolutionary Irishman (5) 3 Stuff found in Grieg or Gershwin? (5) 4 Calmed down, accepting student has removed material (7) 5 Gossips a lot about the origin of luminescent tableware (7) 6 Fights against work and pretends (7) 7 Hunt around shopping centre for rabbit (5,4) 8 Cake that European character picked up? (5,4) 14 Agreed people must have time for reparation (9) 15 Salt water absorbs most refined sulphur (9) 18 Went inside vault and put in code (7) 19 Off colour, playing football? (3,4) 20 Being pessimistic, a pair run on the road (2,5) 23 Prone to be somewhat unruly in general (5) 24 Indian, for example, once a criminal (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: 15th December 2021. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 407 Across 1 Young whale (4) 4 Rough, husky (6) 7 Beer (3) 9 Agitate; prison (sl) (4) 10 Fat from roast meat (8) 11 Falsify; equipment (3) 12 Thought (4) 13 Never rag (anag) (8) 16 Chilling, scary (13) 19 Slimmest (and elegant!) (8) 23 First light (4) 24 Assistance (3) 25 After-effect (8) 26 Wicked (4) 27 Pitch; sailor (3) 28 Shuts (6) 29 Cast off (4)

Genius 405 solution Down 2 Naval unit die (anag) (12) 3 A confused mixture (7) 4 Prevaricate (5) 5 Copying (5) 6 Reddish-brown pigment (5) 8 Occasionally (4,2,1,5) 14 Substantives (5) 15 Free, disencumber oneself (of) (3) 17 Spot, point (3) 18 Portable steps (7) 20 Lawful (5) 21 Fairies, sprites (5) 22 Open pies (5)

It was obviously Colonel Mustard in the Ballroom with a dagger!

Winner: Anne McIlroy, Deal, Kent Runners-up: James Bibby, Prenton, Merseyside; Patricia Carter, Bromley, Kent

Moron 405 solution Across: 3 Lace, 7 Safe, 8 Hair (Laissez faire), 9 Pairs, 10 Afar, 11 Hiding, 13 Sunshade, 15 Shun, 16 Gobi, 17 Festival, 18 Mangle, 21 Lady, 23 Sushi, 24 Name, 25 Need, 26 Boar. Down: 1 Calf, 2 Depressing, 3 Lair, 4 Cashiers, 5 Sari, 6 Originally, 10 Assignment, 12 Discipline, 14 Alfresco, 19 Numb, 20 User, 22 Drew.

The Oldie December 2021 95

Competition TESSA CASTRO In 1915, the US card-game expert Bryant McCampbell introduced the point-count method of hand evaluation: ace = four, king = three, queen = two, knave = one.

Those were the days of auction bridge, but McCampbell introduced it for auction pitch, a US trick-taking card game derived from the English game of all fours. Then, in 1923, still before contract bridge began in earnest on a cruise liner in 1925, US expert Milton Work publicised it.

On this month’s deal, sent to me by John Murrell of Kent, the partnership with 28 points performed enormously worse than the partnership with 12.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

West ♠ 10 8 3 ♥74 ♦ A Q J 10 9 ♣9 5 3

North ♠ Q4 ♥A ♦643 ♣A K J 9 8 7 4

South ♠K ♥KQJ8632 ♦K2 ♣Q 8 5

East ♠ AJ97652 ♥ 10 9 5 ♦875 ♣-

The bidding at table one South West North East 4♥(1) end (1) Practical shot.

The bidding at table two 1 ♥ Pass 3♣ 3♠ 4♥ 4♠ 5♥ 5♠ (1) Dbl end (1)Trading on the favourable vulnerability.

At table one, West guessed to lead a club.

Bingo – East ruffed. East switched to a diamond, West beating declarer’s king with the ace and leading another club. East ruffed again, then cashed the ace of spades (felling declarer’s bare king) and led a second diamond. West won and led a third club, East ruffing yet again. The defence had garnered the first six tricks and, although declarer won the rest, that was three down.

South may not have felt too good about conceding 300 points but he was to do a lot better than his counterpart at table two.

South at table two led the king of hearts v East’s five spades doubled. North won the bare ace and switched to a hopeful ace of clubs. Declarer ruffed and tried the diamond finesse, low to dummy’s queen winning. He led a spade from dummy, winning the ace (felling South’s king) and led a second diamond to the king and ace. He could now run diamonds, leaving North to score only the master queen of spades. South could never win the lead to cash a second heart, and that was 11 tricks and doubled game made. East-West +650.

As US expert Marty Bergen so pithily put it, ‘Points, schmoints.’

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 273, you were invited to write a poem called Bags. Your least-favourite kind of bag was the ‘bag for life’, which did not live up to its name.

But Adrian Fry’s narrator embraced life in bags: ‘I keep my life in placky bags:/Bus tickets, clippings from the press,/Old Guernsey pounds, packets of fags,/Scrawled poems: it’s a mess.’ Commiserations to him and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize, The Chambers Dictionary, going to Max Ross.

I can remember when the coalman brought Big bags of coal, a hundredweight in each, But with each bag, in retrospect, we bought Some priceless things, now gone beyond our reach.

We bought a friendly fire that made us doze In carefree evenings in a homely room, And pensive flames that from love’s fingers rose Beautiful, like tulips in full bloom.

We bought a warmth that cannot be replaced However much we spend. Those bags of coal Gave us contentment, happiness encased In big black lumps that cheered a childhood soul.

As those bags crashed upon the cellar floor They brought my family fuel, and much, much more.

Max Ross ‘I bags the creamy one with yellow icing.

The one Mum said I could, because I picked it.’

My brother simply laughed the laugh of triumph.

‘You’re much too late, chump – I’ve already licked it.’

My frequent childhood tears stretched into manhood, His cruel one-upmanship unsatisfied.

But deepest of the cuts I had to suffer, He bagged my lovely girlfriend for his bride.

He’s gone now, and his house that needed clearing Seems mournful as I bag up all his life, And all those decades that we’d never spoken, Heartbreaking, like his long-forgotten wife.

The black bin bags are stacked up in the hallway – He can’t unpick my choice of destination – Consign the bleak ones to the local tip, The good ones to the British Heart Foundation.

Con Connell

Here it sits below the belt, a vehicle for humour, A skin-tone stick-on plastic bag to mitigate the damage Of Crohn’s disease, colitis or the trauma of a tumour.

You do a job; it does a job. It’s there to help you manage The sudden disappearance of the rest of your digestion By mimicking the rectum that your guts connected to.

It’s a logical solution to an existential question; Your stoma is your anus and your bag’s a Portaloo.

It’s a bonus boon, a blessing that is rare and unexpected, So instead of elegising over what you haven’t got, Remind yourself that you have been especially selected; That you never have to scurry and you never have to squat.

Ann Drysdale I’ve grown attached to this old bag. The only snag Is that it holds within its folds Enough to sink the setting sun. It weighs a ton.

There’s so much kitsch I need to ditch: Three pairs of specs, a bulging purse – but then there’s worse: A ball of string, a curtain ring, Six pens, a bunch of keys, loose change and – this is strange – A teddy bear, a lock of hair, One notebook (blank), another (full), a hank of wool, A tube of gel, a pale pink shell, My iPod, headphones, mobile phone, a pretty stone, A scribbled song, a black lace thong.

Decluttering is not my scene but, well, I mean, It’s so jam-packed I’ve had to act.

I’ve binned those brochures, tissues, sweets – the zip now meets – But then, today … the strap gave way.

Karen Pailing COMPETITION No 275 Stone is presumed to have the edge as a building material. But bricks deserve attention. A poem, please, called Bricks. Maximum 16 lines. We still cannot accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 275’, by 16th December.

The Oldie December 2021 97

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The Oldie December 2021 105

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Did she have an affair?

Q

A couple of years ago, I lost my partner of over 20 years to cancer and have since experienced the full spectrum of human emotions such as love, loss, pain, hope and anger, along with dreams unfulfilled. But I also have some unanswered questions which have niggled me since her passing. I’m pretty sure she was very secretive about money matters and also suspect she had a romantic liaison with a work colleague.

I made the wrong choice of confiding in one of her best friends, who misinterpreted these questions as accusations and sternly told me, ‘I still have her back,’ and asked, ‘Why now?’ I fear I may have now lost a close mutual friend and should, in retrospect, have kept my private thoughts to myself, but unfortunately I still don’t have answers to my questions and I guess I must accept that I never will.

Do I contact this friend to try to explain my position or let it lie?

B R, Exeter Let it lie. People can react very oddly after a bereavement.

Absolute fury can be a response – and they’re often very ashamed of the feelings. So when you start raising doubts about your partner’s honesty, I suspect that your mutual friend feels so guilty about having similar thoughts that she jumps on them like a ton of bricks. It’s her own suspicions that she’s trying to suppress, not yours. And she’s in complete denial about them. Could it be that your late partner did have a dishonest streak – but your mutual friend is so horrified about the thought that she can’t bear you to entertain it? Even though fury and bitterness are very common reactions to a bereavement, the stricture ‘Never speak

A

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

106 The Oldie December 2021

ill of the dead’ is often used to suppress honest but distasteful ideas about people who’ve died. I myself think that complete honesty is much the most helpful way of getting over a bereavement, and that it is more human to grieve over a real, fully rounded person, warts and all, than to build people up into saints. Which they weren’t.

Remembrance of times past

Q

I liked the idea of organising a Desert Island Discs with elderly relatives you want to pump for information about their past. Another way would be to say you’re writing your memoirs and want to know your family history. You’ll be amazed how much stuff will come bubbling up then, particularly when you ask them about your early life.

V S, Chichester Most older people love talking about the past: the hard part might be getting them to shut up rather than encouraging them to open up with their memories. I got my father to talk about everything he could remember and recorded it on a tape recorder – huge fun and, although the tapes are pretty crackly, it’s lovely hearing his voice.

A

I can’t take it with me

Q

At 92, I find my teeth are all collapsing, and my dentist is very keen for me to have several implants. I could afford it, but they’re incredibly expensive and do need a lot of maintenance, I gather. My daughter says I must do what I want; it’s up to me.

And friends say I mustn’t be influenced by wanting to leave my children more money, because it’s my money!

P L, by email

ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk To order a print subscription, go to subscribe@theoldie.co.uk or call 0330 333 0195 Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £45; Europe/Eire £51 USA/Canada £52; rest of world £61.

A

What a lot of people don’t realise is that many older people actually want to leave their children as much as possible when they die! There’s a feeling that children bully their parents into giving them all their money before they pop off, but at this stage of my life I would hate to squander my money on foreign holidays and luxuries if it meant my children getting less in the end. Let’s be honest: you’re not going to live for decades longer; your sparkling new teeth aren’t going to be on display for ever. And you probably aren’t out to dazzle blokes with your alluring teeth anyway. A plate would be far cheaper, and you’d get used to it pretty quickly. I’m with you on this one. Go for the cheaper option.

Let’s talk about death

Q

As an oldie of 96, I am not morbid, but I find the young are reluctant to accept clear, adult thinking on the subjects of age and death. I see it as just common sense to accept the obvious! Am I right? I was gently reproved recently when I voiced this opinion to a young woman with whom I was discussing my funeral arrangements. ‘Oh, Mary, you mustn’t talk like that!’ she said.

Mary Duly, Lee-on-the-Solent She needs a bit of reproval in return. Remind this woman of what MP Charles Walker said frankly last year. ‘The fact of the matter is that people in their 80s and 90s die,’ he said. ‘If that comes as news to anyone or they’re offended by that statement, they haven’t been paying close attention.’

A

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

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Review of Books Winter round-up of the reviews

Paul Bailey admires this year’s Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut Michael Barber remembers a giant of travel writing Biography & Memoir History Fiction Sport Current Affairs Afghanistan Children’s books Winter 2021 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Buy local Review of Books Issue 58 Winter 2021 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House by Adrian Tinniswood George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch by Andrew Roberts The Young HG Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin Stars and Spies: Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business by Christopher Andrew and Julius Green A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit Silverview by John le Carré

Publishing’s ‘Super Thursday’ this year fell on 14th October, but, according to the Bookseller, it was ‘the lightest for years, with the pandemic rattling autumn publishing schedules for the second consecutive year’: some 300 hardbacks were published on that day. This doesn’t mean we are all reading or buying fewer books, however. Last year some 202 million hardbacks and paperbacks were sold in the UK, the first time since 2012 that sales had passed the 200 million mark. Let’s hope that this year there are enough drivers to feed bookshops around the country, as publishers and shops hope to cash in on the Christmas market.

If for one reason or another you can’t get to your local bookshop then an alternative to the ‘world’s largest online retailer’ is a newish website called Bookshop.org, ‘with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops’. One independent bookshop in London called it a ‘knight in shining armour’, according to the BBC website. Why is it different to youknow-what? Well, this online retailer, which started a couple of years ago in America, shares its profits with independent bookstores. Shops which sign up – and there are now more than 500 in the UK – make, according to the company, ‘30 per cent of the cover price of the books sold’, which is, however, less than the 43 to 50 per cent bookshops can expect when selling direct. An article in the New Statesman, though, suggests that the new online company was ‘attracting customers who usually shop on the high street – whether at a chain such as Waterstones, Blackwell’s or Foyles, or at an independent’ – and was not in fact ‘denting’ the behemoth’s sales…

Who knows?

But now that lockdown is over (for ever, one prays) the message is clear: it’s always best to buy local. And if you look inside, there are more than 50 books reviewed to help you plot your Christmas purchases.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Nikhil Krishnan

16 NOVEL

Paul Bailey on Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize winning The Promise

17 SPORT

This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes

18 CURRENT AFFAIRS

Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter by Emma Soames

21 MISCELLANEOUS

Making Nice by Ferdinand Mount

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

The Magician by Colm Tóibin

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

7 PAPERBACKS 8 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS Lucy Lethbridge on Doris Langley Moore

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

25 TRAVEL

Michael Barber on Norman Lewis

26 FICTION 30 CHILDREN’S BOOKS Emily Bearn

14 AFGHANISTAN The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 3

History

The Money Changer and His Wife by Quentin Matsys, 1514

ANTWERP

THE GLORY YEARS

MICHAEL PYE Allen Lane, 272pp, £25

For a brief period in the 16th century, Antwerp was a thriving commercial city, but its reputation was overshadowed by that of Amsterdam.

In this ‘galloping and flavoursome’ book, wrote Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times, Pye ‘has balanced the scales with a compact but lustrous gem of a book. Studded with racy anecdotes but firmly embedded in archival research, it shows why the city that nurtured “a pragmatic kind of tolerance” rose so fast – and why, almost as rapidly, it fell. Pye unrolls a sparkling string of stories rather than a heavy tapestry of contexts, hinterlands and aftermaths: look elsewhere for those. Wary of anachronism, immersed in the flow, he never uses the term “globalization”.’

The city’s prosperity was based on the importation of English wool, while it supplied England with wine from the Rhine, oats, furs, turbot, grapes and live falcons. ‘In this swarming fresco, which merits a place near Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches or Robert Hughes’s homage to Barcelona, Pye not only rescues Antwerp’s lost “world of liberty”, he leads entranced readers through its grubby, glittering streets.’

However, by the 1570s, Antwerp’s 4 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

glory was in decline. ‘The Spanish invaded and, at a stroke, the city of tolerance and free thinking became a hotspot of religious fundamentalism,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Daily Mail. ‘Pye can’t help sounding sad and, indeed, he communicates this sense of paradise lost profoundly. The result is a book of imaginative historical reconstruction that reads as brilliantly as a novel by Hilary Mantel.’

In his review for the Times, Gerard DeGroot concentrated on the city’s rich culture in art and books and its enlightened attitude towards women.

‘Capturing the essence of 16thcentury Antwerp is difficult; its story is as convoluted as its streets,’ said DeGroot. ‘That story does not lend itself to linearity; there’s no single plot, no straight narrative lines.’ But Pye is ‘the perfect chronicler of this extraordinary place, since he revels in complexity and never hesitates to use his abundant imagination. His prose is as opulent as the city itself.’

BLOOD AND RUINS

THE GREAT IMPERIAL WAR 1931-1945

RICHARD OVERY Allen Lane, 1040pp, £40

‘Richard Overy is the master historian of the Second World War and of what he calls the “morbid age” that preceded it,’ wrote John Darwin in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘This

book is his magnum opus (in every sense of the phrase). It is a commanding global history of the conflict that brings together its geopolitical and geostrategic elements with a stringent analysis of its many dimensions... It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance with which argument and insight are interwoven in a fast-paced narrative... Extraordinarily compelling, and written with remarkable fluency.’

Overy traces the roots of WWII back to the ‘final dynamic drive to empire’ of Germany, Italy and Japan in the late 19th century, and starts his account with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. ‘Historians tend to specialise,’ wrote Saul David in his review for the Daily Telegraph.

‘Rarely do they write as authoritatively as Overy does in fields as diverse as diplomacy, economics, battlefield tactics and war crimes. In almost every paragraph there is a telling phrase or statistic.’ Blood and Ruins is ‘majestic and original... At almost 1,000 pages, it puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in the shade.’

Rana Mitter, in the Critic, agreed that this is ‘perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the Second World War yet to appear in one volume. You might think that by reading extensively, you could construct a book like this one. You could not... Richard Overy has done a signal service with this compellingly written, impressively researched book.’

THE GLASS WALL

LIVES ON THE BALTIC FRONTIER

MAX EGREMONT Picador, 320pp, £25

Rather like Belgium, Estonia and Latvia were for hundreds of years the cockpit for rival great powers who rode roughshod over the locals.

Latterly they were governed with an iron fist by Baltic German barons on behalf of the Tsar, whose fall gave these small buffer states their first taste of independence. But within 20 years, as the Economist noted, they found themselves on the wrong side of history again, ‘smashed between the Nazi hammer and the Soviet anvil, with dreadful consequences for everyone, but particularly the large

History Jewish population’ – almost all of whom were killed.

Reminding readers that ‘Max Egremont’ is the nom de plume of an English baron whose stately home is Petworth House, the Economist says this ‘may explain, but does not excuse, his over-emphasis on the region’s long departed German aristocracy’, rather than their misbegotten peasantry. Tom Ball made a similar point in the Times: ‘What strikes you is how few native Estonians and Latvians are met along the way …

They appear a people marginalised within their own homeland, who are only now coming to define themselves and their nation.’ Keith Lowe was more positive. Writing in the Literary Review, Lowe said Egremont had written ‘an extraordinary book … Part travelogue and part history book, it is a brilliant exploration of how the past infuses the landscape, buildings, art, literature, traditions, food, conversations and lived experience of the Baltic people.’

HARLOTS, WHORES & HACKABOUTS

A HISTORY OF SEX FOR SALE

KATE LISTER Thames & Hudson, 256pp, £25

‘Last year,’ explained Gerard DeGroot in his review for the Times, ‘Lister published A Curious History of Sex, a delightful combination of serious research and irreverent commentary.

That book and her popular Whores of Yore website have established her as a leading (or at least the most outspoken) authority on the history of sex. Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts (Lister loves alliteration) is a more serious book about the history of sex

William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress

for sale. It’s still occasionally funny, but its main purpose is to uncover how “stereotypes, stigma and sensationalism have obscured the lived experience of people selling sex”.’

Lister’s book is nothing if not comprehensive, encompassing ancient Greece, medieval London, Renaissance Italy, Edo Japan, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China. As a campaigner for the rights of workers, she ‘uses her knowledge to expose an ancient injustice, namely the persecution of workers in an industry that society deems both reprehensible and essential’. The result is ‘a fascinating book about a subject too often swept under the rug. It’s also very beautiful, magnificently designed and packed with hundreds of superb photos. The illustrations are appropriate because sex is, after all, an intensely visual thing. This is a coffee-table book that packs a powerful bite.’ In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin noted that ‘Lister raises some interesting questions, but while there are many pictures of sex workers through the ages, we very rarely hear from the women themselves. This is not totally surprising; sex workers are generally on the silent side of history.’

SBS: SILENT WARRIORS SAUL DAVID William Collins, 528pp, £25

Senior oldies may recall Cockleshell Heroes, a 1955 film starring Trevor Howard, about intrepid British canoeists sabotaging Nazi ships in Bordeaux harbour. If they’ve long forgotten that these heroes belonged to the Special Boat Service, it’s not just because, as Roger Boyes put it in the Times, the SBS, unlike the SAS, ‘haven’t recruited Andy McNab to shout about their various escapades.

It’s because commandos in canoes paddling miles at night into an enemy harbour in teams of two need to keep their lips zipped and their profiles low.’

Originally Paddy Ashdown, an SBS veteran, was commissioned to write about them. Following his untimely death, Saul David, a distinguished military historian, picked up the gage.

Boyes congratulated David on ‘an accomplished act of storytelling … that often gladdens the heart, but also makes you think about the nature of

Start of the attack on Bordeaux, 1942

‘Each adventure is relayed with all the relish of a Commando comic’ sacrifice’. Alan West made a similar point in the Spectator. This ‘handful of brave determined men worked deep inside enemy territory and were likely to be executed if caught. Many drowned in freezing water after attempting to complete their mission.’

In the Daily Telegraph, James Holland was more upbeat, saying how ‘incredibly refreshing it was to read of men of astonishing courage blowing up bridges, surveying invasion beaches, sinking ships in harbour and making clandestine rendezvous with secret agents – all by canoe and midget submarine. Each adventure is relayed with all the relish of a Commando comic.’

ON THE CUSP DAYS OF ’62 DAVID KYNASTON Bloomsbury, 203pp, £18.99

‘On the Cusp marks the halfway point of Kynaston’s multi-volume Tales of a New Jerusalem sequence, which opened with VE Day 1945 and has an ultimate destination of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election win,’ explained Nicholas Wroe in his Guardian review. ‘The books so far have dealt in chunks of between two and five years each, but here Kynaston changes pace to focus on the few months leading up to 5 October 1962 – the day the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do, and the first James Bond film, Dr No, came out – which, he claims, marks the transition between the old world and the “real” 1960s.’ The The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 5

History author’s ongoing achievement ‘is to convince his readers, who know well what comes next, of real lives being lived in near real time, and of a future as unwritten then as ours is today’.

1962, wrote Roland White in the Sunday Times, was ‘a world in which the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, an Edwardian figure who enjoyed grouse shooting on the Duke of Devonshire’s estate, felt it a stinging insult to describe his chancellor as “middle class”. It was also a world in which that chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, unblushingly owned a black labrador called Sambo.’

Although ‘it is certainly possible in this book to see a new spirit gradually replacing the starchy remnants of the Edwardian age... in some places change was very gradual indeed.’

Emma Duncan, who reviewed it for the Times, found the book’s format bewildering. ‘A cusp – a moment of transition, neither one thing nor the other – isn’t a theme.’

Also, the book is ‘oddly structured, in that it covers a period of time chronologically, and includes essays examining three disconnected subjects – farming, immigration and Wales – over a longer time horizon’.

Yet ‘even an unsatisfactory Kynaston book has a lot going for it’ because ‘his research is wonderfully deep and wide’.

THE TUDORS IN LOVE

THE COURTLY CODE BEHIND THE LAST MEDIEVAL DYNASTY

SARAH GRISTWOOD Oneworld, 400pp, £20

Historian Sarah Gristwood’s sixth book, The Tudors in Love, has found a newish take on the most wellcovered dynasty on the bookshelves.

She looks at their relationship with the medieval cult of courtly love and shows how the Tudor monarchs used it to enhance their own status. The Tudors, wrote Gareth Russell, reviewing the book in the Times, ‘were obsessed with reading about the doomed romantic royals who had gone long before them. Arthurian legend, with its distressed damsels and questing heroes, had a particular grip on their overheated imaginations. They delighted in troubadours singing of princesses trapped in towers awaiting rescue by gallant knights.’

Alison Weir in the Catholic Herald 6 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Detail of The Family of Henry VIII, c.1545, with Prince Edward and Jane Seymour

believed that the book is a ‘masterclass in marshalling a vast canon of research into a riveting pacy page-turner’, calling it a ‘treasure of a book’ by one of our ‘finest historians’.

The reviewer on the website Tudor Times was also impressed by the ground that Gristwood covered. At the heart of the idea of courtly love, the reviewer pointed out, ‘was the principle of non-consummation’ – a paradox in which women could not win. ‘If they succumbed to their lovers’ importunities, they were sinful and unchaste, if they maintained an icy distance, they were cruel.’

Gristwood looks at the importance of the Arthurian tales for the Tudors, particularly at the varying portrayals of Queen Guinevere and her famous love triangle, ‘as both the heroine of the tales ….and her role in the war that ended the king’s reign through her doomed love affair with Lancelot’.

Russell praised Gristwood’s ‘superb’ skills in ‘distilling the vast amount of modern scholarship on this topic’.

POWERS AND THRONES A NEW HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

DAN JONES Head of Zeus, 720pp, £25

‘This is one of the paciest 600 plus page books I have ever read,’ exclaimed Richard Foreman in Aspects of History. ‘The book touches upon the rise and fall of empires, pandemics, religious conflict, the failure of a two-state solution in

Jerusalem .… The Middle Ages made us, but equally so the period makes for a cracking story,’ he continued.

‘Scholarship is wedded to storytelling — and flashes of humour exist on the same page as academic rigour, as Jones contrasts the medieval world with our own (and finds that there is more that unites than divides us).’ ‘A fine account of a distant era that still echoes today,’ Kirkus agreed. The book ‘is a rollercoaster ride through the Middle Ages … the sheer quantity of history addressed is astounding,’ Debbie Kilroy marvelled in Get History. It is ‘nothing short of masterful’.

Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times noted the book’s focus on ‘the historical changes in climate’. For instance, ‘Rome’s years of greatest prosperity… remained pleasantly warm and enjoyed plenty of rainfall.

Yet weather also triggered Rome’s fall.’ Similarly, the years preceding the Black Death in western Europe saw bad weather and ruined harvests, so that an undernourished population easily succumbed to the plague.

Surviving workers demanded higher wages and revolted if they didn’t get them. Jones ‘explains the movements of the period with crystal clarity, but it’s as a sequence of potted biographies that it really excels … each vividly sketched in a few deft pages,’ Hart continued.

The book is beautifully produced, Foreman noted, making it ‘a great gift, as well as a great read’.

‘This is now simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages

History History there is, ‘Hart concluded, ‘a hugely impressive achievement, bustling and sizzling with life on every page.’

PALACES OF REVOLUTION LIFE, DEATH & ART AT THE STUART COURT

SIMON THURLEY William Collins, 543pp, £25

Simon Thurley, former curator of the Royal Palaces and chief executive of English Heritage, follows his book on Tudor palaces (Houses of Power) with Palaces of Revolution, an examination of the Stuarts through their residences.

In the Times, Andrew Taylor kicked off his review with a vivid sketch of the execution of King Charles I outside Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House in Whitehall. The building is now the only surviving fragment left above ground of the great royal residences of the Tudors and Stuarts but when the King’s scaffold was erected in January 1649, the palace and its grounds spread over 26 acres. Thurley, said Taylor, ‘is interested in how these royal residences were used, how they were furnished, what they symbolised, and how they reflected and conditioned the mechanics of monarchical power’.

James I used his palaces differently from his predecessor Elizabeth I. Unlike the Queen, he preferred to separate the ‘lodgings of state’ which were used solely for ceremonial of court entertainments and the transaction of state business and ‘lodgings of necessity’ in which the king could relax with his intimate friends and enjoy his favourite pastimes.

In Country Life, the magazine’s architectural editor, John Goodall, was impressed by ‘a hugely impressive and readable’ book. And it’s sumptuously illustrated too.

Old Whitehall Palace, 1675, by Danckerts

TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF MUDDLING THROUGH THE SURPRISING STORY OF BRITAIN’S ECONOMY FROM BOOM TO BUST AND BACK AGAIN

DUNCAN WELDON Little, Brown, 339pp, £20

‘For all the popular history published about, say, Anne Boleyn’s third cousin thrice-removed, books that outline the fundamental forces of British history – the tectonic economic changes beyond any individual’s or even government’s control – are surprisingly rare,’ wrote Anton Howes in his review for the Financial Times.

‘Thankfully, Duncan Weldon has written just such a book. He pans out from the trees we’ve become so accustomed to squinting at to show us a vast, wild and unpredictable wood.

Here is the history that really matters.’

‘For a reader new to the subject, all this will probably be very useful’ Aditya Chakrabortty, writing in the Guardian, said it is ‘a terrific achievement, covering clearly but with subtlety everything from the spinning jenny to Covid-19. Along the way, Weldon makes some intriguing arguments, such as how successive generations of politicians swear they’re fixing problems, only for a new variant to pop up a little later.’

Although Weldon’s book is only 300 pages, wrote Dominic Sandbrook in his Sunday Times review, ‘his narrative races from the early 1700s to the Covid pandemic, taking in everything from the South Sea Bubble to the impact of the financial crisis...

For a reader new to the subject, all this will probably be very useful. For anybody else, though, it’s far too short and far, far too dry. Surprisingly for a journalist, Weldon has a pathological aversion to colour or anecdote.

Human beings do appear, but they almost never say anything. Perhaps that’s not surprising, in what is basically an economics textbook...

Even the chapter on Thatcherism – surely the most controversial experiment in our economic history – is entirely bloodless.’

Paperbacks The historian David Olusoga has called Michael Bundock’s biography, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (Yale University Press, 296pp, £11.99), a ‘remarkable work of detection, a biography of a black Briton from the 18th century that brings to life a rich and vital aspect of our shared history’. Francis Barber was born on a sugar plantation in about 1742 and brought to London when the plantation was sold, arriving aged 10 years old in the household of Dr Johnson, a passionate opponent of slavery. This ‘crisply written, empathetic biography scrupulously documents Barber’s life and illuminates the experiences of black Britons in the 18th century’, confirmed Henry Hitchens in the Guardian; with Kathryn Sutherland calling the book ‘a fine biography’ in the TLS. The Cathedral by Ben Hopkins (Europa, 624pp, £8.99) is ‘a staggeringly ambitious novel’, enthused Antonia Senior in the Times. ‘It begins in 1229, with a bishop’s whim to build a great cathedral, and ends in 1351. Over more than 600 pages it follows the lives of the people of the fictional town of Hagenburg as the cathedral rises, stone by stone.’

Hopkins has ‘written a good old-fashioned historical novel,’ wrote Hal Jensen in the TLS, ‘alive with drama detail rather than encrusted with period research...

The sentences are short, as are the chapters, the language is simple yet sharp, and the reader races happily over the terrain.’ Alun David in the Jewish Chronicle reckoned The Cathedral, whose author is a renowned screenwriter, was ‘ripe for TV adaptation’.

Rupert Everett’s third memoir, To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde (Abacus, 352pp, £9.99), ‘is the story of his enduring obsession with Wilde and how it compelled him to make a film about the doomed writer’, explained Rachel Cooke in the Guardian. It ‘quivers with honesty, A-list gossip and sardonic prose. We should really start describing him as a writer who acts, rather than the other way round,’ thought Ed Potton in the Times.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 7

Forgotten authors LUCY LETHBRIDGE on the fashion historian and novelist Doris Langley Moore If you want a treat, visit the BBC iPlayer archive: buried in there, there’s a period gem from 1957 – Men, Women and Clothes, the first colour series ever made by the Beeb.

It takes place in Eridge Castle, the first home of the Costume Museum, and is written and presented by Doris Langley Moore wearing formidably well-cut dresses adorned with statement buttons. Around the lawns cavort various famous faces in period dress – including Vanessa Redgrave and, curiously, Benny Hill. Moore has a great voice – deep, flavoursome, bold and brooking no dissent: it’s worth tuning in just to hear her enunciate the word ‘accessories’. I had no idea you could roll Ss and Rs around each other so elaborately.

When Doris Langley Moore says, ‘It’s every woman’s ambition to look slinky’, it is said with such authority that one wonders why one had ever been ambitious to be anything else.

Moore, who died in 1986, aged 84, is best remembered for being a fashion historian when the idea was completely new. It was her vast collection of antique dress that formed the first Museum of Costume (now in Bath). Brought up in South Africa and mostly self-educated, she was a prodigious reader who on moving to London in the 1920s published her first book at the age of 24 – a verse translation from Greek of odes by Anacreon. From then on, she never stopped turning them out – among them books on household management, a biography of E Nesbit and a ‘discourse on fashionable life’.

Her 1928 book The Technique of the Love Affair advised women on how to catch a husband. In the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker thought Moore’s tip that you could hook any man simply by making him realise his utter inferiority made ‘considerable sense’.

If only, Parker thought, ‘it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful rather than just successive.’

Moore was obsessed by fashion and pronounced hat-buying the best cure for her occasional bouts of low spirits. She was flapperish but literary, given to de haut on bas hauteur but at the same time not quite snobbish.

‘Harder-core bohemians’ were her chosen circle remembered her friend 8 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Doris Langley Moore in 1957

Barbara Ker-Seymer. She was at all the parties but was entirely independent (her brutal seduction techniques didn’t work for herself as her marriage lasted only a year).

Moore started collecting costume in the 1930s, starting with an Edwardian wedding dress, and became obsessed. Her greatest coup was probably the discovery of the Albanian costume worn by Lord Byron for his 1814 portrait by Thomas Phillips; she unearthed it in the attic of Bowood House. This is turn led to a passion for Byron and the publication of several scholarly works on the poet, a biography of Ada Lovelace and the founding of the Byron Society of which she was the first vice-president.

She wrote once: ‘I am perhaps the only woman to whom nothing but pleasure has come from loving that poet.’ She was a powerhouse of industry and enthusiasms. Her DNB entry includes the line ‘she was a difficult woman and some of her friendships ended in bitterness’ but alas doesn’t expand on it. But she certainly packed a lot in.

Now the enterprising Dean Street Press has re-issued four of Moore’s novels, written between 1938 and 1959. In them, that rich deep voice with its razor-sharp enunciations tells the reader what’s what – but the novels are also funny, somewhat self-mocking and full of often twisty and surprising social observations that often take the reader by surprise.

Although clearly now period pieces, they are still extremely readable and Moore navigates her complicated plots with considerable skill. An added pleasure is the books’

introduction by Roy Strong who knew Moore in the 1960s; she once took him out to lunch at the Ivy and asked him to sign her passport photograph which looked not remotely like her having been taken through flattering gauze.

Moore clearly took seriously the exhortation to write of what you know. In all the novels we see the main character’s preoccupations dovetail beautifully with her own. She may have been difficult to like but Moore is perceptive about character and lays her own susceptibilities bare for her readers. In Not At Home (1948), for example, a middle-aged woman in a Chelsea house filled with lovingly accumulated beautiful things has to get a lodger to help pay the bills during rationing. This beautiful but stupid younger woman is a horror, who leaves a hot iron on an 18thcentury table and wine stains on lovely carpets. There’s a subplot involving a Pinewood starlet which doesn’t quite work but the main dynamic – between two women of different generations and types – is startlingly vividly and convincingly drawn.

In All Done by Kindness (1951), a doctor takes pity on a poor old lady and pays her bills in exchange for a chest of what looks like worthless old paintings. Thanks to the intervention of (guess who?) a remarkably stylish and informed librarian called Stephanie du Plessis, a complex plot of attribution, art world corruption and a bit of (half-hearted) romance unfold. In her last book, My Caravaggio Years (1959), a young bookseller fakes Byron’s lost memoir to sell to a gullible American. He persuades his fashion model fiancée to do some research for him only to find that she begins to be too aware of his less-than-Byronic attractions.

They’re fun. And with their tight plots, carefully sprung surprises and astute social and even emotional observations, every one of them I think would work as adaptations for television drama. It’s time for a Doris Langley Moore revival.

Not At Home, All Done by Kindness, My Caravaggio Years and A Game of Snakes and Ladders are published by Dean Street Press at £11.99 each

Biography & memoir

Dior’s story reflects the era’s conflicts

MISS DIOR

A STORY OF COURAGE AND COUTURE

JUSTINE PICARDIE

Emma Fraser, writing in the i, Miss Dior is ‘far more than a simple collation of archival material exploring the intersection of fashion and war in the 20th century, with Picardie’s personal reflections adding an effective emotional thread. The book juxtaposes the macabre and ethereal, reflecting the contradictions of this era. Picardie contemplates the paradox between the escapist beauty of Dior’s couture and the inhuman treatment his sister endured and how this overlap illustrates the duality of Occupied France... Miss Dior ensures the bravery of the women at Ravensbrück is not merely a distant echo.’ For Laura Freeman in the Times, ‘Catherine’s story is beautifully, hauntingly told in spare and elegant prose by Picardie’ and ‘the archive photographs – there are more than 400 – are moving and evocative’.

HEIRESSES

Faber, 438pp, £25

THE LIVES OF THE MILLION DOLLAR BABIES

This new biography of ‘the heroic, patriotic, and quietly influential Catherine Dior... is of the moment, celebrating an unsung hero at a time when female influences are earning new acclaim,’ wrote Laird BorrelliPersson in Vogue. Sunday Times reviewer, Jackie Annesley, called it ‘an extraordinary biography’. Picardie has used ‘her investigative reporting skills to comb for what she can through the Dior archives and thousands of other wartime documents. The result is Netflixworthy and the pace page-turning as Picardie presents a woman beyond the boundaries of Planet Fashion... In this book it is Catherine’s story that shines – the quiet Dior who preferred flowers to fashion, the unsung heroine who survived the abuse of the Third Reich to help liberate France.’

Artemis Cooper, who reviewed it for the Times Literary Supplement, found it to be ‘a very personal, very passionate book’ in which Picardie ‘makes the reader realise just how much glancing away, how much silence and deliberate forgetting, it took to remake postwar France’. For

LAURA THOMPSON

‘Picardie presents a woman beyond the boundaries of Planet Fashion’ 10 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Head of Zeus, 378pp, £25

Laura Thompson is no stranger to the beau monde, having written two books about the Mitfords and one about Lord Lucan. Heiresses announces itself as exploring the phenomenon of the heiress from the 17th to the 21st centuries. In practice, she restricts herself to English and American subjects. Most reviewers found the book ‘fabulously entertaining’ (Kathryn Hughes in the Daily Mail) or ‘wonderfully entertaining’ (Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times). Ysenda Maxton Graham in the Times thought it ‘deeply empathetic …In fact, I’ve rarely encountered such a concentration of rich, thin, unhappy women who lived in the permanent shadeless glare of vast wealth. Their pain, their guilt, their urge to self-punishment, and their fatal susceptibility to marrying Mr Wrong, are laid bare.’

Daisy Goodwin felt ‘like shouting, “What on earth were you thinking?” as heiress after heiress wilfully marries Mr Wrong’. Despite this note of moralising schadenfreude, the book’s reviewers dutifully noted the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. However, any pretence

that Heiresses is a work of social history falters before the way the critics mainly retold the stories Thompson has collected. Daisy Fellowes asking who some children were in the street in Paris only to be told they were hers, or Alice de Janzé in Happy Valley groaning: ‘Oh God, not another f***ing beautiful day’ struck several.

CHAISE LONGUE BAXTER DURY Little, Brown, 224pp, £16.99

‘Baxter Dury was introduced to the world as a five-year-old urchin, standing alongside his dad on the cover of Ian Dury’s 1977 album New Boots and Panties!!’ explained Neil McCormick in the Telegraph. ‘Dury’s parental skills, however, left a lot to be desired.’

‘In this entertaining memoir,’ said the Observer’s Neil Spencer, ‘Baxter is clear-eyed about his father’s strengths and failings, of which he saw more once he had effectively dropped out of school altogether and was lodging in his father’s flat: “Dad broke your confidence and replaced it with his own.”... Things took a weirder and more alarming turn with the arrival of a new minder, a 6ft 7in “malodorous giant” who had previously worked for Led Zeppelin, among others. His name was Peter Rush but he was commonly known by his nickname, the Sulphate Strangler, a soubriquet earned by drug consumption (and dealing) and picking up people by their throat. The Strangler became a bizarre in loco parentis whenever Ian was away.’

In the Sunday Times Victoria Segal called the book ‘a bright, bruising account of growing up in the

Baxter and Ian Dury on 1977 album

Biography & memoir blast zone of a chaotic parent’, adding that it was ‘wild, exhilarating and often very funny, but only, you suspect, because it’s at a distance, safely in the rear-view mirror of someone else’s life’.

praised a ‘meticulously researched book’ and wondered why the Duke had not been imprisoned. ‘He could even have been tried for treason after the war.’ But the Windsors remained at liberty, forever exiled in ‘a gilded, lonely, pointless life’.

SPEAK, SILENCE

IN SEARCH OF WG SEBALD

CAROLE ANGIER Bloomsbury, 640pp, £30

TRAITOR KING

THE SCANDALOUS EXILE OF THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF WINDSOR

ANDREW LOWNIE Blink Publishing, 352pp, £25

Andrew Lownie’s book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had reviewers reaching eagerly for modern parallels. ‘It is packed with stories of fraternal feuds, bickering sisters-in law, arguments over titles and money, ill-judged memoirs and reckless relationships with unsavoury people,’ wrote Marcus Field in the Evening Standard. In fact, it should be ‘urgent reading for royals’.

Lownie has concentrated on the Windsors’ life after the abdication, particularly their ‘shady’ activities during the war. Historians have argued about the extent of the Windsors’ dealings with Hitler’s Germany but Lownie is firmly of the opinion that they were actively engaged in German intrigues. AN Wilson in the TLS enjoyed the book enormously (‘briskly written and compulsively readable’) but thought Lownie had found little that ‘will not be familiar to the addicts’. But what a story it still is, full of spies, crooks and dodgy friends. ‘There is Wallis Simpson’s hypnotic and still not quite comprehensible hold over the little prince, from almost the moment they met at a party in 1931; and her bizarre emotional history, including her affair with the German ambassador Ribbentrop, who sent her 17 carnations a day in acknowledgement of the number of times they had slept together.’

In the Spectator, Francis Beckett

The four great prose works of WG Sebald were published around the turn of the millennium, a period once perceived as the end of history. Ryu Spaeth described Sebald’s books in the New Republic, as ‘mournful monuments… glimpses of the vast necropolis just beneath the surface of things’. Sebald averred that the function of literature was to awaken ‘the faculty of remembering’. His novels are in the ‘sombre business of saving the forgotten souls of the Holocaust’. His biographer, Carole Angier, set out to square Sebald’s mendacity in life with the painful honesty of his work. He is perceived as ‘Nabokovian’ rather than a ‘charlatan’ for his bold borrowing of other people’s lives (without their permission) as sources for his books.

Anthony Cummins, in the Guardian, defined this as ‘a kind of fake analogue’. Angier sets out to ‘probe the implications’ of Sebald’s uneasy blend of fact and fiction. It is to her credit that Angier ‘doesn’t try to settle the question of Sebald’s effects.

Ultimately, the brilliance of her biography, a spectacularly agile work of criticism as well as a feat of doggedly meticulous research, lies in Angier’s ability to look her subject straight in the eye.’ For Jonathan Derbyshire in the FT, Angier solves the Sebald puzzle: the Holocaust is the ‘catastrophe for which he would spend the rest of his life trying to atone’.

FOREVER YOUNG A MEMOIR

HAYLEY MILLS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 392pp, £20

Hayley Mills is ‘full of vim’ and ‘still a sparkling storyteller’, assured Helen Brown in the Daily Telegraph. While Hollywood is full of stories of child stars going off the rails, Mills never

did. For Louis Bayard in the Washington Post, Forever Young is ‘an affectionate but clear-eyed memoir of an unusual career that began at 12, swelled to global proportions during puberty and in young adulthood, dwindled into something quieter’.

Mills’s career was created and owned by Walt Disney. Her first role as Pollyanna (1960), brought him and her instant global success. But Mills is ‘tart’ about her former employer: ‘When it came to deal making, the Mickey Mouse Club took no prisoners.’ She is ‘refreshingly honest about her mother’s alcoholism, her own bulimia and her troubled first marriage to Roy Boulting, a film director 32 years her senior’.

Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal praised Mills’s writing as well as her acting; Forever Young is ‘an unexpected treat: a brave and revealing memoir with nary a dull passage’. Roger Lewis in the Sunday Times shared his view: ‘Hayley is fully aware of how she used to come across on screen and her brave book will evoke vivid reminiscences of the 1960s, when the fate of perky young blondes was to be as a lamb to the slaughter.’

LIVES BETWEEN THE LINES

A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF THE LOST LEVANT

MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp £20

With his mother descended from an Italian Jewish family which settled in Egypt in the 19th century and a father whose Greek Orthodox family settled in Palestine in the mid-1870s, Vatikiotis is eminently qualified to write about the lost world of the Levant. This is ‘the moving and beautifully written story of a journey to explore his identity by visiting the places... in which several generations The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 11

Biography & memoir of his Levantine ancestors made their homes,’ wrote Justin Marozzi in the Financial Times. ‘As well as being a highly personal family-memoir-cumtravelogue, it is a paean to tolerance between diverse faiths and different communities at a time when much of the Middle East is being consumed by bigotry, fanaticism and sectarian violence.’

Andrew Lycett, in the Spectator, found Vatikiotis to be ‘quietly opinionated, a quality which makes him an admirable guide for this evocation of an era – a journey of personal discovery, where, despite complexities, everything stands neatly in historical and topographical context’.

Vatikiotis’s pen portraits of his ancestors and family members left Times reviewer Richard Spencer ‘wanting more of this amazing cast of characters. For the family are bit-part players in what is in fact a potted history of the late Levant, living proofs in his view of the Ottoman Empire’s enlightened approach to minority cultures.’ The ‘final two chapters describe and acknowledge the ambiguities consequent on Britain’s eventual imperial retreat and the region’s expulsions of foreigners – British, Jewish, Greek, Italian alike.

They are easily the finest and worth the cover price alone.’

IN THE SHADOW OF THE EMPRESS

become so much more accessible.’

And he noted that ‘the pithy footnotes alone are worth the price of the book’.

THE TICK OF TWO CLOCKS

A TALE OF MOVING ON

JOAN BAKEWELL Virago, 192pp, £16.99

Empress Maria Theresa: formidable

against a turbulent century of social unrest, revolution and war,’ DeGroot continued. ‘In describing these familiar political events, Goldstone holds her own against an impressive fraternity of scholars; the depth of her research and the acuity of her insights are outstanding.’ Goldstone, he acknowledged, ‘is fascinated by families’, understanding that behind the pomp and ceremony ‘these monarchs were real people … the way they lived their lives at home shaped how they behaved on the world stage.’

The book’s uniqueness ‘lies in the way these characters are brought to life’.

Kirkus praised ‘a colourful collection of dynamic, prodigiously

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 616pp, £25

‘Goldstone’s depth of research and acuity of insights are outstanding’

This biography of Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, and three of her daughters ‘is a virtuoso performance, Goldman at the peak of her creative abilities’, Gerard DeGroot enthused in the Times. As Frederick the Great grudgingly conceded, Maria Theresa ‘executed plans worthy of a man of genius’, but she did more than that. She gave birth to 16 children, who drew confidence from knowing their formidable mother loved them.

The fates of Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Maria Antonia, all of whom made dynastic marriages, are featured here.

‘The interlocking lives of these formidable women are played out

researched portraits’, adding that Goldstone ‘is an empathetic biographer’. Indeed, DeGroot noted that ‘In Goldstone’s hands, [Marie Antoinette] becomes more sympathetic and complex, a woman who did not deserve the fate dealt her.’ Her difficulties with education suggest that she may have had ADHD, while Louis XVI was possibly autistic, denying Marie Antoinette the affection she craved.

‘Goldstone has a distinctly casual way of discussing these women,’ DeGroot noted. ‘Purists will find her offhand manner annoying, but it has an important effect. Described in 21st century terms, these characters

THE DEFIANT LIVES OF MARIA THERESA, MOTHER OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, AND HER DAUGHTERS

NANCY GOLDSTONE

12 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

National treasure Joan Bakewell, in her eighties, decides to prepare for the ending of her days by moving from the Primrose Hill townhouse she has lived in for 50 years to something more manageable containing a bedsit for the carer she will inevitably need.

This, then, wrote Rachel Cooke in the Observer, is the ‘story of the move, and of how its downsizing author comes to slough off – sometimes painfully – the many things she will no longer have room for’.

Born in 1933, Bakewell is of that gilded generation who ‘had the luck to buy property when she did and watch its value soar underneath her’, wrote Sarah Ditum in the Times – a point not lost on Roger Lewis, in the Telegraph. ‘Bully for you, dear,’ he responded to her statement that ‘We oldies with our own homes are lucky indeed.’ ‘Equivalent youngsters today,’ Lewis went on, ‘will find her life reprehensively perfect’ and the ‘capital gain’ from the sale of her house nothing short of ‘obscene’. Not for her, ‘a charity almshouse or maximum-security twilight home smelling of cabbage’, he sniffed.

Cooke, too, admitted she was ‘stabbed again and again with envy at [Bakewell’s] good fortune’. Even the move itself ‘turns out to be as seamless as flashy hosiery’. ‘To be clear, I don’t begrudge her anything,’ Cooke insisted, while Ditum thought her ‘creative solution’ to old age ‘gracefully described’ and an ‘inspiration’. Even Lewis, possibly in a fit of remorse, conceded the book was ‘an eloquent poetry of departures… fun and brightness concealing, perhaps, her life’s darker corners’.

PESSOA

AN EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

RICHARD ZENITH Allen Lane, 1,050pp, £40

The reputation of the Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, has been quietly growing, but David Sexton in

Biography & memoir the Times hailed ‘this immense, magnificent biography’ by Richard Zenith as the revelation that establishes him beside modern masters such as Joyce, Beckett and Kafka. Pessoa was brought up in Durban, where his stepfather was consul, then returned to Lisbon, which he never left. There he worked

SINATRA AND ME

IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS

TONY OPPEDISANO WITH MARY JANE ROSS Scribner, 320p, £18.99

This intimate account is a trip ‘through Oppedisano’s memories of his first Sinatra album purchase at age 13, his introduction to the legendary crooner at a Manhattan bar in 1974, and his eventual role as Sinatra’s road manager during the final years of [his] touring career’, explained Meghan Roos in Newsweek. ‘Informed by hours of late-night conversations the author had with Sinatra, it’s a bleak tale of fading powers and creeping debility,’ said Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times. In the Daily Mail Daniel Bates noted, ‘Sinatra sometimes talked about his mental health issues and said he was a “24-carat manic depressive”. Late in his life [he] said he thought he was bipolar.’

Fernando Pessoa: master of invention

in humdrum office jobs and published one slim volume of poems, Message.

He died aged 47 in 1935 ‘alcoholic and almost certainly a virgin, leaving behind a wooden chest filled with thousands of pages of disordered manuscripts, scrawled on pieces of paper picked up at random’. These were to become his prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, posthumously published in 1982.

In the Literary Review, Alberto Manguel quoted Adorno, ‘The finished work is, in our age and climate of anguish, a lie…Pessoa arduously succeeded in avoiding the lie’. Pessoa worked through multiple ‘heteronyms’, an astonishing collection of different writers in English French and Portuguese that he had invented.

Manguel wrote: ‘the marvel of Zenith’s biography is that he has managed to follow the tracks of them all, with their many detours, changes and evolutions, physical as well as philosophical, in a maddening kaleidoscope of identities where no one has the final word.’

In the Guardian Peter Conrad suggested the heteronyms were ‘imaginary playmates, refugees from a lost childhood’. He concluded that Zenith’s biography worked best ‘when treating Pessoa as a tragicomic oddity’.

First meeting, 1972: Sinatra, Les Stanco (musician) and Oppedisano

Apart from mental states and music, sex looms large. ‘At one point,’ said Segal, ‘Oppedisano is helping a whiskey-tired Sinatra to put on pyjamas when the singer looks down at his penis and sighs: “If you could only tell my friend where you’ve been.” “You know, Frank,” Oppedisano replies, “perhaps it would be a shorter list if he told me where he hasn’t been”.’ Segal called Oppedisano ‘an observer, a caretaker, loyal to the point he was holding Sinatra’s hand when he died.

Occasionally indulgent and sentimental, his account still adds a tenderness and vulnerability to Sinatra’s story that’s there in his music, but rarely in his biography.’

WILL SHE DO?

ACT ONE OF A LIFE ON STAGE

EILEEN ATKINS Virago, 312pp, £18.99

Eileen Atkins, one of the most loved and admired actors of her generation, put lockdown to good use by writing her memoir. ‘Theatrical memoirs … can be quite gruesomely tedious,’ Rachel Cooke confessed in the Observer, ‘but Atkins’s is bliss: so funny and atmospheric and true.

She’s honest about herself, too, as content to relate her humiliations as her triumphs.’ It ‘displays the emotional intelligence, acute observation, wry humour and above all honesty that distinguish Atkins’s acting’, Michael Arditti agreed in the Spectator.

Mick Brown in the Telegraph praised it as ‘by far the most entertaining book I have read this year — candid, revealing and shot through with a wit so dry it’s almost parched’. ‘She graphically describes a childhood of material, cultural and emotional deprivation’ and ‘painfully charts the indignities of her early life’, Arditti noted.

The memoir stretches from when Tottenham ‘Baby Eileen’ at the age of six started tap-dancing and singing in working-men’s clubs for 15 bob a night, up to the age of 32 when she first went to Broadway.

The subtitle of the book suggests there has to be a second Act. Roger Lewis in the Mail certainly hopes so, ‘because as a writer she is very fine, with a wit drier than a martini’.

‘Above all, this is an exhilarating portrait of an actress who has surmounted seemingly insuperable odds to reach the pinnacle of her profession,’ Arditti concluded.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 13

Afghanistan With the catastrophic end to the West’s two-decade adventure in Afghanistan still fresh in the mind, a rash of new books have come out – some felicitously timed; others yanked forward in the publication schedule – to offer analysis, blame, background and the odd I-told-you-so.

Most optimistic, perhaps, is Toby Harnden’s account of what, writing in the Times, Max Hastings called ‘the days when the world, or rather the struggle, was young and full of hope’.

Harnden secured access to the special forces soldiers dropped by the CIA into Afghanistan after the towers fell, and uses it to tell the story of the first major engagements in the war against the Taliban. Armed to the teeth and with $3 million in running-around money, they were dropped into northern Afghanistan by a Black Hawk chopper with ‘Don’t Bring A Knife To A Gunfight’ stencilled on the side. Hastings said it was a ‘terrific action narrative, compromised as history by its dependence on the CIA version of events, and a surfeit of adjectives and four-letter words’.

Writing in the Spectator, Justin Marozzi called it an ‘on-the-ground, action-packed, shoot-’em-up, all-American gunslinging adventure’, whose heart was ‘the Battle of Qala-i Jangi, a bloody, six-day revolt of around 400 al Qaeda prisoners in a 19th-century fortress designed by British engineers during earlier imperial adventures’. As Marozzi noted, that was the scene of the US’s first casualty in Afghanistan – and ‘almost 2,500 followed over the next two decades’.

Those decades were covered in a book that took a longer view, Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers, which benefited from ‘the quintessentially American reporter’s unrelenting focus on detail and terrier-like persistence, as evidenced by his multiple freedom of information requests and the three-year legal battle it took to get the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to disclose its previously secret “Lessons Learned” interviews with key figures.’ The picture those interviews tell is damning: ‘Never mind the complexities of Afghanistan, even the most basic understanding of the place appeared vanishingly elusive […] The Afghanistan Papers is a devastating blast against the lies and deceit which 14 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Afghan Commandos outside Kabul

FIRST CASUALTY

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BATTLE THAT BEGAN THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

TOBY HARNDEN Welbeck, 320pp, £18.99

THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR

CRAIG WHITLOCK Simon & Schuster, 366pp, £20

THE LONG WAR

THE INSIDE STORY OF AMERICA AND AFGHANISTAN SINCE 9/11

DAVID LOYN St Martin’s Press, 464pp, £21.59

AFGHAN NAPOLEON

THE LIFE OF AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD

SANDY GALL Haus Publishing, 345pp, £25

steadily deepened over the years.’

The Guardian’s Julian Borger agreed, hailing Whitlock’s ‘many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities’ and calling it ‘a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years […] a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes’.

Another overview came from David Loyn, whose authority – as John Lloyd noted in Quillette – is based on first-hand experience, ‘a BBC correspondent who dedicated much of his life to understanding Afghanistan [and] in the last two years in Afghanistan, he was an adviser on communications to Ashraf Ghani, who became president after

Karzai’s resignation’. In Loyn’s account, ‘during both Karzai’s and Ghani’s periods in office, prosecution of the war was hampered by conflicting realist and idealist impulses in the American capital’. As for the Afghan end of things, Loyn defends Ghani against accusations of personal corruption, but ‘does not duck recording a catalogue of failures.

These included the deliberate weakening of the regional governors, an inability to build political support and a flaccid and self-defeating response to the chance of developing a peace process with the Taliban.’

A sense of ‘if only’, in this context, hung over reviews of the veteran war correspondent Sandy Gall’s Afghan Napoleon, which told the story of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a mujahideen leader who as a young man was the West’s golden boy in the 1970s proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As Colin Freeman noted in the Telegraph, ‘Gall’s book serves two timely purposes. One is to retell Massoud’s legendary campaign against the Soviets, which saw him dubbed “the Afghan who won the Cold War”. The other, though, is to ask whether more Western support for him in the 1990s could have led to a better Afghanistan.’

This ‘Afghan Che Guevara’ ‘spoke fluent French, loved poetry, and wanted Afghanistan to become a moderate, multi-ethnic democracy’, and ‘true, Massoud’s men were accused of human rights abuses, but nothing on the scale of the looting and pillaging committed by other mujahideen leaders’. ‘Some may… accuse Gall of falling too much for the Massoud myth,’ said Freeman, and pointed out he was ‘an ethnic Tajik, so any government led by him would have struggled for acceptance by Afghanistan’s larger Pashtun group’.

Still, he could have been ‘a Tito, perhaps, if not quite a Tony Blair’.

But the CIA turned against him. As Matthew Leeming wrote in the Spectator, ‘The book makes clear the chain of disastrous misjudgments by the US in failing to support Massoud and, almost unbelievably, actually favouring a Taliban takeover in 1996.’

In 2001, Massoud was assassinated by suicide bombers posing as a TV crew. ‘His assassination was especially tragic,’ wrote Leeming, ‘because, Gall believes, he was the one man who could have ensured Afghanistan a democratic future.’

Novel Damon Galgut’s The Promise is the South African writer’s finest novel, believes PAUL BAILEY There is a sardonic interloper in The Promise, the arresting new novel by Damon Galgut, who is never identified. It might just be the author himself who interrupts the narrative at unexpected moments with comments that bring the reader to a stop, but that seems too obvious an explanation. The voice is that of someone who sounds like the storyteller’s conscience as well as his confidante, and it informs the overall tone of a book that encompasses the decline of the Swart family and the inevitable collapse of apartheid, the political system that sustained their privileged way of life for more than 40 years. It’s a moral tale, in its way, about a set of people unacquainted with the simplest principles of everyday morality. There are scenes in which the Swarts’s farm in Pretoria has much in common with the House of Atreus.

The Promise opens in 1986, when white supremacy in South Africa was in its dying days, with the death of Rachel, the wife of Herman (Manie) Albertus Swart, the owner of a reptile park called Scaly City. Manie is suffering on two counts – from the loss of Rachel, but also the fact of her conversion back to the Jewish faith she was born into when she knew she was terminally ill. He feels enraged by what he still sees as both a rejection and a betrayal. Their three children are summoned to the farmstead for what will be a kosher funeral. The 13-year-old Amor is picked up from the boarding school she hates by her aunt Marina and her husband Ockie, an unlovely couple Galgut clearly relished creating.

Amor’s sister, Astrid, busy disposing of her virginity, is already on the premises, and Anton, the firstborn, who is doing his national service as a rifleman in the South African army has been granted compassionate leave for a few days.

Rachel’s is the first of the four funerals that Damon Galgut accounts for in meticulous, and sometimes macabrely funny, detail. Her husband’s, nine years later, is a burial imagined by a savage farceur – so much so, you could even say it’s to die for. Marina’s conviction that the body in the coffin is not her beloved brother’s is the inspiration 16 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Four funerals: often macabrely funny

for the most alarming incident in the entire novel. Although he has admitted that he has never managed to finish reading a single work by Dickens, Damon Galgut – in The Promise, at least – frequently writes passages of bright comedy that merit being called Dickensian. The glee with which he sets down everything you ever needed to know about the workings of an undertaker’s business or the manner in which a corpse is prepared for its eventual cremation is a reminder to the reader of the old adage that there’s humour to be found in circumstances that are usually considered to be beyond a joke.

There is a central character, too, who is reminiscent of one of the great Victorian novelist’s memorable hypocrites. Alwyn Simmers (note the surname) is Manie Swart’s spiritual advisor. He has removed himself from the Dutch Reformed Church and has struck out on his own and, with the financial assistance of Manie, built his very own church on his benefactor’s farmland. Simmers is almost blind and dependent on his formidable sister and helpmeet Laetitia. They make a grimly pious pair. ‘The Lord has been good to him in recent times, and he has a fat flock who regularly pay their tithes’ observes the storyteller, thinking the pastoor’s thoughts. Anton, cast by

Galgut writes passages of comedy that merit being called Dickensian

Simmers in the role of the prodigal son, sees through him instantly, recognising him as a crook on the sanctimonious make. Nevertheless, the man of God is fun to be with on the page, especially when his ultra-expensive speaking wristwatch announces the time at inconvenient moments.

It is Amor who shows at every stage in this family saga, to use a convenient term, the qualities of selflessness, compassion and goodness so little in evidence among her siblings and the father she loves despite himself. One learns from the outset of the novel that she was struck by lightning as a child. The bolt hit her foot, necessitating the removal of a toe, but otherwise she wasn’t seriously injured. Manie, regarding her survival as a gift from the almighty, had his faith restored with the assistance of the everobliging Simmers. Amor befriends the Swarts’s black servant Salome and her son Lukas and is determined that Rachel’s dying wish that Manie should give the hard-working Salome the little house, amounting to not much more than a shack, she lives in.

Amor hears him assure Rachel that he will honour her wish, and that’s the promise of the title. It remains unfulfilled almost until The Promise comes to an end.

This is the finest of all Damon Galgut’s extraordinary novels. It reads as if the author has liberated himself from certain shackles he has needed in the past to convey the feelings of repression and social discomfort his people suffer. He walks a literary tightrope here, courting caricature and avoiding it with bold stylishness. The untidy and often squalid lives of the desperate Anton and the vain and shallow Astrid are presented with just the right amount of information. The writing – so impish, so playful – is a constant joy. The big historical events of the last three decades are uncomfortably present throughout.

Galgut has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize twice before and is this year’s winner. The Promise, it is safe to predict, will endure.

The Promise is published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99

Sport football’s ‘dark arts’, wrote Barekat, for his admirers it was ‘just another of his talents’, and his infamous hand of God goal against England in 1986 was justified ‘by invoking Argentina’s underdog status’. Barekat concluded that: ‘One gets the sense the book may have been completed in a hurry, but this is nonetheless a compelling and even-handed account of a truly extraordinary life.’

ALL IN

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BILLIE JEAN KING

MARADONA

THE BOY, THE REBEL, THE GOD

GUILLEM BALAGUE Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 384pp, £20

‘First there was Diego, the sweetnatured, generous, boundlessly enthusiastic kid from Villa Fiorito, a slum without running water on the south side of Buenos Aires,’ wrote John Aizlewood in the i. ‘Blessed with unnatural levels of natural talent, he would become the world’s best football player.’ But then there was ‘Maradona, the creature spawned by Diego’s genius. Mean-spirited, self-absorbed and without boundaries, Maradona was a cocaine fiend and it redesigned his inner landscape.’

Anthony Cummins in the Guardian wondered why Spanish football journalist Guillem Balagué had kept to ‘stories that have been told many times over’. It’s all here, from his ‘eight-to-a-room boyhood to the fracture of his magical left ankle in an X-rated horror tackle, to the 1994 doping ban that ended an unlikely international comeback’. But anyone curious about what came next — ‘managing Argentina, working in Mexico, Belarus and Dubai, more trouble with drink and drugs, allegations of domestic violence, may find less to go on’.

One intriguing Balagué tidbit, according to Houman Barekat in the TLS, is that it could have been a very different story had ‘Sheffield United succeeded in their attempt to sign him in 1978’, a deal scuppered by the military junta, who saw him as a national asset. Cocaine was the downfall and Belagué ‘traces Maradona’s first sniff’ to arriving in Naples in 1984, ‘from where it took hold’. As to Maradona’s mastery of

Viking, 482pp, £20

Who can forget the sight of Billie Jean King presenting Emma Raducanu with the US Open singles trophy and not reflect that without BJ there might have been no Emma? King’s new memoir is, wrote Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, a ‘vivid account of her rise to sporting greatness and her struggles to attain equal treatment for women in a shockingly discriminatory sport’. Melanie Reid in the Times told how: ‘At 11, she was yanked out of a photo line-up because she was wearing shorts, not a tennis skirt. At 15, short and plump, she was told by a coach that she would succeed “because you’re ugly”.’ Tim Adams in the Observer described King’s life as one of ‘struggle, fought first for parity between the men’s and women’s games, and then as a champion of gay rights’. King, he said, ‘approached both these causes in the same spirit in which she played the game, always looking to attack rather than defend, more likely to charge the net than play things safe’.

Rebecca Myers in the Sunday Times saw the book as ‘a compelling portrait of modern America, from the desegregation of schools to the heyday of Gloria Steinem’s Ms magazine’. The i’s John Aizlewood

Billie Jean King in 1973: a sporting great

was, however, unconvinced, pointing out that ‘while she lingers on meeting Nelson Mandela, she hurtles past playing Apartheid-era South Africa in 1966, while Mandela was still in jail’.

But it was Reid who captured the general view, summing the book up as ‘brave and moving, a must-read for tennis fans and a vivid slice of social history — lucid, accomplished, thorough, slightly earnest and deeply humane’.

THE MASTER

THE BRILLIANT CAREER OF ROGER FEDERER

CHRISTOPHER CLAREY John Murray, 421pp, £20

The crucial elements in the life of one of the tennis greats of our time were well set out by G Sampath in The Hindu: ‘His Swiss-South African origins, early years of training in Basel, his teenage tantrums, the untimely demise of his Aussie coach Peter Carter and how it goaded him to take full ownership of his talent, the years of absolute dominance followed by a three-way rivalry with Nadal and Djokovic, and his wife Mirka’s role as a shield against off-court pressures.’

Clarey, Sampath went on, ‘pulls off the difficult feat of assimilating these known facts with original observations, drawing on anecdotes and insights culled from interviews with some 80 people’.

William Skidelsky, in the Times, acknowledged Clarey, chief tennis correspondent of the New York Times, as the ‘doyen of tennis journalism’ whose ‘knowledge of the sport is compendious’ and his portrait of the early life ‘especially interesting’.

‘His parents, both keen players, supported their son’s tennis but left him free to make his own choices, and his advancement, Clarey makes clear, was a collaborative effort.’ It was Carter who had most influence on the embryonic champion both in life and death, and, said Sampath, ‘moulded his distinctive free-flowing technique and bequeathed him the famous one-handed backhand’. And it was Carter’s shocking early death that ‘played a crucial role in motivating Federer’s ascent to greatness’, revealed Skidelsky. ‘In the months that followed there was a marked change in his approach: he became far more focused and determined — as if playing for “Pete upstairs”.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 17

Current affairs

Boris Johnson: charismatic

BROKEN HEARTLANDS A JOURNEY THROUGH LABOUR’S LOST ENGLAND SEBASTIAN PAYNE Macmillan, 432pp, £20

What happened in the so-called ‘red wall’ seats of the Midlands and northern England that caused them to switch from Labour to Tory in the general election of December 2019?

Sebastian Payne, Whitehall correspondent of the Financial Times, bought a red Mini Cooper and undertook a road trip to find out. ‘The result is a nuanced tour-d’horizon of a political landscape shaped by history, emotion, loss and patchy regeneration,’ wrote Julian Coman in the Observer. ‘Payne visits 10 red wall constituencies in England, nine of which turned blue in 2019. At each stop along the way, he intersperses local foot-slogging and analysis with a rich array of interviews, engaging a huge cast of characters... This engrossing, warm and insightful work is an indispensable guide to how it came about.’

Payne grew up in Gateshead, which is not a ‘red wall’ seat but shares similar characteristics. ‘His skin in the game makes the journey a personal one,’ wrote Martha Gill in the Evening Standard, ‘and this lends the book a particular warmth (it may also explain some of the candour of his interviewees). His passion for his subject comes through... What we get is a patchwork quilt of explanation, analysis, and anecdote, which gradually builds to Payne’s thesis: that Labour in these areas was indeed a victim of long-term, structural forces beyond its control – but that in 2019 18 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

these were turbocharged by Brexit, along with Jeremy Corbyn’s failings and Boris Johnson’s charisma...

Payne’s entertaining and insightful book is essential reading.’

In her review for the Times, Janice Turner found the book to be ‘thorough to the verge of obsessive... painting vivid portraits of uncelebrated towns. No one escapes his lively interrogation. He collars every living Labour leader except (notably) Jeremy Corbyn, old Tories such as Norman Tebbit and some rather surprised new MPs. He also speaks to countless angry, thoughtful, passionate, despairing locals, from fishermen to café owners, trade unionists to businessmen.’ New Statesman political commentator Stephen Bush said the book ‘examines the narratives on Red Wall constituencies like the layers of an onion: starting with superficial readings, before peeling them back to reveal greater complexity.’

FEMINISM FOR WOMEN THE REAL ROUTE TO LIBERATION JULIE BINDEL Constable, 248pp, £16.99

The writer and campaigner Julie Bindel is a co-founder of Justice for Women, which advocates for those convicted of murder after having experienced male violence. She is, as the Observer’s Rachel Cooke put it, a person of ‘integrity, bravery and determination’. For Melanie Reid in the Times she is ‘a rockstar of modern feminism’. But Bindel’s unfashionable views on sex work, pornography and biological sex have led in recent years to her being de-platformed following protests by trans activists and their allies, among them those who argue that ‘sex work is work’. At one debate, her opponent, a pornographer, was given a warm welcome by students who’d tried to get Bindel herself taken off the bill. Asked Cooke, ‘Is it really such a crime to believe, as she does, that sex is a material reality, and gender a social construct?’

In Feminism for Women, Bindel takes her axe to modern shibboleths.

The MeToo industry; the surrogacy business (‘a reproductive brothel for impoverished women’), porn and, of course, the trans debate. The cover comes with a puff from JK Rowling which, as Reid says, is a ‘red rag to a

bull’. Reid applauded her courage: ‘Why should young women in universities and other settings be silenced, forced to accept a form of feminism that benefits men and is harmful to women?’

In UnHerd, Kat Rosenfield agreed with Bindel’s argument that feminism had begun to ‘eat itself’, no longer making common cause among women because they are women but fragmented into the minute subdivisions of power demanded by ‘intersectionality’. Rosenfield found the Bindel polemic sometimes ‘overwhelming’, writing that this is ‘never truer than when Bindel turns her focus to men, and the women who love them’. However, ‘This is not to say that Bindel’s identity as a lesbian precludes her from talking to and about heterosexual women. Indeed, the notion of identity as a be-all-endall litmus test for determining who does and doesn’t get to speak on a given topic is just the sort of nonsense that this book rightly pushes back against.’

POWER PLAY ELON MUSK, TESLA AND THE BET OF THE CENTURY TIM HIGGINS WH Allen, 400pp, £20

In Power Play, Tim Higgins, Wall Street Journal technology reporter, has probed the evolution of the Tesla electric car technology and its famously eccentric creator Elon Musk. According to Kirkus Reviews, readers will find ‘a gold mine of facts and foibles in this immersive analysis’. But with perhaps an emphasis on the foibles? In the Los Angeles Times, Russ Mitchell was a wee bit disappointed. ‘Higgins doesn’t break much news or gossip – but the book also nicely encapsulates this sweeping history of the electric-car juggernaut, a company that often seems to innovate and thrive in spite of its founder rather than as a result of his vaunted genius.’

In the Times, Tesla-driver Stephen King confessed that he was an enthusiastic imbiber of the electric car kool aid. Elon Musk himself, reflected King, ‘is a remarkable character’. He made his first fortune by creating then selling the online payment service that later became PayPal. Since then, and still only 50, Musk has devoted his energies into working out how to

Current affairs create environmentally friendly cars by pumping money into research into storable energy in renewable batteries. King thought Higgins’s book ‘a bit Wall Street’: rather too much finance, not enough human detail; Musk himself seems to remain an enigma.

Jo Livingston in the New Republic highlighted how vulnerable Musk’s technologies actually were. Chief among the problems of Tesla is the tendency of lithium-ion batteries to catch fire. The review ends with a story that should fill us all with foreboding: ‘Last week, for example, over 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters in Victoria, Australia, fought to contain a massive fire at a Tesla facility caused when one, then two, 13-metric-ton lithium battery packs caught fire inside a shipping container.’

I ALONE CAN FIX IT DONALD J TRUMP’S CATASTROPHIC FINAL YEAR

CAROL LEONNIG AND PHILIP RUCKER Bloomsbury, 592pp, £25

that engulfed the White House and federal agencies tasked with dealing with Covid-19, protests over police brutality, and the transfer of power to a Biden administration. Among the plethora of galling anecdotes, Leonnig and Rucker reveal that Trump expected the FDA to approve remdesivir as a Covid-19 treatment because Oracle founder Larry Ellison said it worked, that chief of staff Mark Meadows considered Anthony Fauci a “fearmonger” and blocked his TV appearances, and that Rudi Giuliani’s advice to Trump on election night was to “just say we won”.’

This may be a book for hardcore Trump-era completists, however, as ‘the book’s moment-by-moment accumulation of detail grows dull at times, and the desire of the authors’ largely anonymous sources to shift blame and preserve their own reputations makes it hard to parse what actually happened.’ But Lloyd Green in the Guardian thought the book was ‘essential reading’, pulling ‘back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath’.

LANDSLIDE THE FINAL DAYS OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY MICHAEL WOLFF Bridge Street, 336pp, £20

Can a truly crazy person become the President of the United States? Well, yes. Landslide, the final volume in Michael Wolff’s trilogy about the Donald Trump years, takes readers to the chaotic end of Trump’s presidency when the man in the Oval Office spiralled even further into self-

deluded grandiosity. Peter Conrad in the Observer found Wolff too indulgent to a man ‘he despises but whose absurd antics he can’t help enjoying’. Wolff even sees Trump as a kind of ‘innocent’ whose ‘cluelessness absolves him of blame’. Conrad continued that the portrait of Trump that emerges here is ‘the monstrous spawn of showbiz and PR – an exhibitionistic performer whose only talent is for self-advertisement’.

Justin Webb in the Times thought the book was Wolff’s best by far. ‘His previous books on this president... titillated us with inside tales from a dysfunctional White House; terrified us a bit with gut-wrenching episodes of Diet Pepsi-fuelled craziness. They were warm-up acts. Low energy in comparison. Now we get the real deal.

Landslide cuts deeper than any previous book about this president, indeed about any president. It suggests that he was and is out of control.’

In the Evening Standard, Nick Curtis too was gripped by Wolff’s account of ‘new depths of dysfunction’. The regime, Curtis learned, was ‘governed by chaos and venal favouritism where trusted staffers could become bitter enemies in a moment’. And in the Daily Telegraph, Mick Brown also hailed the book as Wolff’s finest yet. ‘It is a terrifying, albeit highly partisan, study of a man refusing to grasp reality and retreating into delusion – or, as Trump and his supporters would doubtless have it, courageously and single-handedly fighting against the most egregious attack on American democracy and attempting to deprive him of his rightful place in the White House, and history.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 19

MATT JOHNSON

This is the authors’ (both Washington Post reporters) second book on Donald Trump. It takes us up to the turbulent downfall of the president and his refusal, two months after he lost the election, to concede defeat.

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker quote the parallels with Hitler’s Germany that were used by the staff of the White House as Trump’s supporters stormed the corridors of power. ‘This is a Reichstag moment,’ said General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Milley saw that the United States under Trump was undergoing its own version of the Weimar Republic, complete with modern day ‘brownshirts’ attacking the seat of government itself. Another senior official told the authors that Trump was ‘the guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless, then says “I will protect you”.’ And that, the unidentified official went on, ‘is what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933’.

In the Publishers Weekly, the reviewer was (mostly) impressed. I Alone Can Fix It is ‘a sweeping study of bureaucratic dysfunction caused by a “poisonous, disloyal atmosphere”

Donald Trump: portrait of a ‘monstrous spawn of showbiz and PR’

Miscellaneous 12 BYTES

HOW WE GOT HERE. WHERE WE MIGHT GO NEXT

JEANETTE WINTERSON Cape, 288pp, £16.99

Josiah Wedgwood in 1774: ‘the man should be as famous as the brand’

THE RADICAL POTTER

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF BRITAIN

TRISTRAM HUNT Allen Lane, 323pp, £25

‘Fabulously unputdownable,’ wrote Judith Woods in the Daily Telegraph, adding that ‘in parts it reads like a thriller’. Richard Lambert noted that ‘Wedgwood’s remarkable story has been told in many biographies over the years’, in his Financial Times review, but found that ‘the great contribution of...

Hunt’s new book, is to place him in the context of the rapid economic and social changes during his lifetime that helped make his success possible.’ Hunt, a former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central and now director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, has produced a ‘brisk and highly readable biography’, wrote Paul Lay in his review for the Times, which ‘places Wedgwood in a dissenting tradition that goes back to the civil wars ... It is a timely tale.’

Rowan Moore, in the Observer, felt that ‘Hunt performs the important task of telling the great potter’s story clearly and accessibly ...

Wedgwood the man should be as famous as Wedgwood the brand.

That he is not might be due to his business – there are more heroic and glamorous trades than making pots

– and to the national tendency to undervalue manufacturing. Hunt’s book should help to correct that imbalance.’ For Sarah Watling, in Literary Review, ‘one of the achievements of Tristram Hunt’s biography... is to bring into view the commercial and moral instincts of the man behind the powerhouse...

Wedgwood emerges from this book as a man of voracious interest in the world. Canny and determined, he had both strong beliefs and the adaptability that marks any great innovator. Hunt... is as interested in what the man can tell us about the times as the times meant for the man.’

In the Daily Mail Ysenda Maxtone Graham said ‘this delicious, meticulously researched, wideranging but never long-winded book made me admire Tristram Hunt as well as Josiah Wedgwood’, while Kathryn Hughes in the Mail on Sunday said, ‘Hunt is exquisitely alive to all the contradictions in Wedgwood’s achievements ... a rich portrait of the charismatic but contradictory man who made Georgian Britain the most stylish country in the world.’

Wedgwood emerges as a man of voracious interest in the world

12 Bytes is a feminist gallop through computing history, with starry roles for Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, and lively digressions about the industrial revolution and the ways in which that machine age could have been handled differently. Winterson argues that ‘the Data Age will be the biggest change yet seen on Planet Earth’ and ‘the next 25 years will take us into a world where intelligent machines and non-embodied AI are as much a part of everyday life as humans are’. She warns against leaving everything to men such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates – a ‘priestly cast of tech types … the ones with special knowledge’ and urges ‘a revolution in thought’ to go with tech revolution.

Joanna Kavenna in the Literary Review praised 12 Bytes as ‘agile, fascinating, richly varied and beautifully idiosyncratic’. Everything, in fact, that AI will never be. David Marsland in the Evening Standard described the book as ‘fascinating and scary, but also often very funny, with Winterson’s wry observations and clear love of a good sci-fi movie keeping things moving’. But Beejay Silcox in the Times Literary Supplement struck a more impatient note, describing 12 Bytes as an ‘erratic collection of techno-optimist essays’ which had ‘the fidgety, fractious quality of internet rabbit holes: Jeanette in world-wide wonderland’. She described Winterson’s argument that there was no need to be afraid of technology, ‘it’s how we use it that matters’, as the cyber equivalent of ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’.

FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS TIME AND HOW TO USE IT

OLIVER BURKEMAN Bodley Head, 273pp; £16.99

Oliver Burkeman used to write a weekly column about timemanagement fixes. Now the gamekeeper has turned poacher and he compares his previous self to an alcoholic being paid to write about wine. He suggests our obsession with The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 21

JAMES LEE

Miscellaneous

Playing croquet is good for you

productivity is an addiction, which we use to distract us from the fact that life is short – 4,000 weeks is all you have if you live to the age of 80.

Burkeman argues that the technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us because they increase the size of mountain we’re trying to climb. He dismisses social media as ‘a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things’.

Marianne Power in the Times was grateful that Burkeman ‘instead of offering new tips on how to cram more into your day… questions why we feel the need to’. Robbie Smith in the Evening Standard particularly relished sections which explored ‘the minds of medieval peasants before the invention of the clock’. Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday was pleased to discover that many of his current favourite ways of passing time – walking, cooking risotto, playing croquet and dancing the conga – were ‘entirely in tune with Burkeman’s suggestion that we should slow down, live in the moment, and engage in communal activities’.

survive by co-operating in bands — and the most successful were those who achieved “the approval and acclaim” of the group. They lived longer and reproduced more prodigiously: “with status comes better food, more abundant territory, superior health care . . . it leads to greater access to preferred mates and bestows on children social opportunities”.’

Storr identifies two ‘prestige games’ that we play to acquire status: ‘virtue games’ and ‘success games’. It all sounds very plausible yet Janice Turner in the New Statesman, though diverted by the ‘fascinating stories’, was left ‘underwhelmed’ by what boiled down to an ‘eloquent, entertaining discourse on the obvious’.

And in the Literary Review, Darrin McMahon, although he enjoyed a ‘brisk and engaging’ read, found that Storr never quite nailed what he really meant by ‘status’: ‘Part influence, part prestige, part assessment of the place of others in society, part evaluation of our own, status comes in many different forms.’

SAD LITTLE MEN

PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND THE RUIN OF ENGLAND

RICHARD BEARD Harvill Secker, 288pp, £16.99

Richard Beard has written a bitterly passionate denunciation of private boarding schools and their effect on the boys who are sent to them and the men they become. He was one of these schoolboys himself (prep school at Pinewood and then Radley) and,

now 53, believes that the experience of being sent away has damaged him (and others like him, including those in government) beyond repair. Nicola Shulman in the Times Literary Supplement was dazzled by Beard’s writing: ‘it’s really good, clever, dazzling in its anger and the force of its argument’.

Nicholas Lezard in the Spectator was also impressed. ‘I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this,’ he wrote, ‘one of the finest polemics I have ever come across.’ Beard looks at the twisted children now running the country (‘he pays special attention to the Prime Minister and his predecessor but one’) and finds that boarding schools have much to answer for.

Beard’s ‘obsession with Radley borders on the unbalanced’ In the Times, however, David James found Beard’s argument was too politically motivated to hold up.

Does he think that ‘because he went to the same type of school as Johnson and Cameron he knows how and why they behave as they do? Why does he not make the same claim for other old Etonians such as Justin Welby or Eddie Redmayne?’ And his ‘obsession with Radley borders on the unbalanced: why, of all places, return there? Why revisit it “three or four times a week”, walking among its locked-down, empty classrooms?’

James was perplexed by a ‘strange, self-indulgent primal scream of a book’.

THE STATUS GAME ON SOCIAL POSITION AND HOW WE USE IT

WILL STORR William Collins, 416pp, £20

Will Storr (among whose previous books is Selfie, an examination of western self-obsession) contends that it is the fight for social status that is the defining battle of human survival.

As a result, humans are highly sensitive to the tiniest indicators of status. James Marriott in the Times was intrigued: ‘Competition for social status, Storr argues, structures all human activity. Humans evolved to 22 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Public school life: Malcolm McDowell and David Wood in Lindsay Anderson’s If...

Miscellaneous AGAINST WHITE FEMINISM RAFIA ZAKARIA Hamish Hamilton, 206pp, £14.99

A walk-up in Soho

THE RIGHT TO SEX AMIA SRINIVASAN Bloomsbury, 304pp, £20

Amia Srinivasan is the youngest ever Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Oxford, and this is her first book. It is a collection of essays about contemporary feminism. Three chapters touch on the tension between calls for the regulation of sex work, the punishment of sexual violence and the harmful consequences of carceral legal systems set up to protect women. A fourth describes how her students persuaded her to see the positions of the anti-porn feminists of the 1970s as dismayingly prescient. A fifth looks at whether consent is possible when unequal social relations prevail.

Jane O’Grady in the Daily Telegraph was indignant: ‘Srinivasan denies being moralistic and authoritarian. She is “not imagining a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice…. There is a kind of discipline here… [but] what is disciplined… isn’t the desire itself, but the political forces that presume to instruct it”. Orwellian or what?’

Mary Harrington in UnHerd found that ‘although the author’s ‘sentences are models of clarity…her paragraphs and overarching arguments are not’. Clair Wills in the Financial Times was moved to quote the American poet Robert Hass: ‘“All the new thinking is about loss/In this it resembles all the old thinking” … except in this case the new thinking, like the old thinking, is about power.’

Rafia Zakaria’s polemical book about the sins of white feminists who haven’t checked their privilege was received less than enthusiastically by white feminist reviewers. Interviewed by the Guardian, Zakaria laid it on the line: ‘I don’t think white women are truly aware of how uncomfortable other women feel, how much they have to edit themselves, how fed up they are.’ In the Sunday Times, veteran second-waver Joan Smith disliked Zakaria’s determination to look for divisions, calling it an ‘attack that goes for the jugular’, with a ‘sketchy’ grasp of argument and history. Smith went on: ‘Defining people in terms they would not recognise or accept is a key ploy of identity politics, and feminists are lumped together and traduced throughout.’ The author’s ‘singularly ill-informed account of modern feminism’ was particularly jarring: ‘When I see feminists pitted against each other in this mean-spirited way, I can almost hear the patriarchy laughing.’

The Washington Post’s Mythili Rao was also dismayed by the book’s blanket generalisations (and its author’s tendency to employ pseudoacademic jargon): ‘At times it’s as if the sins of White feminism – which can be seen in everything from United Nations commitments to Sex and the City plotlines to Virginia Slims advertisements – are too vast to number. But Rao concluded her review by conceding that the heart of what the book demands – ‘a feminism that is less self-satisfied and secure in its power, more curious about the differences in women’s experiences and more generous and expansive in its reach’ – is worth fighting for.

WASPS

THE SPLENDORS AND MISERIES OF AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY

MICHAEL KNOX BERAN Pegasus, 416pp, £22

The term Wasp – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – was not coined till 1948, but Wasps had long existed as America’s patrician class, driven by

Protestant guilt to assert themselves in public life and yet subject to various neuroses. Famous Wasps have included Henry Adams, J Pierpoint Morgan Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Franklin’s wife Eleanor, and Edie Sedgwick (Andy Warhol’s tragic muse).

‘Nobody will ever again memorialise the Wasps so vastly or with such erudition and dazzling cultural range [as Beran],’ wrote Thomas Blaikie in Literary Review.

‘The book’s bold fragmentary structure and extended philosophical passages make it in places as challenging to read as The Waste Land itself – yes, T S Eliot was a Wasp... The Wasp story is really the American story and the dilemmas that confronted the Wasps are intriguing: how to be a public person yet retain a viable inner life; how to be cultivated yet not remote; how to steer a path between virtue and power.’

FD Roosevelt: famous Wasp

Karen Sondstrom, in the Washington Post, said that Beran’s ‘fluency and command feel like products of full immersion in his subjects’ lives and psyches’. For Paula Byrne, writing in the Times, Beran’s history ‘shows how the top-drawer Wasps, who were once beguiled by art, poetry and civic duty, had become addicted to golf, tennis and horse and sailing boat racing’ and ‘argues that the new postwar generation of Wasps was deeply flawed, emotionally repressed and prone to mental disorders’. His book is ‘a delight: meticulously researched, exhaustive, slightly bonkers’, and ‘a smorgasbord of delicious and outrageous details’.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 23

Travel

‘For lust of knowing what should not be known/We take the Golden Road to Samarkand’. Flecker’s lines could serve as an epitaph for Norman Lewis (1908-2003), much of whose life was spent doing just that. ‘I enjoy an adventure,’ he used to say, his ideal destinations being places that were either under the cosh, like Bolivia and Paraguay, corrupt, like liberated Naples, Sicily and Batista’s Cuba, or combustible, like French Indo-China, the demise of which he was one of the first to anticipate. Lewis’s private life was adventurous too. He had six children by three very different partners, the first of whom was the daughter of an exiled Mafioso whose ‘fatalistic irony’ he adopted himself.

Of Welsh descent, but brought up in Essex where his father owned a chemist’s shop, Lewis, whom I interviewed for the BBC in 1975, seemed quite different from those debonair pre-war globetrotters like Peter Fleming and Paddy LeighFermor. With his horn-rimmed spectacles, drill-sergeant’s moustache and rasping London accent he reminded me of the office manager in my first job, a sardonic old sweat whose passion was snooker. Yet like Fleming and Leigh-Fermor, Lewis was always determined to live life on his own terms. When war broke out he and his first wife were living in Cuba. She remained there and he returned to Britain, not out of patriotism, but because he thought the war was an experience not to be missed.

Unfit for the sharp end – he was asthmatic – Lewis was enrolled in Field Security, an autonomous Intelligence unit operating in newly liberated territories. Though appalled by much of what he saw, Lewis relished being able to snoop ‘in any place, at any time, and in any dress’, a unique status on active service that he strove to reassert, with some success, on his peacetime assignments.

Like many ex-servicemen Lewis found it hard to settle down after the war, which he described as ‘a shot in the arm’. Financially secure thanks to a second-hand camera business he had started in the Thirties, he

Norman Lewis in the Thirties

persuaded Jonathan Cape, who had published his first novel, to commission a travel book about French Indo-China. The result, A Dragon Apparent, was a bestseller that introduced readers to an unfamiliar warzone. ‘Nothing he describes is dull,’ said one reviewer, a verdict that was later echoed by Cyril Connolly, who said Lewis ‘could make a lorry interesting’.

Bullied at school for being Welsh, Lewis instinctively empathised with the plight of indigenous peoples like the rain forest Indians of Brazil, whose catastrophic decline he investigated for the Sunday Times in 1973. The result was a long indictment called Genocide which confirmed the existence of a ‘final solution’ to the Indian problem, instigated by government agents in the pay of loggers and mineral prospectors who coveted the tribal lands. Even worse was the connivance of American Protestant missionaries in the massacres, a classic example, Lewis thought, of the way in which the interests of fundamentalist religion and aggressive capitalism coincided.

Genocide inspired the foundation of Survival International, a body dedicated to the support and protection of all tribal peoples. But Lewis admitted to me that, at bottom, it was curiosity and restlessness that drove him rather than humanitarian zeal. ‘What

happens is that I get a sudden urge to go somewhere remote, like the Brazilian jungle, which involves a good deal of discomfort and even danger, and where I ask myself what on earth I think I’m playing at.

But then I stumble across something that concerns me, like the plight of the Indians, and I begin writing and campaigning on their behalf.’

Lewis also sounded an early warning about the damage done to the environment by cutting down the rain forest. It would, he told a friend in 1978, ‘be like the world losing a lung’.

As well as travel books Lewis wrote The Honoured Society, a scholarly history of the Mafia, and Naples ’44, a war memoir now regarded as his masterpiece. He also wrote 15 novels, one of which, The Sicilian Specialist, both the CIA and the Mob did their best to suppress.

What gave offence was the plausible theory Lewis advanced about their culpability in President Kennedy’s assassination. Noting how during the war the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, had forged lasting links with mobsters like Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano, Lewis argued that both organisations had good reason to hate Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs disaster, for which they held the President to blame. Lewis even proposed a real-life alternative killer to Oswald: a crack-shot Cuban called Bonachea Leon who was let out of prison to bump off high profile targets.

Mysteriously, Lewis won no prizes and received no accolades, an egregious oversight that must have tested his capacity for ‘fatalistic irony’. So to end on a positive note, here are two of his typically quirky anecdotes. In Algeria, he was told of a French professor studying consciousness who would station himself beside the basket of the guillotine, ready to grab the severed head and shout a question in its ear.

And in Naples, he met a gynaecologist who specialised in restoring lost virginities.

Many of Norman Lewis’s books are published by Eland Books The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 25

ALEX HAGAN

‘Nothing he describes is dull’: MICHAEL BARBER on the adventurer and writer Norman Lewis

Fiction BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU SALLY ROONEY Faber, 337pp, £16.99

CASE STUDY GRAEME MACRAE BURNET Saraband, 320pp, £14.99

The frame of Case Study is that the author of the novel we are reading is writing a biography of a disgraced 1960s psychiatrist called Collins Braithwaite and has been sent notebooks detailing another woman’s investigations into Braithwaite whom she believes drove her sister to kill herself. ‘Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all,’ observes the patientdetective, a mousy spinster whose assumption of a false identity leads to a seeming discovery of another self.

Braithwaite, a misogynistic workingclass Northerner, tangles with real-life characters including RD Laing, Colin Wilson and Joan Bakewell. Leyla Sanai in the Spectator asked of the psychiatrist: ‘Did he ever exist? And if not, does this make the story any less intriguing? The answer to that is a resounding “no”. I was hooked like a fish.’

Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph wrote that while the reader ‘is constantly aware... of the tricksy contrivances by which Burnet bamboozles you over who to believe… he captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.’ James Walton in the Times described how Burnet’s previous novel, His Bloody Project, was wrongly shelved in true crime by some booksellers. He suggested that Case Study might also be mistaken for non-fiction, advising readers ‘to check in the psychology section because it’s certainly worth finding’. He praised the novel for doing ‘a fine job of keeping our sympathies shifting, and of conjuring up a lost cultural era. Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.’

26 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

Sally Rooney’s anticipated third novel is ‘a puzzle’, said Susannah Goldsbrough in the Telegraph; it is ‘brilliant and flawed’. Following closely on the success of Normal People Rooney explores the complexities of relationships, class, gender and sexuality. Rooney breaks up the storyline by interpolating political discussion of zeitgeist-y issues in an exchange of emails between the two female protagonists.

But for Goldsbrough, the debates do ‘nothing to advance the plot and weirdly little to flesh out the characters’. Rather, this structure is ‘frustrating, because jammed between the emails is some of Rooney’s most beautiful writing’.

‘It centres on a will-they-won’tthey romance plot involving two couples,’ said Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, ‘but it does so in a way that feels a little uncanny and a little mechanical, lacking the breath of human inspiration.’ She admitted that ‘though there are many beautiful passages’, she found it was ‘the book’s overriding tone of narcissism and despair that stayed with me, weighing me down for days’.

‘Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney’s best novel,’ enthused James Marriott in the Times. ‘Her prose is now free of moments of clumsiness … Her ideas are more fully, poetically developed. The emotional control and technical mastery of the book’s final pages reveal her as a novelist who will soon be able to do more or less as she likes.’

He went further: ‘The book moved me to tears more than once.’ Brandon Taylor in the New York Times defined Rooney’s genre of writing as a ‘kind of plotless un-novel’. For him the sense of isolation between the characters conjured ‘the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting’.

Robert Graves and further still.

Higgins’s innovation is to put the female characters of myth in the author’s seat: eight chapters focus on tales told by eight heroines, with Higgins standing behind them as the silent ninth, a clever parallel with the nine muses she invokes in the beginning. Weaving is the dominant metaphor for storytelling here. Each woman weaves a decorative tapestry that links together fables, episodes and tales, a nod to Ovid’s own finely-spun, kaleidoscopic Metamorphoses.

Sharp insights are made throughout The warp and weft suits Higgins’s discursive style well: Sara Wheeler in the Spectator liked how she ‘creates the illusion of spontaneity (“And now what?”) and handles suspense brilliantly’, and Claire Allfree in the Sunday Times commended her for keeping ‘the storytelling largely ticking along while offering the occasional nifty comment on female narrative agency’; but she found ‘the odd lapse into modern vernacular… ugly’. Higgins is dexterous with a wide range of sources, as 30 pages of notes show, but still proves a master of distillation: Harry Mount in the Catholic Herald praised her as ‘brilliant at the shortcut to the eternal beauties of the Greek myths’. Do we learn anything new? Sharp insights are made throughout. But after a recent glut of retellings, there are signs of Classics fatigue: Allfree

GREEK MYTHS A NEW RETELLING CHARLOTTE HIGGINS Jonathan Cape, 318pp, £20 (250)

Greek Myths is the latest addition to the overworked genre of ‘myth reinterpretation’ that reaches back to

Helen of Troy and Paris by David (detail)

Fiction wondered whether ‘we have reached peak Greek myth’ and ‘could do with a bit of breathing space’.

THE WOMEN OF TROY PAT BARKER Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £18.99

The Women of Troy is the sequel to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which reworked the Iliad from the point of view of Achilles’ captive concubine Briseis. Briseis is centrestage again, narrating the aftermath of the fall of Troy, in which Greek victors and Trojan captive slaves (all women) are living in the ruins of the city, waiting for favourable winds to carry them home. Lucy HughesHallett in the Guardian found it sufficiently ‘merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak… This is the Trojan war not only demythologised but stripped bare of every vestige of the heroic or numinous.’

Barker draws freely on Greek tragedy: Euripides’ Trojan Women is the obvious model, and Sophocles’ Antigone is equally important (to bury or not to bury Priam is the question). The men are degenerate and unheroic, typified by Achilles’ petulant son Pyrrhus. The women are resourceful, fractious, barbed. Briseis, pregnant by the dead Achilles and now married to another Greek warrior, is both victim and victor-byproxy, untouchable and begrudged by virtue of the child she bears. Barker’s diction is unrelentingly vernacular, all ‘bollocking’ and ‘gobshite’, and Ruth Scurr in the TLS wondered whether ‘Barker’s portraits of Pyrrhus as the anti-hero and Briseis as the unsung heroine sometimes falter through misjudged similes and metaphors’.

But this is cosmetic. Daisy Dunn in the Literary Review hailed it as a prescient novel that ‘prompts less pity than anger in the reader, who recognises in the experience of the mythological characters what is only too real’.

MONUMENT MAKER DAVID KEENAN White Rabbit, 912pp, £25

Not even his most ardent admirers have claimed that David Keenan’s latest novel, Monument Maker, is a relaxing read. In fact they struggled

even to describe what it was about.

David Annand in the Times Literary Supplement absolutely loved it (‘at once sacred and profane, highminded and foul-mouthed … beautiful and bewildering, formally daring and frequently confounding’) but even he ‘limped to the end of it, exhausted and emotionally wrung out, but convinced of Keenan’s profound artistic seriousness’.

Stuart Kelly in the Guardian noted that the novel was ‘structured as a cathedral, the reader moving through books entitled “Nave”, “Transept”, “Apse” and “Choir”’. The final pages are an index of every single character in the book – and there are a few of them: ‘Chagall, Ouspensky, Bernini, Saint Anselm, Hans Frank or Arthur Rimbaud are all fleeting presences.’

Kelly liked some parts of the novel, ‘the parts that are more meditation than narrative’ and ‘there is a wonderful cadenza on whether books dream and change while they are not being read’. But overall, however, ‘there is too much self-indulgence in Monument Maker’.

In the Times, Houman Barekat shared Kelly’s reservations. Reflecting on Keenan’s earlier career as a music critic, he found reading the novel ‘rather like listening to an unpolished early demo by a much-loved band.

You can see the rudiments of talent: the feverish, hallucinogenic quality of his rhythmic prose style, his manic obsessiveness and sweary libidinousness.’ But there is too little ‘control’ and too much ‘messianic pontification’ and ‘woolly theorising’ in what ends up a ‘bloated and repetitious novel’.

THE INSEPARABLES SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TRANS. LAUREN ELKINS Vintage Classics, 176pp, £12.99

Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 semiautobiographical novella The Inseparables has been published in English for the first time. Critics received this story of two teenage girls from Catholic bourgeois backgrounds rapturously. In the Spectator, Sarah Ditum described it as ‘slim, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls – and the pressures that sunder them’. While Sylvie, noted Ditum, is ‘on a path towards education and self-reliance, Andrée’s destiny is

The Inseperarables: true friendship

marriage, and Sylvie watches helplessly as her friend succumbs to expectation’.

De Beauvoir’s childhood friend Elizabeth Lacoin, the model for Andrée, is also the figure of Zaza in her autobiography: their passionate friendship began in Paris in 1917 and lasted until Zaza died of viral encephalitis in 1929. In the Guardian, Deborah Levy reflected on the importance of Zaza for de Beauvoir who ‘spookily, vampirically, admits that she “believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death”.’ ‘In my view,’ wrote Levy, ‘she never quite managed to write up the spectre of Zaza entirely convincingly, which is why she kept returning to try to catch her on the page. Maybe this is because her own fierce desire for Zaza to finally claim the life she deserved might have been stronger than Zaza’s own desire to risk all she would lose in doing so: God, her family, bourgeois respectability.’ The novella was, thought Boyd Tonkin in the Times, a ‘succinct, scorching tale of adolescent love and loss’. It grips, thought Tonkin, ‘not just as a portrait of semi-requited teenage ardour … but because de Beauvoir gives the torments of belief their due.’

Lauren Elkins’s translation was widely admired. Tonkin enjoyed the ‘lucid, sculpted prose [which] can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality’ and Ditum called it ‘beautifully accomplished’. The prose, she said, ‘feels like a living voice and not, as is too often the case with translation, like a heavy-footed performance of respect for an inaccessible original’.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021 27

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Children’s books EMILY BEARN on books for Christmas

Books with elves and twinkling Christmas trees on the cover inevitably have a limited shelf life – but this year’s crop of festive picture books are nonetheless too pretty to resist. Christmas Street (Nosy Crow, 20pp, £14.99) by Jonathan Emmett is a sumptuous board book, featuring a pull out play scene and gentle tuition in the ABC. (‘I is for ICING, on freshly baked cakes. J is for JINGLE, the sound a bell makes.’)

And every bookish toddler will be familiar with Julia Donaldson’s Tales from Acorn Wood, in which Fox loses his socks, and Rabbit has difficulty napping. Twenty years after the series began comes the sixth instalment, Squirrel’s Snowman (Macmillan, 12pp, £6.99), in which Donaldson uses her hypnotic rhyming text to tell the story of a squirrel struggling to find the necessary adornments for her snowman. (‘Squirrel’s snowman has a head./ Now he needs a nose./ Can Squirrel find a carrot?/ What do you suppose?’) And Constance in Peril (Two Hoots, 32pp, £12.99), by the new dream team Ben Manley and Emma Chichester Clark, tells the witty story of a doll from a bygone age, who struggles to cope with the indignities of modern life. ‘Edward’s favourite toy was a soft, old, cloth doll. Her name was Constance Hardpenny and she had led a tragic life.’

For older readers, The Bear Who Sailed the Ocean on an Iceberg by Emily Critchley (Everything with Words, 288pp, £7.99) is the enchanting story of a boy who finds a hungry, 30 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2021

loquacious polar bear in his parent’s freezer. How did he get there, and can Patrick’s pocket money cover the cost of Monty’s sardines?

And in Sally Nicholls’s Time-Seekers novels, our heroes Alex and Ruby have already survived a Victorian Christmas, an Edwardian crime caper, and the French Revolution. A Secret in Time (Nosy Crow, 208pp, £6.99) is the fourth book in the series, and finds the children tumbling through the magic mirror into the freezing winter of 1947. Sisters of the Lost

Marsh (Chicken House, 336pp, £7.99) is the latest Gothic delight by the former school teacher Lucy Strange. This time, writing with familiar aplomb, Strange tells the story of six motherless girls, a cruel and superstitious father – and a daughter who threatens to bring curses on the family when she mysteriously vanishes into thin air.

Clockwise from top: Christmas Street, Constance in Peril, Medusa, Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong!

(‘Be sure the first girl marries well,/ The second in the home to dwell.’)

And children with an appetite for crime will find plenty to relish in The Very Merry Murder Club (Farshore, 432pp, £12.99), a collection of 13 sinister Christmas tales, edited by Serena Patel and Robin Stevens. As with Stevens’s Murder Most Unladylike series, this is crime at is comforting best.

In the rush of new titles at Christmas, the classics can be overlooked. But Journey to the River Sea by the late Eva Ibbotson, telling the story of an orphaned girl sent to live with her cousins in the Amazon, should be in every child’s library – and is now available in a sumptuous new 20th-anniversary edition, illustrated by Katie Hickey (Macmillan, 336pp, £20).

And it would not be Christmas without a feminist retelling of an ancient myth. In Medusa (Bloomsbury, 224pp, £14.99), Jessie Burton reimagines the story of Medusa’s exile to a far-flung island, at the whim of the capricious gods. By focusing on Medusa’s internal struggles, and by adding some box-set drama to her relationship with Perseus, Burton turns one of Greek mythology’s most contested figures into a heroine fit for modern fiction.

And dinosaurs always feature heavily in the Christmas non-fiction lists – but if we are to believe Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong! (Nosy Crow, 64pp, £12.99) by Dr Nick Crumpton, illustrated by Gavin Scott, we’ve all been barking up the wrong tree.

‘Very new fossils have made some paleontologists believe that DIPLODOCUS’s eyes might have been protected from the sun by bony eye-shades’ is among the many revelations designed to make budding young scientists rethink their assumptions.