Barry Humphries on stage

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

Am 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.

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

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

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, 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

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.

When Irish eyes weren’t smiling

The radio shows of my youth loved banning saucy songs, says Mary Kenny

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 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 WEH 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!

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

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

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph

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…

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 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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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, 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

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

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

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 PG 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

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 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

‘Do you sell cars?’

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

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 – 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

I Once Met Stevie Smith

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

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

Jimmy Jewel vs Hylda Baker

Books

Highsmith’s low point

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995 Edited by Anna von Planta 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 WH 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.

‘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.

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

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. 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.

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

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 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

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

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,

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. 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.

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,

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

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.’

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 HW 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’. Iain Dale’s The Presidents: 250 Years of American Political Leadership is published on 18th November (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)