The Oldie magazine - December issue (394)

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December 2020 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 394

Masters of suspense Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart by Roger Lewis

Oldie of the Year Winners

Petula Clark, William Roache, Joan Plowright, Edna O’Brien The British Character – Pont cartoons special

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Perry Worsthorne, fashion icon page 16

Features 10 2020 Oldie of the Year Awards 15 On a zipwire into my sixties Jim White 16 Dearest Perry Lucinda Lambton and Craig Brown 18 Alfred Hitchcock, master of delusion Roger Lewis 20 Snooker’s gone to pot Donald Trelford 22 Genius of Pont’s cartoons Mark Bryant 25 The Railway Children at 50 Kate Garner 28 Art gave me a second chance at life Simon Pratt 31 Thatcher’s enemies Norman Tebbit 32 Tom Lehrer’s joyful present to us all Francis Beckett 35 Tolstoy’s last stop Sara Wheeler

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 The Oldie of the Year 2020 Petula Clark Gyles Brandreth 12 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 14 Olden Life: Who was Gilbert Harding? Andrew Roberts

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Pont on the British Character page 22

Maggie’s fall – the guilty men page 31

101 Crossword 103 Bridge Andrew Robson 103 Competition Tessa Castro 110 Ask Virginia Ironside

14 Modern Life: What is nature scanography? Cynthia Sharp 38 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 39 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 42 Letter from America Philip Delves Broughton 44 School Days Sophia Waugh 44 The joy of Ceefax Rev Steve Morris 45 Home Front Alice Pitman 47 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 48 God Sister Teresa 48 Memorial Lunch: Stephen R Hill James Hughes-Onslow 49 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 50 Readers’ Letters 53 I Once Met… Billy Wilder Anthony Lipmann 53 Memory Lane 67 Media Matters Stephen Glover 69 History David Horspool 71 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 71 Rant: Frumpy old women Liz Hodgkinson

55 Boris Johnson: The Gambler,

by Tom Bower Sarah Sands 57 Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,

by Ferdinand Mount Ysenda Maxtone Graham 59 Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, by Selina Hastings Barnaby Rogerson 59 To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde,

by Rupert Everett Matthew Sturgis 61 Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold, by Stephen Fry Ferdie Rous 61 Break a Leg: A Memoir, Manifesto and Celebration of Amateur Theatre, by Jenny Landreth Benedict Nightingale 65 Mr Wilder and Me, by Jonathan Coe Alex Clark

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Books

Travel 92 Travels with my daughter Nick Welch 94 In Odysseus’s wake Nigel Summerley

97 Taking a Walk: My lucky dip on the Dorset coast Patrick Barkham 99 On the Road: Sean Rafferty Louise Flind

Arts 74 Film: Supernova Harry Mount 75 Theatre: my best nights Paul Bailey 75 Radio Valerie Grove 76 Television Roger Lewis 77 Music Richard Osborne 78 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 79 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 81 Gardening David Wheeler 81 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 82 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 82 Restaurants James Pembroke 83 Drink Bill Knott 84 Sport Jim White 84 Motoring Alan Judd 86 Digital Life Matthew Webster 86 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 88 Getting Dressed: Béatrice Viennet Brigid Waddams 91 Bird of the Month: Brambling John McEwen Advertising For display, contact Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover AF archive/Alamy

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The Old Un’s Notes How to buy The Oldie during the lockdown Thanks to the lockdown, buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be quite as easy as usual at the moment. There are three simple ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for £4.95 (free p & p within

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Ted Heath’s Ulster outpost

Don’t ever have Ted Heath to stay – unless you’ve got at least two pianos in the house.

That’s the lesson of On to the Next, the autobiography Jane Goddard has written, aged 91.

She has composed the book in a novel way, describing and drawing 14 houses she’s lived in, from Bedfordshire to New Zealand, Washington and Chelsea.

From 1953 to 1972, Goddard was married to Sir Robert Chichester-Clark (1928-2016), the Londonderry MP who was the last MP representing a seat in Northern Ireland to be a British government minister.

His brother, James Chichester-Clark, was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971.

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the UK) at: www.magsdirect.co.uk.

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Sign up for The Oldie e-newsletter and Barry Cryer’s jokes During the lockdown, the Old Un is producing extra pieces every day on The Oldie website, including Barry Cryer’s jokes.

Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best of our

blogs, with a Talking Pictures recommendation.

To access it, go to www.theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box, above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.

the then Leader of the Opposition, Edward Heath, stayed at the ChichesterClarks’ house, Ross House in Kells, Country Antrim (pictured), in the late 1960s.

Heath was not an easy guest, not least when he saw Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, on telly – Heath, to

his horror, hadn’t been asked to respond.

‘When Viola [another guest] attempted to charm him with questions as to his childhood, he responded with gruff monosyllables,’ Goddard writes.

Poor Viola then asked Heath if he’d like to play some

music on the two pianos in the house. ‘He quite tersely asked me if they had both been tuned together,’ Goddard remembers.

Heath only finally cheered up after playing the Brahms Haydn Variations. ‘Later that afternoon, he decided he would like Viola and me to sing duets while he accompanied us, and we sang Wesley’s anthem Blessed Be the God and Father, and that made him happy.’

Has there ever been a trickier guest in history than the Incredible Grump?

Among this month’s contributors Maureen Lipman (p10) was made a Dame in October. She plays Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, which turns 60 this December. She is on Celebrity Gogglebox with Gyles Brandreth (who writes on p9).

Lucinda Lambton (p16) is a writer and photographer who’s presented over 80 TV films. Her husband and Oldie Fashion Icon of the Year, Peregrine Worsthorne, sadly died in October, aged 96.

Donald Trelford (p20) was editor of the Observer from 1975 to 1993. He is author of Snookered (1986). In 2014, he revealed in The Oldie that he’d become ‘Britain’s oldest new father’ at 76 and a half.

Nick Welch (p92) tried to avoid the family business – writing – by working in advertising and on eco-campsites. Still, he’s written for the Guardian and the Lady.

He’s the father of pop star Florence Welch.

When the Old Un is reincarnated, he doesn’t want to come back as a cow.

Science has, it seems, taken all the romance out of life on the farm.

That’s what he thought on reading a new poem by Oldie contributor Rachel Billington.

She composed it on seeing the local bull inseminator arrive at her Dorset village.

The Bull Inseminator The bull inseminator came to our village today.

Oh, the shrieks and wails of protest or delight!

The Oldie December 2020 5

law. Unfortunately, there were no laws to determine the quality of what they drank.

Bootleg gin, which fuelled the craze for cocktails, was as lethal as the gin of Hogarth’s day.

How right Dr Johnson was to describe drink as ‘a picklock to the imagination’.

Important stories you may have missed Wooden duck nabbed from bar Western Telegraph

‘This is an upwardly mobile phone, sir. It converts everything you say into the Queen’s English’

Padlock stolen during shed burglary Lowestoft Journal Bird appears in Europe Times £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie December 2020

From the cow, I mean Cosy in my bed (It was still early), I wondered about This way of bringing life – A syringe, a man employed – it was a man.

Then in spring a calf with the blackest eyes, The longest lashes and a tentative bravery, As I talk to him, or her, over the gate.

Jenny Bardwell’s memories (November issue) of Kingsley Amis, her naughty uncle, reminded the Old Un how drink makes the ink flow.

Amis, recalling how nervous he was when starting a novel, said a glass or two of Scotch helped get the show on the road. Simon Raven would spend an hour or so before going to bed, ‘alone and half drunk’, jotting down ‘ideas, paradoxes and reveries, about a third of which would stand the test of sober consideration in the morning’.

Both Amis and Raven insisted they couldn’t write properly when drunk, yet both were very heavy, routine drinkers, whom you could justifiably call ‘well-adjusted alcoholics’. Almost the last coherent words Amis uttered were ‘For God’s sake, you

bloody fool, get me a drink!’

Other British writers who generally had a bottle within reach included Graham Greene (who had, says his latest biographer, ‘a Homeric tolerance for alcohol’), Henry Green, Jean Rhys and Anthony Burgess. In later life, Evelyn Waugh would start proceedings with a pint of his Noonday Reviver: gin, Guinness and ginger beer.

American writers were even thirstier during the first half of the century.

Paradoxically, this was partly a consequence of Prohibition. William Faulkner was not alone in thinking that ‘civilisation begins with distillation’. Intelligent people, in particular, felt it was their duty to break the

Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), was no stranger to intoxicants either. Nor was his great friend Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

And now, 70 years after Cassady wrote it, the epic letter he sent to Kerouac in December 1950 is finally being published – in The Joan Anderson Letter: The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation (Black Spring Press).

Neal Cassady sketched by his wife, Carolyn Cassady

Cassady had an affair with Anderson in Denver in 1945.

They were both 19, she was pregnant by another man and, in Cassady’s words, she was such ‘a perfect beauty of

‘I don’t want to live on the edge but I wouldn’t mind visiting it’

loveliness that I forgot everything else’.

Cassady messed up the affair through drink and a spell in prison, all described in juicy, sex-crammed detail in his 15,000-word letter. ‘The greatest piece of writing I ever saw,’ Kerouac said.

The letter went missing after Cassady’s death, at the age of 41, in 1968, and

Kerouac’s, at 47, in 1969 – both accelerated by drink and drugs. In 2011, the letter was rediscovered in Oakland, California.

After legal machinations, only now is it being published in full for the first time.

Pictured are the guillemots in The Oldie’s Bird of the Month column by John McEwen.

The column is illustrated by Carry Akroyd. And now you can buy her 2021 calendar (£10 from carryakroyd.co.uk), featuring her pictures of some of Britain’s loveliest birds.

Guillemots are the ideal Christmas bird. They often return to their breeding

Christmas party: guillemots return to Skokholm in winter

grounds, such as Skokholm, Pembrokeshire, in December, to perform mysterious water-dances.

The locals believe they came home for Christmas celebrations.

‘I am frequently misquoted – often accurately.’

That was the winner of last year’s Wilde Wit Competition, put on by the Oscar Wilde Society with The Oldie.

The prize goes to the person who comes up with the line that sounds most like something Oscar might have said. Last year’s winning quip, above, was by Darcy Alexander Corstorphine.

We invite you to enter your own Wildean witticism for this year’s competition.

The judges from the Oscar Wilde Society committee look for wit combined with elegantly stated truth.

Three winners will receive Wildeana, a compendium of anecdotes, epigrams, asides and accounts, signed by its editor, Oscar Wilde Society patron Matthew Sturgis.

Submit as many entries as you like at oscarwildesociety. co.uk/wilde-wit by 30th November 2020.

It’s one hell of a holiday.

Seven centuries after Dante’s death in 1321, the city of Ravenna in north-eastern Italy is inviting tourists to celebrate the writer who brought the underworld to life.

This UNESCO-listed town is where the poet wrote The Divine Comedy and is buried under a neoclassical tomb.

Ravenna will host exhibitions of Dante-inspired work, a Dantedi (sic) Festival and The Divine Comedy Show, which may sound like a stand-up routine but, in fact, comprises full-length, public readings of his epic poem.

The highlight of the commemorative year is a two-day walk, In Dante’s Footsteps. This self-guided tour doesn’t promise to guide you from despair to salvation.

Nor is the Roman poet Virgil alongside you to show the way, as in the original epic work.

But your holiday does become hellish as you leave Ravenna for the nearby small town of San Benedetto and the Acquacheta Waterfall.

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Smoked salmon on rye with tarragon, horseradish and crème fraîche

Dante compared the roar of its cascading water to the noisy Flegetonte, the river that separates the Seventh and Eighth circles of Hell.

If reminders of the afterlife are too much, there are always the local, dark-berried Sangiovese wines to drown your sorrows.

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The Oldie December 2020 7

the oldie of the year 2020 She’s danced with Fred Astaire, sung with Sinatra and sold 68 million records. And now she’s our Number 1 award-winner

Petula Clark

By Gyles Brandreth

P

DAVID HADZIS

etula Clark is a phenomenal phenomenon.

I am not quite sure why she hasn’t been our Oldie of the Year every year for the past quarter of a century. She is 88 on 15th November, looks 60 (and a fab 60, too), and has been doing her thing (singing, acting and composing) for more than 80 years.

She made her professional debut in 1939, singing with a teatime orchestra in the hall of Bentalls department store in Kingston upon Thames. She was paid with a tin of toffee and a gold wristwatch.

Petula became a household name during the Second World War, entertaining the troops on radio and in person, not simply as a child who could sing and dance (‘the British Shirley Temple’) but, more intriguingly, as a pre-teen impersonator (‘Radio’s Merry Mimic’), who could do impressions of everyone from Vera Lynn to Carmen Miranda and George Formby.

Apparently, Winston Churchill simply adored her. She could do him, too.

She made her first film in 1944, her first TV series in 1946 and her first hit record in 1949. You know about her 1964 global Number 1, Downtown, but there have been countless others, before and since. For many of them, she was the composer as well as the performer.

Late to the party, we TOOTY judges realised we had to recognise her when she stole the notices in this year’s West End revival of Mary Poppins, playing the old lady who sings Feed the Birds.

Thanks to COVID-19, the show closed almost as soon as it opened, but it will be back in 2021 and Petula Clark will be back with it. She doesn’t simply have snap in her celery. She’s a trouper who sang through the Blitz and, come what may, the show goes on.

As chair of the judges, I presented Petula with her award via Zoom. (The other judges were Maureen Lipman, Tim Rice,

girlfriends, Pet and Ulla. Her parents, Leslie and Doris, were both nurses. Born in Surrey, she was brought up in South Wales, but her childhood heroine was Swedish (Ingrid Bergman), her first boyfriend was Norwegian and ever since she first performed in Paris, in the 1950s, she has been a European.

She has sung as much in French, German, Italian and Spanish as in English. In Britain, we are not entirely comfortable with all that, are we? That must be the reason she isn’t yet a dame.

Oldie of the Year Petula Clark in Geneva

Quentin Letts, Craig Brown, Rachel Johnson, Roger Lewis, James Pembroke and Harry Mount).

She was at her home in Geneva, Switzerland, and I was at the Museum of Carpet in Kidderminster. Do go. It’s a disused carpet factory transformed into a world of weaving wonders. You can even work your own loom. It was a fitting setting to roll out the red carpet for Britain’s longest-serving and most successful female singing star.

Chatting with Petula, I realised why we haven’t rated her as we should. She does not live here and she is very unassuming. She has sung with Sinatra, danced with Fred Astaire (in Finian’s Rainbow (1968), she was his last on-screen dancing partner) and sold 68 million records, but she never shows off.

Her real name is Sally. Her dad claimed to have invented Petula by combining the names of two former Sponsored by

When I first met her on a TV show in the 1980s, the producer (an old boy) said to me, ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? But people of my generation don’t feel we are allowed to fancy her because we got to know her when she was a child. Funny that. It’s the same with Julie Andrews.’

When Petula starred in The Sound of Music on stage, the living members of the Von Trapp family all declared that Petula was the definitive Maria.

She’s a very unstarry star. I knew she had worked with everyone, from Sacha Distel to Sammy Davis Jr – she wouldn’t gossip about any of them. She knew the Beatles (she got her first Grammy before they got theirs) and was befriended by John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their bed-ins. They wanted her to join them on the mattress – but only to meditate.

Elvis Presley, on the other hand, was up for a proper threesome. When Petula and her friend Karen Carpenter turned up at his dressing-room door in Las Vegas, he made it plain he was ready to entertain them both – and how. The girls laughed politely, made their excuses and left. Petula had further encounters with the King, but nothing happened.

Elvis has long since left the building, but Pet is still with us, still riding high and now, at last, our Oldie of the Year.

Hurrah!

See overleaf for our other winners The Oldie December 2020 9

the other oldie of the year awards

William Roache

oldie non-resting actor of the year

William Roache, 88, my colleague on Coronation Street, says he has the best job in the world, playing Ken Barlow from the first episode in 1960 until today.

This December, he celebrates 60 years in a job he once said ‘will only last ten or 11 weeks’. He is in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running character in a soap opera in the world. Ken has survived assorted wives, punch-ups, bereavements, adultery and arson.

He went into the Welsh Guards aged 21 and emerged as a captain, but the theatre of repertory, not war, was his ambition. Tony Warren, creator of the Street, says the moment Bill walked into the room, he knew he had the perfect actor for conventional schoolmaster Ken. Bill has made the character truthful, intelligent, warm, perceptive and occasionally rather – ‘ding-dong’ – racy.

In his 88 years, Bill has survived many personal tragedies, legal battles with newspapers, bankruptcy, bereavement and, worse, an hour on the sofa with Piers Morgan – who tried to ascertain the number of women Bill has slept with. In fact, his 35-year marriage to his beloved late wife, Sarah, and the love of his five children are, as he says, ‘the tea break from life’ that keeps him so energised.

He is loved and respected by all the cast, crew and cohorts on the Street and his philosophy of life has kept him, in his own words, ‘feeling wonderfully immature’.

Maureen Lipman

Dame Joan Plowright

oldie great dame of the year In Roger Michell’s documentary Nothing Like a Dame (2018), a resilient, cheerful Joan Plowright tells her fellow Dames – Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Eileen 10 The Oldie December 2020

Atkins – how she was put in her place by Michel St Denis as a student at the Old Vic Theatre School, in the late 1940s. St Denis, a fastidious tyrant, looked at the girl from Lincolnshire and informed her authoritatively she would never be able to play queens or aristocrats.

The great actress – now 91 and, sadly, blind – chuckles, adding that she didn’t want to play queens, anyway. Plowright, who retains a trace of a Lincolnshire accent, has played the odd toff in her long and distinguished career, but her crowning achievements have been in more proletarian parts.

I vividly remember two of her earliest performances at the Royal Court Theatre in the heady years when it was a place of continual excitement and discovery.

She was deliciously bawdy as Mrs Margery Pinchwife in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. And it was as the idealistic Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s Roots that she first displayed the glowing, passionate energy that she has made her hallmark. She brought that spiritual conviction to Shaw’s Saint Joan and Major Barbara and her gift for radiant,

natural comedy as the Neapolitan housewife Rosa in Eduardo De Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

Her official title is Joan Ann Olivier, Baroness Olivier, DBE, which sounds very grand, if not queenly, but she remains Joan Plowright for me.

Paul Bailey

Edna O’Brien

brainy oldie of the year Edna O’Brien, who turns 90 on 15th December, is the world’s greatest living novelist.

She began as a beautiful, Irish elf maiden, whose books were banned and burnt by the outraged Catholic clergy.

Having quite vanquished narrowminded critics and moralists, she is now a grand old queen of letters, a Dame of the British Empire, officially

anointed in Dublin as a Saoi or Wise One. Her sin, and her abiding fame, was to have described sexual liberation and male predatoriness – everything being rooted, despite her long residence in London, in what James Joyce called the priest-ridden society of rural Ireland. My favourites are The Country Girls (1960), August Is a Wicked Month (1965), A Pagan Place (1970) and Zee & Co (1971).

The latter, about ‘the sexual geometry

of the eternal triangle’, was made into a film with Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Susannah York.

Taylor, with her shrieks of joy, complete erotic confidence and enjoyment of fancy clothes and the high life, was a perfect embodiment of an Edna O’Brien heroine and personality – a woman hurt by love but never giving up on it, willing to risk agony for euphoria.

Edna once qualified as a pharmacist – so what makes her stories additionally piquant is that she knows exactly when to sprinkle a few drops of poison.

Roger Lewis

Sir Frank Bowling oldie artist of the year

Sir Frank Bowling, 86, is not just a national treasure, knighted in October.

He is treasured internationally.

Although he left Guyana at 19, its colours and brightness light up his canvases. In Britain, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where contemporaries included David Hockney, Peter Blake and R B Kitaj.

When, in 1962, he was awarded the silver medal many thought that he, rather than Hockney, deserved the gold.

In the following year, along with Peter Blake and others, he was commissioned to produce paintings for the Shakespeare400 exhibition at Stratfordupon-Avon.

It took a while, partly because he disappeared for a while to New York, but, in 2003, he was the first black Briton to

be elected to the Royal Academy. Now he is a greatly respected Senior Academician. He was appointed OBE in 2008.

His move to America in 1966 was prompted partly by his wish not to be pigeonholed as a Caribbean artist, and he was evolving from figurative painting to abstraction. He plunged into the New York art world, living for a time at the Chelsea Hotel alongside Warhol and Rothko, and in 1967 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The formidable critic Clement Greenberg made him see ‘that Modernism belonged to me also’.

Nowadays Bowling is still at work, directing assistants like a conductor, in New York and London studios. The simile is apt; he is a poet and musician in paint.

Huon Mallalieu

book, Murder on Mustique. There is a lilt in her voice; she is having the time of her life. She has emerged from a far-fromeasy existence. Born as a girl when her parents, the Earl and Countess of Leicester, sought a male heir, she felt she was a disappointment. She later married Colin, a man with a wild temper, who failed her at his death by leaving his money to a man he worked with on St Lucia. She lost two sons and nursed a third son back to life following a nearfatal accident. Her book tells her story with courage and zest, and she launched it by taking over Graham Norton’s TV show – no mean achievement.

For some years she kept her spirits high by cooking up imaginary deaths for Colin – wrapping him up in cotton was one ingenious plan. Wisely, she diverted these fantasies into a work of fiction.

Hugo Vickers

Colin Thackery

oldie crooner of the year

Lady Glenconner oldie memoirist of the year

Lady Glenconner, 88, must be one of the most active Oldies of the Year to join that distinguished group, several of them centenarians.

She was already well known through many a TV interview, having been a Maid of Honour at the 1953 Coronation, a friend and Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret, and as wife of the maverick Colin Glenconner, who bought the island of Mustique and turned it into the most exclusive and glamorous of all Caribbean resorts. Since 2019, she has shot to global fame with her bestselling memoir, Lady in Waiting.

To talk to Anne today is to hear news of Russian editions, Japanese translations and excitement for her new

Last year, former Royal Artillery forward observer Colin Thackery, now 90, won the ITV talent show Britain’s Got Talent.

He did so in the uniform of a Chelsea Pensioner and the nation was wowed by his soaring voice.

The reason he won perhaps went a little deeper than mere musicality. Colin sang love songs to his late wife, Joan, who had died in his arms three years earlier. Younger viewers saw that love is not exclusively their province. The longer we love, the sharper the wrench of parting.

Gunner Thackery, as he was for 25 years of his life, stood on stage, ramrod-backed, his tunic buttons gleaming even more than Alesha Dixon’s lipstick. He raised his arms to the theatre’s gods and opened his mighty lungs as he sang, ‘I could fly higher than an eagle – ’cos you were the wind beneath my wings.’ Across Britain, chins crumpled and eyes welled.

Colin discovered singing as a boy when recruited to a church choir. He joined the Army and fought in Korea. En route to war, he belted out moraleboosting songs on his troop-ship.

Music has helped him to come to

terms with Joan’s death. ‘No matter what I sing, I’m singing to her or one of my family.’ He is a grandfather to four. He often slips down to the dementia ward at the Royal Hospital and sings with comrades there, former fighting men whose minds may have wandered but who can still recall a tune.

Colin Thackery, sir, we salute you.

Quentin Letts

Roger Law

oldie puppeteer of the year At 79, when he should be dozing by the fire with his eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Roger Law has had the temerity to revive Spitting Image, 36 years after it began.

It was hard enough back then. I was in my early thirties, he in his early forties, and it nearly killed both of us. He certainly nearly killed me in the bar of the Holiday Inn in Birmingham when, in an argument over the miners’ strike, he threw a sofa at me. His energy is prodigious, his curiosity protean, and his capacity for work, like him, huger than life.

He is a pirate, a scallywag, a mentor, a wonderful friend and an inspiration for generations of artists. In the ’60s, he was at the cutting edge of journalism as a Sunday Times and Observer caricaturist.

In the ’70s, he taught at Holborn College of Art while he and Peter Fluck dazzled the world with outrageous front covers of beautifully photographed plasticine models.

From 1984, he ran Spitting for 13 years and, afterwards, in his midfifties, he gave up alcohol, tobacco and work and went bumming round the

world. Unless he is drawing, Roger can never sit still. So he got a job as artist in residence in Sydney, lived on Bondi Beach and learned to surf. That done, he spent ten years in and out of China creating exquisite – and often gigantic – ceramics with local craftsmen. Now Spitting Image once again.

He’s mad, incorrigible, a fabulous beast and a force of nature. And all this in the same dusty, blue fisherman’s smock.

John Lloyd The Oldie December 2020 11

Grumpy Oldie Man

How to make Britain great again Our final hope? Become part of America matthew norman

Forgive the lightning raid on our Prime Minister’s home terrain of mindless optimism – but, at this uniquely dismal moment in national life, I’m on the hunt for what Ian Dury knew as Reasons to Be Cheerful.

A second Dury, it would appear, I am not. In his 1979 single, that glorious lyricist found cause for good cheer in a startlingly eclectic range of things.

Woody Allen was a safe choice back then, albeit the mainstream perspective on him has altered since. Health-service glasses are an even more distant memory than the universal love for that neurotic auteur.

Time has been gentler to the eradication of smallpox. These days, it’s blessedly impossible to imagine living under the threat of a lethal virus.

As for ‘round or skinny bottoms’, another Dury spirit-lifter, one admires the devotion to inclusivity that informed his oeuvre.

Were Dury alive now, and commissioned to update the song for this age, you assume its running time would be reduced from almost five minutes to somewhere between seven and nine seconds.

I write at the most uncertain and perilous fork in the road this country has approached since Winston Churchill just about dissuaded his Cabinet from parlaying with Hitler to save the Empire.

As confirmed by their efforts to control the pandemic, Boris Johnson’s Cabinet might most succinctly be described by the first line of another Dury number. Anyone unfamiliar with Plaistow Patricia is ill advised to google it if their appetite for profanity is easily sated.

While the plague rages anew, the self-styled Churchill manqué who leads Her Maj’s government may locate a reason to be cheerful in another minor challenge.

With the deadline for doing, or not 12 The Oldie December 2020

doing, a trade deal with the EU upon him, at the time of writing (shortly before the US election) the central influence on what we might dignify as his thinking lies not in Whitehall but in Washington.

Could there be a stronger testament to Brexit’s success in ‘getting our sovereignty back’ than undenied reports about Johnson nervily awaiting the result of the US presidential election before deciding what to do?

Whatever the outcome, Johnson’s terror of a Joe Biden presidency scuppering his tragicomic faith in a generous US trade deal retells an overfamiliar story.

The ceding of British sovereignty was always to America rather than to Europe.

We have been at the US’s mercy ever since an ailing John Maynard Keynes took his begging bowl to the US Federal Reserve just after the war and, month after month, was savagely rebuffed.

Despite the giant merkin of the ‘independent’ nuclear-missile system under effective Pentagon control, for all the fig leaf of that anachronistic UN Security Council permanent seat, Britain has become an international castrato.

And listen to us now, squealing about reclaiming sovereignty at a pitch only dogs can register, under the Prime Minister who bet the farm on the legendarily charitable instincts of Donald J Trump.

Whether or not that bet has paid off, the tacit but luminous confession that the entirety of British foreign policy rests in American hands underscores the truth from which we have been understandably eager to shield the eyes.

‘This country, on its current trajectory, is finished. In a century or two, it may revive’

This country, on its current trajectory, is finished. It may not be finished eternally. In a century or two, who knows, it may revive. For now, however, it is done as an international power of even the third or fourth rank.

Assuming the election is decided, and isn’t being litigated towards another judicial coup à la 2000, we will for several days have been treated by now to the mandatory drivel about that ‘special relationship’.

In fairness, the relationship is special, if not precisely in the way peddled by faux patriots of the Faragean ilk. It is the relationship a befuddled grandparent enjoys with a spoiled and selfish grandchild, craving visits that almost never happen, idolising the odious adolescent regardless of the misbehaviour.

If we want a miraculous rejuvenation, in the style of those old timers in Cocoon, there is a quick and easy fix.

Being a US dependency with no shred of influence on US policy – a kind of North Atlantic Puerto Rico – is a house of bondage from which there is only one escape route. Marching to the rousing rebel cry of ‘No Domination Without Representation’, we should apply to become the 51st State of the Union.

We aren’t that much further from the US mainland than Honolulu. But where Hawaii has three electoral votes, our population would give us close to 100.

The future of the US, and of the planet, would be shaped by the voters of Dundee, St David’s, Antrim and Blandford Forum.

In an instant, Britain would slip the ever-tightening shackles of isolation and irrelevance and burst free as much the most powerful not-quite-country in human history.

If the thought of this renaissance isn’t a reason to be cheerful, all I have left is the prospect of washing down the chlorinated Christmas turkey with a tankard of hemlock.

who was Gilbert Harding?

Sixty years ago, on 16th November 1960, the TV and radio star Gilbert Harding died, aged 53, of an asthma attack outside Broadcasting House as he was getting into a taxi.

Only a few weeks earlier, on 18th September 1960, he’d been the subject of one of the Face to Face interviews with John Freeman. A man known for his irascibility on the panel show What’s My Line? seemed a bizarre choice for such a prestigious series.

But his rise to fame, almost entirely due to the medium of television, in some ways encapsulated the nation’s social changes. Harding was born to the master and matron of a Hereford workhouse.

Five decades later, he was immortalised in Madame Tussauds as ‘The Most Famous Man in Britain’.

After graduating from Queens’ College, Cambridge, he drifted through various schoolmaster posts and even a brief spell as a Bradford police constable before joining the BBC Overseas Service in 1939. He was assigned to Outside Broadcasts three years later, and by 1950 he regularly chaired Twenty Questions, where he became infamous for his suspension for drunkenness on air.

His conclusion was especially memorable: ‘I’m fed up with this idiotic game. As for the score, if you’ve been listening you won’t need it. If you haven’t, you won’t want it.’

Such outbursts set the template for Harding’s future career. From 1951 onwards, a combination of short temper

On the verge of tears: Gilbert Harding on Face to Face, 1960

what is nature scanography?

Nature scanography, or scanner photography, is the process of, in my case, laying fresh flowers, foliage, nuts or mushrooms onto a scanner covered with a box. In this way you can create digitised images 14 The Oldie December 2020

which eventually become beautiful photographic prints.

Searching for a creative and rewarding project during lockdown, I began experimenting with scanography after being given a birthday card of scanned flowers by my painter brother who added, encouragingly, ‘You could do this!’

Having researched this new idea, I tracked down the required flatbed

and brandy prompted him regularly to berate the contestants of What’s My Line? When Bob Monkhouse made a guest appearance, the producer instructed Harding to ‘goad’ the star to make better television.

As well as his memoirs, Harding’s work includes his novelty record, Takes Two to Tango with Hermione Gingold. There were also ten film appearances, usually cameos, in which he played himself.

None of these enterprises could have anticipated Face to Face. Broadcasting conventions meant there could be no overt references to Harding’s homosexuality, and so the interviewer’s questions referred to how a deep relationship with his mother prevented his marrying.

Joe Moran points out, in Armchair Nation, how the producer Hugh Burnett was ‘constantly urging his cameramen to go in tighter, believing, as the Ancient Greeks did, that the face was the mirror of the soul’. There were no cutaways to Freeman; the broadcast focused on a middle-aged man, awash with regrets, who wept on air.

This self-loathing was a constant theme of his ghost-written books. Along My Line concluded with ‘But I do wish the future were over.’ Stephen Wyatt’s radio play Doctor Brighton and Mr Harding suggests that Harding hoped the interview would finally destroy his popular image. Harding regarded himself as a ‘tele-phony’. All the viewers seemed to crave on What’s My Line? was another Harding outburst as he attempted to guess the profession of a ‘cheese-winder’s clerk’.

Harding once observed his status was akin to that of a weary circus lion in need of protection from his public. Face to Face removed the bars from the cage.

Andrew Roberts

scanner on eBay and, on a whim, took a deep breath and clicked the Buy button.

I set it up in a small space in my sitting room, next to my laptop. Living in Lyme Regis, a beautiful seaside town close to a river and hills, I began collecting hedgerow plants and flowers on my permitted daily walk. Kind friends, whom I was eventually permitted to meet outside, allowed me to roam their

gardens, woods, orchards and fields, where I gathered posies and leaves, carefully carrying them home in a box lined with damp paper.

They were then quickly placed on the scanner so I could capture them digitally, ready for printing. This would often take as long as three or four hours, until I was happy with the composition, angle and light of the many different flowers and plants, while others awaited their turn in the fridge.

One morning, a local company, who grow and forage different species of mushrooms, brought me a basketful of ivory- and coral-coloured fungi which scanned beautifully, resulting in some of the most magical prints so far.

Six months after my first tentative

Pin-sharp: camellias by Cynthia Sharp

efforts, and having bought excellent face masks on the Etsy independent shopping website, I had a lightbulb moment. On Etsy, I started selling my own unframed A4 prints of ten of my scanned images.

Negotiating the Etsy website technology while I was setting up my shop was a bit of a challenge, but seeing my images and being able to point family and friends to my shop has been a great thrill and a source of pride.

I now have over 500 different images.

My relaxed, casual walks now have an intensity and purpose about them. I find I am viewing the countryside with even more enjoyment and a sharper eye to this curled honeysuckle tendril or that new-born leaf.

Cynthia Sharp

Supersonic journey into my sixties

There was a moment, as I was hanging over the lip of an abandoned slate quarry in Snowdonia, when I wondered what on earth I was doing.

Why had I allowed myself to be attached to the fastest zip line in the world and the longest in Europe, a device that dispatches visitors at more than 100mph down a vertiginous slope while they lie suspended more than 75 feet above razor-sharp scree?

There comes a time in a person’s life when they are surely too old for this sort of nonsense, too wise to be feeling their lunch rapidly making its way up the throat fuelled by a surfeit of undiluted terror. And, if turning 60 doesn’t give a hint you have passed that point, then nothing will.

A friend thought it an ideal 60th-birthday present. Never mind treating me to a cream tea at the Savoy, a night at the opera or a bottle of something tidy. Instead, I was fired along a thrill ride known as Velocity 2, in a place called Zip World in Penrhyn quarry, just outside the former

mining town of Bethesda, north Wales.

And the odd thing was, on a glorious autumn afternoon, I wasn’t alone as a thrill-seeking oldie. Everywhere I looked, at appropriate social distance, there were bald heads, grey hair and middle-aged spread. In the off-peak time, when the school summer holiday trade has dissipated, it seems the majority of those turning up to Zip World are similarly marking their transition into advanced age. After my ride, I met a chap who was there to celebrate his 80th.

‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘Made me feel young again.’

Which is the point. What we were all doing on our Welsh adrenalin rush was proving we were still not past it.

And Zip World is clearly doing very well out of the grey pound, cleverly monetising our collective need to cling on to wild youth. Dame Judi Dench had a go on it recently. Her picture, showing her grinning wide in the excited aftermath of her ride, is there on the wall, one of many silver-surfing Canutes seeking to hold back the tide of time.

Despite the suggestion of mortal danger, the fact is that this is a safer exercise than heading down the stairs to the wine cellar. Nor does it require any particular skill. Unlike other adrenalin activities, the most strenuous physical input is a gentle walk up to the initial launch point.

Yet, when it begins, after weights have been applied to your back to ensure you aren’t buffeted by the wind, the safety crew have supplied a rocket-launch countdown, and you are pinged off down the wire, it is a magnificent sensation.

As you swish over the extraordinary scenery, travelling so fast you can't hear yourself scream (and boy, I tried), the fun is jaw-dropping. Arriving all too soon at the finish station, being unclipped and lowered back down to earth, you find yourself skittish with adrenalin.

That is when it becomes properly clear why you have done it. That is when you feel an emotional uplift that allows you to forget what birthday it is you are marking. Well, almost.

Jim White The Oldie December 2020 15

Lucinda Lambton salutes her husband, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the Sunday Telegraph editor who died in October aged 96

Dear Perry, my gallant knight

P

erry was my sweetheart – my handsome-as-a-man-can-be, beloved sweetheart.

When we met, he asked why I had fallen in love with him and I answered without hesitation that it was because of his elegance of mind and manner.

So it was and so it most dashingly continued to be, these qualities delighting me for every one of the 30 years of our marriage. My admiration for him glowed with a tremendous pride that never dimmed one jot.

He was a clever, fearless and original thinker, as well as being a consistently good, kind and sympathetic man. What a particular delight it was never to be disappointed or let down by even a shadow of the second rate, while always feeling able to rely on his wisdom and understanding. At the same time, it must be said that he certainly had some controversial views!

Our lives together – our listening to thundering classical music in front of the fire, writing and walking in the countryside with four dogs – were pretty perfect.

Good fun was had when he relished pricking the pomposity of those who deserved it, which gave him enormous pleasure. Smiling in a particularly satisfied way, he would gleefully rub his hands together, delightedly crowing, ‘I’ve got them now, Luce – I’ve got them now!’

Dozens of letters have arrived, jam-packed with praise.

‘What a marvellous life he had,’ wrote journalist Xan Smiley. ‘And what fun and pleasure he gave to so many people; most of all friends but of course also to the thousands of delighted readers. He had such style in words and in the flesh.’

Writer Ferdy Mount declared, ‘Perry 16 The Oldie December 2020

Lucinda Lambton and Perry at their wedding, Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, 1991

had been a joyous part of my life for more than half a century. Other people will recall his fondness for saying the unsayable and wearing the unwearable.

But I treasure most of all his kindness and heartfelt courtesy, especially to young people who were unsure of themselves – such a rare quality.’

His son, Oldie editor Harry Mount, wrote, ‘I didn’t know anyone like him –

taking contrary views with an amused and amusing level built into them.’

Our friend Will Wyatt declared Perry to be a ‘a wonder … such a provocateur and such a handsome dandy… We rejoiced to have that silver hair, the pink shirt and pink trilby in our garden.

He and I must have disagreed about many things but it never felt like that when we talked. He steered the

Perry in El Vino’s, 1971, by Nicholas Garland

Sage of Fleet Street Craig Brown on the clever dandy who combined wisdom, honesty and gay abandon

P

erry Worsthorne arrived at the 2012 Oldie Awards in the outfit you see pictured below.

Then aged 89, he accepted his award for Fashion Icon of the Year with a characteristic flourish. ‘Having failed to become a sage,’ he said, ‘I will now be remembered as a dandy.’

In fact, he proved himself a perfect combination of the two, with a large pinch of the iconoclast thrown in.

A Spectator diary opened with this immortal sentence: ‘Put on coffee enemas as part of a cure to help me break a hellish addiction to the antidepressant Seroxat, I have accidentally discovered, a bit late in the day for me, that they are a sure-fire remedy for hangovers.’

He once recalled how Darcus Howe had phoned him to say Channel 4 was so pleased with their joint programme on race that they wanted to commission a series.

‘My vanity was tickled. Six hour-long programmes on prime time! As to money, that, too, was discussed: a possible

sum of £40,000. So rosy did the financial prospect seem that I bought a new Citroën with the, for me, unheard-of extra luxury of leather seats.’

Alas, Perry was then told the project had been cancelled, with not a penny in compensation. ‘How does television get away with such high-handed and unscrupulous, not to say uncivilised and unmannerly, behaviour?’ he asked.

It was his use of such words that led many to see Perry as an old fogey. But it was only half the story. He was also wonderfully candid and incautious: I can’t think of any other journalist who would have mentioned what they were paid, or sent up his own mercenary ambitions with such gay abandon.

He liked to play up to his lofty image, and then to place a whoopee cushion beneath it. Having been guyed about his Christian name in the New York Times, he boasted that the first child born after the Pilgrim Fathers had disembarked from the Mayflower was christened Peregrine ‘and a name good enough for the Pilgrim Fathers ought to be good enough even for the New York Times’.

But he then admitted he had boasted of his Pilgrim Fathers connection to General Eisenhower, whom he met on the campaign train in the 1952 presidential election.

‘After pondering this for a moment, his face broke into the famous Ike smile and he said, “See here, son, I have to tell you that your goddam first name sure never caught on.” ’ The Oldie December 2020 17

DAFYDD JONES/NEIL SPENCE/NICK GARLAND : ABOVE

conversation to fields of interest to us both.’

Hurray – a thousand hurrays – that he was so liked and admired.

A most curious aspect of his personality was his having little interest in matters aesthetic – paintings, architecture etc. They virtually passed him by. While realising this was shamingly unacceptable, he would nevertheless come out with such remarks as he made on our honeymoon, amidst the glories of the pink rocks of Utah: ‘God got here first before any architect.’

And, with my interest in buildings, he applied himself with zest, first realising what transformative wonders could be created, with – eureka! – an adobe multistorey car park in Santa Fe! It genuinely delighted him.

For someone who claimed no artistic sensibilities, he instinctively turned out as a fashion plate.

He was forever garnering praise for his appearance. Once in Spain, a whole restaurant, to the last man, stood to clap on his departure! Bowing and smiling with delighted surprise, he raised his pink-ribboned straw hat, gratefully acknowledging their applause, while wearing down yet further the large hole in the crown, already frayed at having been raised so many times for the ladies.

One friend, James Williams, wrote, ‘Without a doubt, he was the most stylish man I ever met and, even the last few times we saw him, he exuded distinction – no mean feat in your pyjamas!’

They were, of course, pink.

His manners were peculiarly good: once in the middle of a quarrel, in a grim diner in Massachusetts, I was sitting up at the counter, when an angry, cigarettesmoking slag appeared over my shoulder from the kitchen.

‘A woman!’ thought Perry. Manners to the fore! With a supreme effort, he managed, contortionist–like, to bow and to force forth a winning smile for her amidst our quarrel. The slag was demolished in seconds.

He was game for many sprees, such as listening to old-timer Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana, with tears rolling unashamedly down his cheeks as he saw the French faces of their Acadian ancestors who had settled in America in the 1750s.

I loved him with all my heart. I gave him thousands of kisses every day, while always being so very grateful and proud that I was his wife.

Forty years after the director’s death, Roger Lewis admires Vertigo, his masterpiece about obsession, madness and the occult

Alfred Hitchcock, master of delusion

AA FILM ARCHIVE/GRANGER/ALAMY

A

lfred Hitchcock died 40 years ago – but, rather more interestingly, almost exactly 100 years ago, November 1920, saw the release of the first film he ever worked on – The Great Day, a silent movie, now lost, for which he wrote all the title cards.

As we commemorate the centenary of Hitchcock’s first working in movies, I think of his best film, Vertigo (1958). Not a film so much as a ballet – and dance risks a loss of balance – it is a study in dizziness.

There are long stretches without any dialogue, and the last words, spoken by a nun in the bell tower, are ‘I thought I heard voices.’ Voices, echoes, shadows, glimpses…

It is a film about obsession, madness and occult feelings. James Stewart’s detective, Scottie Ferguson, is fracturing, cracking up, with a fear of heights, emotion and what is to be found beneath any placid surface.

He is indifferent to the devotion of Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). He never quite sees what is in front of him – yet the plot involves dedicated watching and waiting, as Stewart follows a green car, a 1957 Jaguar Mk VIII, zigzagging around the San Francisco streets and down the hills, which dip and rise steeply.

We certainly register the intensity of Stewart’s observation – lots of shots of him gripping the steering wheel. But what actually does he think is ever presented to his gaze?

Not what he thinks – for what imperfect eyes we have. When Midge drives past his apartment and 18 The Oldie December 2020

Hitchcock (1899-1980) in the Twenties

witnesses Kim Novak leaving – she gets that wrong too.

There is an elaborate (and implausible) murder plot, about doubles and decoys, with Novak pretending to be a reincarnation, staring at a portrait, visiting a grave and sitting in the window of an empty hotel room. The McKittrick Hotel, like Norman Bates’s creepy house on the hill, has a menacing dark staircase and a worn carpet.

All these trances and stunts. But it is all an opportunity, nevertheless, for a San Francisco travelogue, with VistaVision views of the deep blue bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Ambrosia Room at Ernie’s restaurant, which closed in 1995, when fast food replaced fine dining across America.

The film is made with such confidence: the long takes; the spell that

it’s aware it is casting. It is an investigation – no, not quite that; an exposition – of hysteria, male hysteria, as prompted by falling (vertiginously – and involuntarily) in love. But love is no balm or solace here. It is an illusion, a projection, guaranteeing only loneliness, heaving frustration and cruelty – Stewart isn’t exactly kindly with his belle, or belles. Love is that which unfulfills.

Nothing is solved or satisfied. It causes only an extremity of agitation, and death.

Vertigo is an affair of ghosts. ‘To put it plainly,’ Hitchcock told François Truffaut, ‘the man wants to go to bed with a woman who is dead.’

This makes it sound like Rebecca (just remade for Netflix), where Max de Winter remains fixated on his brash late wife, and Laurence Olivier bullies demure Joan Fontaine into running Manderley as she had done.

But this later film, from the Fifties, is one of those masterpieces making one wonder if those involved were fully aware of what was happening.

For when we have the car journeys through the ancient forests, and the camera tracks to the green canopies, we are in the forests of the unconscious – and to what extent was Hitchcock inspired by Freud?

It is crudely Freudian in interpretation – the towers and stairs, the symbolism about erections and impotence; Novak’s compliance with father figures (Stewart was twice her age); the fetishism about clothes (Novak’s array of perfect grey suits, white coat and a black scarf, designed by Edith Head) – but somehow it transcends fashionable psychoanalysis.

The Spanish mission, San Juan Bautista, with the campanile, incidentally, is like the church in Salvador Dalí’s Suburbs of a Paranoiac Critical Town (1936), where the bell is the shape of a woman in an old-style dress.

Stewart doesn’t want to sleep with a woman who is dead; he wants to possess a woman who never existed.

Novak is as split as Jekyll and Hyde.

She is malleable, permitting herself to suffer. As a partner, a mistress, she is as illusory as Larkin’s Jill or Keats’s Lamia, a porno fantasy figure.

And it is always disastrous to impose fantasy on a real person: one of the most awkward scenes in the film is when Stewart takes Novak to Ransohoff’s, the shoe shop, and the hairdresser’s, and compels her to turn into (to turn back into) somebody else. He is coercive, domineering, a director with a starlet.

He’s disgusted, later, when he realises she’s been Gavin Elster’s girl: ‘Did he train you? Did he rehearse you?

Did he tell you exactly what to do,

what to say?’ Yet hasn’t he used her in a similar way?

But it doesn’t do to dismantle the plot and its mechanical motivation.

Hitchcock must have thought this as, a third of the way through the picture, he gives everything away. What matters much more is the distinctly languorous mood, much assisted by the music.

Bernard Herrmann’s pulsing, rocking score (it is a lullaby) was recorded in London and Vienna, conducted by Muir Mathieson, and is a kind of slushy, insidious reflection of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. In these shimmering orchestral sounds, it is as if the living and the dead – or the apparently dead – move back and forth, list, like the lilies of the field.

In the music – and in the colours, the queasy, almost tropical greens, the reds and deep purples, edged with neon.

There is a theatrical use of the backdrops, silhouettes, gloom and brightness.

Everything in life, the lesson seems to be, is an illusion.

There are lots of doubles – women in the street or in Ernie’s restaurant, who for a moment Stewart thinks might be Novak.

People are not unique, we are to conclude. Full possession of anybody is

going to be an impossibility, as they whirl away like virus particles or spores.

And whirls and whorls are all over Vertigo: the hairstyles, bouquets of flowers, the cross section of a tree, with the rings in the bark. It is part of the theme of disorientation. The spirals and circles (beginning with Saul Bass’s spirographic titles-design animation); the general throbbing and pounding; the underlying atmosphere of sickness.

Stewart is actually in the sanatorium for a year or so, St Joseph’s Hospital, in Buena Vista Avenue East, with clinical depression – visited only by Midge, who plays him a Mozart record, a spinning disc, unavailingly. The final shot, of Stewart on the high parapet, opening his arms and looking upwards in supplication, is like a dancer’s representation of absolute despair.

There is no consolation in this film.

Swift, in A Tale of a Tub, defined happiness as ‘a perpetual possession of being well deceived’ – and Stewart in Vertigo is the less deceived. There is no requirement for him, at the finish, to wonder or worry how ‘summer’s honey breath [shall] hold out against the wrackful siege of battering days’.

He has seen a beloved plummet to the ground not once but twice. Renewal and relapse mean only a recurrence of horror – never fresh beginnings.

Dizzying heights: (clockwise from left) Hitchcock in 1973; Stewart and Novak; Saul Bass’s spirographic designs

The Oldie December 2020 19

Gone to pot Sober players, dull commentators and the smoking ban killed snooker, says Donald Trelford

DAVID MUSCROFT/SHUTTERSTOCK

F

or many years, late November and early December was about the UK Snooker Championships. And the Easter weekend was not about church services, country walks or outings to the seaside. For me – and for thousands of others – it was about the World Snooker Championship at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.

I used to go every year and followed the tournament avidly. I got to know the players and even wrote a book about them (Snookered, 1986).

But for several years now, I haven’t bothered even to watch it on television.

This year, when COVID-19 forced the event to move to August, I didn’t know or care who won. My disillusion with snooker is shared by so many other former fans that the game is clearly facing a serious decline.

Why has this happened? The main reason is that the players have become robotic – skilled workmen rather than artists. The game lacks the vivid personalities of the Eighties, when television coverage reached a record 18.5 million viewers after midnight on a Sunday for the most exciting world final of all time, between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor in 1985.

Taylor, the man in the giant glasses, had gone eight-nil down but, after a nip of brandy, he eventually drew level at 35-all and won the last frame on a hotly contested black, the only time he had been ahead in the match.

It was the biggest audience ever on BBC2, watched by nearly half the households in Britain. That was the peak of the game’s popularity, and the graph since then has gone steadily down.

Only a third or so of that number watched Ronnie O’Sullivan win his sixth world title. The champion himself is also concerned about snooker: ‘It just feels boring. The sport is dying.’ His explanation is simple: ‘The smoking ban killed the clubs.’ With so many snooker

20 The Oldie December 2020

Nail-biter: the Davis–Taylor classic, 1985

clubs having closed, only half the number of boys in the 16-18 age group now belong to one, compared with eight years ago.

Where are the players now to match the excitement created by Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, Jimmy White (‘the Tooting tearaway’), Cliff Thorburn (‘the cool riverboat gambler’), Ray Reardon (‘Dracula, the Welsh Prince of Darkness’) or – craziest of all – ‘the Canadian teddy bear’, Bill Werbeniuk, who needed 20 pints of lager to keep his hands steady enough to play?

There are still huge sums of money floating around the game. O’Sullivan is said to have earned more than £12 million, including a £500,000 prize for winning this year. But, still, fewer people are playing the game in Britain and fewer people are watching it on TV because they find it less interesting.

Snooker has been through crisis periods before. It used to be the junior partner to billiards, which was a much bigger draw until the Second World War. Billiards destroyed itself as public entertainment because players became too good and too dull, amassing huge breaks (the record is 4,137 by an Australian, Walter Lindrum, playing against Joe Davis in 1932). Opponents

got fed up waiting hours to get a shot and the public got fed up watching.

The great Joe Davis got snooker going after the war, but it never caught the public imagination as the handful of bow-tied old pros kept on playing one another and holding exhibition matches.

When Davis retired in 1964, he said, ‘Snooker has no future.’ Just five years after that doom-laden prophecy, Pot Black launched on BBC2, exploiting the introduction of colour TV. Snooker was the perfect game for the small screen and drew a massive audience.

Incredibly, though, there were no TV cameras when Higgins opened a new era by winning the world title in 1972 in a British Legion concert hall in Birmingham, with the small crowd sitting precariously on planks and beer crates. The tabloid press anointed him the game’s first superstar, with the air of a hustler or pool-room shark.

Snooker had rediscovered its roots in raw working-class life.

TV ratings soared with the move to the Crucible in 1977 and the brilliant staging of the event by the BBC’s Nick Hunter.

The commentators became stars, especially ‘Whispering’ Ted Lowe, who once said innocently, in hushed tones, ‘Fred Davis, the doyen of snooker, now 67 years of age and too old to get his leg over, prefers to use his left hand.’

The commentators are now as dull as the players: no excitement, or emotion – just dull efficiency.

The organisers dismiss talk of a decline as nonsense, pointing out that there are many millions of players in China and other Asian countries, with 150 snooker clubs in Shanghai alone, and that the world final has a global audience of untold millions.

Maybe so – but, sadly, it no longer includes me and many others who once loved this beautiful game.

The UK Snooker Championship 2020 starts on 24th November

E

ighty years ago, on 23rd November 1940, the great British cartoonist Pont died of polio, aged only 32.

Throughout the Thirties, Graham Laidler (Pont’s real name) was celebrated for his cartoons in Punch and his three collections, particularly his famous series The British Character. It is a mark of his genius that, 80 years after his death, they are still very funny.

The first of the series was ‘Adaptability to Foreign Conditions’ (4th April 1934), reproduced below. In all, Pont produced more than 100 variations on this single theme.

The title of a posthumous collection of his work, Most of Us Are Absurd (1946), gives the key to his crazy humour: he made observations on what he saw as the innate madness of human beings themselves.

According to novelist T H White – in his introduction to Pont’s second book, The British at Home (1939) – Pont said, ‘I do not try to draw funny people. I try very hard to draw people exactly as they are.’

The British Character ran for six years, from April 1934 until April 1940, and contained 104 drawings. A collection of more than 50 of these (plus others), with an introduction by E M Delafield (best known for her 1930 bestseller The Diary of a Provincial Lady), was published in 1938 and sold 10,000 copies before Christmas that year.

A notable example is ‘Love of Keeping Calm’ (5th May 1937), published two years before the Ministry of Information’s Keep Calm and Carry On poster campaign – so popular in a wide

22 The Oldie December 2020

Eighty years after he died, aged only 32, Pont still nails the British character. By Mark Bryant

Master of Anglo-Saxon attitudes range of recent parodies. In Pont’s cartoon the diners on a sinking ship (the men again in dinner-jackets) continue their meal, surrounded by water.

Gavin Graham Laidler was born on 4th July 1908 in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, son of the proprietor of a firm of painters and decorators. He was educated at Newcastle upon Tyne Preparatory School and Trinity College, Glenalmond, Perth (now Glenalmond

College). One of Pont’s closest schoolfriends was John Fenwick, a grandson of the founder of Fenwick department store (established in Newcastle in 1882), to whom Pont dedicated his third book of cartoons, The British Carry On (1940).

He then studied for five years (from 1926) at the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture in London. However, soon after qualifying (ARIBA), he contracted tuberculosis and, after a major operation in 1932, was unable to pursue an architectural career.

Turning instead to drawing, from 1930 to 1936 he published a weekly four-frame strip The Twiffs, in Woman’s Pictorial magazine using, for the first time, the pseudonym Pont (said to derive from a childhood joke about Pontifex Maximus – the Pope’s alternative title as ‘greatest priest’).

His first cartoon appeared in Punch on 31st August 1932 when he was 24, and from then until his death, eight years later, he produced more than 450 cartoons for the magazine.

As well as The British Character, Pont’s other series included The British at Home, Wartime Weaknesses and Popular Misconceptions. One in the latter series was ‘Life in the BEF’ (13th December 1939), showing members of the British Expeditionary Force literally hanging out their washing

on the Siegfried Line (as in the popular wartime song), to the astonishment of its German defenders.

By coincidence, the German cartoonist E O Plauen produced an almost identical drawing for the weekly Das Reich, with a British POW hanging out his washing between two gun turrets on which storks are nesting.

Pont’s work in the first year of the Second World War was especially good.

This included cartoons showing the supposed coolness of the British in adversity: like the two pub regulars and a barman quietly ignoring Lord Haw-Haw’s radio propaganda claims of national panic (14th August 1940).

Some, though still very funny, were deemed unsuitable to be published by Punch during the war and made it only

into the later anthologies. They include the country squire in his mansion, saying ‘Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. And now, dammit, Hunting.’

Every fan has his or her own favourite cartoon. The Oldie’s founder and former editor, Richard Ingrams, said, in his introduction to The World of Pont (1983), that his was the man in the British Character cartoon ‘A Disinclination Ever to Go Anywhere’ (2nd February 1938), reprinted above.

Ingrams wrote, ‘He sits slumped in a comfortable armchair while his wife, who has got someone on the other end of the phone asking them to dinner or drinks, gazes at him with a look of real desperation in her eyes. That man is me...’

Pont had many admirers, from

J B Priestley to Osbert Lancaster (who was born exactly a month after him).

Lancaster once said, ‘In comic art, as in many other fields of human endeavour, the man who can worthily maintain a long-established tradition and make it relevant to the times in which he lives is rare indeed. Such a one was Pont. A great many Punch artists have observed and recorded the life of the middle classes; but few could rival his eye for the revealing detail and fewer still the delicacy and wit which every lightest bit of crosshatching so subtly revealed.’

Eighty years after the artist’s death, this is as true as ever.

Dr Mark Bryant is author of the Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists

Graham Laidler, aka Pont The Oldie December 2020 23

From left: Phyllis and Bobbie (Sally Thomsett and Jenny Agutter) talk to Mr Perks (Bernard Cribbins)

Transport of delight Fifty years after The Railway Children film, Kate Garner makes a pilgrimage to the Yorkshire steam railway where it was made

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

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t was the red flannel petticoat that did it! As I watched Bobbie avert imminent disaster by ripping up her petticoat, creating a makeshift flag and bringing the steam train to a halt, I was left wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

What a heroine … though she then rather spoilt it by fainting on the railway.

I was totally entranced by the gloriously sunny and gentle world of The Railway Children. This classic was released 50 years ago, in December 1970 – and it remains a favourite film of my generation.

The story, based on the 1906 book by E Nesbit, tells of three children and their mother leaving their comfortable London home to live near a country railway, in mysterious circumstances.

It takes some time for the viewer to learn of their father’s wrongful imprisonment on suspicion of his being a spy, selling state secrets.

Their new home, Three Chimneys, is different from what they are used to – dirty, tumbledown and rat-infested.

But the children adapt to their new impoverished life, making friends with

the stationmaster Mr Perks and waving to passengers on the passing trains.

It is a gentle tale of friendship, family and love, with the children involved in escapades: rescuing a boy trapped in a tunnel; helping a lost Russian gentleman; finding ways to make ends meet when their mother falls ill; celebrating Mr Perks’s birthday; and the eventual discovery of their father’s alleged crimes.

That leads to the need to clear his name and secure his release. The film draws to a close with the memorable ‘lump in the throat’ scene of the The Oldie December 2020 25

swirling smoke, slowly clearing from the station platform to reveal Bobbie’s father (Iain Cuthbertson), ending with her immortal line, ‘Daddy, my daddy.’

I’ve watched the film many times. The original version starred Jenny Agutter as the eldest child, Bobbie, Dinah Sheridan as Mrs Waterbury, Bernard Cribbins (Mr Perks), Sally Thomsett (the middle child, Phyllis) and Gary Warren as the youngest, Peter. It was directed by Lionel Jeffries, better known as an actor. The 2000 version on ITV, though interesting, does not compare, despite the delightful Agutter taking on the role of Mother.

The Railway Children was Jeffries’s directorial debut – he originally planned to play the stationmaster, Mr Perks. He was returning to England on board a liner from America to film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – in which he played

they were portraying. Thomsett, whose character is supposed to be 11, was really 20 – three years older than Agutter, playing her elder sister!

Thomsett recalls being given strict instructions that her real age never be revealed. She was banned from drinking, driving or being seen with her boyfriend.

Both girls were housed in a hotel in Haworth to stop them venturing into nightclubs. Thanks to this subterfuge, the film crew remained unaware of Thomsett’s real age and treated her as a child throughout filming.

When I moved to Yorkshire, I was delighted to learn the movie had been filmed at Oakworth Station and on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (KWVR). After the Beeching cuts in the Sixties, societies emerged to try to save some old railways, including the KWVR.

STUDIO CANAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Keep the red flag flying: Bobbie stops the 11.29 and averts disaster

Grandpa Bungie Potts – and borrowed the book of The Railway Children from his 13-year-old daughter Martha, as his books had been lost.

He loved it. Recognising that few films were made for both children and grownups, he bought a six-month option on the film rights for £300 and began work on the screenplay. He struggled to find a financier but Bryan Forbes, chief of production at EMI Elstree Studios, came up with the money and persuaded Jeffries to direct rather than act.

The final result is still considered one of the finest British films – if not the finest – for children. It has stood the test of time.

As a debut director, Jeffries exercised methods that could be unconventional. If a scene went well, the young stars were rewarded with pocket money and sweets, despite being older than the children

At the time of filming, the local society had been operating for a couple of years in a low-key fashion. Jeffries retained the Oakworth name for the station in his film, boosting the popularity of the local area over the years, as visitors flocked to see familiar locations from their favourite childhood film.

A dedicated Railway Children walk allows followers to revisit the doctor’s house, Mr Perks’s cottage, Three Chimneys and other buildings and streets used during filming.

Oakworth Station appears in many

‘My utter thrill – I heard the familiar sound of a steam train’s whistle’

scenes throughout the film including the eventual homecoming of the children’s father. Standing on the beautifully maintained platform, you can easily envisage the children and Mr Perks.

As the steam trains pull in, you are instantly transported to a different era.

There is something magical about steam trains: the sights, sounds and smells evoke a bygone age when life seemed less complicated, gentler and more family-orientated.

The circular six-mile walk is a must for diehard fans. I rejoiced in spotting various buildings and reminiscing about the film with my rather long-suffering husband who somehow missed the whole Railway Children experience.

Imagine my utter thrill when, walking near Mytholmes Tunnel and the embankment where young Jim injures his leg during the paper chase, I heard the familiar sound of a steam train’s whistle.

Turning slowly, I saw a train emerge from the tunnel, shrouded in smoke, just like in the film! I almost did a Bobbie and fainted on the spot. This was also the site of the famed red-petticoat scene, where there is a landslide and the 11.29 train is saved from disaster by the quick actions of the children.

Before COVID-19, Oakworth Station, the KWVR and nearby Haworth, used in many scenes, were popular tourist spots.

It was a film fan’s paradise, with various generations flocking to see where filming took place. The film has kept its magic despite the passing years, and grandparents are now introducing their grandchildren to this much-loved story.

There were plans to celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary but these required the railway to survive the financial devastation wrought by the pandemic. Having closed in mid-March, lines such as the KWVR have suffered unsustainable financial losses. But, thanks to an appeal supported by Agutter, the railway weathered the storm and the trains were ‘back in steam’ in August.

I can’t wait to return. If I close my eyes, I can picture the platform of Oakworth Station, hear the train’s piercing whistle and smell the acrid smoke and coal from the furnace.

In my mind’s eye, I spy Bobbie in her pristine, white dress staring through the smoke and seeing the face of her beloved father appear.

And, yet again, that lump forms in my throat and I find myself swallowing hard. The magic of The Railway Children will affect me for ever, however advanced my years.

For train bookings, go to kwvr.co.uk The Oldie December 2020 26

After a failed suicide attempt, Cambridge scholar Simon Pratt learnt to paint with one arm – and took a point off a Wimbledon champion

Art gave me a second chance at life

I

was a ‘jumper’.

On 7th February 1990, at around 11pm, at Queen’s Park Station on the Bakerloo line, I leapt in front of the approaching train. I was 18 years old.

I remained conscious throughout but felt no pain. Afterwards, I told the ambulance crew to tell my parents that ‘I have bumped into a lamppost and, if they believe that, they will believe anything’.

I knew I wanted to live a week before I jumped – it was an epiphany. But I still went ahead. The only thing I can remember now is the surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital informing me he would have to amputate my left (writing) arm from my shoulder because it had lost its pulse. The train had run over it inches from my neck.

The blow to my forehead was serious.

There followed a 10-hour-long operation to fish out the chips of bone that were floating around my brain. I have had a plastic plate inserted in my skull to cover the hole. A patch of skin under my right eye was shredded (amazingly the eye was not harmed) and a skin graft from behind my ear was put in its place. That ear was pinned back as part of the operation – pretty useful, as it did rather stick out.

There were then four days in intensive care, tended by an attractive nurse, who sent me a postcard when she went on holiday abroad some time later. I spent three weeks in a surgical ward. The metal staples were removed from the stump where my arm had been. I immediately felt a ‘phantom limb’. A sensation akin to pins and needles ran down my ‘arm’. This phenomenon exists to this day; it isn’t painful – just irritating.

28 The Oldie December 2020

Simon Pratt today

Then the real crunch came: I was going into the psychiatric unit at the hospital. I had never felt so humiliated.

Dad said he was crying inside.

I received a treasure-trove of getwell-soon cards. I was visited by old schoolmates who had not liked me at Westminster School, where I had been a Queen’s Scholar. Friends from the Christian Union to which I belonged at Jesus College, Cambridge, where I was studying mathematics, often came – one of the girls is still my best friend.

Lord Justice Staughton and his wife came (my father was his clerk).

Staughton paid me an immense

‘I heard Dad weeping as he worked. All his dreams for me had been destroyed’

compliment: he said I was the bravest man he had ever met.

Mum was granted compassionate leave by the House of Lords, where she was a Hansard reporter. She popped in all the time. The chaplain and the maths teacher from Westminster were ardent supporters.

I was in the psych ward for six more weeks. I have to admit that, after a period of adjustment, I quite enjoyed the funny farm. I was on a high; I had SURVIVED. There were some real characters inside. I had intensive art therapy, which sorted many issues out.

To this day, the strangest thing of all is that the consultant psychiatrist did not believe I had a mental illness. He insisted I had had a nervous breakdown from overwork at Cambridge. He said I had the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old, and the intellectual age of a 25-year-old.

This is despite my telling him a plethora of psychotic delusions and fantasies.

It took another seven years, and another serious breakdown, before I was properly diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and psychosis. I now take a gram of lithium carbonate every morning. It has saved my life.

Dad converted the attic into an artist’s studio for me – he is talented at DIY. I heard him weeping as he worked. All his dreams for me had been destroyed.

So, I started to paint with my right arm. I had been awarded an ‘A’ grade in A-level art at school – so I wasn’t starting from scratch. My first efforts were not good – the main drawback when I paint is that my hand shakes. I cannot achieve the draughtsmanship I wish I had. I enjoy

Life drawing (clockwise from top left): The Unhappy Clown; Landscape, Uzbekistan; Erotic nude; Whirl 2; The Cherry-Pickers

painting large canvases; I can use my whole arm, sweeping over the cotton.

When I paint a portrait in particular the eyes are a challenge.

Improvement was gradual: the breakthrough came in 1994 when I was commissioned by the English bridge authorities to paint the card game’s world champion as the Queen of Hearts for the front cover of their magazine.

That was the start of my new life and I

have since had many exhibitions. I see myself as an English artist – not a disabled artist.

Dressing was never a problem. I astonished the doctors because I adapted instantly to my disability. I learnt to tie my shoelaces, ski in the Swiss Alps, and serve a tennis ball one-handed. I am a keen member of Acorn Lawn Tennis Club in Edgware. I have taken on the former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash at the

Queen’s Club and won a point off his serve. He is still recovering.

Writing was the biggest challenge. It took six months to achieve a rudimentary standard. Even today, it is barely adequate, but now we use keyboards all the time – so it doesn’t matter.

My mum, dad, sister and friends cherished me. I wouldn’t have survived without them. As the Beatles sang, ‘All you need is love’ – and medication.

The Oldie December 2020 29

Guilty men Thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher was toppled by three Conservative big beasts. Her old friend Norman Tebbit names them

T

he story of the fall from office of Margaret Thatcher is told in dispassionate detail by Charles Moore in Herself Alone, the third volume of his masterful official biography, just out in paperback.

But I don’t think he applies the word ‘guilty’ to any of those involved in her fall from office on 28th November, 1990.

She was far from the first – or indeed the last – of Conservative leaders or Prime Ministers to be ousted against their will from office by colleagues, to whom the description ‘guilty men’ or, for that matter, ‘guilty women’ might be applied.

As one of the tightly-knit group of half a dozen or so MPs – led by Airey Neave, the Member for Abingdon and the heroic escapee from Nazi Germany’s most highly secure prisoner-of-war prison, Colditz Castle – who plotted the campaign to make Margaret Thatcher leader in place of Ted Heath, perhaps I merited the description ‘guilty man’ myself.

Certainly, that is how Ted Heath and his supporters regarded Airey Neave and his group of friends when Margaret Thatcher replaced him as party leader in 1975.

Later, I served as a minister in her government and as her Conservative Party Chairman when she won her historic third consecutive generalelection victory in 1987 – just over three years before her tragic fall from office 30 years ago.

Margaret Thatcher was a political phenomenon. Not only was she the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was also the first to win three consecutive general elections – the third with a majority of over 100 seats and a couple of thousand more votes than she had secured at her first.

To those outside the world of politics, it may seem strange that so shortly after she won that historic third consecutive victory in 1987, she was bundled out of

Goodbye to all that: the Thatchers leave Downing Street, 28th November 1990

office, not by the electorate but by her fellow Conservative MPs. It seems to me that there is a built-in mechanism working against a party leader’s holding office for more than a decade or so.

No one survives unchanged the experience of first entering Number 10 Downing St as Prime Minister. The door closes behind them. The windows, which look rather large from the outside, begin to get smaller, showing those inside less of the world outside, as the senior civil-service officials and those famous red boxes grow in number around the new Prime Minister.

Margaret Thatcher’s difficulty – like that of all long-serving Prime Ministers – was that, gradually, there were more and more former ministers whom she had sacked – either over policy differences or because they were simply not up to their jobs. Alongside them sat a growing number who had hoped for preferment but had never been invited to serve.

Fifty years ago, that was less of a problem as there were a good number of Conservative MPs who had no

ministerial ambitions. Some were retired armed-service officers. Others were running businesses or family estates. But in more recent times there have been more younger men and women making a full-time professional career in politics.

In her later years as Prime Minister, Thatcher also found herself at odds with both Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson over European monetary convergence – in which she rightly saw the danger of the creation of the single European currency.

So the first of the guilty men who brought her down were in Brussels; then came Chancellor Howe, who refused to implement her policy of the free-floating pound; and then Michael Heseltine, who was driven by his ambition to succeed her.

Perhaps I too bear some guilt, for, as the pressures built on her in 1990, Thatcher asked me to return to the Cabinet as Education Secretary. But, after much heart-searching, I told her I could not break my word to my wife that I would leave front-line politics in order to care for her after she was injured in the 1984 Brighton bombing.

Towards the end, some of Thatcher’s erstwhile supporters began to look for someone who, if she fell, would save us from the disaster of Heseltine in Number 10. As the struggle reached its climax, one man stayed silent at home in his constituency. The Chancellor, John Major, pleaded that he had toothache in a wisdom tooth.

At precisely the critical moment he overcame the pain and arrived at Westminster to offer not support for Thatcher, but himself as the unity candidate to defeat Heseltine – which he did.

I doubt that he could have saved Thatcher, but in any case he did not overexert himself to try. So was he the most guilty man of all?

Surely not more guilty than Heseltine or Howe – but he was the one who gained the most.

The Oldie December 2020 31

Harvard’s King of Comedy

Tom Lehrer went from satire genius to Ivy League maths professor.

Now, at 92, the great man is giving away his archive. By Francis Beckett

GEORGE KONIG/SHUTTERSTOCK

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ost famous performers maximise their income.

If I’d had to bet which performer would break that habit, I’d have put my money on Tom Lehrer. In October, Lehrer, aged 92, put his songs on his website and announced that anyone can use them for nothing, until 31st December 2024.

You can even mess around with them; put your own words to his music, for example.

The air will soon be full of folk singing loudly in public: ‘All the world seems in bloom on a spring afternoon when we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.’

Lehrer has always worn his genius lightly. At the height of his fame, in 1972, he stopped writing and performing songs, and went back to being a maths professor at Harvard. He said that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger made satire redundant, but that wasn’t why he gave it up. He was just tired of it, and uninterested in celebrity.

In 1959, Lehrer’s songs burst into my stifling Jesuit boarding school like a clown in a cathedral. With The Vatican Rag, Lehrer taught me the precious, liberating lesson that it was OK to laugh at the Catholic Church. (‘Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate.’)

We had heard witty songs before – Flanders and Swann, Ian Wallace, Paddy Roberts – but Lehrer brought from the US a sharp, satirical edge that Britain didn’t produce until Beyond the Fringe turned up in London in the early sixties.

There was a political edge to his work, too. Nuclear weapons filled him with fear and anger, expressed in the powerful, very funny We Will All Go Together When We Go: ‘There’ll be no more pain and misery when the world is our rotisserie.’

The cynicism of America’s using Hitler’s rocket scientist for its weapons appalled him: ‘Once it goes up, who cares where it comes down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.’

32 The Oldie December 2020

A one-man satire boom: Tom Lehrer in the sixties

But the Left wasn’t allowed the comfortable illusion that it owned him.

Every so often he turned round and bit it.

‘You have to admire people who sing [protest] songs,’ he said. ‘It takes a certain amount of courage to get in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out in favour of the things that everybody else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.’

He sang in a sub-Dylan whine: ‘We are the folk-song army. Every one of us cares.

We all hate poverty, war, and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares.’

If only, he mused, folk songs had been written not by the people, but by professionals. So he reworked Clementine as written by Cole Porter, Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan.

He is a great G&S fan, constantly referencing them. Years after he stopped public performances, in a private show for his maths students he mocked those who use unnecessary technical language, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience: ‘If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, why, what a very singularly deep,

young man this deep, young man must be!’

His masterpiece also derives from G&S. It’s simply the names of all the chemical elements, sung to the tune of the Major-General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance: ‘There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium…’

Every Lehrer addict knows that song, but only we nerds know that at one performance in Copenhagen he revealed an older version of the song, derived from Aristotle, which, he claimed, went ‘There’s earth and air and fire and water.’

Lehrer’s work has aged well. It’s often as fresh and funny now as when I first heard it, and every so often it gets a sudden, new meaning.

Back in 1959, there was a reference I didn’t understand. It Makes a Fella Proud to Be a Soldier contains these lines: ‘Now, Fred’s an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.’

The American audience on the record laughed and laughed, and I assumed Peale was famously vacuous. I never heard his name again until I recently discovered he was Donald Trump’s philosophical mentor. And he is more vacuous than I’d imagined possible.

He was the Trump family’s pastor, and Trump has admired Peale’s sermons all his life.

Peale became known as ‘God’s salesman’ and preaches that wealthiness is next to godliness. ‘Believe in yourself!’ his book The Power of Positive Thinking begins.

‘Have faith in your abilities! … formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding … hold this picture tenaciously.’

Peale, who died in 1993, is surely looking down with approval on his pupil. How I would love to hear Lehrer on Trump! But I suppose he feels that, once again, satire can’t compete with the reality.

Tolstoy’s last stop At 82, the great writer left his wife. He wanted to get hundreds of miles away but only made it to a nearby station. By Sara Wheeler

Leo Tolstoy laid out on the stationmaster’s bed, Astapovo Station, 1910

ITAR-TASS NEWS AGENCY/ALAMY

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hundred and ten years ago, on 20th November 1910, the second-most-famous man in Russia after the Tsar died on a modest cot at Astapovo railway station, 200 miles south of Moscow.

Tolstoy had often written about the moment of death. He must have known it was his turn.

Shortly before, an elderly countess had stepped from a carriage onto the lonely platform leading to the stationmaster’s house. Accompanied by a man and woman, she wore a dark coat with a fur trim, and a black hat.

The dawning sky was aspirin-white, but there was no snow. Puffs of smoke rose above the railway engine. The three walked slowly towards the station house.

The countess drew on gloves. As they approached the building, a slim, bearded figure inside slammed the door shut.

I can report these details, as I have watched flickering footage of Countess Tolstoy’s arrival at her husband’s deathbed on YouTube.

Sofia Andreyevna had been married to Tolstoy for 48 years and had given birth to 13 of his children. At four in the

morning, a few days before his death, Tolstoy, carrying a candle, entered his live-in doctor’s bedroom on the first floor of his ancestral home and woke the doctor. He told the man softly they had to leave. Tolstoy said, ‘Don’t wake Sofia.’

He was 82 and wished to renounce the world. His wife was of the world. Tolstoy left Sofia a note saying that he could no longer bear ‘the state of luxury in which I have been living’. He wrote, ‘My leaving will grieve you. I’m sorry about that, but please understand and believe me: I cannot do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming – has become – impossible.’

The two men – the writer and the doctor – rode to the nearest station in a carriage, swaddled against the cold as winter was shouldering in from the north. They bought third-class tickets to

‘My leaving will grieve you. I’m sorry about that … I cannot do otherwise’

Kozelsk and headed to the Optina Pustyn monastery, and then on to visit Tolstoy’s sister in her convent. After that, they set off for the Caucasus, hundreds of miles to the south. But Tolstoy fell ill and was obliged to get off the train at Astapovo (a station now called Lev Tolstoy). They put him to bed in the stationmaster’s house.

On reading his note, the countess threw herself into a pond, but it was too shallow to drown in. After changing her clothes, she chartered a train to Astapovo. But when she got there, her husband’s acolytes wouldn’t let her in until Tolstoy had lost consciousness. It was one of these acolytes who had slammed the door when he saw her. The YouTube footage shows Sofia Andreyevna pressing her face against the window.

Tolstoy’s followers had been saying for years that Sofia was hysterical. Who wouldn’t have been? Tolstoy was one of the most egotistical men ever to have lived which is why he was able to give us those masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Like many great men, he loved humanity but didn’t care much for its individuals.

The Oldie Decenber 2020 35

DE ROCKER/ALAMY

The Master died at 6.05 in the morning. It was oddly fitting that his death should have occurred in a station: his fiction associates the railway with death, not progress. Anna Karenina perishes under a train, red handbag flailing, and throughout the novel the railway represents the ugly threats of modernity, adultery and nightmares.

Did Tolstoy believe he was about to meet his maker as he lay in the starlight?

He had in his life gone through various spiritual crises and conversions, turning to and away from Orthodoxy, confecting his own brand of religious thinking. His faith was always of the mystical variety and for a long time he identified as a yurodivy, Russia’s special brand of holy fool.

Around the time Nicholas II came to the throne in 1894, Tolstoy began supporting persecuted sectarian groups.

He had also criticised the Orthodox church for its unwillingness to stand up to the abuses of a cruel and dictatorial regime. (One wonders what he would have made of Patriarch Kirill’s supine role today.) In 1901, the church excommunicated Tolstoy.

News of the count’s illness had reached the press, and soon hundreds had converged on the Astapovo platform – 60 army officers among them.

A Pathé man, reporters and stills photographers crowded round the stationmaster’s small house along with hordes of villagers. Students across the land demonstrated, expressing their sorrow that such an influential critic of the government had fallen silent.

The body was taken back to the

Out for the Count: Tolstoy’s grave at his family home, Yasnaya Polyana, 120 miles south of Moscow

Tolstoy home, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula region 125 miles south of Moscow.

Thousands followed the cortège and sang hymns, and others knelt in the weak sunshine when the bier passed. A dwelling called Yasnaya Polyana (Bright Glade) had been on the site from at least the 17th century. At that time, the property was on the southern border of the Moscow principality. Tolstoy’s grandfather Prince Nikolai Volkonsky had inherited the land and its dwellings.

He was the prototype for Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Bald Hills, the Bolkonsky estate, bears many similarities to Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy had loved it there. In his

diaries, he describes candlelight glinting off the icons in a corner of his grandmother’s bedroom, and a serf orchestra playing pieces by Haydn as he, a small boy, walked down the alley of beech trees leading to the main house.

He had inherited the estate when he was 19 after his father went to the bad (details are hazy but sex and drink were involved). Besides the land, Tolstoy gained the title ‘count’ but, in the sclerotic Russian hierarchy, he was not considered a proper noble.

Notwithstanding his effusive affection for his beloved childhood home, he had lost the main house at a card game, shtoss, with fellow officers while fighting in the Russo-Turkish war in the Caucasus (‘I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget my existence’). It was typical of his contradictory nature.

After he had gambled it away, serfs took the house down brick by brick and rebuilt it on a neighbouring estate. From then on, the family lived in wings that had been added to the original manor. A single stone remains of the main house, engraved with words saying that Tolstoy was born at that place.

They buried him under an unmarked grassy mound. When I visited his grave, an oriole was pulling at a worm on the mound. The bird and I were alone among shafts of midsummer light filtering through a stand of ashes. Beyond clumps of bluebells, yolky lilies patterned the surface of the shallow pond into which Sofia Andreyevna had hurled herself.

A small sign at the edge of the grave declared, in Russian, ‘Silent Zone’. The chirruping oriole had not read the sign.

The Oldie December 2020 36

Town Mouse

The back-breaking price of country life tom hodgkinson

There’s a mass exodus from the city to the countryside going on.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been steadily migrating from country to city – but now the trend is reversing as a result of lockdown. June and July this year saw a 126 per cent rise in rural property searches.

Town mice are fleeing their cat-filled tenements with dreams of large stores of nuts, home-made cider and bracing air.

They will work from home or their ‘architect-designed garden spaces’, formerly known as sheds.

Well, Mrs Mouse has been fantasising about a country cottage, somewhere we can retreat to and work in, away from the city. It’s a pleasant diversion to get on the computer and peer at properties in Pembrokeshire and Devon and dream about a rural bolthole with log-burner, blackberries in the hedgerows, clean air and fewer predators.

But I am resolutely opposed to the idea.

Country cottages create an enormous burden of time, cost and worry. For starters, to ensure you’re making the most of the investment, you really ought to spend most weekends there.

38 The Oldie December 2020

That means a lot of driving. So you get into the car on Friday evening, only to find horrific traffic on the A303. Arrive in a freezing cold house at midnight. Drink a bottle of wine. Sleep late. Get back in the car and drive half an hour to the supermarket. Buy food. Get the house warmed up and have a nap. Go for a walk in the driving wind and rain. Attend to a broken boiler. Drink more wine.

On Sunday, dash round the garden, weeding and clearing up leaves. Pack the car and drive back to London. Arrive, depressed, at 9pm and sort out school clothes and homework for the children.

When you’re not there, you fret about the pipes freezing, the overgrowing garden, damp in the downstairs loo and – the Town Mouse’s arch-enemy – rats in the attic.

I don’t want to be incarcerated in town

‘I love weekends away.

But let someone else do the work – a richer friend or a hotel’

permanently. I love going away for the weekend. But let someone else do the work – a richer friend or a hotel or country-cottage provider.

Oldie contributor Rachel Johnson says Notting Hill-based novelist Sebastian Faulks spends practically every weekend in a grand house as the guest of wealthy bankers who are keen to show that they have a literary side.

If Mr Faulks had made the mistake of buying his own country cottage, he would not be free to accept these invitations. He would feel bound to visit his own place and light its fire, carry its logs, clean it and do the garden. Not having a place in the country gives you freedom.

There are thousands of places to rent in the UK. Better to spend the absurd fortunes you would squander on a country cottage on fine wines, and you can explore new places rather than being bound to the same place.

I was just looking yesterday at retreats on Lundy Island, run by the everexcellent Landmark Trust. There is a very nice one-person bolthole called the Radio Room which costs only £30 a night. That looks like a nice spot for a town mouse who wants to do a bit of writing and walking. I’m also looking at a rental caravan on the Isle of Eigg. That would be nice in May. In my own case, I also love weekends in London, cycling, walking through parks, not driving, playing tennis, sitting in my chair and doing nothing.

London is fun. One weekend in autumn, Mrs Mouse and I took advantage of a cheap deal to spend a night drinking cocktails in a smart hotel in Marylebone.

We cycled to the hotel on Saturday, cycled home on Sunday and felt as if we’d had a real break. On other weekends, we are free to take minibreaks in Rome or get the train to Paris. So much easier.

What back-breaking toil there is in looking after land – I know from the 12 years my family lived in Devon. Some wag has estimated that each half-acre of land means another half an hour’s work a day.

Some employ people to do this work – but then you have all the hassle of being a manager of people. ‘It is just as irksome to have a servant as to be a servant,’ as D H Lawrence wisely put it.

To be happy, the sages tell us, you should be free of desire. It is wanting stuff you don’t have that causes misery.

Yes, I am aware that desire is also a spur to industry, but Town Mouse is a lazy mouse. Renting or simply doing nothing is far superior to owning.

Be happy – keep it simple.

Country Mouse

I’m pining for Surrey’s pine trees giles wood

A Holland & Barrett health store, pullulating with natural remedies, has opened on our local high street – yet I looked in vain for a natural remedy for what might be called toxic shock.

There is no more upsetting sight to a hypersensitive than a recently harvested field of maize. The one abutting my own land resembles a crime scene inflicted by delinquents: spilt grain, drunkenly leaning uneven maize stalks and compacted ruts filled with water – but no frogs, of course.

They have succumbed to the global amphibian-decline phenomenon.

There was something to look forward to, however. A meeting with younger brother Pip. The little chap knows what I’m like and, as a result, our relationship is not a hornets’ nest of complexities.

As on previous occasions, we agreed to meet at Penwood Nurseries near Newbury, where, if the sun was out, we could tiptoe along the gravel paths of container-grown mountain and umbrella pines and, like the early Impressionists on the Mediterranean coastlines, breathe deeply of the aromatic, resinous ether which in reality is composed of various esters of pinosylvin.

Even in the heaviest deluge, pine trees, which have evolved needles with a shape that deflects raindrops, make wonderful, natural umbrellas. It’s all to do with the ridge-shaped profile designed by nature to blast raindrops apart.

The visit was timely because, talking of natural remedies, what we discovered is that pine not only is a natural antibiotic which exerts a stimulating effect on the process of breathing itself, but also functions as a mild narcotic.

High on natural turpentine, we plumped not to fill our bellies – as we’d planned – with real ale, cod and chips at a local, but instead toddled back to Pip’s where we consumed a healthier option: smoked venison from his recent trip to

the Knepp Castle Shop with his own home-grown saladings.

There we pored over Diana BeresfordKroeger’s The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us, in which we read that pine aerosols have an anaesthetic effect on the body, bringing about relaxation.

Conifers have traditionally been unfashionable, owing to their associations with suburban life. Pine trees abound in such locations as Pinner and North Harrow. But we are living in topsy-turvy times, and never have pines been more in favour in contemporary display gardens. Moreover, who guessed that, post pandemic, the suburbs would become a desirable destination and being sub-urbane a desirable character trait?

However tame the countryside or town may be, a Scots pine gives it a note of wild grandeur.

The branches are tortuous and sinewy-looking. When the light of the setting sun shines on the trunk and larger branches, they turn to a deep crimson and glow with an inward fire.

Angel Clare, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, noted the heightened auditory pleasure of the pine trees. ‘The sea was near at hand but not intrusive; it murmured and he thought it was the pines – the pines murmured in precisely

the same tones and he thought they were the sea.’

Back in my own village, I ran into a neighbour who, like me, was admiring the heron who has begun to visit the village pond. This relocated urbanite is one of many who have flocked out of the city post-COVID to relocate in the ‘countryside’ where they can work from home. I was intrigued to hear this townie lecture me on the ‘maize for energy scam’, telling me they are a ‘false solution to climate change’.

It seems that, thanks to the fame and prestige of Sir David Attenborough, I am no longer the only native to be restless about the global threat to nature.

My wife tells me Attenborough has landed, with his new Instagram account, the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach a million followers – in four hours 44 minutes, thus obliterating the record previously held by Jennifer Aniston of Friends.

But, just as these new countrymen are surging out of the cities and into the countryside, I suggested to the wife that we ourselves cock a snook at prevailing fashions and move away from the wide, open spaces to a farm-free zone closer to London – to Surrey, in short.

A bungalow on the edge of a dry, sandy heath – even a golf course sprinkled with broom, gorse and mature pine trees, with a half-timbered pub on the horizon with fairy lights over the porch – would suit me and the Tibetan spaniel very well. And, as a bonus, the chance to ask visitors whether they came via the Hog’s Back.

I told Mary I didn’t want to spend the final decade of my life as an unwilling, unpaid lab rat for the pesticide industry and that my body was overburdened with toxins.

She pointed out that my eating three packets of sweet and salty popcorn in quick succession, washed down with regular, full-strength Coke, KitKats and millionaire’s shortbread suggested that homeopathic doses of ambient fungicide were the least of my worries.

The Oldie December 2020 39

Profitable Wonders

Magic mushrooms

WESTEND61 GMBH/ALAMY

james le fanu

The joys of mushroom-hunting, the earthiest, most primordial form of foraging, are lyrically evoked in Colin Thubron’s Among the Russians (1983).

On the outskirts of a forest near the Moscow-Minsk highway, he falls into conversation with a young doctor.

‘I wish I could express it,’ the doctor tells him. ‘You know instinctively if the conditions are right. You can sense the thrill of it. So you go forward into a light clearing, perhaps – and there they are!’

The doctor then elaborates on his favourites: delicate, pleated ink-caps with their umbrella hats; strong-tasting red-birch boletas; yellow chanterelles growing in huddles together; and small, dense clumps of honey-coloured armillarias – best consumed, he insists, with a slug of vodka.

Despite this profusion of forms, colours and aromas, the magical enigma of the mushroom is that each of the thousands of species has the same absurdly simple structure – no more than a mass of tangled, interwoven filaments, or hyphae, readily discerned with a magnifying glass.

Those hyphae arise from a vast, subterranean network, stretching out in all directions.

This network, the mycelium, is the body, as it were, of the fungal organism.

The mushroom is its spore-bearing fruit – as if a vine were buried underground and all that could be seen were its bunches of grapes projecting upwards.

Those forest mushrooms are virtually the only evidence, to human eyes, of those ancient, seemingly primitive forms of life that, concealed in their tens of billions below ground, make our Earth habitable.

‘The more we know about fungi,’ writes mycologist Merlin Sheldrake in his recently published, completely riveting Entangled Life, ‘the less makes sense without them.’

Their defining anatomical feature – the hyphae – are five times thinner than 40 The Oldie December 2020

Without fungi, there would be no greenery or evolution of life on Earth

a human hair. They grow ever longer as they tunnel through the soil foraging for minerals and nutrients.

The practicalities remain obscure, but a collection of minuscule vesicles at the hyphal tip – the Spitzenkörper – plays a vital role. These secrete powerful enzymes that break up the soil and absorb the nutrients that are released, manufacturing the components of the ever-elongating cell wall and slotting them in place.

Seemingly senseless, the hyphae can nonetheless detect subtleties of the composition and moisture of the soil.

Though also brainless, they integrate this flood of sensory information to determine the optimal direction for their growth. And so their communication and transport network expands ever outwards. They become, says Sheldrake, ‘a living labyrinth, by which much of the world is stitched into relations’.

The most consequential of the many

attributes of fungi is their ability to form symbiotic, mutually beneficial associations with other forms of life.

Two billion or so years ago, when our planet was a most inhospitable place, they entered into a pact with single-cell bacteria to form lichens.

Together, these ‘pioneering organisms’ can flourish in extremes of heat and cold, colonising and feeding on barren rocks. The bacteria provide the energy for those hair-like hyphae to penetrate those hard, unforgiving surfaces. Lichens accelerate the process of weathering 50-fold or more, transforming rocks into potentially fertile soil. As Sheldrake writes, Tthe inanimate mass of mineral rock crosses over into the metabolic cycle of the living.’

So when, a mere 400 million years ago, the earliest plants made the transition from water to land, there was a receptive stratum into which they could establish themselves.

Once again, the fungi were there to make it happen, proliferating in and around their roots in the most important of all symbiotic relationships.

The leaves of plants, through the process of photosynthesis, abstract carbon dioxide from the air. Chemically transformed into sugars and lipids, it forms their tissues while also being the main source of energy for their fungal partners. Meanwhile, the fungi around their roots reciprocate by abstracting from the soil those vital elements of water, nitrogen and phosphorous necessary for the plants’ growth.

No one can tell how this mutually beneficial exchange is monitored so precisely. But without fungi, there would be no greenery – and no evolution of life on Earth.

Here, the Russian doctor’s forest mushrooms acquire an almost sacramental status as the sole, visible – and edible – evidence of that hidden kingdom of the fungi, without which we would not be here.

Letter from America

Perfect recipe? Beer, guns and dumps

How to catch a ’possum – a favourite dish from Boston to Georgia dominic green First, catch your opossum.

This is not hard. Your prey rolls in at dusk, paddling his splayed legs, each perpendicular to his flat body, each waggling its skeletal, rat-like claw foot.

He does it so slowly that you can apprehend him in the traditional Native American manner: smash him over the head with a hand-carved club or a baseball bat.

If you’ve caught a possum that is missing an apostrophe, go to the nearest airport. You are in Australia. This mistake is easily made. Americans apostrophise the opossum as the ’possum, and early English settlers in Australia followed suit when naming its distant Antipodean cousin.

Native across North America – including my Boston backyard after dusk – an adult Didelphis virginiana is about two feet long. Low and flat, it resembles a sheep that has had its curls straightened by a steamroller, or one of those shaggy white rugs that Seventies seducers laid in front of the gas fire along with a pile of 5p pieces for the meter.

The ’possum used to be eaten widely across the United States. Sometime between 1607 and 1611, the Virginia colonist John Smith (aka Mr Pocahontas) noted that the Powhattan Indians called it ‘opassom’, and that it ‘hath an head like a swine’, the ‘bigness of a cat’, and a ‘tail like a rat’.

You can tell how popular it was in those early winters. Smith’s secretary William Strachey said it was a ‘beast in bigness of a pig and in taste alike’. In 1909, President William Taft was fêted at Atlanta, Georgia, with a ‘’possum and ‘’taters’ banquet. The portly President’s hosts gave him a stuffed souvenir called Billy Possum, to compete with Teddy Roosevelt’s stuffed bear. ’Possum is still a delicacy in parts of the South where the roads are bad. The hunting season in Mississippi extends 42 The Oldie December 2020

from early October to late February – not to allow the ’possums to breed, but because they taste better in winter.

The ’possum has been accused of being a dinosaur or ‘living fossil’, but this is unfair. The last common ancestor of the current population died a mere 23 million years ago (much later than the dinosaurs), on the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. When the seas receded, its heirs crossed the boundary between South and North America, now known to archaeologists as the Great Wall of Trump.

The ’possum is now endemic to North America, mostly because the ’possum mother can shell out as many as 20 babies in a batch, what with her being ‘didelphic’ (having two wombs, one of them a marsupial nursing pouch) and three vaginas (two leading to separate uteri, the third the birth canal). The ’possum male rises to this demanding occasion with a bifurcated penis and, increasing his resemblance to a shuffling old man, an enormous prostate.

In William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust (1927), the first of his novels to be set in Mississippi’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, the Sartoris family, still aristocratic but now declining, feast on roast turkey, cured ham, quail, squirrel and ‘a baked ’possum in a bed of sweet potatoes’.

‘You couldn’t have brought two chargers?’

And how do you prepare one for the table? First, pour half a cup of lime into a gallon of boiling water, and scald your victim. Pull the hair out while it’s still warm, and scrape well. Hack off the feet and tail, and the eyes or head too, depending on your preferred presentation. Gut it, making sure you catch a good spray from its scent glands, scald the corpse in boiling water, and let it stand overnight in cold water with a cup of salt and a pod of red pepper.

The next morning, wash your hands.

Plunge the ’possum into boiling water, and simmer until the skin is easily pierced by a fork. Transfer to a moderate oven, and bake, skin side up, until crisp and brown. Serve with sweet potatoes, hominy grits and cornbread, and invite your cousins if you’re not already married to them.

This is the classic method as recorded by the improbably named Mrs S R Dull in Southern Cooking (1941). The ‘purging’ is necessary because the ’possum is an indiscriminate scavenger.

If you don’t like it gamey, ‘feed it out’ as recommended by Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking (1975): ‘If possible, trap ’possum and feed it on milk and cereals for ten days before killing it.’

Irma also advises that you remove the ‘small red glands in small of the back and under each foreleg’, and that you change the boiling water three times.

If you wish to retain the flavour of terroir and last week’s trash, consult the Hillbilly Crackpot website: ‘’Possums are particularly fond of garbage dumps – so a trip to the dump, late at night, with beer, flashlights and shotguns, can be loads of fun.’

The paving of Southern back roads has increased the availability of roadkill – perfect for ’possum sausages.

Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator (USA)

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The The The Oldie Oldie Oldie December October Month 2020 2016 43

Sophia Waugh: School Days

My Miss Jean Brodie moment This may sound odd but, after nearly 20 years of teaching, I am suddenly feeling a new surge of love for the job. Gone are the bad old days in my last school, when I couldn’t drive past the building in the holidays without feeling sick.

With talk of a second lockdown around half-term, I am praying for that not to happen. The hacking cough I have bothers me not because it might be COVID-19 but because, if others think it is, I will be kept away from my Year 11s. I want to be in the classroom; I feel energised and optimistic.

And I can’t help but wonder why.

One reason is that when the Year 11s came back after their two-week selfisolation at the beginning of term, it was to new groups. It had been decided that, with so much time lost, setting the students would be the best for every level. I have always been an advocate of setting English for the benefit of every ability – so I seized on this news with joy.

I was even happier when it was announced that I was to be given the supergroup, the crème de la crème.

Having always seen myself as a bit of a Miss Jean Brodie, I couldn’t have been more excited. Even better, I was told that, as long as I covered the content, I could do it how I chose. All of them must get at least a 7 (an A in old money).

Ceefax lives on! Well, in a way.

This autumn, the BBC reversed plans to drop its ‘redbutton’ text information service. This was the successor to Ceefax, the world’s first teletext information service, launched in 1974. By 1982, two million British TVs were Ceefax-ready.

In the ’60s, BBC engineers Geoff Larkby and Barry Pyatt first developed a printable information page that could function while the BBC wasn’t on air. Ceefax launched with just 30 pages 44 The Oldie December 2020

Universities complain that first-year students with good grades arrive unable to structure an essay. When I was tutoring children from the top private schools in the land, I found the same.

They understood the texts but could not write a well-structured argument.

Even I, who am all about knowledgeled rather than skills-led learning, insist students must learn structured writing.

And, along the way, I have the joy of teaching Macbeth to students who understand, respond and question.

I have a Romanian boy who arrived in England two years ago who reads Shakespeare like a dream – a dream with a strong Romanian accent, and with understanding and intelligence.

At the other end of the scale, I have a year 7 Nurture class: the weakest of the weak, and alas often also children with terrible behavioural problems. For a moment this week, I faced 12 children whose communication skills are almost as limited as their writing skills. Four of them did not know the alphabet. I wrote it out on the board for them to copy.

These lessons are not their regular lessons; they are supplementary ones to push their literacy. Which, I have to say, needs pushing – along with their attitude and behaviour. By the end of the lesson,

two of them had been sent to the withdrawal room.

Part of my problem had been that, having no idea of quite how weak they were, I had pitched the lesson far too high.

And when they could not do the work, they retaliated by climbing the walls. Almost literally. These children do not have the skills to understand, respond or question.

So I tried a different approach. My having sent two boys out of the lesson before helped; they knew I meant business. But so did making a positive example of those boys, who came back slightly chastened. Every suggestion they made and every answer they gave was met with a merit point. And the public praise they received was met not with embarrassment but with smiling blushes.

Very few of these children had been read to when they were younger. Not only are they not readers; they are not used to stories. So I have a choice: death by worksheet, colouring sheets, drawing and labelling pictures … or a story. I am going to read them James and the Giant Peach and use it as a starting point for bits of writing and grammar.

And, as long as I can keep a lid on the behaviour, I will feel every bit as satisfied with their enjoyment of a story as I will with my Year 11s’ results.

The joy of Ceefax on offer. This mushroomed to include news, sport, racing, horoscopes, holiday tips and even live flight times. It was the place where big stories like the Gulf War broke. You keyed in a three-digit number to get your subject – sport was 300 and entertainment 500.

It all came to an end on 23rd October 2012, the day of the last analogue signal in the UK. Athlete Mary Peters switched off the old signal.

There is a certain nostalgia value to the horrible clunky graphics and the garish colours (blue, white and black), which take us back to a less sophisticated time.

There was a succinct quality: match reports in 80 words are an art form.

Ceefax pointed towards a new information age. But it wasn’t information overload.

It was, to borrow a horrible modern term, ‘curated’. One

minute, we found out that Fidel Castro had just appeared in public; the next, Leeds United were beating QPR. The best thing was that it wasn’t interactive. It wasn’t clogged up by would-be journalists, keyboard heroes with an opinion on everything.

It wasn’t about trolling or vitriol. It was a place where we could See Facts.

REV STEVE MORRIS

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

Mum’s a prisoner in her own care home In the autumn, visits to the Aged P have been conducted in the reception area of the care home.

In addition to reasonable stipulations – social distancing, temperature-taking and handwashing on arrival – we are instructed to sit on either side of a large, free-standing, glass divide.

The set-up feels so prison-like and joyless. You expect to arrive one week and find the Aged P in an orange jumpsuit, intercom phone clutched in one hand, the other pressed to the glass.

Last week, it was so difficult to hear each other above the noise of an engineer fixing a nearby lift, and the clattering of passing trolleys, that it felt as though we were the unwitting stooges of a Jeremy Beadle stunt.

The Aged P, who is hard of hearing at the best of times, could gather only a fraction of what I was saying. We couldn’t see each other properly. The sun shining on the glass had the disconcerting effect of highlighting our glum reflections.

She was so miserable, she didn’t even want to talk about her favourite murders. I sneakily moved my chair away from the screen. Not only could we now see each other, but we could also hear better, too.

The Aged P perked up at once. She started telling me an old family story. In 1957, her mother deliberately pulled down the curtains in my parents’ west-London flat while pretending they had fallen by themselves. We were laughing about this when a care-home manager descended and told me to move my seat back behind the glass.

To be lost in a riveting family drama, from more than half a century ago, only to be dragged back into the Stasi-like reality of 2020 felt like a violation.

I explained that my mother and I couldn’t communicate properly behind the glass. He said that the welfare of residents came first. If that was the case, I wanted to say, perhaps they should do more to improve the quality of the food.

What I did say was that I couldn’t possibly be harming other residents since my mother and I were the only ones there. Moreover, my mother had already, along with one other resident, had the virus back in March. When this cut no ice, I got cross and accused him of enjoying his little bit of power.

This was not greeted with equanimity.

The care-home staff must groan when they see me coming. On the previous visit, when Mr Home Front came with me, I was playing the Aged P a video on my mobile of my niece’s adorable one-year-old son, Alfred.

The Aged P couldn’t see her greatgrandson properly. So, like Private Walker shiftily showing black-market stockings to a lady friend, I moved a little closer.

A carer I hadn’t seen before appeared at once and barked at me to move back. I turned to Mr HF for support, but he had sunk so low in his chair I thought he was going to slide off. She said there was a camera and that, if the powers that be saw me breaking the rules, the staff would be reprimanded. I could only obey.

But where was this mysterious camera? I couldn’t see one. Was she fibbing? If so, I felt – in a funny kind of

‘Sorry – I keep thinking I’m working from home’

way – a sneaking admiration for her quick-witted deception.

Though I understand the importance of protecting the elderly, a degree of common sense is needed before this climate of fear and morbidity defeats us all. The wishes of every resident must surely count for something. In her 96th year, the Aged P should be allowed to assess her own risks. Handwashing – yes.

Distancing – if they insist. But further draconian measures should stop. The elderly have been left isolated and lonely for too long. More harm has been done to our wonderful wartime generation than anyone could possibly imagine.

‘I’d rather die than live the rest of my life like this,’ said the Aged P recently – a sentiment shared by Aged Ps everywhere.

The manager and I eventually made up. His job can’t be easy. And I apologised for accusing him of enjoying his power (finding myself getting a little tearful as I did – oh, the horror).

‘I’ve had another row!’ I announced back at the house.

‘Stop falling out with people at the care home,’ said Betty.

Mr HF was very supportive (while clearly feeling hugely relieved he hadn’t been there).

But what of the Aged P? Had my red mist upset her? I phoned her.

‘Upset me?! You were magnificent!

Now I must go, darling – I’m watching a very good documentary about the Brighton Trunk murders…’

The Oldie December 2020 45

Postcards from the Edge

Sweden unmasked – what a joy!

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny keeps her spirits up and her bottom warm in Stockholm When I was isolated and quarantined in Dublin at the start of autumn, I vowed I must make the best of whatever life I have left to live.

At the age of 76, I can’t be forever feeling locked in and locked up, for fear of COVID-19. So when I found that a travel agency in Deal could arrange a weekend break in Sweden in October, I grasped it.

Sweden has been deplored as a land of liberal porn, then regarded as a gloomy Bergman landscape, and then disparaged as a lefty nanny state where social control is mandatory. In Nordic noir TV, we’ve seen Swedes portrayed as semiautistic introverts.

But Sweden’s image has changed. It’s the nation of the COVID light touch, where the government doesn’t boss and nanny its citizens or require mask-wearing, but trusts people to use common sense.

Stockholm was, indeed, stunning to behold: a classically beautiful capital, set on the Baltic, sometimes said to be a mix of Athens and Edinburgh It is stuffed with fine museums, galleries, churches, palaces and shops. It was a pleasure to walk around, and easy to explore by tram and bus. The fishy food was delicious, too.

And seeing an oldie visitor, solo, the Stockholmers were warmly welcoming.

Since Swedes are functionally bilingual it was easy to strike up conversations in English, and people’s responses were unfailingly friendly. Almost no one was wearing a face mask.

Sweden has been criticised for not imposing lockdowns, although some local areas, such as Uppsala, have had some restrictions. Granted, their circumstances are different from other countries’: low population density, and a tradition of social distancing anyway (as well as immaculate hygiene). There were, anyway, some notices exhorting people to ‘stay safe’ – sometimes in English – to maintain the two-metre rule and to wash hands frequently.

Yet there was, too, an overwhelming

atmosphere of normality, with families and friends openly gathered together in public, cheerfully.

I am not against mask-wearing when it’s required. But I came to the conclusion that the Stockholm friendliness I encountered was definitely connected to the openness of the bare-faced experience. Seeing the full human face prompts more human responses.

Sweden has had its COVID-19 deaths and infections but, when all the data is examined retrospectively, I wonder if it will emerge as more psychologically healthy: where people felt less isolated, less depressed and less locked in by lockdowns?

It was a sweet autumn city break in a sane land.

Stockholm joins my list of approved cities that have decent on-street seating.

Oldies need places to sit down when exploring cities, and the Swedish capital provides plenty of street benches and individual seats. Made of wood, too, which warms – not aluminium, which freezes – the derrière. Bravo!

When I was 20, I got to live in a Kensington flat with a gaggle of BOAC air stewardesses. They were the most glamorous creatures I’d ever encountered

– always dashing off on long-haul flights, seemingly without a care in the world.

One of their number, Rowena Harker Leder, a long-legged Yorkshire blonde, taught me how to eat spaghetti properly, and did a fabulous dance to The Stripper, which seemed both daring and innocent.

She had been part of the legendary Bluebell Girls dance troupe in Paris, led by the formidable Margaret Kelly, ‘Miss Bluebell’.

Rowena, now 84, and a director of the Grassington Arts Festival for 18 years (for which she was awarded an MBE), has written a memoir – Love and Laughter Around the World. It’s about the fun times she’s lived through as a venturesome young woman, as a performer (first at Mayfair’s Murray’s Cabaret Club, just before Christine Keeler), with the Bluebells in Paris and Las Vegas, as a BOAC stewardess and, incongruously, for a short time, as a Sunday-school teacher.

Rowena experienced the golden age of aviation, when being a stewardess was one of the most coveted jobs. She spent time in a New York hotel with a ‘little old lady’ who turned out to be Dorothy Parker. She refused the in-flight advances of Cary Grant (she thought he was mean, with money and in spirit), among many other adventures and larks.

Her romances were varied and exciting, and she is frank without being coarse. Flying was fabulous, but there were also disadvantages. Stewardesses were ‘too old’ on reaching 36, and she suspects their fertility was affected by the crudeness of air-pressure manoeuvres in those days (several pals subsequently had problems conceiving).

Her story is an archive and a picture of the days of our youth, and the robust attitudes young women had. They didn’t whinge about sexual harassment – they dealt with it. Besides, they liked men.

When she hears people say, ‘I don’t regret anything,’ her answer is ‘Then you haven’t really lived!’.

The Oldie December 2020 47

sister teresa

Thou shalt not covet instant gratification The expression ‘delayed gratification’ wasn’t part of nursery vocabulary in the Fifties but ‘don’t snatch’ certainly was, especially during meals.

As I was competing with three older brothers, I felt justified in snatching but seldom got away with it.

With hindsight, the ban on grabbing was laudable. It encouraged good manners (a sometimes overlooked but necessary aspect of charity) and patience (one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit), and it discouraged greed (a form of idolatry).

One of the major shortcomings of the Sixties was the constant and relentless craving to have everything NOW. And, with the inexorable rise of technology, this hankering has become very much worse today.

Instant gratification at all times and for everything has never been part of the Christian ideal. We are ultimately destined for the next world and designed to be here on Earth only for a relatively short span of days. This doesn’t mean pie-

in-the-sky hopefulness, but the conscious practice of a way of living that will lead to full human development. This, in turn, means not endlessly fussing about having everything we think we want at once.

The New Testament is constantly urging us in this direction, often bluntly: ‘God’s grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race, and taught us that what we have to do is to give up everything that does not lead to God … we must be self-restrained’ (Paul to Titus 2:12-13).

It is possible, however, to have too much of a good thing, self-restraint included. There is a grim hymn written

by Love M Whitcomb in 1859, which appears in no fewer than 212 hymnals. It begins, ‘Father, hear the prayer we offer/ Not for ease that prayer shall be…’

It is a negative paraphrase of that best-loved of all psalms, The Lord is my shepherd. I find myself raging at the impudence of someone thinking she knows better than the psalmist:

Not forever in green pastures Do we ask our way to be; But the steep and rugged pathway May we tread rejoicingly.

Green pastures, whether actual or metaphorical, are our right and our destiny, and in troubled times we all need the comfort that they offer.

During lockdown, actual green pastures have literally been a godsend for many people who had never paid them much attention before.

Not forever by still waters Would we idly rest and stay; But would smite the living fountains From the rocks along our way.

There is a place for muscular Christianity, but not by the still waters. It is the Lord who leads us to them.

Noisy rock-smashing is not on; it is a form of egotism ruining heavensent peace.

Memorial Lunch

Stephen R Hill (1946-2019) A memorial lunch was held to celebrate the life of Stephen Hill, former Chairman of Gerald Duckworth, the publishing house.

Seventeen of his oldest friends, many of them City and legal luminaries, gathered in a gentlemen’s club in St James’s Street.

Stephen was an enthusiastic raconteur on a variety of subjects. He wrote learned books on Sanskrit, the British economy and Brexit, The Power of Plato and a history of Boodle’s club. He was proud to send his son to Eton, his old school.

An accountant by profession, he worked with Colin Haycraft, Duckworth’s Chairman for nearly 25 years.

Haycraft, his novelist wife, Alice Thomas Ellis, and Hill held wild discussions at their Camden house, along with their friend Dame Beryl Bainbridge (pictured), who contributed to keeping Duckworth afloat with her many novels.

48 The Oldie December 2020

Touching: Beryl Bainbridge and Hill at Colin Haycraft’s Camden home, 1995

Stephen became a regular financial adviser at the Old Piano Factory, Duckworth’s headquarters in London’s Camden Town. Hill’s skill was in sharing

his enthusiasm for writing books while helping to balance the books.

Among the many writers Hill took under his wing was Terry Major-Ball, older brother of John Major, who had made his living making garden gnomes with his father and younger brother.

Haycraft, the distinguished Oxford sportsman and academic, found this hugely funny and encouraged Terry to write his memoirs, in the style of the Diary of a Nobody.

Hill offered enthusiastic support to Terry and once accompanied him from Stringfellows nightclub in Covent Garden to Downing Street to offer ‘young John’ advice on how to run the country.

Those who attended his memorial lunch were generous in their praise of his eccentricities and many fine qualities.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Your doctor won’t see you now

I long for the days when I was always treated by the same person theodore dalrymple George Orwell said we have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

I’m not sure that there was ever a time when this was not so. If I’m right, Man is not so much a fallen creature as a sunken one. There is, moreover, not much hope of lifting him from the depths to the surface, let alone the heights.

Nevertheless, I was pleased recently to see a restatement of the obvious in the pages of the British Medical Journal, namely a plea for the restoration of continuity of care. The latter has been systematically destroyed, or at least undermined, in the last decade or two – usually in the name of efficiency, but actually with the aim (or perhaps, more modestly, the effect) of deprofessionalising medicine.

If I’m asked, ‘Who is your doctor?’, I cannot say. I can give the name of the building, but not of a doctor in it who more than any of the others concerns himself or herself with me. I should add that I live in a small market town, where I now know many people – but not my doctor.

It is not only in general practice that

continuity of care has largely disappeared. In hospital, patients are treated much as the parcel in a game of pass the parcel. Within a few days – sometimes only hours – they may come under the care of several ‘teams’. No one is in overall charge of a patient’s care, or at least no one for very long.

My late mother was in hospital for five weeks before she died and was seen by her consultant twice. Otherwise, she was attended to by a variable cast of doctors whose entrances and exits from responsibility for her care were numerous and fleeting.

Patients like continuity of care and there is evidence that it leads to better results. A doctor who knows his or her patients other than as ships passing in the night has a lot of implicit knowledge about them that cannot be conveyed in notes, least of all in computer notes. That doctor knows something of each patient’s character and temperament, whether the patient is stoical or one who complains all the time, and so forth. Much repetition of effort could be avoided if doctors had implicit as well as explicit knowledge.

There are drawbacks to continuity of

care, of course, as there are to almost everything. Sometimes, a fresh view of a patient may uncover something a doctor who knows the patient too well misses because the doctor sees only what he or she expects to see. But the disadvantages of continuity of care are far outweighed by the advantages.

One might have thought that, of all medical specialities, psychiatry was the one that most carefully preserved continuity of care, but not a bit of it. I was once asked to look into the death by suicide of a psychiatric patient who, in the two weeks before his death, saw 11 different members of the staff; only one of them twice.

The sheer inhumanity of this, to say nothing of its stupidity and wastefulness, did not strike the managers who asked me to prepare the report. They could not imagine how horrible it would be to have to recount one’s agony of mind to ten different strangers.

Of course, lessons were learned (they always are, after reports): namely that more money was needed to provide a better service. How else could they pay for the meetings that were necessary to correct things?

‘This is great, Angela ... just lose these, move those, change that, that, that, that and that... Then start again’ The Oldie December 2020 49

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

Moody Meades and Ingrams SIR: I thought Jonathan Meades’s piece on Ian Nairn (September issue) was very funny and poignant. Also, it prompted me to drag out of my portrait library – I am an (old) photographer – this pic [below left] I took in 1982 in Langan’s Brasserie for Harpers & Queen of him, a young lady and an Alsatian.

Harpers published three short stories which Jonathan had written about ‘rural lowlife’. These, along with four more, were collected in 1984 as Filthy English, his first volume of fiction.

I also attach [below right] a pic of Richard Ingrams taken for the Telegraph Magazine during the Jeremy Thorpe trial in 1979.

(He had written in lipstick on the photo frame something I should not repeat here.)

Kind regards, Tim Mercer, Chantry, Somerset

Meades muses; Ingrams peruses

Hunter under fire SIR: I read Hunter Davies’s flimsy piece ‘I once met Robert Robinson’ with a weary sense of both déjà vu and upset.

Never one to let the truth get in the way of an anecdote demonstrating envy and spite, Hunter has been trotting out his tales of injustice and sense of inferiority to my late father since 1962, when my father was his senior on Atticus.

His outrage, nearly 50 years later, that my father was the one to buy a Lowry from the artist; his annoyance that a mere Liverpool-born hack could afford a house in Cheyne Row; and the hilarious (to us Robinsons) notion that we had a butler have all been told ad nauseam by Hunter, both in private and in the tribute programme that Laurie Taylor presented for Radio 4 just after my father died.

50 The Oldie December 2020

‘Is the only exit through the gift shop?’

His evident lifelong envy of my father’s talent, success and public profile is perhaps to be pitied and excused. To name my mother and quote from a personal letter she wrote to Margaret, his late wife, however, is not so excusable.

Funnily enough, my mother still has the extraordinary letter that Hunter’s wife sent, and which provoked her uncharacteristically direct reply, but she would never dream of quoting from it or brandishing it; Hunter has squirrelled away this correspondence out of longheld resentment. Besides the discourtesy and invasion of privacy, Hunter’s quote from a personal letter from my mother,

and your publication of it, is a breach of copyright.

My now 91-year-old mother has not been shown this example of grudge and rudeness from Hunter Davies and will not be, since to be traduced publicly by someone she invited into her home would be deeply upsetting and humiliating.

Kind regards, Suzy Robinson, London NW1

Comprehensively ruined SIR: Sophie Waugh might well be right in saying that this year’s A-level-result algorithm penalised the clever poor, but it is nothing compared with the penalty imposed on that category of 11- to 18-year olds by the near abolition of grammar schools and the introduction of the comprehensive school system some 50 years ago.

Yours faithfully, Roy Shutz, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

Good old books

‘Shhh – keep quiet. If he manages to get it, he’ll be doing the whole world a favour’

SIR: I have to disagree with Matthew Webster (Digital Life, September issue). I can get by with digital newspapers; even books at a pinch. But I don’t read half as much of the Times online, and never look at The Oldie on the tablet.

I text and WhatsApp and read and write emails, and that is enough time spent on the screen for me, thanks.

I would rather read a good old book many times, which I often do – and, as I live in France, often in French too – rather than opt for a Kindle (which I think is a swizz, too, on Amazon’s part).

Yours faithfully, Helen Beaney, Corrèze, France

Mozart mistake SIR: Have you noticed that Schwanthaler’s Mozart monument in Salzburg of 1842 (illustrated on page 66 of the October issue) does not display scenes from Don Giovanni? These are illustrated on the front of Tilgner’s Vienna monument of 1896, as described

by Richard Osborne in his article.

All good wishes (und alles Gute), M A Rose, Cambridge

Virgil didn’t write the opening of the Aeneid as quoted. It should be Arma [not Armo] virumque cano – Arma being the accusative plural (it’s the object of the verb, as is virum). It can’t be a typo, as a is nowhere near o on the keys used to type.

Sorry to be so picky; I can’t help it.

Virgil’s wonderful epic deserves better.

Yours faithfully, (Mrs) Moya Lee, Wantage, Oxfordshire

A pithy letter SIR: I am pleased to send you a picture [below] I took last year of a very proud wearer of a pith helmet – the splendid commissionaire of the Eastern & Oriental Hotel in Penang.

He would, I am sure, have been mortified if I’d suggested to him that he was wearing it for comic effect.

Best wishes, Richard Lingard, Guildford, Surrey

I’m not married to a gorgon SIR: I was delighted to see (November issue) that the Old Un approves of Digging Deeper with the Duchess, my new book of essays about gardening tribulation. In your remarks about the book, however, you describe the Duchess as a gin-guzzling gorgon and identify her as my wife.

This has caused much distress to my dear wife, Karen, on whom the Duchess is certainly not based and whose habits are in no way similar to hers. Karen has always viewed this horticultural incubus – based, by the way, on some of my more hard-boiled aunts and great-aunts – with the gravest suspicion, and she is right.

Yours, Sam Llewellyn, Kington, Herefordshire

Corrigendum SIR: Did Marcus Berkman fail his O-level Latin?

While he deserves congratulations for the Christmas Quiz (November issue), he should correct question number 16:

Penang pith helmet

Well-endowed Sibelius SIR: Richard Osborne (October issue) describes Sibelius as ‘gloomy’ but there was another side to his character: his Rabelaisian sense of humour. What follows may be hard to believe and may bring a blush to your cheeks.

Sir Malcolm Sargent visited Sibelius and asked him, in his rather stuffed-shirt manner, ‘Have you a message for the British people?’

‘Yes, tell them I’ve a great big prick and my wife is very happy.’

Best wishes, John Hornsby, Prémilhat, France

Rumpole rolls his eye

‘What’s happened to you? You used to be so young’

SIR: Re Rumpole (see Gyles Brandreth, September issue), many years ago I prepared a short version of Leo McKern’s autobiography for him to read on Radio 4.

When we met each week before the recording to go through the script, if I had cut a passage he really liked, he

‘Aw, come on – before they ban it’

would take out his false eye and roll it across the table – at me. I had to steel myself to roll it back.

Not, actually, a favourite moment.

Derek Parker, Mosman, New South Wales, Australia

A fistful of collars SIR: William Freeman’s article (November issue) reminds me of my 1953 school-holiday job delivering for Collars laundry based at South Kenton, Middlesex.

Each morning, their fleet of black vans, bearing the raised silver logo of their name, processed down Carlton Avenue, Wembley, to the nearest caff in Neasden, for tea and coconut-topped cheesecakes, before dispersing to all parts of Greater London.

Our job was to deliver boxes with a week’s supply of stiff collars of the specified size and collect the soiled items for laundering back at the works.

My adult education began when our driver would render lewd versions of the popular songs of the day: I’m Walking Behind You – a hit for Eddie Fisher and Dorothy Squires – still comes to mind.

I seem to recall that colleagues doing their National Service in the RAF also had to wear detached collars.

Ian Powell, Andover, Hampshire

Ophelia’s naughty secret SIR: Another Wolfit anecdote for Gyles Brandreth, told to me over 50 years ago by the old Dublin actor Seamus Ford.

It was the last night of Wolfit’s Othello in Glasgow, at the Alhambra, I think.

Striding to the front of the stage, Wolfit thanked the audience for their kind reception, and announced, ‘Next week, we shall be playing Hamlet. I myself will portray the moody Dane, and my wife, the fair Rosalind Iden, will portray the fair Ophelia.’

A voice from somewhere in the gods shouted out, ‘She’s a dirty old whore!’

‘Nevertheless,’ bellowed Sir Donald, ‘she will play the fair Ophelia.’

Yours etc, Anthony Weale, Frome, Somerset The Oldie December 2020 51

I Once Met

Billy Wilder ‘Let’s not talk over the phone,’ Wilder had said. ‘You come over to California and we can spend some time together – and I can show you around.’

He said I should stay at the Chateau Marmont Hotel and that he would collect me at 9am on the appointed day. He also said, ‘Please call me Billy.’

I was 30. Wilder had invited me over when he heard through the Berlin grapevine that I was writing a biography of the artist he credited with welcoming him into Hollywood in the Thirties, Ernst Dryden (1887-1938).

So there I was, in October 1987, waiting outside the hotel on a halcyon sunny morning. Billy arrived in an ordinary blue Japanese sedan and told me to jump in. He was a terrible driver, apparently aiming at the oncoming traffic on Sunset Boulevard.

Upon mentioning Sunset Boulevard, he said William Holden was a wonderful man to work with. He recalled the ghostly mansions on Wilshire (not Sunset) that had inspired the film.

He said he wanted to make it in black and white to echo the glory days of early film. By the late Forties, Buster Keaton, the other silent greats, and directors such as Erich von Stroheim

were forgotten shadows in this town, he added.

We passed the Hollywood Golf Club.

Wilder told me about the B-movie star Victor Mature whose greatest aspiration was not so much to make it in films but to join the golf club. Each time he applied, he was told, ‘We’re sorry, but we don’t take Jews or actors.’ Mature replied, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever been called an actor.’

We got to Rodeo Drive and went up to Billy’s little office. There was a row of Oscars in a glass bookcase. As a metal merchant, I noticed that the brass of the newer Oscars was less oxidised than the older ones.

When we broke for lunch, Billy asked me if I liked Italian food and showed me a book of Italian recipes for which he had written the foreword. ‘You take the work where you can get it,’ he said.

He asked me to his apartment to see an object that had belonged to Dryden – the walls were covered in Sunset boulevardier: Billy Wilder

pictures by famous artists. He pointed to a Picasso against the wall and said, ‘You know you are rich, I suppose, when you have nowhere to hang the Picassos.’

We passed through the bedroom where his wife was having a nap. ‘Don’t mind Audrey,’ he said breezily, as we walked round the edge of the bed with Audrey Young lying on her back.

And there in the bathroom was the kitsch, ebony statue of a black boy, holding up a brass plate. ‘I just took it,’ he said, ‘because it was the only thing I could afford as a memory of Dryden.’

When I finished, I sent him the script (he always called it the script), asking him if he would write the foreword. He was in hospital by that time with osteoarthritis and in pain, but he had read the whole book.

‘I am not a writer,’ I had said. To which he replied, ‘You are a writer, because you write’. A few weeks later, an envelope arrived with a handwritten note and a beautifully double-spaced foreword.

Anthony Lipmann

Shown up at Lord Mayor’s Show

In November 1978 I found myself, utterly panicstricken, inside the head of a 30ft-high dragon.

The creature was a giant model for Pete’s Dragon, a film Disney was promoting as its latest blockbuster.

A Disney publicist, I was to climb inside the head and pull the levers working the ears, eyes and smoking nostrils in the annual Lord Mayor’s Show. (This year’s show, due to take place on 14th November, has been cancelled.)

The day arrived, cold and clear. Somewhere in the City, I clambered up the neck and assumed my position on the tiny bicycle seat. Everything seemed in order. The marching band in front of us moved off and we followed, our speakers belting out Disney songs.

It was only as we approached St Paul’s Churchyard that events took a turn for the worse. The seat decided to jerk downwards to the right, forcing me to grab at a metal strut.

I now had only one hand to operate four controls.

Almost horizontal, I frantically tried to work the eyes and the ears. Then the seat snapped off completely, leaving me hanging by one

arm like a stranded chimp.

I then let go of the strut.

Landing on the ladder, which buckled and broke beneath me, I managed to clutch at another metal bar.

Aware that this infernal creature hadn’t blinked, wagged its ears or snorted for a good three minutes, I hauled myself back up and lunged at the dry-ice button.

Unfortunately, the canister swivelled towards my face, blasting smoke into my eyes and filling the interior with a Victorian pea-souper.

This wasn’t going as planned. To the sound of cheering crowds, I groped blindly for the levers. This proved to be disastrous as my foot slipped, snapping another metal bar and

causing me to tumble down the neck. I was now wedged in the blasted dragon’s larynx.

The dry ice started to clear and I looked up. It was a scene from hell. I had two options: I could risk life and limb climbing up the wreckage or stay put, have a fag and wait for help. I reached for my packet of Embassys.

In the event, I was congratulated afterwards.

Nowadays, I can’t begin to imagine what Health and Safety would have said.

By David Treloar, Southfields, London, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie December 2020 53

Books Boris’s last gamble SARAH SANDS Boris Johnson: The Gambler

By Tom Bower

GARY WING

W H Allen £20 Tom Bower’s biography about the most dramatic political life since Churchill is timely. Boris Johnson gambled everything to become Prime Minister and the reward looks pretty Faustian at the moment. But Boris has shaken free from the noose before and there must be a Robert Caro-style – or rather, let’s call it a Charles Moorestyle – biography still to be written.

The author of this one, Tom Bower, is flagged on the cover as Britain’s ‘top investigative author’, who has a cabinet full of scalps. This, interestingly, is not one of them. The only Johnson villain in the book is Stanley, Boris’s father. It is based on an interview with Charlotte, Stanley’s wife and Boris’s mother. She claims, most shockingly, that Stanley was violent towards her, and that he was a selfish and neglectful father. ‘To understand the new prime minister required forensic examination of his relations with his father,’ Bower writes.

He then presents Boris Johnson as an example of a psychological phenomenon, the ‘frozen child’. He is destined to repeat his father’s fatal lack of seriousness and adulterous selfishness, and to grab even more greedily the glittering prizes.

There is a curious ecosystem to the Johnson children. Their childhood was both happy and unhappy. Their parents were both imperfect and loved. Stanley was not a role model in his relationships towards women but he taught Boris his code for living. Boris described it himself: ‘It was a world that believed above all in winners and losers, in death and glory.’

Stanley’s other motto sounds heartless: ‘Nothing matters very much

and most things don’t matter at all.’

But it gave the Johnsons their attractive quality of resilience and humour in adversity.

The trouble with the field of human relations is that there are different truths.

For what it is worth, one of Boris’s siblings told me that the portrait of Stanley in this book had caused anguish among them because it did not reflect his paternal qualities, including life-saving determination to keep the show on the road when their mother was taken into the Maudsley.

It is a feature of Johnson’s life that his fortunes and catastrophes have been both personal and professional. His political decisions splintered his family in the same way that Brexit divided the country. He sank to the depths with COVID, as if he were the body politic.

The conventional thing to say about Boris Johnson is that he is the right Prime Minister at the wrong time. His optimism should have ushered in Brexit, and Theresa May should have been the

detail-driven public servant to get us through the pandemic.

But, reading this biography, I wonder whether the Lord of Misrule is the cause or the symptom of political turmoil.

It is a strange experience reading his biography because I have witnessed all of the periods of the book. I worked with Johnson’s first wife, and attended their wedding. I knew Marina Wheeler, his ex-wife, from childhood. I worked with Johnson at the Telegraph and I was the editor of the Evening Standard during his second term as Mayor of London.

I am reminded of the writer and director Richard Eyre saying that he was usually disappointed reading journalism about people he knew. Even if the facts were right, the essential person was missing.

A fundamental characteristic of Boris Johnson is that he is elusive. The moments of revelation and clarity in the book are usually quotes from Boris Johnson. This detail, for instance: ‘I cycle because no one can tell me what to do.’

The Oldie December 2020 55

This book is really a play without Hamlet; so, once Bower has finished with his Freudian analysis, he turns to Boris Johnson’s record. There is a long, detailed section about his housing policy when he was Mayor. Johnson was encouraged to be Mayor by former editor of the Evening Standard Veronica Wadley and there is a lot of joint enterprise in their vision for London: ‘Veronica Wadley, the editor of the Evening Standard, then a paper of considerable influence in London, was frustrated by Cameron’s indifference to challenging Livingstone’s tired regime.’

I smiled at the expression ‘then’ a paper of influence. Bower is commendable in his admiration for Wadley’s achievements; perhaps it is journalistically pedantic to point out that she is also Bower’s wife and that she has just been elevated to the House of Lords

by Johnson. I mention this because the couple also have mutual friends who are not admirers of Boris Johnson. Max Hastings, who was Boris’s editor at the Telegraph, has railed ever since that Johnson is a cad and a buffoon.

Bower gives Boris the benefit of the doubt in this book and sides with him against the ‘unctuous and fluent Simon McDonald’ (the pro-EU Foreign Office civil servant), the vindictive Theresa May, the competitive David Cameron and George Osborne, and any other obstacles to Johnson’s path.

The events of the Referendum until the present date are well covered, although you do not get the feeling of being in the room that Tim Shipman evoked in his accounts. Neither does Bower have the stylistic elegance of Johnson’s other biographers Andrew Gimson and Harry Mount – who I should say is the editor of this magazine.

But the book does put the case for Boris Johnson, and it is worth considering that there is method in the madness.

Is it a kind of genius who walks away from the wreckage? Is there a final act still to come?

My guilty aunt

YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

By Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury Continuum £20 Readers of Ferdinand Mount’s memoir Cold Cream may remember mention of an aunt and uncle in the Home Counties to whom Ferdinand and his sister used to be dispatched as children.

We had a glimpse of the aunt in a

‘I do it all by Zoom these days’

photograph, lined up with other family members. Mount’s attention, describing that photograph, was on his mother, who, suffering from cancer, was beginning her ‘staged and graceful withdrawal from life’.

That same photograph appears in this delicious memoir offshoot, Kiss Myself Goodbye. This time, Mount’s attention is focused on the aunt, Aunt Betty, the wife of her father’s brother Greig Mount – a woman hard to pin down, as she appeared on her many marriage certificates in a spectrum of names, ranging from Eileen Constance Sylvia Macduff to the wholly invented concoction of Patricia Elizabeth Baring.

‘Call us Unca and Munca, like the Two Bad Mice,’ she instructed the children one day. Who was this mysterious fairy godmother of an aunt, who used to whisk him and his sister off in her Rolls Royce to London theatre trips, preceded by tea at Claridge’s – a hotel so familiar to her that she nicknamed it The Pub? When their aunt took them to the Palladium, and got out of her Rolls dripping with jewels, she was two doors down from the police court where, 30 years before, she had been tried for bigamy. Astonishingly, she got off, although she was bigamously married three times, the third time to Unca.

When I read books about people whose lives are a tissue of lies (such as spies), my eyes often glaze over at the antics of these emotional husks. It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.

I kept turning the pages, even during the chapter about Buster. He was the car-racing bounder Munca claimed was her brother but was actually her son. He was such an emotional peanut shell that he had seven short marriages to seven optimistic women.

Mount takes us on his single-minded quest to find out the truth about Munca’s life. We’re with him in the London Library

when he chances upon a Country Life article about the modernist house Charters in Berkshire, which states that the inappropriately Regency-style interior décor was done by the châtelaine Doris Parkinson’s sister, Mrs G R Mount. Munca!

It turns out that Doris Parkinson (who entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Charters in 1947) was ‘Sheffield, through and through. So, inescapably, was Munca.’ Not the des-res part of Sheffield, but the ‘grinding, scraping and coughing lungs out’ part – so grinding that their uncle Joseph Vail drowned himself in the canal after a final drink at the Woodbourne Hotel in 1886.

An example of Mount’s ear for language is the way he writes ‘Sheffield’ four times in one paragraph, disabusing us of all the impressions Aunt Munca has endeavoured to give that she had a glamorous past in New York and the Philippines.

As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place. With a few brushstrokes he takes us, via Brightside in Sheffield, deeply into the tawdry atmosphere of Crawford Mansions in Marylebone. There, in the early 1920s, the adult Eileen (as Munca was named on her birth certificate) was having an affair with Donald Clark while still married to Harold Ridge.

Mr and Mrs T S Eliot were living in the same block; Mount imagines Eliot silently lifting his Homburg to them in the entrance hall as they went off to their bigamous wedding ceremony.

Not long after this, we’re beside a hissing Russian urn in the Samovar Tea Rooms at 94 St Martin’s Lane, where Donald confronts Eileen, slamming down a divorce petition accusing her (rightly) of having another affair.

The mixture between hilarity and poignancy is painful. Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss.

Munca’s adopted daughter Georgie, who didn’t know she was adopted and wasn’t allowed to marry the love of her life, David Dimbleby, because he would have found out the truth, is just one casualty of Munca’s addiction to lies.

Another heart-rending cameo role is played by a little girl called Celeste, whom Munca briefly adopted in 1950, and then sent back to Canada when she’d had enough of her.

‘What you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ Munca used to say. On the contrary, Mount writes, ‘What you don’t know can sting your heart more than the worst thing you do know.’

The Oldie December 2020 57

A six-bottle writer BARNABY ROGERSON Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life

By Selina Hastings Chatto & Windus £25 I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for this biography.

Knowing Sybille slightly and having read her works (my company, Eland, publish two of them), I foolishly imagined I was familiar with her story.

Instead I found myself gripped from the first page to the last, astonished by the pace of revelation.

Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) is one of the magicians of the English language, and it is one of the wonders of the written-word world that, like Conrad, she wasn’t a native speaker. She was completely German, an unwanted only child from a loveless marriage between a lazy, animal-loving, Catholic aristocrat from Bavaria and an intellectual Jewish mother from northern Germany.

Selina Hastings allows us to see Sybille as a miracle of self-realisation, the one woman in a long line whose work was allowed to flower. We learn how the lives of her literary mother and intelligent grandmother were caught up in the structures and limitations of their time, class and gender.

Without spoiling this brilliantly-told tale, I can say that the ultimate fates of Sybille’s mother Lisa and her grandmother Anna are as dark as one dares imagine. Sybille escaped their different fates by a hair’s breadth.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, she was treated with suspicion by both France and Britain as a German but, as a writer with Jewish blood, she was already listed as an enemy of the Nazi regime. She escaped from Fascist Italy on the last boat out of Genoa, and was saved from deportation at the hands of bureaucrats of the English Home Office by a personal intervention at the last hour.

Sybille was virtually self-taught, educated by books, by the conversation of her mother’s literary friends and by a lifelong fascination with the workings of the English courts of justice.

She developed a genius for exploiting friendships and, having come from a highly dysfunctional family, managed to embed herself like an intelligent cuckoo in family after family, extracting love, money, sex and an education.

She became an intimate of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, as well as the children of Thomas Mann.

A succession of female lovers would gradually coalesce to form her real family, a network of critical but also highly involved friends. They all held fast, ignoring the evidence of Sybille’s worthless first three novels until she finally found her own voice.

I have three distinct memories of Sybille. Forty years ago, as an impressionable student, I was a guest in a sophisticated London household full of the last embers of the Bloomsbury Group (which, on this occasion, included Frances Partridge, Robert Kee and Stanley Olson).

There was a birthday party with a pair of exceptional magnums of claret, sent as a gift by the Duke of Devonshire.

Sybille came over in the middle of the afternoon to be the midwife to this wine, reverently dusting the labels, cleaning the magnums’ necks, slicing off the lead seals, removing the cork bottles and checking their scent.

It was like watching a high priestess at work, serious now in order to enjoy maximum satisfaction later.

Two decades later, she would be pouring scorn and vitriolic derision down the telephone. I had sent her half a dozen prospective cover designs. All of them infuriated her. She compared them to tourist postcards, which could have been selected only by someone who had not read her book, or who had read it but totally misunderstood every nuance. It was a disturbing experience.

I took counsel and was amazed at how quickly a group of courtier-like friends assembled themselves to help sort things out. There was a tinkle of amused laughter. I had been so foolish to speak to her at 4.30pm – ‘never a good time, is it, darling, for anyone who loves to lunch’.

So the task was taken over by two tall, talented and beautiful women, whose company Sybille already delighted in: her agent Sarah Lutyens and the artist designer Luciana Arrighi.

Then, towards the end of her life,

‘We’ll get an ambulance to you just as soon as we can raise a television crew’

Eland not only revived Jigsaw (one of her three great works) but plotted with the French consul for a public (yet unpompous) dinner that ended with a medal of honour for Sybille from France.

My wife and I were in high favour, and felt the warmth of her intelligence, interest and curious charisma wash over us.

But there were limits, even for those lucky enough to be rewarded with an intimate supper in one of her favourite small London restaurants.

Sybille came armed with a hamper that held half a dozen of her favourite bottles of exquisite wine. Without any embarrassment, she served herself a small glass to accompany each of the courses, then popped the cork back in.

It did not appear selfish, but was nevertheless an exhibition of brutal honesty.

She was a serenely self-sufficient survivor.

Rupert’s Wilde life MATTHEW STURGIS To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde

By Rupert Everett Little, Brown £20 ‘Like a shark, I am at my best on the move,’ Rupert Everett declares. ‘Arriving doesn’t suit me. I hate leaving – and staying in the same place feels like drowning. But once I am on the tracks and the past falls behind, I experience a kind of weightless ecstasy, a sloshed affection for the world, which looks its best after all from a passing train.’

And, indeed, this book, the third instalment of Everett’s memoirs (after Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years), is in part a hymn to European rail travel. The author, in a decade-long struggle to finance, and make, a film about the last days of Oscar Wilde, shuttles, in quest of inspiration, funding and locations, across the continent: London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Cologne, Rome and Naples.

To the End of the World is quite as brilliant as its two predecessors. It is sharp, camp, fearless, touching and very, very funny. If the book is centred on the Herculean struggle to make The Happy Prince, it also reflects on Everett’s lifelong engagement with the figure of Wilde, as a weaver of words, a subversive wit, a great dramatic role (in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss) and as the definitive homosexual.

Everett writes wonderfully well. There are beautiful evocations of seaside hotels, Belgian suburbs and Parisian S&M bars.

And if he occasionally overwrites, The Oldie December 2020 59

he overwrites wonderfully well, too.

As is no doubt proper for a book about film-making, the author deploys a full range of cinematic tropes from the jump cut and the flashback to the dream sequence and the montage. It allows the pace to be maintained, and the mood to shift, along with the scene.

There are crystalline vignettes of the gilded titans: Joan Collins at the Ivy, ‘FURIOUS’ at Everett’s non-appearance – but magnanimously forgiving him, a decade later; Azzedine Alaïa working alone on a wedding dress in an empty atelier; Gregory Peck and Luise Rainer in Roddy McDowall’s home cinema, watching old black-and-white movies ‘after an early supper’.

Among the insights into the arcana of A-list existence, Everett says, ‘Don’t say I love you’ to a movie star: ‘They can’t cope. The fourth wall will tumble down like the tabernacle veil. They will reply either “OK” (Madonna) or “Thank you” (Michael Douglas).’

But these flashes of celebrity are balanced by moments of more pungent nostalgia – for his childhood reading of Wilde’s fairy stories or the travails of drama school; for the youthful excitement of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre (where he learnt his craft – and his pose – from Philip Prowse); for the memory of his transsexual Parisian friend Lychee, murdered in the Bois du Boulogne and now buried within a green carnation’s throw of Wilde, at Père Lachaise.

Everett’s battle to bring his vision to the screen is a long one. Over the course of endless pitches, production meetings and funding cuts, the film shifts and changes – growing bigger, smaller and smaller again.

In the first heady days of the project, it could have been a major Hollywood production, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the leading role.

But Everett, having written the script, was determined to star – and direct – as well. Hollywood turned its back. And so – more shamefully – did the BFI. European money – and compromise – became necessary.

For one brief moment, Everett considered keeping the main characters in period dress, but setting the action in the modern day. It was an idea tentatively endorsed by footballer Thierry Henry, with whom he shared it on the Eurostar to Paris. The pervasiveness of football in contemporary life is one of the less expected themes of the narrative: the game is always on in the background.

Everett confronts each fresh setback with a mixture of histrionic despair, practical stoicism and camp humour. It is

a cocktail that mystifies his longsuffering German co-producers.

‘The problem is that things are either funny or tragic in Germany but rarely both. And, anyway, from the English standpoint, humour is not the Germans’ strongest suit. The language is not built for it and neither are they.’

Nevertheless, in spite of all reverses, through the imaginative use of smoke and mirrors (literally), through EU subsidies and the selfless generosity of Colin Firth, the film was made. At last. It came out in 2018.

In his desire to chart the movie’s ‘reception’ (ignored in America; scuppered in Germany – by the World Cup; admired but largely unwatched in England; loved in Glasgow; and ecstatically greeted by the bohemians of St Petersburg), Everett rather hurries over the actual achievement of his cinematic creation.

It is worth pausing to acknowledge that it is a really impressive piece of work. Ditto this book.

Matthew Sturgis is the author of Oscar: A Life

Trojan effort FERDIE ROUS Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold

By Stephen Fry Michael Joseph £20 The quantity of information in Troy is astonishing.

Fry’s reimagining extends far beyond Homer, drawing on Hesiod, Sophocles and Chaucer. He brings together these sources in a concise narrative which in terms of content is hard to fault.

The book opens with the foundation of Troy and the curses that led to its downfall – along with that of the House of Agamemnon – generations before the Trojan War. The more familiar

stories – such as the Judgement of Paris, and Achilles being dropped in the Styx – are expanded, while the less well-known, such as Heracles’s sacking of Troy and the tale of how Menelaus won Helen’s hand in marriage – by lottery, as it happens – are drafted into the story.

The work is dense, with footnotes clarifying a pronunciation, or explaining some convoluted etymology or interesting historical titbit.

Fry delves into biology when explaining how Helen’s mother, Leda, gave birth to two separate sets of twins – one courtesy of her husband, Tyndareus, the other thanks to the advances of a sexually aggressive swan in the form of Zeus. The precise term is heteropaternal superfecundation.

This inclination towards the didactic combined with Fry’s cosy style makes the lives of Troy’s heroes quite relatable, but also lends itself to some regrettable simplifications.

His account of the savagery of the Trojan War, the keenly portrayed desire of the soldiers to return home and the blockheaded arrogance of Agamemnon reads like a history of the First World War. Fry’s rendering of the dialogue is sharp and makes for amusing reading.

When Agamemnon moans about not being able to marry Helen, Odysseus suggests Clytemnestra. ‘Marry Clytemnestra! What could possibly go wrong?’ – a nice touch, given Clytemnestra’s later murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy.

But Fry’s extensive vocabulary does get too much at times. The ‘smearing’ of ‘unguent’ over Achilles is complemented by wordplay that tries too hard to imitate Wodehouse: ‘See what’s what, what?’

Troy is an excellent read, but the ending doesn’t do it justice. Fry concludes with the sack of Troy and a needless, condescending assertion that ‘We cannot dare assume that armies fighting under our flag have not been guilty’ of ‘atrocities’ on a par with it.

Damn fine am-dram

BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE Break a Leg: A Memoir, Manifesto and Celebration of Amateur Theatre

By Jenny Landreth Chatto & Windus £16.99

‘We’re looking for applicants who are accident-prone’

Like almost everyone I know, I’ve done some amateur acting.

I started at school as the Third Witch in a scene from Macbeth which the headmaster thought so good he made us repeat it, to the consternation of The Oldie December 2020 61

the assembled parents, among them Kenneth More, who later told me he’d never forget the slump of the spirits he felt. Much later I was a Prince Hal whose sword broke during the fight with Hotspur, forcing me to kill him with the hilt.

At Cambridge I was Kinesias in an outdoor production of Lysistrata, during which I waddled about in sexual frustration pointing at a tall tree supposedly symbolic of my penis. The director thought the audience would find that hilarious. Instead, they looked depressed and puzzled, seeing a physically impaired undergraduate inexplicably yelling at a beech. It was then I finally realised I couldn’t act.

But zillions of my fellow citizens continue to find acting important – even essential. In her enjoyably exuberant book about amateur theatricals, Jenny Landreth cites studies showing that 5,380 groups were, before coronavirus, giving an annual 92,000 performances to millions. And she argues that their common image – that they are ‘church-hally or twee’ – is unfair. Yes, non-professional actors – the preferred term – have fun, but they work hard to stage often serious, sometimes challenging drama.

Landreth herself followed her theatre-mad mother and dentist father into the Highbury Players, a group near Birmingham whose repertoire has included Chekhov, Anouilh, Sartre, Shaw and Miller. In her book, she follows the progress of an elaborately mounted revival of Variations on a Theme, Terence Rattigan’s updating of La Dame aux Camélias, interspersing this with reminiscence, history, visits elsewhere and much else.

The line between amateur and professional theatre has often been blurred. After all, the first masterpiece in our drama, the painfully realistic York Crucifixion Play, was staged by pegmakers and painters. Much later, no great house was without its drawingroom theatricals, the racy Lovers’ Vows

‘So, basically, Marvin, never give up on your dreams’

‘A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery’ by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1766.

From Painter of Darkness by Matthew Craske, Yale University Press, £25

causing consternation in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. And in 1813, London flocked to the Haymarket to see the ‘Celebrated Philanthropic Amateur’, alias Robert Coates, as a diamond-encrusted Romeo who ended a high-camp performance by dying three times.

So one might go on, citing (as Landreth does) the theatrically obsessed Dickens or (as she doesn’t) the Zürich revival of The Importance of Being Earnest that Tom Stoppard featured in Travesties and which led to a minor consular official’s suing James Joyce for the cost of his trousers.

Many employers encouraged in-house acting, one branch of the Midland Bank allowing rehearsals to take place in an enormous safe. English-language theatrical groups appeared all over the old Empire and, indeed, modern Europe.

Landreth goes to Antwerp for a festival of amateur work, actually enjoying a play ‘in which Beethoven and Quasimodo invite you to a panel discussion on the search for the impossible sound’.

She’s rather less entranced by work (‘Are there any Spanish people here? Yes, but not enough to spoil it’) at a golf club in Marbella. Then it’s off to Kilmuckridge in Ireland for a festival of one-act plays, one involving a man who, suspecting his girlfriend of infidelity, feeds her dog to her in a stew.

As she demonstrates in her genial, breezy way, there are plenty of strong, bold groups around: Maddermarket in Norwich, People’s Theatre in Newcastle, Questors in Ealing and the leftist Unity Theatre, once of London, still active in Liverpool. That gave stage time to The Oldie December 2017 63

Paul Robeson, who explained his refusal of a West End role by saying that, ‘as an artist, I must have a working-class audience’. It also inspired Joan Littlewood and introduced Michael Gambon, Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell to the stage.

But then many famous names first honed their skills as amateurs. Landreth mentions Charles Laughton and Brenda Blethyn, among others, but surprisingly omits those who went straight from university into professional theatre, such as Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn and John Cleese, who coincided at Cambridge.

I remember hearing Eric Idle, president of the Footlights in 1965, asked if he planned to become an actor after graduation. ‘I am an actor,’ he replied stiffly – and, yes, he was.

But why so many groups? Why the appeal? Well, it’s live, it’s human and, a word that often appears here, it brings ‘joy’. Not always to audiences, of course.

Landreth admits that there was a man ‘loudly groaning in front of me’ at the undercooked opening of Variations on a Theme. But the production grew, as did the audience’s appreciation.

Enough, clearly, to justify Landreth’s basic claim that amateur acting gives identity, voice, belief, strength and ‘bubbling kinship’ to a community. ‘Theatre makes family; family makes theatre.’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Comedy’s King Billy ALEX CLARK Mr Wilder and Me

By Jonathan Coe Viking £16.99 Film and music have run through Jonathan Coe’s fiction.

His novels include the 1961 Shirley Eaton and Kenneth Connor comedy that lent its name to his novel What a Carve Up! There was the prog rock that weaves in and out of the series of books beginning with The Rotters’ Club in 2001, most recently including Middle England.

His characters become obsessed by these cultural artefacts, whose lives begin to echo them, or vice versa. Their loss or disappearance becomes a matter not only of nostalgia but of a vanishing sense of identity.

That theme is writ exceptionally large in Coe’s concise, exquisite Mr Wilder and Me, a novel that could only have proceeded from its author’s

‘Well, yes, I’m happy – but I feel I could be happier’

preoccupation with the film director Billy Wilder, yet which also prods at wider ideas of creative obsession.

Coe’s Wilder is largely encountered in his older years. The triumphs of Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard have left him revered and yet unable to interest the money men in the new projects he still feels compelled to pursue with his long-term writing partner, Iz Diamond.

The pair’s latest production is Fedora, the story of a faded film legend, starring Marthe Keller and William Holden. When the Los Angeles studios decline to get on board, Wilder finds himself German financiers, leading to what he describes, with grim humour, as a win-win situation. If the film soars, it’s his revenge on Hollywood. If it tanks, it’s revenge for the concentration camps in which his mother and other family members died.

Into this mix, Coe throws another of his favourite kinds of character – an innocent keen to become more worldly, a youthful devotee whose inexperience is nonetheless inflected with an instinctive understanding of the complications of age, ambitions, disappointment and acceptance.

There’s a comically improbable meeting at a Hollywood dinner, at which a young, cheeseburger-eating Al Pacino makes the first of two appearances.

Then a 21-year-old Anglo-Greek, Calista, is hired as an interpreter for Wilder and Diamond as they begin to shoot Fedora on, again improbably, the island of Corfu. And it’s Calista – now a middle-aged woman balancing the fading of her own musical career with the demands of her teenage daughters – who narrates the novel.

Coe is wonderful at capturing the court atmosphere of a film set. Exhausted actors are forced into repeated takes as Wilder insists they recite their lines with not even the tiniest deviation. He also

captures the tension and fragility that underpin a film set’s essential unreality.

Wilder may be the king, and Diamond his loyal and capable consort, but there are young pretenders at the gate, the ‘kids with beards’ – Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola – currently wowing audiences.

‘My God, this picture with the shark,’ says Wilder of Jaws. ‘When will people stop talking about this picture with the shark?’ But he is acutely aware of Spielberg’s talent, as well as his popularity. Indeed, the last film he wanted to make was the adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark that won the younger director seven Oscars.

Following a biographical trajectory and its details poses obvious dangers – of a predetermined outcome, a writer chasing the ball and a deadening of invention. But Coe is sprightly and witty enough to avoid that.

Along with the massing of enough detail to satisfy movie esotericists, he has a penchant for narrative risk-taking.

When, for example, Wilder tells the story of his escape from Berlin and his later, unexpected foray into working for the British government, the text suddenly becomes a film script, as though the details are so painful they must be mediated into another genre.

Similarly, the final scene between Wilder and Calista is so drenched in sentimentality and symbolism that it shouldn’t work at all. And yet Coe, attuned to the fact that often sentiment is used to avoid confrontation of our most powerful fears of loss and regret, pulls it off.

And, at the book’s heart, of course, is Fedora itself – the neglected, underrated late-period work that portrays failure and despair, Coe’s book adding to its intricate history.

Seek it out if you can; it will unsettle you as much as Jaws, in its own way.

The Oldie December 2020 65

Media Matters

What’s the point of Times Radio?

It’s dull, it doesn’t make money and Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like it stephen glover When Times Radio was launched in June, I raised a silent mental cheer.

Here was a serious, new, national radio station challenging the hegemony of the left-leaning BBC. It had succeeded in poaching several able broadcasters, including the Corporation’s admirable deputy political editor, John Pienaar.

What was there not to like?

Five months later, I should report that not a single person has ever mentioned a Times Radio programme to me in private conversation.

There are endless puffs of the station in the pages of the Times and Sunday Times, and it reciprocates by ceaselessly plugging its newspaper siblings.

Government ministers dutifully give it interviews, which are generally conducted in a much less stormy fashion than on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5. But there seems to have been very little ‘cut through’ to the national consciousness.

Doubtless these things take time.

Most of us are set in our ways, and though we may grumble about Auntie she has been part of our lives for so long that it is hard to desert her for an upstart.

Moreover, however irritating Radios 4 and 5 can sometimes be, they command enormous journalistic resources which even a station backed by Rupert Murdoch cannot hope to match.

Yet I wonder whether there isn’t a deeper problem. Times Radio is worthy and competent. It is civilised and discursive. Unlike the BBC, it strives to be neutral – and succeeds. It is, in fact, entirely creditable. But it is also rather dull.

The station gives an impression of having all the time in the world. The likes of Matt Chorley and Mariella Frostrup have three hours a day, four times a week, to fill, without any assistance from a co-host. Interviews are apt to drag on, and there is much lengthy rumination on the part of presenters.

If you value an absence of aggression and have a high boredom threshold, Times Radio might suit you. I’m afraid that, for me, it resembles a moderately interesting dinner party that has gone on too long.

A useful comparison is between Radio 4’s Today programme and Times Radio’s morning slot (which, at a mammoth four hours, lasts an hour longer) introduced

by Aasmah Mir and Stig Abell.

I ought to prefer Times Radio, as I am often infuriated by the eagerness of the BBC’s Nick Robinson to interrupt hapless ministers as soon as they have started to answer a question. But I find it too leisurely and easy-going. One moment, Stig is giving a politician a comfortable ride; the next, he is genially trying to flog you a subscription to the Times and Sunday Times.

It’s odd that Rupert Murdoch, the architect of the modern Sun, should have helped to give birth to something so bland and inoffensive. Or was he not paying much attention? He is rumoured to be less than ecstatic about his extremely well-behaved new baby, and one can see why.

Murdoch must be losing lots of money on the venture, since the station is free and there are no advertisements. The object of the exercise appears to be to promote the two newspapers and to try to build up a larger readership, while cocking a snook at the BBC. Will many of us switch?

The problem is that, with limited resources, Times Radio is trying to beat Radios 4 and 5 on their own turf. It would make more of a splash if it were more

opinionated and had some ‘edge’. It should be a little shocking and irreverent.

I appreciate that it can’t afford to run counter to the values of its mother ship, the Times. But a national radio station that had some of the rumbustious and controversialist character of the Sun would be more widely noticed.

On the whole, the Times’s obituary of the magnificent Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who died in early October, was fair and balanced, and it was strikingly well written. But there was one extraordinary misjudgement about the former editor and peerless columnist.

The obituarist declared that, ‘despite his aspirations’, Perry was ‘no intellectual’. This is nonsense. It would be almost as outrageous to declare that Alexander the Great was ‘no soldier’.

Perry conformed more exactly to my conception of an intellectual than almost anyone I have ever met.

If he had read his obituary, he would have been hurt. The writer intended to wound posthumously. Who was he (it must have been a man)? Someone, I would guess, familiar with the ways of Fleet Street over the past half-century.

I wonder whether my old friend Tony Howard, who died in 2010, may have had a hand in commissioning it. He was obits editor of the Times between 1993 and 1999. In that role he mischievously asked me to write the obituary of my former colleague Andreas Whittam Smith, hoping for something barbed. More out of laziness than on principle, I didn’t write it.

Did Tony plant land mines about other eminent journalists that will blow up long after his death?

The Oldie December 2020 67

History

Digging for history

Metal-detector finds – from Bronze Age gold to Roman emperors david horspool Do the names Brian Malin, Cliff Bradshaw, Terry Herbert and Kevin Blackburn mean anything to you?

They may sound like a tough-tackling back four of the mid-Seventies, but in fact they are responsible for some of the most important archaeological and historical discoveries of the past 20 years.

They aren’t historians or professional archaeologists – they’re the metal detectorists.

Detectorists (the detector is the machine) received an affectionate ribbing in the recent TV series of that name, starring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook. But the results of their activities, which of course include hours of trudging about fields finding nothing but bottle tops and ring pulls, have transformed the way historians think about all sorts of aspects of our past.

Take the Romans. In 2004, Malin discovered a jar of third-century AD coins buried in the Oxfordshire countryside, including one bearing the name Domitianus. The single previous coin from this period engraved with this name, discovered in France, had long been dismissed as a probable hoax, because the only emperor named Domitianus lived about 200 years earlier.

The new coin means Domitianus II must have existed, briefly elevated to the title during the declining years of the western empire in the third century AD. Another Roman find, made by Kevin Blackburn, gives a window to a more settled time in the Roman occupation.

The Staffordshire Moorlands Pan is a copper and enamel bowl, or trulla, of the mid-second century, a keepsake from Hadrian’s Wall, inlaid with the names of forts on its western edge, and a name, Draco, possibly of its owner.

The Ringlemere Cup, Cliff Bradshaw’s find, has enhanced historians’ view of an even earlier period. This mangled but beautiful object, made from a single piece

of gold, is nearly 4,000 years old. One of only two of similar type discovered in Britain, and of only six in Europe as a whole, the cup allows scholars to piece together a picture of a Bronze Age culture existing between Britain, Brittany, Switzerland and Germany.

Other recent finds have made historians rethink Alfred the Great’s relations with his neighbours; the reach and sophistication of the Vikings who settled in England; the level of resistance to the Norman Conquest; and the location of the battle of Bosworth.

And that is before we get to the most astonishing recent find, the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009 by Terry Herbert. This haul of more than 4,500 mostly gold and silver pieces from seventh-century Mercia is both a cache of weapons and a showcase of extraordinary workmanship. It includes parts of an ornate helmet ‘fit for a king’ (as the Potteries Museum, which now shares the Hoard, describes it). It’s every inch a match for the Sutton Hoo example.

Metal-detecting is not a purely British pastime. The machine was invented in France, and in the United States was first used to trace bullets in gunshot wounds (including those of President James Garfield, assassinated in 1881 to no

Real find: Jones and Crook, Detectorists

avail), before being briefly taken up, with no more success, by gold prospectors.

Now hobbyists trawl American Civil War battlefields and post videos of their finds.

In Britain, however, there is a unique partnership between amateurs and professionals, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which encourages detectorists to register finds with British Museum liaison officers across the country. In the case of suspected treasure, there is a legal obligation to do so, but the scheme is envisaged as a two-way street.

Detectorists, once dismissed as cranks, are now respected as the first line of archaeological research. They get to understand more about their find through expert advice, and the experts can grow their understanding of the past.

The scheme also preserves discoveries of great historical and financial value, and money is raised to compensate the detectorists and landowners so that finds can be preserved for the nation.

To buy the Staffordshire Hoard, £3.285 million was raised, including £900,000 directly from the public. Since the scheme began in 1997, more than 1.5 million finds have been reported.

Kevin Leahy of the British Museum calls the wealth and spread of resulting data ‘unparalleled anywhere in the world’.

This October, Reading University revealed the discovery of the tomb of the ‘Marlow Warlord’, a six-foot-tall sixthcentury warrior and tribal leader, buried in state with sword, spears and other objects of high status. His presence, according to Dr Gabor Thomas of the university, ‘provides new insights into this stretch of the Thames in the decades after the collapse of the Roman administration in Britain’.

The academics will do their best to explain who he is and why he’s there, but who found him? Take a bow, Sue and Mick Washington, of the Maidenhead Searchers.

The Oldie December 2020 69

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

A Guinea for your thoughts

TOM PLANT/ BUCKNALL/ALAMY

Guinea, Guiana, Guyana: are you puzzled by these republics with similar names?

It’s the news from Guyana that makes me ask. This small South American country has not had much luck over the years. Its history has been dominated by sugar and slavery. Recently, however, vast quantities of oil have been found.

The economy will have grown by 51 per cent this year, says the IMF, making it the zippiest in the world. Rejoicing all round might have been expected, but no: the discovery has led to violent squabbling.

The Indo-Guyanese, most of whose forebears came as indentured labourers from North India, are pitted against the Afro-Guyanese, who are descendants of slaves from West Africa. The indigenous people, a relatively small group known as Amerindians, look on in despair.

Guyana’s troubles are a typical consequence of European colonialism.

This slice of South America used to be British Guiana. It’s part of a region known as the Guianas, which includes Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, and French Guiana, an overseas department of France.

Please don’t confuse any of these with West Africa’s Guineas. They include plain Guinea, a former French colony, and Guinea-Bissau, once Portuguese, and Equatorial Guinea, bagged by the Spanish (oil has made it Africa’s Guyana).

Frumpy old women Whenever you see an older woman of 60-plus in a TV drama, she is portrayed as looking drab and dreary, wearing clothes that came out of a Fifties dressing-up box.

And with hair to match; an iron-grey, rigid perm that has not been seen on a real woman for about 40 years.

In Alan Bennett’s recent

And please don’t confuse these Guineas with the island of New Guinea, half of which is a part of Indonesia and the rest a part of Papua New Guinea, a country lying north of Australia.

How did seven countries in three continents get these G-names? Guiana seems to have been first. Sir Walter Raleigh published The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana in 1596 – so the word must have had some currency then. It surely arose from Guayana, the Spanish version of Guiana, supposedly meaning ‘land of many waters’ in an Amerindian language.

Some of the African slaves sent to the Guianas no doubt came from the region around the Gulf of Guinea, but that’s not where the name Guiana came from. That is first recorded in 1598, and is of unknown origin, though it may be a corruption of a Berber name for the ‘land of the blacks’, which the Portuguese then borrowed.

About 65 years later, ‘guinea’ entered the English language as the name for a coin made of gold that had often originated in Guinea. At first, it was worth £1 and used only by the Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa. However, it became so popular that it was made legal tender in 1717 at the fixed rate of 21 shillings, having varied in value before then.

Talking Heads, the actresses were made to look like ancient grannies; quite different from how most older women are in reality these days.

A ‘granny’ is still popularly perceived as being a whitehaired, befuddled old lady with a hearing aid, false teeth, fluffy slippers and a mauve cardigan. Yet when I (now 76) went to a grandparents’ day at my grandson’s primary school, the headmaster said the grannies looked so young these days that he often mistook them for the mothers.

We do work at it. As soon as beauty salons, nail bars and hairdressers were open again, we flocked to them, none of

Some guinea coins bore the image of an elephant, and some had a castle too – ­ though the common pub name Elephant and Castle seems to be unconnected.

Guinea has also given its name to several plants and creatures, from guinea plum to guinea fowl, but not even Rudyard Kipling has told us how the guinea pig got its name. A native of South America, it seems to have no clear association with Guinea or even the Guianas.

The link to Papua New Guinea is clearer. New Guinea was given its name by a Spanish explorer who thought the indigenous people looked like the Africans of the Guinea coast.

And what of the Indians? How do two such different peoples as the IndoGuyanese and the Amerindians come to share a name?

The answer goes back to Christopher Columbus who, when passing by in 1492, mistook Cuba for Vietnam or, more broadly, thought he was in Asia and had found the spice islands east of India known as the Indies.

When his mistake became clear, these Atlantic isles were given the name West Indies, and the indigenous peoples of North and South America were called Indians, or Amerindians.

What’s in a name? A hell of a lot, in the case of India, the Guineas and Guyana.

us wanting to look like a mad old witch for a second longer.

These days, we older women are fit, vibrant and fashionable, wearing the same kind of clothes as our teenage granddaughters, and getting them from the same shops, too. We are at the gym all the time or doing daily workouts on Zoom. Far from

SMALL DELIGHTS Putting on an old gardening jacket after several months and finding a crumpled but usable banknote in the pocket.

ROBERT SMITH, MIDDLESEX Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

being bent double over a walking frame, we have a spring in our step. Some of us even run marathons.

Instead of wearing shapeless cardigans, we are in skin-tight stretch jeans, white flatform trainers, new T-shirts and stylish jackets.

We threw out the pleated tweed skirts, thick American tan tights and wide-fitting orthopaedic shoes years ago – if we ever wore them in the first place.

It is time – more than time – to ditch that patronising, outdated stereotype, which is no longer even amusing, and depict women of a certain age as we now are: glamorous, fun and up to the minute.

LIZ HODGKINSON The Oldie December 2020 71

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Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT SUPERNOVA (Released 20th November) Breaking news! Mr Darcy has gone all soft.

In this moving, melancholy film, Colin Firth is no longer Mr Grumpy – the role he perfected in Pride and Prejudice and the Bridget Jones series.

Instead, he is a loving, gentle, agonised pianist, Sam, who is gradually losing his American writer husband, Tusker (Stanley Tucci), to dementia.

Before Tusker’s mild symptoms get any worse, they make a farewell road trip around beloved old haunts in the Lake District, culminating in a dinner at Sam’s sister’s house.

Colin Firth has played a gay man before, in A Single Man (2009). Then, as in this film, he wisely introduces no campness – a welcome sign of how mainstream gay films have become, with no need to bang a drum or over-inflate characteristics. A sign, too, of Firth’s greatest virtue as an actor – being understated.

For conservative oldies, by the way, it is all very sensitively done, too, with no sexually graphic content.

The film is literally a slow mover. Sam and Tusker’s campervan lumbers at a creaking pace around the top ten autumnal views of Cumbria – where else in Britain, and what season, could be better at delivering picturesque melancholy?

The story, too, is slow. Nothing much really happens, except for Sam’s growing realisation of how quickly Tusker is losing his faculties – and Tusker’s increasing readiness to reveal his despair 74 The Oldie December 2020

after years of his doing his best to conceal it.

It’s all a bit one-note (although, speaking of notes, Firth does a very good job of playing Elgar’s Salut d’Amour on screen). The director and writer, Harry Macqueen, is skilled at portraying sadness. But cinemagoers’ tears flow more easily when sadness is cut with humour – that’s why John Hannah got us weeping when he read Auden’s Funeral Blues (‘Stop all the clocks…’) in Four Weddings and a Funeral. This film should make you cry; it doesn’t quite because it’s too unremittingly sad.

Still, Stanley Tucci is adept at reproducing the sudden memory lapses that hit dementia-sufferers mid-sentence.

He is convincing, too, at maintaining a chipper, teasing, Noo Yawk state of mind, in a vain bid to hide the awful truth of his accelerating decline.

Both Tucci and Firth are completely relaxed with each other. That ease in each other’s company (and the irritation) make for a more convincing display of love than the hyper-romantic speeches – and the happy ending – Hollywood would demand.

But it’s Firth who steals the show.

Because he’s been in so many blockbusters, it’s tempting to believe in that stupid equation: box-office

gold = low-grade acting. But, in the same way the hugely successful Stephen King is a brilliant writer, the hugely successful Colin Firth is a brilliant actor.

He is the master of the sentence that is self-interrupted through sadness and awkwardness. ‘How long have you…?’ he asks Tusker at one point. You don’t need to be told that the last word of that sentence would have been ‘got’.

The great American director Billy Wilder (whom Anthony Lipmann writes about meeting on page 53) said of his jokes that if you let the audience work out the punchline in their mind, they’ll thank you for ever.

Well, the same is true of sadness: less is more. Let the audience draw their own conclusions rather than have the actors scream their agony to the rooftops.

You don’t have to say anything to show you’re sad if you’re blessed with Colin Firth’s ability to display intense sadness merely through the eyes – combined with his understated intonation that communicates so much through the tiniest change in volume and tone.

It helps, too, that he is so attractive to man and woman – even when, as here, he sports a bushy, unkempt beard and carries a bit of extra weight. He manages to look glamorous even when he’s doing the shopping in a Cumbrian SPAR outlet.

Has an actor ever been so gifted at portraying the strange anguish of experiencing overpowering emotions and not being very good at displaying them? In other words, at acting the part of a middle-class, middle-aged Englishman in crisis.

Ultimate road trip: Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth

THEATRE

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

PAUL BAILEY MY PIN-UP PERFORMERS If – and it’s the biggest ‘if’ in the world right now – coronavirus is ever contained, and life is allowed to return to what we shall have to call the ‘old normal’, perhaps the ancient art of the theatre will thrive again.

Actors, musicians, designers, stagehands and all those who contribute to putting on a show, of whatever quality, will be employed once more. I hope to be around when that happy day arrives.

So I’m obeying the rules, when they’re comprehensible, and wearing colourful masks, just like the actors who graced the first performances of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. I’ve been to the sites of Greek and Roman theatres in Turkey and stood in amazement at the size and scale of them. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them occupied by hundreds of excited spectators.

That feeling of excitement before and during a play, a ballet, an opera, a concert and, especially, a solo performance is one that has never left me after six and a bit decades of theatre-going.

I first felt it when I was still in short trousers, as I sat bewildered in the gallery of the Grand at Clapham Junction, one of the few surviving music halls, as one very old artiste followed another onto the stage in a show entitled, appropriately, The Good Old Days. A woman dressed as a sailor was there, smoking a pipe; and a man with a face painted black with large, white lips, recalling how he used to sigh for the silvery moon.

Years later, at the beautiful Metropolitan in Edgware Road, long since gone – despite the efforts of John Betjeman, among others, to save it from developers – I saw Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie, captivate and startle audiences with his innuendo-ridden jokes. ‘It’s not me, lady, it’s your mind,’ he would say to a woman in the stalls, already laughing uncontrollably before he had even reached the punchline.

Max was banned from the BBC Light Programme, as was Rex Jameson, who always appeared in drag as Mrs Shufflewick, an elderly lady with a red conk, nursing a Guinness in the saloon bar of the Cock and Comfort. I caught his incomparable act at the Greenwich Theatre, an oddly respectable venue for a comic whose gags were concerned with lost knickers and feet trapped in John West salmon tins after an unbridled outburst of passion in a dark alleyway with a needy young man in bell-bottoms.

The Cheeky Chappie: Max Miller (1894-1963)

I remember John Gielgud’s Benedick and Leontes from my schooldays; and Edith Evans in a long-forgotten play, Daphne Laureola, with the then unknown Peter Finch – she gave the most convincing drunken acting I’ve ever witnessed. She was notably abstemious in real life.

Wilfrid Lawson – Doolittle in the film of Pygmalion – was, by contrast, seldom sober. When he was, he scaled heights most actors could never aspire to – I think of him as the father in Strindberg’s masterpiece The Father, weeping in the arms of his nurse, played by Beatrix Lehmann, in the closing scene.

In my last year at the Central School, where I trained for my short-lived career on stage and screen, Beatrix, always accompanied by her golden retriever, taught us. I asked her once what it had been like to act with Wilfrid Lawson. She said she loved him. He would come every night to her dressing room before the curtain rose with an assortment of coloured pencils in his hand. He would identify the colour of each one, proving he hadn’t touched a drop. She found that very touching.

Let me single out a few of my most wonderful nights at the theatre: Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in Mother Courage in the 1950s, when anything German was still unpopular, and the Moscow Art Theatre in that same decade, performing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. The sets were cumbersome and tired-looking, but the acting was a revelation.

I was already accustomed to English productions of Chekhov that smothered those glorious human comedies under a blanket of sentimental nostalgia, but these Russian actors knew different. They laughed, sobbed, talked over one another’s sentences and achieved pathos by not signalling it.

Then there was Peggy Ashcroft as Hedda Gabler, and – more recently – Laurie Metcalf as Mary in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and brilliant new plays by the likes of Lucy Kirkwood and Annie Baker, and Imelda Staunton in everything, and…

RADIO VALERIE GROVE I love dramas based on the recent past.

An afternoon play on Radio 4, Talk to Me, was about Ayn Rand: familiar name, but who was she? Cited as the ‘favourite author’ of a man who doesn’t read (Trump); co-founder of a selfish capitalist philosophy.

What we got, in this ingenious concoction by Mary Ward-Lowery, was an improvised documentary – a treatment she has used previously for Thomas Hardy and Karl Marx.

It’s a labour-intensive process.

Ward-Lowery conducted ‘interviews’ with Ayn Rand, her film-star husband Frank O’Connor (they met in Hollywood on a Cecil B De Mille set) and Rand’s sister, Nora, from St Petersburg, The Oldie December 2020 75

‘It’s haunted by an 18th-century farmer who can’t believe what we paid for it’

the city Ayn (Alisa) left for New York in 1926.

Diana Quick, always diligent when preparing to play a part, was a remarkably convincing Rand; Rupert Wickham wonderful as her husband Frank. The entire cast sounded extraordinarily natural. Without a script.

How? Ward-Lowery and her writers supplied documentary evidence, and then met the cast on Zoom to discuss each character. A framework was knocked out. The interviews were individually recorded on computers from the actors’ homes. Dazzling proof of the intuitive intelligence of actors when they truly inhabit a character. Who needs lines?

I did not warm to Ayn Rand, though.

By contrast, Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, is my hero, and Simon Bovey’s play, Franklin, was a moving reflection of this inspiring, gentle man, played by Trevor White. It told how, in 1968, after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a mother wrote to Schulz, suggesting it might be helpful if the Peanuts strip were to include one little black kid. Schulz was advised not to by some. The black kid would have to be flawless to avoid causing offence. And Schulz would lose syndication in papers south of Dixie.

Schulz – self-effacing and goodhearted – wanted to do it, but agonised: would he appear patronising? The answer – a little boy called Franklin who helps Charlie Brown build a sandcastle, and whose dad is away fighting in Vietnam – was perfectly judged. The director was Marc Beeby.

On a wet and wintry Wednesday morning, when the news couldn’t get much worse, came a moment of instant cheer from an unlikely source: Today. It was the inimitable sound of Tom Lehrer singing The Elements, to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Modern MajorGeneral. Bliss! The story behind this, as Francis Beckett writes on page 32, was that Lehrer, at 92, is waiving the royalties from his brilliant lyrics for five years.

They played snatches of favourites – 76 The Oldie December 2020

The Vatican Rag, Poisoning Pigeons – but neglected to play the muchdownloaded, COVID-appropriate I Got It from Agnes, which he would perform in 1950s nightclubs. And now I can quote, without The Oldie’s having to pay a fee, the opening quatrain: ‘I got it from Agnes. She got it from Jim,/ We all agree it must have been Louise who gave it to him. / Now she got it from Harry, Who got it from Marie,/ And ev’rybody knows that Marie… Got it from me.’ Watch it on YouTube and be reminded how Lehrer personifies charm in performance. Andrew Neil, John Pienaar’s stand-in on Times Radio that week, asked the vital question: how long are song royalties collected? Answer: lifetime plus 70 years. Many thanks to Tom. There are no newspaper editors like Harry Evans any more, passionate about upholding truth, ‘attacking the devil’ in the words of his Northern Echo predecessor, W T Stead. Nobody moved across a newsroom (or a tennis court) faster, and no editor was more approachable, eagerly intent on getting the story. This Archive on 4 was a repeat from Harry’s 90th birthday in 2018 and it was good to hear his stories again, prompting peals of laughter from Razia Iqbal, who told him, ‘You’re one of the reasons I became a journalist.’

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS The midlife-crisis drama Us began well, with Saskia Reeves, playing Connie, saying she’d had enough; she was off: ‘This is my time, Douglas.’

Douglas, played by Tom Hollander, hadn’t been expecting such dramatic news – so he hastened to the rubbishdisposal unit and tore up cardboard boxes in a fury. Opera played on the soundtrack, to indicate class. Though the

Not such a grand tour. Douglas (Tom Hollander) visits Venice in Us

pain on Douglas’s face was subtle and real – tiny flinches and frowns – the series quickly degenerated into rom-com chick lit, with plenty of nice, sunshiny views of European cities.

The idea was that Connie had always pined to be an artist; she was a bohemian at heart. But, as is always the way, she’d been cramped and squashed by two decades of domestic and uxorial duties and the child-rearing drill. Here she suddenly was, sitting on the fat-armed sofa with nothing to look forward to, save a beetroot detox and a book club.

All of this was interwoven with flashbacks to the couple’s younger selves – and what was remarkable was that the actor and actress cast didn’t resemble their older versions in the slightest.

I suppose, in this politically correct, colour-blind casting era, we should be grateful the characters didn’t suddenly become Asian or Bantu, as in the recent David Copperfield film, where Steerforth’s mother steps out of a carriage looking like Xena, the Warrior Princess.

In these earlier scenes, the Hollander character was a fussy little pedant, always having to correct people, always needing the last word. The scene where he blew his top because his toddler son inventively made a dinosaur from the Lego pieces, instead of following the instructions on the box … Connie should have walked out on him there and then, not waiting another 15 years.

In the final scenes, Douglas was attacked by jellyfish and had a heart attack and an affair with a Danish dentist, the son revealed that he was gay, and Connie, who all her adult life had yearned to be irresponsible, put her possessions in cardboard boxes.

Mike Bartlett’s six-parter Life consisted of yet more unravelling relationships, principally Alison Steadman’s. After half a century, she woke up to the fact her husband was a jeering bully. ‘It’s my time, Henry,’ she said, chucking her frocks in a suitcase.

As played by Peter Davison, the husband in question was indeed one of those recognisable codgers who always mock and belittle the lady wife, making flat jokes at her expense. I rather cheered when Alison left in a late-night taxi but sadly she came back, as her husband couldn’t work the dishwasher and said he had terminal pancreatic cancer.

The programme was an ensemble thing, set in a Manchester block of flats.

Everyone was implausibly spiteful, drunk, snooping, secretive or in turmoil one way or another. Victoria Hamilton had a whale of a time, banging and

Ed McLachlan

bouncing off walls, alternately wallowing in self-pity and going off like a rocket with pent-up sexual frustration – I expected her to set off poltergeists. Life was six hours of mine I won’t get back.

By contrast, I enjoyed Roadkill, principally because Hugh Laurie has shaped up as a first-class actor, the pop-eyed comedian well in the past.

Here he was immensely likeable (paradoxically) as Tory swine Peter Laurence, who despite his lies and swindles somehow connects with the electorate – who warm to his naughty persona. On the other hand, Laurence – or Laurie – has these eyes that at times can glaze over rather frighteningly.

The complex scenes with the family in their nice kitchen had real Chekhov weight – deep emotion and hurt, which the characters are trying to come to terms with, and may never. David Hare at his best.

Saskia Reeves was back as Laurie’s cheated-on wife, conducting amateur choirs (‘This is my time, Peter’). Millie Brady was a beautiful daughter, who quite saw through her father, refusing to

fall for the charisma. Helen McCrory, as the Prime Minister, made me realise she should have played the Queen rather than Olivia Colman, who is hopeless. I much like Sylvestra Le Touzel, who always has an air of comedy, like Margaret Rutherford.

Enola Holmes, about Sherlock’s sassy sister, is on Netflix, and is full of anachronistic feminism: ‘Don’t be thrown off course by other people, especially men,’ says Helena Bonham Doodah to Millie Bobby Brown, who may even have actually said, ‘This is my time, Mycroft.’

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE BERNARD HAITINK THE ENIGMATIC MAESTRO ‘That boy doesn’t know a thing, but he’s a conductor!’

It’s a story Bernard Haitink, 91, has often told but, sad to report, omitted to repeat in John Bridcut’s predictably civilised 90th-birthday tribute, Bernard

Haitink: The Enigmatic Maestro, broadcast on BBC2 in late September.

The title won’t have thrilled Haitink – he’s always loathed the word ‘maestro’ – nor would he have been overjoyed to read that he would be lifting the veil on ‘the secret arts of conducting’. Haitink is the one conductor of standing who’s most likely to tell you that there are no secrets, other than those that dance attendance on any teacher who helps alchemise great art into gold for those he’s privileged to lead.

It was his near-contemporary Sir Colin Davis who pointed out, in a memorable 1994 edition of Anthony Clare’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair (now a Radio 4 podcast), that conductors come in many guises. He cited preternaturally gifted musicians, such as Karajan, Toscanini and the Greek-born sage Dimitri Mitropoulos, and those who, like himself, had few if any demonstrable skills.

Does it then follow, Clare asked, that conducting, like psychiatry, is a profession that, though not bogus in itself, is capable of being practised by people who are? Does that not apply, Davis countered, to any profession in which an individual is given authority over others? Keenly aware of his own shortcomings, much as Haitink has always been, Davis said his sole claim to authenticity was that he had never pretended to be something he was not.

‘The musicians don’t have to like me, or agree with my view of the music. What they can never say is that I am bogus.’

When Haitink received the call back in 1963, there were those in Amsterdam’s mighty Concertgebouw Orchestra who griped at playing under an inexperienced young Dutchman. Yet they will have known in their gut that he was no impostor.

Haitink brought to the table most of the things that mattered. Good hands, a communicative eye and a thoroughgoing knowledge of music that he’d studied for himself on the page, not vicariously through other people’s recordings. He could also communicate his wishes – and this, indeed, is one of the secrets of the born conductor – without an overdue reliance on words.

If it’s a great orchestra, it will of course have its own rich repository of knowledge. The ensemble Haitink inherited in 1963 had long been revered for its expertise in the symphonic works of Mahler and Bruckner, and in 20thcentury French music. And it was with these repertories that, early on, he made his own distinctive mark.

The Bruckner and Mahler cycles The Oldie December 2020 77

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The challenges of running London’s increasingly dysfunctional Royal Opera House in the 1990s must have seemed doable to someone whose by now somewhat Hobbesian view of humankind helped steel him to the task.

When the house closed in 1997 – and came near to losing in perpetuity its orchestra and chorus, as the bungled redevelopment plan took its toll – a headline appeared in the Times: ‘Will the Garden ever bloom again?’

A quarter of a century on, faced with yet another crisis, more bungling, and another unsustainable closure, we’re back asking that selfsame question.

Will our governments and quangocrats never learn?

Bernard Haitink, a born conductor: no secrets but magical communication

he recorded in Amsterdam between 1963 and 1971 already had the feel of recordings that would look well on one’s shelves in decades to come. And so it proved when they were reissued on Haitink’s 65th birthday in 1994 and again, in rather better digital transfers, in 2019.

The Mahler cycle has not been superseded, partly because Haitink himself began to tire of some of the symphonies. ‘We all know there’s better music,’ he later observed, ‘but if you want success as a conductor, you do Mahler, and the louder the better.’ His Bruckner, by contrast – notably his reading of the Seventh Symphony which provides the musical backdrop to Bridcut’s film – has broadened and deepened over time, like a fast-flowing river making its quietus with the greater ocean beyond.

I first met Haitink in Amsterdam in 1968. Five years on from his Concertgebouw appointment, he’d taken up a similar position (to much grumbling in Amsterdam) with the London Philharmonic. I sensed at the time that he felt stultified by Amsterdam. Not by the Concertgebouw, or by the Philips recording team led by the peerless Jaap van Ginneken, but by Amsterdam’s conservative audiences and parochial press.

It was only later that I learned of the traumas he’d experienced during his teenage years – not so much during the Nazi occupation itself as at the time of the liberation when local in-fighting, canting and hypocrisy (powerfully described in Bridcut’s film) came fully into view.

78 The Oldie December 2020

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON DONOVAN’S COMEBACK The last time I graced the Cadogan Hall in Chelsea was for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s unusual one-man show against Brexit.

BHL, the plunging-shirted French philosophe, disrobed and clambered into a bath on stage in a bid to dissuade UK – ‘the brain and beating heart of Europe’ – from leaving the EU. In October, it was Donovan’s turn, delayed from March, to take the stage to perform not ablutions but his back catalogue of mid-Sixties hits. The socially distanced pensioner audience exhaled through their masks with relief when he announced, ‘Well, we finally made it – I’m going to sing a few songs from the first albums.’ At least we wouldn’t have to endure the dreaded ‘new material’ from the old boy.

It was my first live gig of the year, and my expectations, though low, were never exceeded. I went with Tim de Lisle, the

rock critic of the Mail on Sunday, who told me he’d go to anything live, such was his desperation to go to concerts and do his job. ‘The one to beat in 2020 is still Rick Astley at Knebworth,’ he said glumly as we took our seats.

When Donovan was escorted on stage, I couldn’t help but gasp. ‘That old geezer can’t be Donovan!’ I hissed to Tim. And he is ‘only’ 74.

He had long, white hair in a crimped mullet, black jeans and a maroon shirt.

He strummed his guitar, accompanied by a tuneful, pleasant voice. He reprised his handful of solid hits – Hurdy Gurdy Man, Season of the Witch, Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow – in a quavery but strong voice, so nobody in the 100-strong audience who’d held on to their tickets since the spring could be short-changed.

Oddly, the evening – well, the gig actually started at the unwitching hour of 4.30pm so he could go round again – almost came alive when he told tales of jamming with Paul McCartney in 1965 on a Sunday in the Edgware Road.

Paul had rung the doorbell, having left his Aston Martin on the kerb with the door open and the radio on, and barged into Don’s flat: he was two lines short for a ‘children’s song’ he was writing. And so it was that a star-struck copper reparked the Aston Martin, and Donovan came up with ‘sky of blue and sea of green, in my yellow submarine’ for the Beatle. ‘I didn’t believe that story when I remembered it myself,’ he said with a chuckle.

Though tuneful and pleasant, the gig felt more like a thé dansant in a care home without the dancing or, indeed, the tea. Not one of the songs was worth the price of admission.

Beggars can’t be choosers, I know, but, on reflection, BHL in the bath was the bigger splash.

A tea dance with Donovan: the Beatles anecdotes were better than the music

Gino Severini’s Danseuse No 5 (1915-16), oil on canvas. One of the stars of the Pallant House collection

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU

©ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON2020.

Pallant House, Chichester: winter exhibitions. Piano Nobile, London W11: Ben Nicholson Walter Hussey was one of Britain’s most important 20th-century art patrons. He was vicar of St Matthew’s, Northampton, a church built by a brewer, Mr Phipps, and so known as ‘Phipps’s Fire Escape’.

Later, he was Dean of Chichester, He was also instrumental in saving the fine, 18th-century Pallant House from neglect after years as council offices. As part of his campaign, he left his collection, with works by Moore, Hepworth, Piper, Richards and Sutherland, specifically to be exhibited in the house.

Other donors of Modern British and European art included the property developer Charles Kearley, and Sir Colin ‘Sandy’ St John Wilson and his second wife Mary Jane King, architects of the museum’s modernist extension.

In fact, there are two Wilson collections here because, after the death of Muriel, Sandy’s first wife, in 2018, hers was accepted in lieu of tax and allocated to Pallant House, where an unusual

number of female collectors is represented. Works by Paolozzi, Blake, Hockney and others from the Muriel Wilson bequest make up a show running until 29th November.

The gallery is wasting no time in catching up on months lost earlier in the year. From 20th November to 6th January, more than 100 Christmas cards designed by some of the most popular artists of the century will be on display. They include several of those described by Paul Nash as ‘an outbreak of talent’ among his RCA pupils.

In the main galleries (from 25th November) there will be a Richard

‘Let me guess – another cartoon that reminds you of us’

Hamilton retrospective to 14th March, and ‘Degas to Picasso: International Modern Masters’ to 18th April. Hamilton (1922-2011) was the John the Baptist of Pop Art, and an internationally influential figure, who blurred the boundaries between art and design.

Pallant House is celebrated for its modern British holdings; ‘Degas to Picasso’ demonstrates that it is also strong internationally. In April – all being well – the two will come together. Several works on loan to the Ben Nicholson show currently at Piano Nobile, Portland Road, London W11, will return to Chichester for its own Nicholson exhibition.

Nicholson (1894-1982) was, with Moore and Bacon, one of the very few mid-century British artists to have a commanding international standing.

Piano Nobile concentrates on reliefs and drawings from 1955 to 1979, and it shows his re-engagement with colour after the monochromatic 1930s reliefs, and the skill of his naïve-seeming draughtsmanship.

There is much more poetry in these works than might be supposed, and it is worth taking time to absorb it.

The accompanying publication is impressive at a time when scholarly catalogues are gravely threatened.

The Oldie December 2020 79

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER WINTER GREENS With our retinas still aglow after a few months of vintage autumn colour, we are left with bare twiggery and 50 shades of green. From now until deciduous trees and shrubs expand their leaf buds in March and April, we must take comfort in whatever verdancy remains.

Worry not. This isn’t a plea for the widespread planting of conifers in the garden, some of which, pleasingly, among a largely brutish and gargantuan brigade, do have enviable grace, composure and manageable proportions.

Instead, I’m considering broadleaf evergreens with a gloss that does its best to sparkle on the dreariest of winter days.

Take, for example, award-winning, well-behaved, small- to medium-sized Sarcococca hookeriana from China and the Himalayas. One of the commonly named Christmas boxes, it’s in the Buxus (boxwood) family but isn’t threatened by the two currently rampant destructive forces: box-moth caterpillars and blight.

It’s hardy enough throughout the British Isles, although wise gardeners will site it against a wall, where a degree or two of extra warmth will boost the glorious scent of its small, white flowers at this time of year. Self-descriptive ‘Purple Stem’ has added colour interest.

Despite hailing from Mexico and south-west USA, the hardy, winterflowering, evergreen Choisya ternata freely covers itself with sprays of white, sweetly scented blossom in early spring and often again from late autumn for a few more weeks.

Its other chief joy is its aromatic foliage when crushed, which makes it a pleasure to clip if it begins to outgrow its allotted space.

Unless you wear sunglasses in

December, it’s best to avoid a variety dubbed ‘Sundance’, with very bright yellow foliage.

The daphnes take us into an altogether more sophisticated (and, sadly, more expensive) world. Many are famed for their cold-season perfume.

Pink-flowered, all-round winner Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’, raised and named for his wife Jacqui in 1982 by Alan Postill, ace propagator at the world-famous Hillier Nurseries in Hampshire, is described as being a ‘splendid and very hardy form … flowering when in full leaf … with a powerful fragrance’. There’s just time to pop it onto your Christmas-present list.

Because of their prickly, holly-like leaves, mahonias are often sited away from paths. Fortunately, the scented ones can distribute their bouquet far and wide on a slight breeze, allowing them to be appreciated while you’re standing out of harm’s way. They all bear yellow flowers.

M aquifolium (the Oregon grape, so called for its decorative, blue-black berries) is a low-growing spreader – useful for difficult corners where few other plants would thrive.

My particular fondness is for the taller-growing varieties under the name Mahonia x media – less scented but stately, with ruffs of handsome, pinnate leaves and terminal clusters of long, lax

Cold comfort: Osmanthus x burkwoodii

racemes in late autumn and winter.

I’d suggest ‘Buckland’, ‘Lionel Fortescue’ or the shorter-growing varieties ‘Underway’ and ‘Winter Sun’.

Larger, sweet-smelling evergreens include osmanthus, a group of shrubs that can extend to a height of about 12 feet. O x burkwoodii (pictured) is terrific. Its minute flower buds, scattered over the entire plant at this time of the year, won’t open for another couple of months – but when they do, to reveal tiny, white, star-like florets, you’ll want to bottle the fragrance.

Hollies cannot be overlooked in this season. Choose them now, when they’re berrying; if space is restricted, consider dwarf cultivars such as ‘Burford Nana’, ‘Rotunda’ and ‘Caressa’.

Finally – how could I not? – mistletoe.

But you can’t choose this parasite. It has to choose you.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SALSIFY A root vegetable known as the oyster plant, with the flavour of artichoke and young shoots tasting of asparagus, must surely be something special.

This is salsify, which many people will never have eaten but which was popular with the Victorians, partly thanks to Mrs Beeton.

It is grown and eaten more widely in France and Italy, unlike the parsnip which it resembles and which is hardly seen in Mediterranean markets. Salsify is an intriguing vegetable, belonging to the daisy, sunflower and dandelion family (Asteraceae) and producing purple-pink flowers in summer, which look rather like the star-shaped honka dahlias.

Salsify is easy enough to grow: the seed should be sown in soil that has not been freshly manured and the plants thinned to about six inches apart.

The Oldie December 2020 81

When hoeing between the plants, be careful not to damage the roots, which bleed easily. The roots can be lifted from mid-October or left in the ground through the winter and harvested the following season. As it is a biennial, the salsify roots will put up edible shoots and flowers during the second year.

The black-skinned version of salsify (with white flesh underneath) is also called scorzonera, apparently from the Italian scorza negra, or black bark. But this derivation is not certain, since the full name of black salsify is Scorzonera hispanica. Another explanation gives the name a French origin, from the old word scorzon, meaning adder, because in the 16th century the root was believed to be an antidote against snake bites.

Scorzonera has broader leaves than the true salsify, its flowers are yellow and it is said to have a more pronounced flavour. I grew it one year, without much success, as the roots were thin and almost 12 inches in length, and tended to snap when being dug up. They should have been left to grow stronger in the second year. A few plants, self-seeded, came up the following year, with green stems, which, I now know, I could have eaten.

The flower buds are also edible, and the petals can be added to salads.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD APHRODISIAC TRUFFLES Oldie fungi-foragers will already know it’s been a bumper year for fruiting bodies in the woods and forests of our sceptred isle.

Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life was reviewed in the October issue. Do read the chapter on the elusive truffle and its ability to mess about with the mammalian brain, its essential spore-spreaders.

Truffle-wise, there’s a brief cross-over between the September-to-Decemberfruiting Piedmont white, Tuber magnatum (rich man’s truffle), and December-through-March’s Perigord black, T melanosporum. Lesser-value truffles – among them, our own native T aestivum (summer truffle) and T borchii (bianchetto – spring-fruiting, native to Italy) – don’t have the umami whack that makes those of higher value so desirable.

There are a lot of lookalikes around, mostly Chinese, that smell right because they’ve been sprinkled with truffle oil.

Truffle oil is fragranced with a chemical copy, whatever it says on the tin. The only way to preserve fragrance in a truffle is by flash-freezing as soon as it’s liberated from the earth. Which is before we get to the real point of the unruly gang of subterranean, pheromone-laden 82 The Oldie December 2020

Gas 6. Roll out the pastry to fit a 25cm tart tin. Prick the base, and bake for 10-15 minutes, till the pastry is set.

Meanwhile, whisk the eggs with the cheese, freshly ground pepper and a little salt. Stir in the fungi mix and grate in the black truffle or add a few drops of truffle oil.

Spread the mix in the tart case and bake at 350°F/180°C/Gas 4 for 35-40 minutes until the filling is almost set but still a little trembly in the middle.

Serve warm, with or without white truffle slivered over the top.

seducers: all members of the family, to a greater or lesser extent, smell of sex.

Truffles are taste-enhancers. They can be shaved over (white) or added to (black) absolutely anything that sings to your soul. Hey ho, if love were all.

Croustade aux champignons truffe This Provençale quiche is a crisp, olive-oil pastry case baked with a filling of wild fungi and goat’s cheese. Cultivated mushrooms – pick a mix of oyster, straw and button – can substitute for wild.

Truffles are optional (there’s news of melano in semi-cultivation in the UK). If your truffle is one of the blacks, grate into the mushroom mix before cooking; if white (lucky you), sliver over the top when serving. If using truffle oil, add sparingly. Serves 4 as a starter The pastry 250g plain flour 4 tbsp olive oil About 100ml hand-hot water ½ tsp salt The filling 2 tbsp olive oil 350g mushrooms, wiped and sliced (optional) 1 small truffle or a few drops truffle oil 1 large onion, finely sliced 1 sprig thyme 2 tbsp black olives, pitted and chopped 4 medium eggs 100g fresh goat’s cheese Salt and pepper Work the pastry ingredients together with the hook of your hand, adding just enough warm water to form a smooth ball. Cover with clingfilm and leave to rest for half an hour, while you prepare the filling.

Heat the oil gently in a frying pan, add the mushrooms, onion and thyme and cook gently till the mix begins to sizzle and brown a little. Stir in the olives, remove from the heat, pick out the thyme and leave to cool.

Preheat the oven to 400°F/200°C/

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE DINNER TIME An old friend, who in his seventh decade is still a creature of the night, is spitting feathers about being ejected from restaurants at 10pm, half an hour after he normally arrives.

Knowing him to be a devout Francophobe, I tried to placate him by reminding him that Paris now shuts down at 9pm, but he’s convinced it is an early sign of England being turned into a homely, J B Priestley-style workers’ paradise with dripping on toast at 6pm.

Yet dining late became a mark of sophistication only after the First World War. Well into the twenties, the legacy of DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act), dating from 1914, combined with the Licensing Act of 1921 compelled restaurants to shut at 10pm and nightclubs at 12.30am – and they could stay open that late only if they served food.

The smarter clubs, like the Embassy and the Café de Paris, served a proper dinner at a guinea a head, with champagne at a massive 30 shillings a bottle. The majority served bacon and eggs to keep on the right side of the law, albeit at 10s 6d, the price of a five-course dinner in a top restaurant.

Plates of days-old food were as much a part of the table furniture as the candles.

During one of many police raids, Brenda Dean Paul was obliged to pick at an antique sausage on a plate that had been permanently glued to the table. Little wonder that Evelyn Waugh dubbed nightclubs ‘second-rate places for third-rate people’.

The dinner hour has throughout history steadily got later and later, mainly because lunch achieved its current stature only in the second half of the 19th century.

‘Nunch’ or ‘nuncheon’ was ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’. Johnson described it as ‘a piece of victuals to be eaten between meals so not even a meal in itself’. Jane Austen thought ‘noonshine’ a fashionable novelty. In the 19th century,

at midday a city gent sustained himself on a biscuit and a glass of sherry. In his 1952 masterpiece, Movable Feasts, Arnold Palmer cites 1903 as the first reference to a lunch party.

Henry VII’s court dined at 11am; Cromwell’s ascetic contemporaries at 1pm. By 1700, a merchant’s family would dine at 2pm to allow for a little more wealth-generation. In 1712, Steele said the dinner hour had slipped during his lifetime from 12pm to 3pm, which seems to have been the usual hour until the 1760s for London – but 2pm was still customary for the less fashionable country gents. Boswell talked of leaving for dinner at 5pm. Work would have continued for the conscientious, who could look forward to supper at around 9pm or 10pm.

It was the popularity of afternoon tea, whether at Lyons Corner House or at a smart hotel, and the boom in theatregoing that compelled London hotels and restaurants to offer a later dinner from 5.30pm to 8pm.

César Ritz, who ran the Savoy from 1889, saw a hotel as having 24 hours in which to make money. He introduced thés dansants between 3pm and 6pm before encouraging guests to visit the American Bar for the new cocktails, pushing the dinner hour forward to 8pm – and even later if after a show.

Yet dinner then was shorter, too.

Lady Jeune, a society grande dame, wrote that ‘no dinner should last more than an hour and a quarter if properly served and should consist of no more than eight dishes’.

Let me confess, I may not like being moved on at 10pm but, like that lady who was a tramp, I ‘get too hungry for dinner at eight’.

DRINK BILL KNOTT GRAHAM GREENE’S TIPPLE Graham Greene loved Rioja.

In Monsignor Quixote, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor, takes the eponymous priest to Madrid’s famous old Sobrino de Botín for dinner. He orders two portions of suckling pig and ‘a bottle of the Marqués de Murrieta’s red wine. ‘ “I’m surprised that you favour the aristocracy,” Father Quixote remarked.’

Greene was a friend of Vicente Cebrián, the owner of the Marqués de Murrieta bodega and of Castillo Ygay, which lends its name to the estate’s two greatest wines. I know this because, about 20 years ago, I was given a tour of the bodega by Vicente’s son, after which he asked me to sign the guest book, but not before pointing out a previous entry,

dated 4th August 1987. Written by Greene to Cebrián, it argues that winemakers, like writers, will never retire: ‘Retirement is the most deadly of all diseases. It kills more people than cancer.’

Cebrián, sadly, was unable to test this assertion, succumbing to a heart attack in his late forties, but his son carried on his father’s vision. The wines are superb.

Looking for a very special Christmas bottle? The terrific 2009 vintage of the red Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial will hit the spot perfectly: profound, rich and spicy, with a healthy splash – 19 per cent – of Mazuelo (aka Carignan), adding fine tannins and acidity.

The other 81 per cent is, of course, Tempranillo, the grape variety on which Rioja has built its reputation, ever since the vineyards of Bordeaux were ravaged by phylloxera and demand for the local wines soared. Most of La Rioja’s great bodegas were founded between 1850 and 1900, when phylloxera was at its peak.

Tempranillo is now the third-mostplanted variety in the world, behind Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Unlike those two, almost all of it is grown in Spain, notably in Ribera del Duero, where it is known as Tinto Fino and produces such stellar wines as Vega Sicilia and Pingus.

More affordable Tempranillo is not hard to find. In the crianza style – young and fruity – try CVNE’s silk-smooth Viña Real 2017, the bramble-scented Viñedos Barrihuelo 2017 or the Wine Society’s Navajas 2015, with its trademark Rioja oakiness and gently spicy, black fruits.

Reservas and Gran Reservas spend years in wood, and even longer in bottle before release. For Gran Reservas, this can be decades: Murrieta’s 1942 Gran Reserva, famously, was released only in 1983. Reservas worth trying include the mellow, food-friendly Beronia 2015 and Viña Tondonia’s elegant, strawberryscented Lopez Heredia Reserva 2006, aged for six years in cellar.

Outside Spain, the most notable plantings of Tempranillo are in Portugal, especially the Douro, where (as Tinta Roriz) it is used for both port and table wines. It is starting to be planted in California and Australia, too, and it has long been grown in Argentina, where it is often used for blending.

Zuccardi, in Valle de Uco, blend it with Malbec to make a wine in their Series A range – the 2019 vintage is available from Majestic, £12.99 – and it is a very happy union, marrying the cherry-ripe freshness of Tempranillo with the brooding, forest-floor richness of Malbec.

It produces a wine with the deep purple hue of an aubergine; or, for that matter, a Monsignor’s socks.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines, a white and two reds: a crisp Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire; a spicy, sun-drenched red from the south of France; and a Portuguese red in which Tempranillo, under the guise of Tinta Roriz, plays a leading role.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Les Secrets de Sophie, Sauvignon de Touraine, Famille Bougrier, Loire 2019, offer price £11.99, case price £143.88 There’s a hint of yeasty complexity to this crisp, delicious white.

Guilhem, Moulin de Gassac Rouge, Pays d’Hérault 2019, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 A classic blend of Syrah, Grenache and Carignan: very well made and great value.

Quinta da Alorna, Tejo, Portugal 2017, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00 A heady mix of four varieties, with Tinta Roriz to the fore: nicely balanced fruit and tannin.

Mixed case price £125.92 – a saving of £26.95 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price.

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For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 28th December 2020.

The Oldie December 2020 83

SPORT JIM WHITE FOOTBALL WITHOUT THE FANS When West Ham hosted Manchester City in a Premier League fixture recently, COVID restrictions insisted that no fans could be in the London Stadium.

But Hammers supporters are an inventive lot. And in an attempt to replicate the match-day experience, a bunch of them hired out a cinema in the Westfield Shopping Centre, just a stone’s throw from where the game was taking place. Here they watched together. They weren’t doing anything illegal.

The baffling pandemic restrictions enabled them to gather inside to see the game on a screen, when they weren’t allowed to sit outside just down the road watching it live. The depressing truth is they may be doing it like that for some time.

Test events had been due to start on 3rd October – the beginning of the process of a return to normality. But when the second wave broke, the plan for allowing crowds back to elite sport was put on indefinite hold. Despite the culture department’s making a commitment to getting fans back into stadia as soon as it is safe to do so, there is no timetable or clue as to when that might happen.

And how football – and every other professional sport – is missing its live audience. Even at the top, partially insulated by television revenue, income has been torpedoed. Manchester United’s annual turnover was down from £627m in 2019 to £509m in 2020. Playing behind locked doors had turned a net profit of £18.9m into a loss of £23.2m. And that’s the richest club. Imagine how the bottom line looks at Accrington Stanley.

It’s not just the money. The absence of fans is affecting the very way the game is played. Since fixtures began again after the lockdown, I have been able, as a member of the press, to go along to report. Everything is superbly organised; everyone is safely spaced. Temperatures are taken on arrival – a nervy moment for any reporter with a raging hangover.

But when the game starts, with no more than a couple of dozen in attendance, it feels very odd. With no crowd noise, you can hear the players communicating down on the pitch. Goalkeepers are the loudest, bellowing instructions constantly.

Martin Dúbravka, Newcastle United’s Slovakian keeper, it turns out, yells in a magnificent adopted Geordie accent.

Then there is the noise when someone kicks the ball. It sounds like a snare drum reverberating round the empty stands.

But the biggest difference is this: the 84 The Oldie December 2020

rhythm of the game is altered. Only in its absence is it possible to appreciate the symbiotic connection between crowd and performer. Without spectators, the home team gains no advantage. Referees are not influenced by the yelps of outrage that accompany every foul.

Most obviously, the swirl of noise is not there to provide the emotional fuel to drive a team forward in critical moments.

We always knew fans were vital to provide atmosphere and money. Now, we discover, they have a more fundamental role in the very flow of the game. COVID has provided unimpeachable evidence of a truth to which some of us have long clung: football without fans is nothing.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD HYDROGEN SELLS All I remember of school physics is failing to get the Bunsen burner going and having to draw diagrams of something called the Leclanché cell.

I didn’t know what it was but I do know that I still don’t really understand what electricity is. Thus, at the start of the electric-car craze, when someone told me they were an interim solution and the future was hydrogen fuel cells, I nodded wisely and fraudulently. That’s because I don’t understand what hydrogen fuel cells are, either. But I think he was right.

In September, the world’s first full-scale, six-seater hydrogen plane took to the air over Bedfordshire. Its operators, ZeroAvia, hope to introduce zero-emission commercial flights by 2023. Airbus are aiming at transcontinental hydrogen flights by 2035.

But cars, trucks, ships and trains (a hydrogen train ran to Evesham in September) are already ahead of the game. There are about 53,600 assorted hydrogen-powered vehicles worldwide (many of them forklift trucks), albeit a measly 240 registered in the UK. You could add to that number tomorrow by ordering the Hyundai Nexo or Toyota Mirai. The Metropolitan Police runs 11 Mirais, ideally suited to those who use vehicles 24 hours a day and

An early battery, the Leclanché cell, invented and patented in 1866

don’t have time for recharging electric batteries.

Fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) work by storing hydrogen in a tank at enormous pressure (700 bars) and feeding it through a stack of fuel cells to combine with oxygen from the air to generate electricity, its only by-product – or emission – being water. There is a battery but it’s small. The high-pressure tanks have been violently tested, including being shot at, and hydrogen leaks are harmless, unless in a confined space.

Refills take roughly the same time as conventional refuelling. Driving an FCEV is reportedly just like driving an electric car.

Advantages include zero tailpipe emissions and doing away with large batteries containing rare and expensive minerals. Hydrogen production requires electricity but green hydrogen, its fans argue, could be wind-powered or derived from the electrolysis of seawater.

Over the past decade, about £649 million of wind-powered electricity was discarded unused because it couldn’t be stored, whereas hydrogen can be stored indefinitely in depleted oilfields and salt caverns.

Again, unlike with electricity, the energy in hydrogen doesn’t diminish when it moves. Thus, although Toyota and Hyundai are leading the pack in the UK, Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and Honda are now also developing FCEVs. Hitherto, hydrogen has been held back by lack of filling stations. It’s the usual chicken-and-egg problem – which comes first, the network or the users? But now a company called ITM Motive is building them where there are regional commercial fleets of trucks, taxis and buses, and branching out from there.

They’ve installed seven and have another six under development, with plans for 100. Given the long range of fuel cells, they reckon that should be able to provide national coverage. At present, refuelling costs are about £10 plus VAT per kilo but that should fall to £7 – only slightly more expensive than today’s diesel prices.

Once we have a credible network – and provided we don’t make a hash of it, as we have with electric vehicles by having no standard plug-in – I don’t see any disadvantages.

As for the Leclanché cell, I can hardly blame my ignorance on my schooling, having had more than 60 years since in which to make some effort to acquire at least a simulacrum of scientific literacy.

All it took was two minutes on Wikipedia, prompted by my writing this. Next stop, fuel cells: ten more years and I reckon we’ll be using them.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Talking about 5 Generation I expect you’ve heard of 5G, which you probably know has something to do with mobile phones, but what is it really?

It all relates to how equipment (not just phones) connects with other equipment wirelessly. The G stands for generation, and in the past 40 years we have evolved from 1G to 5G. 1G gave us sound, 2G gave us text, 3G gave us mobile internet and 4G made everything about ten times faster.

5G, when it is properly available, will

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make everything another ten times faster still, offer far more capacity and reduce the delay between sending and receiving (the ‘latency rate’) to as near zero as makes no difference. It will allow new farming techniques that use drones to plant, monitor and water crops, and service many more things, such as self-driving cars, fridges, baby monitors and fire alarms, that are daily being connected to the internet.

There are numerous practical difficulties: 5G achieves its high speeds by using ‘millimetre waves’ (mmWave), which are extremely high-frequency radio waves. Unfortunately, they travel only a few hundred yards and then only between points that have an uninterrupted line of sight. They struggle with bad weather and can’t go through walls. So, for the time being, 5G often has to rely on the same radio waves that 4G uses, which travel further and aren’t frightened of rain but are not as fast.

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‘I think I see your problem’

At present there aren’t anything like enough masts to provide even a national 4G service, and a 5G network would need many more than that. To provide universal 5G, we’ll need a gigantic, new infrastructure of masts, all a few hundred yards apart at most.

So the phone companies are spending fortunes installing masts all over the place. That’s fine in a town, but getting 5G established in the countryside is going to be challenging. It was suggested that church towers might be used, which sounded like a good idea, but the churches lost interest when the phone companies said that they were not prepared to pay rent. Quelle surprise.

In the meantime, phones that can make the best of the 5G network, when you can find it, are far too expensive.

Despite all this, in my view, and in the words of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, 5G is ‘a Good Thing’ or, at any rate, could be. It might hugely benefit many areas of life – more than we know at present. In healthcare, it will enable remote surgery, and it might even make autonomous cars safe. But it’s years away from being universally available in the UK, if it ever is.

One final point: despite some widely shared, Facebook-based conspiracy theories, there is no evidence of a link between 5G and coronavirus. None at all.

Not a sausage. Viruses cannot travel on radio waves or mobile networks. So no need to wear that hat lined with tinfoil.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The safe bets of saving Households saved massively more this spring than ever before which is a surprise, given that interest rates are so miserly.

Between April and June, we put aside £55 billion, whereas the average is usually £5 billion a month. This was mainly because we had little opportunity to shop or commute at that time, and anyone worrying about redundancy held on to their money in case they lost their job.

We won’t continue saving at that high 86 The Oldie December 2020

level but, fortunately for the banks, we are likely to remain cautious about unnecessary spending for some time.

Banks need your savings because these contribute to the amount of money they can lend to borrowers – but they still want to pay next to nothing in interest. They have no need to improve their rates, even though demand for mortgages is high, because they can borrow money from the Bank of England at only 0.1%. In November, National Savings & Investments (NS&I), a big

competitor, slashed rates on all its variable-rate accounts – some of them to a negligible 0.01%.

The tricky bit for banks is to make sure you save with them rather than with a competitor. Some of them have come up with the idea of introducing gambling into savings, although not for customers in Northern Ireland, which has different gambling laws.

Premium Bonds used to be the only opportunity of your winning a large lump sum while getting your stake

money (ie your savings) returned when you wanted it. But NS&I has lengthened the odds on a £1 Premium Bond winning a prize from 24,500:1 to 34,500:1. Banks say their accounts give better odds and pay interest as well.

Nationwide Building Society has an 18-month fixed-rate bond, the Mutual Reward Bond, which pays 0.5% interest.

There will be one prize draw (next February) to win £10,000. Savers get one entry for every £100 saved and the maximum investment is £10,000, which is equal to 100 entries and gives a 1 in 200 chance of winning. The more people who save, the more £10,000 prizes will be handed out.

The Family Building Society’s Windfall Bond earns the Bank of England base rate, 0.1% at present, with 21 prizes each month, including one worth £50,000. Each bond costs £10,000 and has a 1 in 714 chance of winning each month and a 1 in 60 chance of winning once a year.

With Halifax’s long-running Savers Prize Draw, savers with at least £5,000 across various Halifax and Bank of Scotland accounts are automatically entered and 1,600 of them will win, with three top prizes of £100,000. Halifax

does not reveal the odds, but £550,000 is won each month.

The Treasury is running a PrizeSaver pilot with 15 credit unions. Members get one entry for every £1 they save, up to a maximum of 200 a month. Interest depends on the individual credit union.

They can win £5,000 or one of 20 prizes

worth £20. If the trial is successful in attracting more people to save with credit unions, the scheme will be extended when the pilot ends next March.

Whether a prize-paying savings account turns out to be the better bet for you is entirely down to luck. Never forget to check the interest you will earn.

The Oldie December 2020 87

Getting Dressed

English queen of a French vineyard

Béatrice Viennet reigned over Sotheby’s and the family vines brigid keenan At the end of this year, Britain says au revoir to our cousins across the Channel, as we leave the EU. This is a particularly sad time for those Brits who live in France.

One of them, Béatrice Viennet, tenth child in a family of 11, grew up on her father’s farm next to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence.

She knew Churchill when she was a little girl. A kindly uncle figure, he once gave her some chicks to rear. Later she fell in love with a French wine-grower, Luc Viennet, whom she met in London, and she now lives among the vineyards on his family estate near Montpellier.

Now 71, Viennet had been working for Sotheby’s for a decade before she married. She continued to do so, becoming their representative in the Occitanie region of France.

She drove across the country to look at family treasures for sale, giving advice and calling in experts – ever on the lookout for the priceless discovery.

Viennet was 33 when she moved to France – almost exactly the same age as writer Nancy Mitford was when she left London for Paris after the Second World War. While Viennet was growing up in the 1950s, Mitford was writing hilariously from her new home about how appallingly the English dressed. She told of two English duchesses being turned away from Christian Dior because the people at the entrance considered them too dowdy to be admitted.

‘If you are a duchess in England,’ Mitford wrote, ‘you don’t need to be well dressed – it would be thought quite eccentric.’

Dress by Sessùn; suede pumps

by Manfield, Montpellier 88 The Oldie December 2020

On our island, she continued, style was deemed to be showing off, something the English most disliked. The only people ‘allowed’ to look good were ‘men and little children – our Queen and Princess Margaret set the fashion for the world until they were ten’. And even men ‘would not dream of wearing a new suit until it had spent one or two nights in the garden’.

Viennet’s mother shared this notion: ‘She was very anti dressing up and showing off. It was considered “common” to draw attention to yourself in those days.’

As a child and a teenager, young Béatrice was dressed mostly in her sisters’ hand-me-downs. When she grew up, she met the designer Victor Edelstein and, being model-sized (which she has remained), was able to buy the sample garments from his collections at an affordable price.

‘The French still like to think the English dress badly, but of course they are far more fashion-conscious now and, anyway, fashion has become more international. These days, I think the difference is that the English are more eccentric in their taste and the French more classical.

‘Paris still leads the way here – the Paris Collections are a very big deal in France. There is a certain amount of “seduction” in French dressing. It is not at all show-off; more cultural and intellectual. But, at the same time, they want séduire, to seduce. No, that’s not the right word – “attract”. Take Madame Macron – her clothes are very well chosen and suit her: simple, not flashy, good colours.’

Viennet looks as elegant as her life and her job demand. She buys few clothes but they are always classically designed and well made. Some are French, some British. Paul Smith is a favourite.

Arriving in France in the early

In a Victor Edelstein party dress, c1991

1980s, she had more problems learning to lay an upper-class table than with clothes – ‘Spoons and forks upside down! Maybe it’s to show off the coat of arms! And you never eat the dessert with a spoon.’

Viennet spent a year au-pairing with a family in Paris between leaving convent school and her first job (selling jumpers in the Scotch House in Knightsbridge). So speaking French has never been a problem.

Her French helped when her husband died suddenly in 2008. She found herself alone, untutored in the ways of wine, responsible for 124 hectares of vines (that’s up to 100,000 bottles), with the vendange only five days away. ‘The people with vineyards around me were wonderful – there is an amazing esprit de solidarité among the growers.

Someone came to help me and saw me through the whole vendange.’

Viennet went on to run the Seigneurie de Peyrat vineyards very successfully until she handed over to her niece; she still helps out when needed.

For wine-loving oldies, December might be the last chance to order the Seigneurie de Peyrat wine duty-free!

The Brambling

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd As bird lovers know, finches are exceptionally easy on the eye.

Most of the family dozen seen in Britain could be contenders for first prize in a beauty contest, with the brambling (Fringilla montifringilla) to the fore.

Regarded as the ‘northern chaffinch’, it has a bolder plumage. It is black where the chaffinch is grey. It has white underparts: the most noticeable difference in both sexes is the bright, white rump. It is unique among the finch dozen in being only a winter migrant.

Sometimes a million-plus arrive from Scandinavia and Russia in autumn, leaving as late as May. Bramblings’ favourite food is beech mast. The copper of the mast and dead beech leaves blend with their tortoiseshell colour; the white flurry of a disturbed flock is a snowy sign of winter.

As their beech-mast preference shows, they are not berry- or seed-eaters in the first instance; unlike chaffinches, with which they nonetheless often congregate.

Their name accordingly does not derive from a taste for brambles, although they do like to roost in thorny scrub, but is probably a corruption of ‘brindle’ – in other words, russet with strokes of another colour.

The ‘forgotten finch’ comes from the unpredictability of its weatherdependent migrations. Hence the breadth of its migrant numbers: 45,0001.8 million in the latest UK population estimate (British Birds). It means even birdwatchers may never see one. This is borne out by my books of bird poetry: the principal finches are all celebrated but not the brambling.

The same applied in pastoral times.

George Muirhead wrote in The Birds of Berwickshire (1889) that it was seen ‘every year’ but its visits were ‘erratic and uncertain’. He explained: ‘The “Cock o’ the North” is mostly associated in our minds with severe weather of winter, when deep snow covers the level expanse

of the Merse, and curlers are on the ice; for then it is seen in small numbers about the stackyards, feeding with the linnets and chaffinches.’

In mild weather, it took to ‘open fields’ and ‘plantations where it feeds upon the beech-mast. Large flocks were seen in the beech woods at Paxton in the autumn of 1874’, but December snow left ‘only a few remaining about the farm-steadings’.

Like most winter migrants, bramblings follow food, invariably from north to south; hence ‘Cock o’ the North’.

This can cause huge flocks. In 1981, 150,000 on Merseyside; and, for a few

weeks in the winter of 1951/52, 70 million descended on the beech woods near Hünibach, Switzerland – the largest gathering of a bird ever recorded. The global population is declining yet still estimated at 100-200 million.

The brambling nests in conifer and birch forests across northern Europe and the Palearctic. Tardy males in Britain may sing their mating song. Nests are sometimes reported in Scotland, but few have been verified.

The 2021 Bird of the Month calendar is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie December 2020 91

Travel Travels with my daughter When pop star Florence Welch was asked to an Irish literary festival, she took her father Nick Welch along – and he loved it

O

ne day, my old friend Viv Guinness sent me an email.

She wondered whether ‘the daughter’ Florence (aka Florence + the Machine) might like to feature at the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas in County Carlow, a couple of hours south-west of Dublin.

Flo was back on the phone within a day or so and absolutely on for it. The clincher was the presence of Jeffrey Eugenides, an author whom I had not read yet, but is adored by my children and their friends. Most delightfully, I am allowed to come, too.

County Carlow is rolling country, with some green mountains to the south, and Borris House is a wonderful, somewhat sombre confection, with an elegant but thoroughly lived-in interior.

It has been the home of the MacMurrough Kavanagh family for centuries. They are engagingly around and about during the festival.

Florence has a perfect room at the top of the house. I’m suddenly disappointed that I helpfully agreed to be downgraded to a local B&B. But then I am a gilded hanger-on, not even a real author – I

92 The Oldie December 2020

suppose I could claim co-authorship of Florence’s being.

Within minutes of arriving, I am meeting some of many new best friends, including Barry the man on the door who keeps the riff-raff out of Borris House.

By now an experienced ligger, I know it’s always useful to get on good terms with security personnel. They know where things are and who does what.

A chatty fellow, Barry informs me he has been looking after HRH (Prince Charles) who was in Kilkenny a week before. Apparently, HRH had been very

well received and enjoyed himself so thoroughly that he stayed rather longer than expected.

There is a green room in Borris House where the writer-talkers can hang out, and it is actually green – the walls an old, very muted shade of eau de nil, hung with family portraits – ­­ with a magnificent dining table around which they all sit.

The writers appear a little preoccupied, as well they might, having to talk in public about what they wrote in the quiet privacy of their garrets.

Richard Ford seems impossibly handsome and gives me clear and sensible advice about my cricked neck (Ibuprofen, not paracetamol). Jeffrey Eugenides looks rather dapper and less preoccupied than most. My own mild concern is for the man who will be interviewing Florence in an hour or so.

He is Fiachna Ó’Brionáin, a member of the band Hothouse Flowers and now a broadcaster as well. He is a most charming man – dark suit, dark hair, with a fine grin. He is, however, a little worried about what he’s going to do with Flo. I call her to suggest that she finish primping and come down for a chat with

DANIEL WILLIS

Proud father: Florence and Nick Welch.

Below left: Borris House, County Carlow

him. I feel I might have almost earned my corn as I leave them to it.

The interview goes very well. Flo makes an absurdly obvious point about pop-song lyrics, and why she does not print them on her albums. They can often, she says, unlike poetry, appear banal when simply printed, as their magic comes from the musical context and rendition.

Another wonderful inhabitant of the green room is the American writer Edmund White, exuding something of the air of a Southern gentleman of a certain sort, despite having been born and brought up in the northern states of Ohio and Illinois. He is a delight both in the green room and on the stump.

We have supper in one of the tents that have been put up on the lawn.

Writers, presenters, punters, liggers and locals all swirl around in constantly shifting, friendly drinking configurations.

Even normally abstemious, sensible folk are reeling about, glasses in hand, with a broad grin and sparkling eyes.

Ireland has them in its boozy embrace.

One guest is later found trying to crawl on all fours to the pub.

Suddenly, there’s riotous giggling in the normally studious, restrained green room. The young girls who set up and now run Florence’s book club have arrived from Dublin. They and Flo are delightfully excited by the whole thing and by the sheer proximity of soooo many authors. Between Two Books was started by two teenagers in Dublin and is now a worldwide phenomenon with more than 70,000 subscribers.

Then I spend an hour or two in the drinks tent with a lively gang of younger locals, and conversation moves far away from literary topics. We ramble around the issues of British/Irish history and relations without falling over ourselves.

I am at some stage reassured about a certain line of behaviour that I have adopted occasionally over the years: normally at about 9.30 during a pub evening with friendly Irish people, I make weeping apologies for the appalling behaviour of the British in Ireland over the centuries. When I tell my new friends of this, they smilingly

assure me things have moved on a bit, and that too much history isn’t always a good thing.

That evening, Florence interviews Jeffrey Eugenides, without appearing too starstruck. It is, she admits, quite refreshing to be the fan talking to someone who doesn’t really know who you are – Jeffrey isn’t particularly aware of Flo’s oeuvre.

Flo turns in and I make it to the local pub, O’Shea’s. Flo is not a party animal these days but announces that she is more than happy for me to keep the Welch flag flying into the wee small hours.

We are preparing to depart, and I sit for the last time in the green room, waiting for our cab to arrive. A new writer/presenter has arrived.

‘What’s the time?’ she asks me repeatedly and nervously, as her session looms ever closer.

‘Seventeen minutes to go,’ I say, ‘but don’t worry – it’s all very friendly here.

I’m sure it will all go very nicely.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘you don’t understand.

There are a number of people here who don’t like me very much at all.’

It turns out that she is the chief literary critic of the Irish Times and has had to be less than complimentary about a number of authors. Some of them, she adds, are present and, furthermore, she has now published a novel herself.

Oh Lordy, what a brave woman. She has my sympathy, as a gamekeeper turned poacher – or is it the other way round? I leave her with Jeffrey Eugenides, having ascertained that she has been complimentary about his work.

Her name is Eileen Battersby and her novel is Teethmarks on My Tongue and I hope her session went well. Sadly, Eileen ­ was killed in a car crash the next year – 2018. Now, more than ever, I hope that her session went well.

There is a special – perhaps Irish – lightness of touch to the Borris House Festival. It is utterly lacking in pretension – compact, informal, informative, friendly and constantly engaging on any number of levels. It has an extraordinary range and quality of writers and speakers who may be attracted by that same lightness of touch.

I thoroughly enjoyed it on many of its diverse levels and hope to return in the future.

And I can. Borris House Festival was, like so many festivals, cancelled this summer but it will return next year.

Borris House Festival, County Carlow, takes place on 11th-13th June 2021: festivalofwritingandideas.com The Oldie December 2020 93

My birthday odyssey As he turned 70, Nigel Summerley followed in Odysseus’s footsteps from Italy to Ithaca

I

f three score years and ten is a milestone on life’s journey, where better to spend one’s 70th birthday than in Ithaca – especially after my own 4,000-mile odyssey, much of it in the wake of the Big O himself?

Odysseus was plagued by Poseidon; I travelled in the face of a pandemic – not easy when criss-crossing between Greece and Italy in late 2020. After sailing around the Aegean, I traversed the Peloponnese, took boats and trains across Italy to Sicily, went north up Italy’s ‘Odyssean coast’, then doubled back to Greece to make landfall in Ithaca.

My odyssey really began in the Cyclades with a beautiful Greek woman called Helen (or Eleni) – no, not that one, but a friend on the island of Syros. It may surprise you (it did me) that so many sites linked to Odysseus are in Italy. But Eleni knew the connection and played me music from a 2002 EU project,

Ulysses’s Ports, involving musicians from Greece and Italy celebrating their common Odyssean heritage.

Sailing back to the mainland, I took a boat from Patras via Corfu (home of the Phaeacians who helped Odysseus home) to Italy.

At Brindisi a zealous border cop told me I could not enter the country as a tourist; it was so long since he’d seen a holidaymaker that I think he genuinely believed they were banned. Only when I invoked the name of Odysseus, waved my negative COVID-19 test result and explained my mission did he relent.

I sped south as fast as unreliable Italian trains allowed to Sicily, land of the Cyclops. Here too was the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Italy’s toe, where Odysseus faced the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis.

There was no sign of Charybdis’s foul whirlpool; the water was warm and still

as I swam out from Messina, the sun burning hot. But 90 minutes later, after a ferry across the Strait, I arrived in the town known as Scilla to the sound of mountain thunder and rain flooding the streets.

The tempest seemed so supernatural that I fancied the gods wanted to stop me from scaling the 250ft crag called Scylla’s Rock. But the weather cleared and I reached the summit. From here, Edward Lear marvelled at seeing the Aeolian Islands. Storm clouds hid them from me, but I certainly felt the winds of Aeolus that caused Odysseus so much trouble.

I had planned to sail past those islands Far left: Odysseus and the Sirens on a 480BC vase from Viterbo, Italy. Left: Lake Avernus near Naples, said to be the entrance to the Underworld.

1776 etching

94 The Oldie December 2020

HARRY MOUNT

Journey’s end: Odysseus’s Palace on Ithaca dates back to 3000BC

and the Galli isles, lair of the Sirens, but my boat was cancelled at the last minute.

So no need to think of being tied to a mast. Trains took me to Naples and beyond to explore the Odyssean coast and one of its most stunning spots: Lucrino, by Lake Avernus and the entrance to the Underworld. The ancients reckoned a lakeside cave led to the land of the dead.

The only cave here, called the Sybil’s Cave, is truly spooky, the entrance barred, cobwebbed and guarded by flies and lizards; an atmosphere of decay seeps from it.

The vast, 200ft-deep lake sits in the crater of an extinct volcano. And here I had my strangest experience. Halfway round the lake, I came to a wooden bench and found myself saying aloud, ‘Hello, Jean [to my mother who died in 2019].’

I don’t believe in an afterlife but, sitting on the bench, I felt her beside me, sharing the amazing view. My mother, a great traveller, had spent later, less happy times confined to a bench outside her home; perhaps my awareness of this had triggered something.

And then I remembered that Odysseus also met his dead mother here, although he didn’t know she had died.

Next came Formia, home of Cicero, who reckoned this was the land of the

Laestrygones, man-eating giants who attacked Odysseus’s crew. The Formian sky can be bright blue above the sea, while black clouds clothe the mountains and stretch threatening dark fingers towards the visitor. An air of malice is palpable. Like many of Odysseus’s men, Cicero met a gruesome end here, decapitated by thugs sent by Mark Antony. I paid my respects at his monumental tomb just outside town.

I missed the Galli isles but not sirens.

Statues and images of seductive merwomen abound on the Odyssean coast; and there are living sirens too: swimming in barely-there bikinis or lounging topless on posh yachts. The salacious Roman emperor Tiberius would have approved.

Tiberius was also an Odyssey fan – at his seaside villa at Sperlonga, he had a gigantic cavern in the grounds filled with epic tableaux of Homeric scenes.

Their remains were found during roadworks in 1957 and some have been

‘A woman in a leopardprint coat told me to put my case in the back – and off we went’

reconstructed at the museum next to the ruined villa, most notably the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus.

Two places lay claim to be the island of Circe, the sorceress who turned Odysseus’s men into swine. The first, Ponza, off the Odyssean coast, is certainly magical – although I found sailing round its rugged neighbour, Palmarola, in a small boat much more like something from the Odyssey.

The second – and my choice – is nearby Monte Circeo, now a dramatic headland but long ago an island. This 1,700ft peak constantly shapeshifts depending on light and weather but always looks like an island. Although from a distance it appears severe and barren, I found as I climbed it that its slopes are covered with a fecund, enchanting forest; all day I saw no one else here, men or swine.

And so north to Rome, east to Bari and over the sea to green Ithaca – which lacks touristy beaches but majors in wild beauty. It also has an archaeological site dating back to 3000BC, now talked of as ‘Odysseus’s Palace’ (pictured, left).

Archaeologist Andronikos Sakkatos, supervising a tidy-up when I visited, said, ‘If you want to find Odysseus, this is the place. You get a feeling here that you will get nowhere else in the world.

‘Whether or not there was a real person called Odysseus, there were people like that here. And later Odysseus became the local hero, his face appeared on coins, people made offerings to him before embarking on a journey.’

When I landed on Ithaca, I walked the steep road from the port. An English woman in a four-by-four offered me a lift but I said no. As the road grew steeper, I regretted it. But then another car stopped. A Greek woman in a leopardprint coat, with wild blonde hair and full make-up, told me to put my suitcase in the back – and off we went.

I asked her to drop me near Deksia Beach, the place where Odysseus is said to have finally come ashore (and not far from my rented apartment). As I tumbled out of the car and thanked her, I asked her name, almost as an afterthought.

‘Penelope,’ she said.

After 40 days, 13 boats, 16 trains and 15 buses, the Fates had timed it so my arrival at Odysseus’s beach was in the car of a woman with the name that drew him back to Ithaca. To hear that name from her lips almost made me cry with emotion. I don’t think my odyssey could have a better ending.

The Oldie December 2020 95

Taking a Walk

My lucky dip in Dorset

GARY WING

patrick barkham

I’m not a fan of taking a walk in an unfamiliar place without any kind of plan – but I love plotting a stroll in a strange place on a map, imagining its contours and then seeing how the real landscape unfolds.

I recently found myself in the charming Dorset town of Bridport on a glorious autumn morning, so I scanned the OS map for a coastal lucky dip. After 30 seconds, my eyes lighted on the blue ‘P’ for parking beyond a village called Lower Eype, and a promising maze of green, dotted paths offering a cliff-top walk and a loop inland.

I liked the look of its obscurity, tucked as it is between busy Burton Bradstock and the hotspot that is Golden Cap – at 627ft, the tallest cliff on the south coast. I liked it even more when my satnav couldn’t find Eype Mouth.

The tiny lane to the cliffs must be a vehicular puzzle in summer but it was a quiet, mellow, off-season day and the postcard shack was shuttered and car park unmanned. The sunshine glittered silver on the sea, and the coarse sand of Eype Mouth beach gleamed a rather lurid orange. I headed west, up the hill, following the South West Coast Path which is here known as the Monarch’s Way. This cliff-top stroll was instantly, casually majestic but it did not showcase the power of the sea. Walking at Olympian heights made the teal-hued English Channel look deceptively subservient, swept smooth by the wind.

Here, the land was king, Dorset’s green downs – and intriguing conical hills – rising proudly to the north and west.

The path ducked into a sheep-shorn amphitheatre before rising to Thorncombe Beacon. Three ravens rode the wind around the hilltop, croaking with contempt at the dog-walkers below.

I was breathless by the time I reached the top; the view westward took even more breath, Golden Cap rising in sandy layers like a wedding cake. Beyond it shone a cluster of tiny houses – Lyme Regis – and

then the Jurassic Coast rolled on, a blue line stretching into Devon.

I descended the beacon for Doghouse Hill, an alluring name on the map that turned out to refer to a pleasant, grassy field studded with gorse and munched by cows – whose mouths are more forgiving on the sward than sheep’s, which turn every pasture into a bowling green. At the field’s edge, I cut back sharp right and followed a hidden, partly overgrown path inland towards Frogmore Hill, before climbing up again to the sycamore woods above Downhouse Farm.

If it hadn’t been for the sea at my back, I could have been tucked deep in the Dorset countryside, cocooned by hedges turning yellow and umber, and fistfuls of blood-red hawthorn berries. The path plunged into the woods, which celebrated all seasons at once: winter had arrived on the western side of the wood, while on the sheltered eastern edge the trees still bore their leaves. This small copse smelt edible, rich with the sour tang of fallen sycamore leaves.

The path descended towards Downhouse Farm, where I turned left

onto the track and discovered the Down House Farm garden café. Open all year (lockdowns permitting) except on Mondays, it has a sheltered garden which provides a perfect refuelling stop.

I then took a right onto a path across fields of sheep and back into Lower Eype.

Although the air was cool, a bright golden butterfly flew across the turf – a clouded yellow, a migratory insect, cutting it fine (this was late October) to cross the Channel to warmer climes.

Back at Eype Mouth, I felt obliged to crown my lucky dip with the last swim of the year. I plunged into the clear, cold, greeny-blue depths. When I surfaced to gasp with the joy of the cold water, it was also to be bathed by the gold shining from the cliffs, the shingle and the soft light of autumn.

Park at Eype Mouth car park (£4); head west along the cliff path. Turn sharp right inland at bottom of Doghouse Hill, following field-edge path signposted for Frogmore. Follow signs up to Downhouse Farm (where cream tea awaits), then across fields back to Eype Mouth The Oldie December 2020 97

On the Road

Luck of the Northern Irish In Tune presenter Sean Rafferty tells Louise Flind about Martinis, the Troubles’ Blitz spirit and turning Celtic pink on beaches

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

A book, and I admire a colleague who says the only thing he needs is a ready mix of very, very cold, quite stiff Martinis.

working, Big Ben. I would find it very difficult to do without metropolitan stimulus here and the rootedness of Ireland.

Something you really miss?

My own bed – I’m incredibly critical when I stay with people. When they say, ‘Did you sleep well?’, I say, ‘No, those pillows were really uncomfortable and the duvet is too hot,’ and they get very cross.

Is In Tune recorded at Broadcasting House? What’s your favourite room at the BBC? It’s all live, but at the minute I’m broadcasting from home. The old Radio Theatre is my favourite because we do our Christmas specials there.

Favourite destination?

London and Donegal – I have dreams of the tide coming in and the light changing and that sort of crepuscular moment.

Otherwise I could live in Italy – the first time I went to Rome, I thought, ‘I’ve been here before, generations ago.’

Thoughts on Beethoven’s 250th birthday?

It doesn’t matter how many times you hear Beethoven – there’s always something extraordinary underneath that wasn’t there before. He’s an eternal companion, like Bach.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

My parents were both fiendish golfers and I was bought up on a golf course in Newcastle, County Down. So you’d think they’d want to go somewhere else but no, we went towards Rosslare onto another golf course for holidays.

Your favourite place in Ulster?

I love the Donegal landscape, the Atlantic and Lough Swilly.

Why did Germany/Italy/France produce so many great composers in the 18th and 19th centuries, unlike us?

The underlying structure – they built so many more concert halls. The dukes and principalities had their opera houses and orchestras and there was an intensity of competition.

Your favourite place in the Republic of Ireland?

Wexford – because I’ve been going since my early twenties for operas.

Your favourite Irish composer?

Charles Stanford – marvellous choral work and rather beautiful motets.

Your favourite place in Belfast when you were reporting during the Troubles?

I presented television news and current affairs throughout the Troubles and, like anything, you get used to it and there was an extraordinary Blitz spirit. The place everybody loves is the Crown Liquor Saloon.

Your favourite composer of all?

Has to be Bach, who raises my spirits every single time.

Where do you live in London? Is London or Ireland home?

I’m between Oval and Vauxhall – I hear the birds in the morning and, when it’s

Hotel or apartment?

Hotel. I like silver service. I never want to see another hotel-buffet breakfast again…

Do you lie on the beach?

I lie on a beach, love the idea and get bored very quickly – I also turn Celtic pink.

Favourite international food?

Light fillet steak with Béarnaise sauce, very fine chips and a good glass of claret.

Your best experience in a restaurant?

In the Delaunay in London, having lunch with a friend. I had either lost my card or left it at home. The maître d’ came over and said, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear, sir. Please don’t worry – just ring us when you get home.’

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

Yes – I’m curious, so I do. I made some great friends in New York: we met in a restaurant, laughed ourselves silly and we’re still in touch.

Do you have a go at the local language?

Oh God, very bad. A bit of French, particularly after a bottle of wine. In Italy once, a very grand Italian lady said to me, ‘Your accent is very good – now all you need to do is learn the language.’

Biggest headache?

Travelling alone, I think.

It’s harder to take the broad view when things go wrong, so I tend to get very, very irritated.

Do you like coming home?

Yes, and I do a strange thing. I have a childhood clock and one that belonged to my aunt, and the first thing I’ll do is light the fire and wind up both the clocks.

Top travelling tips?

Always take a bottle and, from now on, a full flask of something alcoholic.

Finally, is there anything you’d like to plug?

I love presenting In Tune – meeting some of the best musicians in the world is the most enormous privilege and luxury. I couldn’t be more grateful that this is where I am.

The Oldie December 2020 99

Genius crossword 394 el sereno D is the key to solving this puzzle, and stands for the same word in every case Across 1 D may be certain to keep hold over criminal (10) 6 Colour evident in apple crumble? (4) 10 Mischievous female found in river flowing west (5) 11 One in school after strike took off (9) 12 D Green must be upset and stuffed (8) 13 Gold found by Oxford academic benefactor (5) 15 Flavouring that is in demand after article? (7) 17 Conservative had red crackers and cheese (7) 19 Turn in Italian involved in plot that’s sectarian (7) 21 Bowl - and regularly dent helmet! (7) 22 Leading occupation of drug dealer losing head? (5) 24 Took a firm stand, seeing name inscribed in one’s first edition (8) 26 A union D flying dinosaur (9) 27 Daughter fronting tricky situation for D (5) 28 The origin of “Dig for Victory” in regular garden (4) 29 Revolutionary cliques thrown into river melt away (10)

Down 2 Objective in near future is causing outrage (9) 3 D’s fashion designer mainly importing sources of nankeen and gingham (5) 4 Accommodated former schoolmate and told tales about golf (7) 5 Swindle set up to trap bonkers individual of no fixed abode (7) 7 A clergyman’s basic principle (5) 8 Subscribe to provide indemnity (10) 9 Blimey - poor D’s nose! (8) 14 Former ANC leader, like a bear with no small drum (10) 16 Points to Republican working in “The Crown” (8) 18 Threatening a nurse, D goes off (9) 20 Germany twice welcoming victory over the French, fade away (7) 21 D’s headquarters with judge in Northern Ireland (7) 23 D may be on this to get accommodation (5) 25 Unhappy hour, oddly, for a holy man (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 9th December 2020. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 394 Across 1 Former Indian coins (5) 4 Admonish (4,3) 8 Mature (3) 9 A repeated theme (5) 10 Small complaints (7) 11 Plebiscite (10) 14 Required (6) 16 Threaten (6) 18 Burdensome, cruel (10) 22 Weird (7) 23 Thespian (5) 24 Distant (3) 25 Perils (7) 26 Curt, concise (5)

Genius 392 solution Down 1 Looking up to (8) 2 Informed (8) 3 Securer (5) 4 Occupant (6) 5 Anorak (7) 6 Greasy (4) 7 Commotion (4) 12 Room heater (8) 13 Practise (8) 15 Cost (7) 17 Underpants (6) 19 Begin (5) 20 Second-hand (4) 21 Smile crookedly (4)

Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, plus assorted characters as highlighted.

Winner: Ian Simpson, Benton, Newcastle upon Tyne Runners-up: Ann Benson, Marple, Chesire; George Hart, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire

Moron 392 solution Across: 1 Goal, 4 Deluxe (Goldilocks), 7 Eve, 9 Asks, 10 Metallic, 11 Ono, 12 Brat, 13 Behemoth, 16 Accommodation, 19 Disorder, 23 Imam, 24 Emu, 25 Annoying, 26 Mail, 27 Amp, 28 Ordeal, 29 Host. Down: 2 Obstructions, 3 Lesotho, 4 Demob, 5 Latch, 6 Xylem, 8 Dictionaries, 14 Evoke, 15 Era, 17 Mar, 18 Triumph, 20 Odour, 21 Drive, 22 Regal.

The Oldie December 2020 101

Competition TESSA CASTRO Admire East-West’s defence on this month’s deal. Then ask yourself if declarer could have done better. The contract is 4 ♠ and the lead is the ♦ 2 which smells like a singleton (assume it to be so) – it can’t be top of a doubleton, that’s for sure.

Dealer South

Neither side vulnerable

North ♠ 75 ♥ K 10 7 ♦KJ64 ♣J 10 8 4 West ♠ 842 ♥QJ984 ♦2 ♣7 6 3 2

South ♠ K Q J 10 9 6 ♥A3 ♦AQ83 ♣9

East ♠ A3 ♥652 ♦ 10 9 7 5 ♣A K Q 5

The bidding South West North East 1 ♠ pass 1NT pass 4♠ (1) pass pass pass (1) I like it – South’s spades will provide a perfectly adequate trump suit facing a singleton or even a void.

Trick one proceeded ♦2, ♦4, ♦9, ♦A, and at trick two declarer led a sneaky ♠ 9, hoping West would duck ♠ A. However, East won ♠ A and, correctly resisting the temptation to cash a top club, returned ♦5, a suitpreference signal, asking for the return of the lower-ranking clubs (over hearts). West ruffed and dutifully returned ♣7. East won ♣Q and returned ♦7, West ruffing again.

Although declarer could ruff West’s hopeful second club, that was one down. Nice defence.

Declarer missed a chance. In an effort to snip the line of communication between the defenders in clubs, at trick two he should cash ♥A, next cross to (♥J and) ♥K, then lead ♥10, hoping East plays low (either out of laziness or, here, because he has no higher heart). He now discards ♣9 from hand. He has swapped a club loser for a heart loser, but in doing so has prevented the second diamond ruff. After winning ♥Q, West may lead a club but declarer ruffs. He leads ♠ 9, East winning ♠ A and giving his partner one diamond ruff. However, the second diamond ruff is lost and the game made. A classic ‘scissors coup’.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 260, you were invited to write a poem called Shoulder to Shoulder. Tears came to my eyes often as I read your entries. Bill Holloway’s couple in a hospital lavatory was especially moving. Tim Lloyd’s narrator recalled a rugby-scrum friend: ‘As I carried his coffin it did cross my mind, / We were shoulder to shoulder, one last time.’ Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations being shouldered by Alan Pentecost.

Masked, aproned and exhausted. But my friends.

For I have grasped their presence through the fog Of intellectual dissonance and haze Of travel in a wilderness of days.

And now they’re clapping me who only was An object of their love particulate, Recipient of their patient artistry.

Their world… But now they’re clapping me!

Repayment is impossible although Nothing I would give could be too great, No recompense sufficient as a fee.

And now I find that they are clapping me!

I’m in a wheelchair passing through their ranks.

And still they are applauding, me to greet.

To welcome me, who should be giving thanks.

Instead I celebrate our joint estate!

Alan Pentecost November days of bleak renown When beasts were slain and salted down, When seamen drew their boats aground, When Pushkin’s tedious season frowned.

Come Thomas Hood and vent your scorn (No shade, no shine, no noon, no morn) On month of popish plot and blood, On month of gale and fog and flood.

November when the wind is raw, Men, side by side, remember war, As widows weep and strangers hug, As politicians scowl and shrug.

I walked out on an autumn day Across the dazzling Sandlings bay, My newborn grandson sweetly smiled; Grow old, grow old, November’s child.

Peter Davies Prickling, warm with nerves and lights we perch, Flushed necks, conflicting fragrances, bathed skin,

Trembling earrings, long black sleeves and skirts.

Discreet throat-clearing, subtly proffered mints, Moist fingers placing glasses, checking scores.

Hands clap a rainstorm welcome, out he strides, Transformed from jeans to tailcoat, baton raised.

Two hundred flat black shoes are planted firm.

We rise, as we have done for thirty years – Watching hair grow grey and lines define – In halls, cathedrals, churches hot and cold.

Shoulder to shoulder we have practised, learned, Complained, and laughed, and pencilled Cresc or Dim, And sung, sung glory, sung with unmasked soul Until this year. Piano, hall and chairs Distanced from sound, and sanitised of song.

Jane Bower ‘The war effort now needs more land under the plough.

Whoa there, Madge! Come on, Dolly.

Look smart!

Govn’r says we’ll begin on long meadow today, So let’s get you both harnessed and start.’

The field at last reached and, hitched up to the plough, The pair set off with purpose and power; Straining, shoulder to shoulder they turn the hard earth, Trudging back and forth, hour after hour.

A quick nosebag for lunch and it’s back to the job, Slow progress; the ground’s heavy and tough.

It’s raining now, windy, everyone’s getting tired; The light’s failing. Says the ploughman ‘Enough.’

A long trek takes them home for warmth, shelter and rest And some grooming by eager young men.

‘That was hard, well done girls, aye, just champion; But tomorrow we do it again.’

David Jeans COMPETITION No 262 A poem, please, called An Annual Task. Maximum 16 lines.

Still no entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie. co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 262’, by 6th December.

The Oldie December 2020 103

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The Oldie December 2020 109

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside The forgotten oldie army

Q

Sorry to be bothering you but can we start OLD LIVES MATTER please?!

At advanced ages, my husband and I feel forgotten!

Anni Edwards, by email The truth is, of course, that, whatever concerned noises we may make, young lives do always matter a bit more than old lives. ’Twas ever thus and that’s how it should be. You’ve had a life. Don’t be greedy. But if you want to draw attention to yourselves, then it’s up to you. Dance a polka down your local high street. Wear pearly king and queen outfits. Start a charity. Make a difference. And resolve never to set the tone by saying, ‘Sorry to be bothering you’ – as you just have, to me – again.

A

Let’s not get physical

Q

My husband and I have agreed to have a ‘civilised’ chat about our relationship. Easier said than done because one or other of us nearly always loses it and it can get quite physically unpleasant. Is there any way you can suggest we can both control our tempers?

Name and address supplied Marriage counselling exists precisely to give both partners a safe space to talk. No one’s likely to throw punches in front of a third party. If you have a mutual friend you could trust to keep the peace, that would do just as well. And less pricey.

You could always try discussing the problem on the phone, giving each other a set amount of time – like two minutes – to speak, but you’d each have to

A

guarantee that you wouldn’t put the phone down. I’ve always found the best time to broach tricky subjects is on a car journey, preferably on a motorway.

You’re both strapped into your seat and not looking each other in the eye. And it’s in both of your interests, since presumably neither of you wants to die, to keep fisticuffs out of it.

Late husband’s last laugh

Q

It was a standing joke in our family that if I went too far – driving him mad by nagging or otherwise ­– my husband would threaten to buy a pair of red trousers, a thing I abhor. We always ended up laughing.

And he never bought the trousers.

The one other threat he never carried out was, in the unlikely event that he ever be asked on to Desert Island Discs, to choose My Way as his favourite song. Sometimes he’d just start singing the first line to tease me – it was another family joke.

However, now he has died, I find that he’s put in a request for My Way to be played at his funeral. My children, not having been in on the joke, don’t understand and say I should forget it – but I just can’t. I think I’d just collapse with grief. Any ideas?

J G, Sussex Your husband only meant it as a joke. He would have hated you to be upset. I’m sure he stipulated this to cheer you up, rather than cast you down. But, if you can’t face just cutting it out, why don’t you play the Sid Vicious version? That way, you’d be continuing the banter, scoring over him as it were, and perhaps the laughter would overcome at least some of the tears.

A

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110 The Oldie December 2020

My COVID-phobic wife

Q

My wife has always been obsessive about cleanliness, but the last few months have turned me into someone whose life is dominated by it. If I go outside, I have to change all my clothes when I get in. She refuses to touch the groceries from the supermarket for three days, during which they have to be stored outside. After that, all of them – even the vegetables – have to be cleaned in soapy water. She wears plastic gloves and has now taken to wearing her mask inside the house even when watching television. I find this is getting unbearable: she refused to let our daughter come inside the house even when it was allowed. I love her, but my life is becoming intolerable.

Name and address supplied Unless your wife admits she has a completely irrational phobia, and that she must get help, there’s very little you can do. You will either have to leave or accept that this phobia is like an incurable disease, like dementia. In that case, you should start to insist that you eat separately, with food that’s uncontaminated by detergent, and perhaps try to make some rooms obsession-free so that it’s her life that gets narrower rather than yours. If a sensible word of advice from the doctor would make a difference, then try to insist that she go – her condition may be some kind of dementia treatable with medication. Otherwise you’ll just have to accept that your wife is no longer the person you married.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

Emily Bearn suggests Christmas books for children Paul Bailey hails a triumphant debut Lucy Lethbridge admires Isabel Colegate’s novels Biography & Memoir History Fiction Nature Current Affairs Paperbacks Winter 2020 | www.theoldie.co.uk

A bumper crop Review of Books Issue 54 Winter 2020 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Windsor Diaries: A Childhood with the Princesses by Alathea Fitzalan Howard Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee Let’s Do it: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale Inside Story: A Novel/How to Write

by Martin Amis The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 by William Feaver

On 3rd September, some 600 books were published in the UK. That’s a huge number for one day. And it was the smaller publishers, independent bookshops, and little-known and first-time authors who lost out. Covid-19 is of course the reason why many publishers postponed publication dates for a few months leading to the scrum. The big guns – Martin Amis, Robert Harris, David Attenborough, Elena Ferrante, Caitlin Moran and others – were all reviewed. But the smaller fry were often ignored: there’s only so much space newspapers and magazines can give to reviews, and cuts in advertising meant literary editors were given fewer pages to fill.

Small independent bookshops are often pushed for space and can stock only comparatively few new titles – and anyway browsing in this age of coronavirus is still a problem.

The latest James Bond film has been delayed twice because of Covid and now won’t be released until April next year. And many publishers have followed suit. Profile Books, for example, moved most of its new titles from May this year, rescheduling many for next year. John Preston’s Fall, The Mystery of Robert Maxwell was moved by Vintage from July this year to February 2021; HarperCollins’s Dr Karl’s Little Book of Climate Change Science by Karl Kruszelnicki has moved from this year to March 2021; and Canongate, Cornerstone and Orion have all delayed publication of major new works until the new year.

Literary festivals also fell under the coronavirus curse; but many – including Cheltenham, Hay and Chalke Valley – re-invented themselves online – not as good as the real live thing but a great alternative.

Online surveys found that people were reading more during the pandemic; and my own (completely unscientific and tiny) survey found that many reread old favourites and ‘light’ rather than ‘challenging’ books. But whatever your inclination, where better to look for ideas for yourself and friends than inside this supplement? Happy (safe) browsing.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

17 CURRENT AFFAIRS

8 PAPERBACKS

21 CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean by David Reynolds

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Melissa Arancio, Kami Jogee For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, email editorial@ theoldie.co.uk

10 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

22 MISCELLANEOUS

24 NATURE 16 BACK ON THE BOOKSHELF Lucy Lethbridge on Isabel Colegate

25 FICTION 30 FIRST NOVEL Paul Bailey on Douglas Stuart The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 3

History lack of drama in her narrative, the real excitement lies in the unexpected light it sheds on reaches of history that otherwise might seem confused and lost to darkness’.

ALARIC THE GOTH

AN OUTSIDER’S HISTORY OF THE FALL OF ROME

DOUGLAS BOIN Wiley, 254pp, £19.99

The south wall in the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuova, Ravenna

RAVENNA

CAPITAL OF EMPIRE, CRUCIBLE OF EUROPE

JUDITH HERRIN

KIERAN DODDS

Allen Lane, 576pp, £30

Why does Ravenna contain so many beautiful churches from the fifth or sixth century? asked Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph. In Judith Herrin’s book, which recounts ‘the city’s life from 402, when it became the capital of the Roman Empire in the West, to 751, when the Lombards took over... The story is not, she emphasises, one of decline, but of rebirth, for Ravenna established what European Christendom could become.’ During the period of its ascendancy, Ravenna faced in two directions: ‘It escaped the wholesale iconoclasm that in 730 smashed images in Constantinople because, though it was then ruled politically as an exarchy from Constantinople, it looked religiously to Rome, where the Pope opposed the destruction of images. But Constantinople protected Ravenna from the explosive expansion of the Islamic empire at this period. It was a close call.’

Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook found that Herrin ‘has a nice eye for colourful details. The 4 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

Lombard king Alboin, who invaded northern Italy in 569, killed the leader of the rival Gepids and converted his skull into a golden goblet. Alboin forced his wife Rosamund to use it too, which was a bit insensitive because the Gepid king had been her father. She got her own back by hiring a hitman.’ Although the book is ‘often formidably demanding’, Sandbrook wrote, ‘it is worth reading for the sheer weirdness of the details: the bizarre schisms about the nature of Christ; the furious punch-ups between rival Ravenna gangs; the wild passions of the chariot races; the deadly feuds about the sanctity of icons’.

In his Spectator review, Ian Thomson noted that the text is ‘dense with mention of Theodores, Theodosiuses, Theodoras and Theoderics’, but is nonetheless ‘eminently worth reading’, while ‘the colour plates are so sumptuous that the Ravenna mosaics fairly g6low on the page’. For Tom Holland in the Financial Times, ‘while there is no

‘Alboin killed the Gepids’ leader and converted his skull into a goblet’

Was Christianity, with what Gibbon called its ‘preaching of patience and pusillanimity’, responsible for the fall of Rome? No, says Douglas Boin, the author of a new book about Alaric, the Gothic chieftain who in 410 AD sacked the city. Rome’s duplicitous rulers, he says, had only themselves to blame. Enfeebled by luxury and dissipation, yet still fancying themselves a superior race, the arrogant heirs of Macaulay’s ‘brave Horatius’ looked down on virile mercenaries like Alaric who manned their armies. Even worse, they tried to short-change them – and got their just desserts.

Imaginary portrait of Alaric, 1836

Unfortunately for Boin, details of Alaric’s life are, Boin admits, ‘frustratingly thin: whole decades of his existence have simply vanished’.

And although, said Patrick Kidd in the Times, ‘he knits the strands together with a vibrant writing style’, his narrative lacks balance. ‘Alaric’s side is entirely noble and reasonable, the Romans are “rabid xenophobes”.’

The result is ‘a parable for our intolerant age’, in which “Goth Lives Matter” and “Rome Must Fall”.’

The Literary Review’s Peter Parker agreed that at the core of

History Boin’s book is the ‘ambivalent relationship’ Rome had with the ‘outsiders’ on whom it had come to rely. These outsiders felt they deserved Roman citizenship. The Roman establishment ‘feared that romanitas, the essential core of what it meant to be Roman’, would be contaminated if the outsiders’ wish was granted. So although most of Alaric’s life is irrecoverable, Boin successfully explains how he ‘became the embodiment of Rome’s selfdefeating fear of the world outside its frontiers’.

THE CHURCHILL COMPLEX

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

IAN BURUMA Atlantic Books, 309pp, £18.99

When Bismarck was asked to identify the pre-eminent fact in modern world history, he replied, ‘That America speaks English.’ And although, as Shaw noted, our common language sometimes separates us, without it there would be no ‘special relationship’. More’s the pity, said Christopher Meyer in the Spectator.

Formerly Our Man in Washington, Sir Christopher banned the use of this ‘rhetorical tool’ by Embassy employees because it made us look ‘terribly needy’.

Meyer thought that Ian Buruma, briefly editor of the New York Review of Books, writes ‘with a certain caustic panache’ about, eg, ‘Americans as they really are … America First is, as it has always been, their unshakeable, unsentimental, cold-blooded credo.

They pay lip service to the Special Relationship to keep us sweet … but sneer at us in private for our pretensions.’

‘The price we have paid,’ says Buruma, ‘is our submission to American interests when our true

other species when they behave like us’, said New Scientist’s Simon Ings, ‘Wragg Sykes shows that it is much more fruitful to see how human talents are related to behaviours exhibited by other species.’

MI9

A HISTORY OF THE SECRET SERVICE FOR ESCAPE AND EVASION IN WORLD WAR TWO

HELEN FRY Yale, 320pp, £20, ebook £20

KINDRED

NEANDERTHAL LIFE, LOVE, DEATH, ART

REBECCA WRAGG SYKES Bloomsbury Sigma, 288pp, £18

In Nature, Josie Glausiusz began her review of Kindred with this startling admission: ‘A quarter of the way through I was longing to meet a Neanderthal. By the end I realised that we had met. She is in me – or at least, in my genes.’ Glausiusz then explained how Kindred’s author, palaeolithic archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, ‘smashes stereotypes.

She ranges over 350,000 years, from the Neanderthals’ first emergence more than 400,000 years ago to their disappearance about 40,000 years ago, describing how they bequeathed some of their genes to humans even as they vanished. Neanderthals were, she writes, “not dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree, but enormously adaptable and even successful ancient relatives”.’

In the Times, Richard Morrison agreed that Dr Wragg Sykes had done Neanderthals a long overdue favour.

Thanks to high-tech scanners and computers modern scientists have concluded that in many ways these ‘cavemen’ were the equal of early Homo Sapiens. ‘They created tools and weapons out of stone, bone and wood and used glue to stick things together and pigments to colour them.’ They also used ‘plants for medicine and coal for fuel, and invented ingenious ways of cleaning and drying hides and stitching them into well-fitting clothing. There’s evidence that they used cosmetics and jewellery as well.’

So, ‘rather than congratulating

Heroic: Renata Faccincani della Torre

MI9 had two roles. One was to smuggle information and gadgets into PoW camps, while the other was to establish lines of escape via Spain or Marseilles. ‘Helen Fry has over the years devoted much study to British intelligence in the war and has mined the recently opened MI9 files deeply,’ explained Allan Mallinson in the Spectator. ‘Several recent books have shone light on the heroic part women played in the story of intelligence, and Fry illuminates their role even more – their lead, indeed, in the various escape lines, especially in Italy, and also, for the first time, something of their role in the interrogation of returnees, the principal source of escape and evasion intelligence.’ This is ‘a noble, moving and inspiring book’, he concluded.

Giles Milton, too, praised Fry for bringing MI9 out of the shadows.

‘Fry’s book features a cast of quixotic characters, many of them women,’ he wrote in the Sunday Times. ‘It is remarkable that so many of these stories have hitherto remained untold and no less remarkable to read of the scale and reach of MI9. With the active support of head office in London, resistance operatives helped 26,190 British and Commonwealth airmen and soldiers to escape successfully from Nazi-occupied The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 5

IMAGE COURTESY VANESSA CLEWES

Grand Union Flag

vocation should lie in the nirvana that is the European Union.’

But Meyer wondered why Buruma bothered to canter over ‘such well-trodden ground’, a point taken up by Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. He described much of the book as ‘soul-crushingly predictable’, and said Buruma’s ‘decision to focus on Prime Ministers and Presidents means he has nothing to say about the cultural and social dimensions of the Anglo-American relationship … It is like being stuck in a lift with nothing to read but the New York Times. I do not mean that as a compliment.’

History territories.’ The Independent’s reviewer, Martin Chilton, who found the book ‘engrossing’, said ‘the gadgets they used – including playing cards that peeled back to reveal maps – are like something dreamt up by James Bond’s mad scientist Q’.

SOFT POWER

THE NEW GREAT GAME FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE

ROBERT WINDER Little, Brown, 416pp, £20, ebook £20

‘That slippery oxymoronic phrase refers to the art of projecting one’s country without wielding a big stick – something Britain, having lost an empire, needs to be good at, and is,’ wrote Andrew Lycett in the Mail on Sunday. ‘While hedging his bets on the effectiveness of this “weapon of mass distraction”, Winder is fascinating on related issues, such as the restitution of artworks. He suggests Britain could steal a march here by distributing its own cultural heritage across the world.’

As Max Hastings explained in his Sunday Times review, the book ‘explores many nations’ exploitation of soft power, including the Russia Today TV network, a Kremlin-funded fake-news factory, and the growing international popularity of Japanese culture... A substantial part of the

‘Winder is fascinating on issues such as the restitution of artworks’ book addresses what the author sees as the diminution of global respect for Britain, and even more for the US, as a consequence of their recent conduct of their affairs.’ Hastings went on to note that Soft Power ‘reflects its author’s intelligence and wide reading’ and ‘pursues a host of themes, from Brexit to Israeli annexation policies; from the German VW emissions scandal to the negative impact of priests’ child abuse on Catholicism’. However, ‘iron discipline is needed for a writer to hold a course through such a diverse agenda as this and reach a useful destination. And in Winder’s book the reader becomes lost in a 6 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

maze. It does not easily work to entwine the global popularity of French cooking with Covid-19 in the same volume.’

THE CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM

A HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS

NEIL PRICE Allen Lane, 624pp, £30, ebook £30

‘Although most people know that the image of Vikings in horned helmets is a piece of Victorian fantasy, they remain as hideously fascinating to Hollywood screenwriters as they once did to medieval scribes,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday Times. ‘Yet as Neil Price shows in his colourful, revelatory new book... to understand the Viking world view, we must consider the environmental catastrophe that reshaped Scandinavian society 250 years before the Viking raids began. This was a series of huge volcanic eruptions of the years 536-541, which pumped so much debris into Earth’s atmosphere that global temperatures plummeted for several years.’ When Viking society re-emerged it was dominated by what Price calls ‘encultured violence and expansive competition’. Price ‘redraws the Viking world in all its strange and gory glory. Thousands of books have been published about the Vikings — this is one of the very best.’

For Rebecca Onion, in her review for slate.com, Price ‘offers a sense of chronology and hits the major high points, while also introducing nonspecialists to the major questions that those who know a lot about Vikings still consider unresolved.

Vikings, Price writes at one point, are interesting to him because of their “curiosity, creativity, the complexity

‘Guests from Overseas’ by Nicholas Roerich, 1901, depicting a Viking raid

and sophistication of their mental landscapes, and yes, their openness to new experiences and ideas”. This is a set of qualities also to be found in this book, which manages to be lyrical, unnerving, specific, and passionately uncertain, all at once.’

THE CRAFT

HOW THE FREEMASONS MADE THE MODERN WORLD

JOHN DICKIE Hodder, 496pp, £25

‘Like golf and whisky,’ wrote Dominic Green of freemasonry in the Spectator, ‘it emerged from Scotland and conquered the world.’

John Dickie’s new history is, like its subject, ‘ingenious and frequently bizarre’ – but also offered ‘a shadow history of modernity’. Rather than simply marvel at the oddity of freemasonry’s rituals (it ‘traces an ancient genealogy from Hiram, the Phoenician architect who built Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem’), the author offers a ‘sober’ and thoughtful assessment of its history in a ‘well-crafted and sensible’ book.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook was tickled by some of the wilder material – including the 1885 claims of an apostate mason called Léo Taxil: ‘The Great Architect of the masons, Taxil announced, was the Devil.

Their lodges housed statues of goat-headed beasts; their rituals involved “bestial forms of carnality and prostitution last seen in ancient Babylon”. The worst masons of all were the New Reformed Palladians, led by a devil-worshipping lesbian called Sister Sophia-Sapho.’

That was all nonsense, of course – though Taxil was neither the first nor last person to cash in on ‘exposing’ masonry. By contrast John Dickie ‘takes on this sensational subject with a wry turn of phrase and the cool judgment of a fine historian […] Dickie recognises the fascination of masonic conspiracy theories […] But his basic line is pretty sensible. Freemasonry, he says, is simply “a fellowship of men, and men alone, who are bound by oaths to a method of selfbetterment”.’

Though his book is as a consequence regrettably ‘light on sex-crazed satanists’, the true story is ‘richly fascinating’ in itself.

History magic, however. The true meaning of magic is that the human mind cannot bear much reality.’

THE FLEET STREET GIRLS THE WOMEN WHO BROKE DOWN THE DOORS OF THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

JULIE WELCH Trapeze, 288p, £18.99, ebook £18.99

Wheel of alchemy symbols

THE HISTORY OF MAGIC FROM ALCHEMY TO WITCHCRAFT, FROM THE ICE AGE TO THE PRESENT

CHRIS GOSDEN Viking, 502pp, £25, ebook £12.99

‘It is rare for me to criticise a book for not being long enough,’ Stuart Kelly confessed in the Scotsman. ‘The History of Magic is erudite, accessible and expansive. I have some caveats, but that does not take away from a quite remarkable and endlessly interesting volume.’

Gosden’s aim in this ‘comprehensive and remarkable book’, Clement Knox explained in the Telegraph, ‘is to rescue magical belief from the enormous condescension of posterity’. Magic, science and religion, Gosden contends, are all ways of understanding our place in the cosmos, but magic is older than religion and science, and better.

‘Religion’s attempt to be less weird than magic but more consoling than science may ... have left it without a constituency,’ Knox shrewdly noted.

Stretching back 40,000 years, this history of magic ‘is breathtaking in scope’, John Carey allowed in the Sunday Times, yet ‘no matter how many words you use to pin it down, its nature is to evade definition…. It should be said at once that this is not a book for everyone,’ Carey warned.

‘For many readers its pages will be full of fascinating discoveries. For others, the same pages will be full of meticulously catalogued nonsense.’

John Gray in the New Statesman described it as a ‘bold, gripping and arrestingly readable universal history of magic… Magical thinking will remain a powerful force in human life,’ he continued. ‘What this shows isn’t the potency of

Julie Welch, who in 1973 became the first female football reporter for a national newspaper, the Observer, has combined her own memoirs with an ‘eye-opening study of Fleet Street’s pioneering women’, wrote Lucy Knight in the Sunday Times. ‘Welch’s book is imbued with nostalgia for a time in her life that was, while difficult, also fun. The Fleet Street Girls is as much an obituary for the “glory days of print” as it is a story of pioneering women. Fleet Street, Welch says, was “a place where you bashed out your words through clouds of cigarette smoke, among overflowing ashtrays, on a beaten-up Remington, to a soundtrack of chittering Telex machines” which stood for “glamour, fame and opportunity”.’

‘Despite the groping and sexism, it was a golden era’ There was an ‘abundance of sexism’ to contend with, even on the part of some women – Evening Standard star reporter Anne Sharpley once advised a junior colleague to ‘always sleep with the Reuters man, darling, because the news desk checks your copy against Reuters, and you’ll have filed before him’. Welch ‘writes with style’, Knight concluded, and ‘her journey to acceptance in a man’s world makes for fascinating reading’.

In her review for the Herald (Scotland), Susan Flockhart described the book as ‘a colourful evocation of the pre-digital and decidedly preMeToo culture that prevailed half-a-century ago, in fetid newsrooms where senior editors snoozed off liquid lunches amid clattering typewriters and rumbling subterranean presses... And despite the groping, sexism and exhausting pace of work, it was, she suggests, a golden era.’

THE KING OF NAZI PARIS HENRI LAFONT AND THE GANGSTERS OF THE FRENCH GESTAPO

CHRISTOPHER OTHEN Biteback, 290pp, £15

Henri Lafont was the alias of Henri Chamberlin, a petty criminal who rose to become king of the Parisian underworld during the Nazi Occupation through plundering Jewish property and informing on or assassinating resistance operatives.

In this ‘highly readable, if gruesome book’, wrote Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph, Othen ‘tells the story of these repulsive men and their exploits with brio... he captures their sordid milieu perfectly’. Othen even argues that ‘by 1943 Chamberlin was the most powerful Frenchman left in Paris’ and that ‘it was not only celebrities such as Maurice Chevalier who came to him for favours (something Chevalier tried hard to live down after the war), but even the head of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, on the grounds that Chamberlin had better access to the most influential Germans than he, a de facto prime minister, did’.

Chamberlin told the lawyer who failed to save him from the firing squad that he ‘lived the equivalent of ten lives’ and so ‘the least I can do is give you one of them’.

For Paul Lay, in the Times, ‘the story that Christopher Othen tells, energetically, vividly, sometimes convolutedly, is a grotesque one. The world we enter is that of the sleazy nightclubs and gangster bars of occupied Paris, booming with the money splashed around by the men of the Wermacht’. He ‘captures the seediness and amorality of Lafont, his men and occupied Paris, and

Henri Lafont, alias of Henri Chamberlin The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 7

Paperbacks ‘Jasper Winn’s Water Ways [Profile, 384pp, £10.99] is an engaging account of the history and people who have worked and lived on British canals, and testimony to their evolving nature,’ wrote Douglas Field in the TLS. ‘He points out that whereas once “canals were key to the economies and innovations of centralised industries”, today they are “wildlife corridors . . . in a sense, a 2,000-mile-long (if very narrow) national park”.’ Winn, explained PD Smith in the Guardian, ‘spent a year on towpaths and waterways, travelling by foot, bicycle and, of course, narrowboat’. And Olivia Edwards in Geographical confirmed that Water Ways is ‘more than a charming travel book, this is a roving miscellanea of engrossing canal facts and lore’.

Laura Purcell’s Bone China (Raven, 448pp, £7.99) is billed as a ‘Du Maurier-esque chiller’, which may be putting it mildly, according to Paraic O’Donnell in the Guardian.

In the Times, Antonia Senior set the scene: ‘Hester Why is the new personal maid to Miss Pinecroft, the weird old lady of the house who sits unmoving in a freezing room that houses a bone china dinner service.’ The story then ‘jumps backwards to Miss Pinecroft’s youth’, when she and her doctor father first moved to Cornwall.

‘Purcell has a sure storytelling touch, a command of atmosphere and a keen eye for the telling details of social history,’ wrote O’Donnell.

And Senior confirmed that the novel ‘builds to a suitably creepy and gothic finale’.

Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945 (Penguin, 304pp, £9.99) is the little-told story of the wave of suicides carried out in the war’s closing period by thousands of ‘ordinary’ Germans as well as those at the top of the Nazi leadership.

‘The exact number of suicides is incalculable, but through gruesome examples, Huber conveys the enormity of the dreadful phenomenon,’ wrote Ruta Sepetys in the FT. ‘Huber tells the shocking stories’ with ‘literary power and skill, making excellent use of unknown material’, confirmed Richard J Evans in the Guardian.

8 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

History History makes you thank God that Britain never had to experience the Grand Guignol of Nazi occupation’.

WORK

A HISTORY OF HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME

JAMES SUZMAN Bloomsbury, 444pp, £25

South African anthropologist James Suzman has lived among the Ju/’hoansi bush tribes of Namibia who are among the last peoples on earth to live by hunter-gathering.

Suzman has previously written about them in Affluence without Abundance – and here he returns to a similar theme in his overview of the history of human work. What do we mean by it? When did the modern belief that work gives ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ first emerge? Reviewing Work in the Times, James Marriott nailed Suzman’s thesis: ‘It all went wrong in 900 BC when we moved from the idyllic state of the hunter gatherer into settlements.’

This is a book, observed Marriott, ‘about the damage of work, it’s anti-work’. The Ju/’hoansi, who spend just 17 hours a week hunting and another 20 collecting firewood, preparing food and fixing shelters, have got it right. ‘That’s less than half the time Americans spend in the office, commuting and doing chores.’

10,000 years ago, the emergence of agriculture condemned humans to the treadmill of labour for surplus underpinned by a terror of scarcity – and concentrated influence in the hands of a few. Today we worry that automation will give corporate giants

Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherer kit

too much power – in ancient Rome they had the same worries about the biggest slave-owning families.

Writing in the FT, Suzman put the case for a 15-hour week, asking the question that might well be put by a Namibian bushman: ‘Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour? And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?’

THIS SPORTING LIFE SPORT AND LIBERTY IN ENGLAND, 1760-1960

ROBERT COLLS

Oxford University Press, 416pp, £25, ebook £25

‘The English foxhunter riding wild over other people’s lands circa 1800, and the English football hooligan running wild over other people’s lands much later, were related figures.

For both, writes Robert Colls, sport was “an expression of liberty and belonging”. In fact, sport was central to Englishness.’ This was the summary of the book’s argument provided by Simon Kuper in his review for the FT. ‘This Sporting Life displays exhausting quantities of erudition, sometimes within a single sentence,’ Kuper observed. ‘The prose is lively even in the footnotes, though the occasional passage of Joycean free association can be confusing. Still, there are jewels on every page, such as the footballer Nat Lofthouse rising at 3.30am on Saturdays in 1943 to work a full shift in the coal mine, before playing for Bolton Wanderers in the afternoon.’

Jonathan Liew, in the New Statesman, found the book to be ‘beautifully and inventively expressed, witty and bawdy in places’, but ‘for all the big ideas and grand unifying theories, perhaps the most impressive element of This Sporting Life is its light touch, the way it never quite loses sight of the fact that at its heart, sport is fun’. In the Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook was another enthusiast for Colls’s vision of sport as central to English life. ‘Eccentric, dazzlingly learned and often very funny’, his book ‘takes in skipping and marbles, foxhunting and cockfighting, poachers and gamekeepers, bloodsoaked prizefighters and cricketcrazed public schoolboys’.

Biography & Memoir testament to Logevall’s talents as a writer and historian that he’s able to demystify JFK the legend but keep John F Kennedy the person interesting. He allows us to delve into the world of the Kennedy family and be swept along by the story without getting carried away by the myth.

Logevall is an elegant stylist, and although he’s in no hurry to get us to the White House, his book never feels slow. JFK is biography at its very best, with Logevall acting as an expert guide without getting in the reader’s way... Such are Logevall’s storytelling powers that, even though we all know the outcome, it still feels like a cliffhanger.’

THE INFILTRATORS

JFK in his school football team, 1926

JFK

VOLUME 1: 1917-1956

FREDRIK LOGEVALL

THE LOVERS WHO LED GERMANY’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE NAZIS

NORMAN OHLER, TRANS TIM MOHR AND MARSHALL YARBROUGH

Viking, 816pp, £30, ebook £12.99

Atlantic, 292pp, £20

‘It is the singular achievement of this magnificent new biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy that it has taken one of the most scrutinised lives of the 20th century and made it feel fresh.’ So wrote Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph. Logevall ‘scrapes away the encrusted layers of myth, rumour and cliché’, he continued, and ‘the result is a generous portrait of the young Kennedy, one that is attentive to his contradictions and weaknesses even as it seeks to understand what it was that made him so extraordinary’. What makes it such a ‘superior biography’, White concluded, is Harvard historian Logevall’s ‘sense of the larger stakes’.

He has ‘the biographer’s ability to pick out the details that shaped the man, but also the historian’s drive to explain why Kennedy so captured and shaped the American postwar moment’.

In his review for the Spectator, Andrew Preston considered it ‘a

‘We may think we live in dark times,’ Rupert Christiansen wrote in the Telegraph, ‘but here is black barbarity beyond imagining.’ ‘It’s a filthy world,’ Philippe Sands agreed in the Spectator. ‘That’s what makes the resisters so rare and so fascinating.... Their story is a timely reminder of what some citizens are willing to do in the face of autocracy and oppression that once again haunts our times.’

‘This is a book that will appeal to anyone who relishes Ben Macintyre’s tales of wartime espionage and cryptic codes, underpinned by terrifying risk, desperate courage, and double dealing,’ Christiansen enthused.

This story of two Berlin intellectuals, Libertas Haas-Heye and Harro Schulze-Boysen, who fell in love and worked to undermine the Nazi war effort, ‘is deeply engaging, enticingly written and extremely affecting’, Sands wrote, noting that Ohler uses a prodigious amount of ‘original and fascinating material’, including letters, to great effect.

Schulze-Boysen, a former student rebel badly beaten by the Nazis, pretended remorse and infiltrated the system in order to sabotage the regime. He and Haas-Heye, whose youthful membership of the Nazi

‘Logevall scrapes away the encrusted layers of myth, rumour and cliché’ 10 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

party provided useful camouflage, drew into their orbit a fluid and amorphous group of people from across the social spectrum opposed to the Nazis. As a Luftwaffe officer he received valuable material, including the invasion plans for Russia. ‘All this was passed on and was, potentially, his most valuable blow against Hitler and the Nazis,’ Roger Boyes noted in the Times. Unfortunately, Stalin dismissed the intelligence as disinformation. The couple were guillotined.

‘Great heroism is properly honoured here,’ Christiansen concluded: ‘Ohler has done his research diligently and he has an enthralling story to tell.’

MUNKEY DIARIES 1957-1982 JANE BIRKIN W&N, 320pp, £20, ebook £20

Jane Birkin: breathless and erratic

The upper-class English model Jane Birkin started keeping a diary as a 16-year-old girl in an Isle of Wight boarding school, where she had a stuffed toy called Munkey as a companion. ‘This is the first volume of her diaries, which came out in France three years ago,’ explained Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian.

‘One wonders why it took so long for them to be published in English, Birkin’s native language. Could it be because, after a promising start describing a postwar British upper middle-class childhood, all faithful family retainers and woolly jumpers, they don’t make much sense? The moment that 19-year-old Birkin swaps Chelsea for Paris, where she will live for the rest of her life, the prose descends into what can only be described as word soup.’

Birkin takes us through her brief marriage to film composer John

Biography & Memoir Barry and her longer relationship with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded his infamous pop song Je t’aime … moi non plus. Hughes was left underwhelmed: ‘Reading these diaries is like being trapped at a particularly demented piece of performance art, where the actors are clearly having much more fun than the audience.’

Jackie Annesley, in the Sunday Times, found that ‘Birkin’s diary entries ultimately expose the toxic reality behind one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples’, while ‘her writing style is as breathless and erratic as her personality, peppered with exclamation marks and bizarre metaphors. After a flight to Tokyo, she describes herself as “a crumpled hanky over a melon”.’

FAT COW, FAT CHANCE THE SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY OF SIZE

JENNI MURRAY Doubleday, 258pp, £16.99

‘Women versus their appetites: that everlasting war,’ Janice Turner lamented in the Times. She is full of sympathy for Murray in her long struggle with her weight. ‘Reading it, I felt a sudden rage that such an eminent person ... should see her life in terms of fat years and thinner ones.’ It wasn’t lack of willpower that kept Murray fat, she continued: ‘What makes it powerful and poignant is Murray, who has tried them all [diets], scrolling back through her 70 years to find the source of her size.... Clearly Murray’s relationship with food and her mother are horribly entwined.’

‘I admire Murray’s bravery in revealing all her indignities in this book: asking for extension seatbelts on planes, needing hip replacements,

Jenni Murray: brave in revealing all

ignoring cruel catcalls,’ Turner continued. ‘I especially admire her admission that she feels that she cheated when she resorted to a gastric sleeve procedure.’

Liz Jones in the Daily Mail was equally sympathetic: ‘This is a moving, brutally honest memoir about what it feels to be fat-shamed despite, as Jenni is able to prove, the fact that obesity is not due to greed, or lack of willpower.’ Rachel Cooke in the Observer was more critical, noting there are ‘dozens of other books on similar territory that are far better’. She conceded that ‘The book’s USP is Murray herself, a good and widely beloved radio presenter, and thus a woman with many fans.’

‘I’d put this book in every school as a warning to girls – and boys – not to waste their lives obsessing over food,’ Jones concluded.

BLACK SPARTACUS

THE EPIC LIFE OF TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH Allen Lane, 464pp, £25

‘One of the greatest stories in modern history has been under-reported,’ wrote Ben Horowitz in the Financial Times. ‘Why do we know so little about the legendary Toussaint Louverture leading the only successful slave revolt in human history that resulted in the creation of an independent state?’

Louverture was born a slave in 1840 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in the West Indies, now Haiti. Former biographers have argued that Louverture betrayed his race as well as his revolutionary calling by treating with the Europeans. ‘Drawing on first-hand accounts,’ however, Hazareesingh, an Oxford historian, ‘explains how Louverture combined European-style drills and African fighting techniques to build an army that would defeat a variety of opponents from Spain, Britain and France between 1791 and 1801.’ He also deployed both black and white diplomats, and ordered plantation owners to pay their slaves a wage.

‘Black Spartacus is a triumph,’ Horowitz concluded. ‘It takes a nearly impossibly complex history and weaves it into a compelling and accurate narrative that reads like fiction.’ It was General Etienne

Portrait of Toussaint Louverture, 1813

Laveaux, the colony’s governor between 1793 and 1796, who dubbed Louverture the Black Spartacus.

‘Louverture intermingled royalist gestures with brash assertions of republican virtue,’ wrote Nathan Perl-Rosenthal in the Wall Street Journal. Hazareesingh has ‘a voracious appetite for original sources and a discerning ear for those which have the ring of truth. He also has a gift for tracing those threads that reveal a previously unrecognised pattern in the fabric of a life.’ The principal achievement of the book is ‘to show how Louverture’s political creed emerged from a compound of the Catholic, Enlightenment and African influences that surrounded the young Toussaint’.

For the Guardian’s David A Bell, Hazareesingh’s admiration for his subject has led him ‘to skate lightly over the most troubling aspects of Toussaint’s career’, namely his increasing ‘authoritarianism’ which ‘arguably prefigured the dictatorships that have plagued Haiti throughout so much of its history’, although ‘his creole republicanism have remained powerful sources of hope, both in Haiti and beyond’.

A DOMINANT CHARACTER

THE RADICAL SCIENCE AND RESTLESS POLITICS OF JBS HALDANE

SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN Atlantic, 400pp, £20, ebook £10.99

Matt Ridley’s Times review of A Dominant Character opened with an arresting summary of its subject’s achievements. ‘When he knew he was The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 11

Biography & Memoir dying,’ wrote Ridley, ‘the scientist JBS Haldane wrote that he hadn’t walked on the seafloor from England to France, but he had been wounded in war, known the love of two women, tried heroin and bhang, eaten 60g of hexahydrated strontium chloride in an attempt to change the acidity of his blood, and spent 48 hours in a miniature submarine.’

Haldane (1892-1964) was ‘relentlessly logical, obsessively mathematical and pugnaciously confident’, not to mention possessed of ‘bonkers courage’; cheerfully gassing himself over and over again in order to understand the effects of various toxic gases on the human body. He discovered how to prevent divers getting the bends, was an expert on explosives and had ‘a longer list of genetic insights to his name than probably any other scientist’. He was also a passionate Communist who, wilfully blind to Stalin’s evil, publicly threw his lot in with the fraudulent Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko.

All this and more is deftly and lucidly explored by Samanth Subramanian, thought Ridley, in a ‘superb biography of this extraordinary man’. Jonathan Weiner, writing in the New York Times, agreed wholeheartedly. ‘At his best, Haldane was a heroic example of the scientist as activist, humanist and idealist,’ he said, and A Dominant Character is ‘the best Haldane biography yet’.

WILD THING

THE SHORT, SPELLBINDING LIFE OF JIMI HENDRIX

PHILIP NORMAN W&N, 400pp, £20

As Stephen Dalton observed in the Times, ‘When Hendrix crash-landed in London in 1966, he sent an electric charge through Britain’s rock scene.

Within three years [he] was the world’s highest-paid rock star...

Within four years he was dead from an accidental overdose of barbiturates, aged 27.’

In the Sunday Times Victoria Segal said, ‘With rare comedy, [Norman] describes the Jimi Hendrix Experience grinding around the UK’s “Scratchings Circuit”, tough clubs – Ilkley’s Troutbeck Hotel, for example – galaxies away from London’s perfumed A-list. Hendrix’s mix of 12 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

RUSSIAN ROULETTE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRAHAM GREENE

RICHARD GREENE Little Brown, 591pp, £25

Jimi Hendrix: a life of dazzling velocity

‘Norman is best, though, turning his narrative skills to Hendrix’s death’ blues, rock and psychedelia made him hard to place.’

She pointed out that in the Hendrix story ‘many key players are dead: bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell; managers Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery; and Monika Dannemann, the “fiancée” who was with Hendrix when he died… Norman is best, though, turning his narrative skills to Hendrix’s death, reconstructing his final hours. He raises the conspiracy theories – he was murdered, he killed himself – but what comes through clearest is how exhausted Hendrix was, how isolated from people who cared.’

‘The biggest question,’ raised by Neil McCormick in the Telegraph, ‘is why, after all this time, Norman would choose to add to the vast trove of Hendrix tomes. The author wrestles disingenuously with the inconvenient fact that he never showed any interest in Hendrix at a time when Norman was, by his own account, “at the epicentre of swinging London… free to interview whomever I liked and with tables reserved for me at all the clubs where he appeared”.’

Segal summed up: ‘Wild Thing can’t quite match the dazzling velocity of Hendrix’s life, but at best it catches flickers of the man in motion, sometimes falling, often in flight.’

According to his Balliol contemporary, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene was ‘completely cynical, really only liking sex and money and his own particular form of publicity’. Sour grapes? Not entirely.

Greene haunted brothels, enjoyed blue films, had several mistresses, befriended traitors and dictators, and perfected the art of backing into the limelight. But he was also a compulsive writer – he described writing as ‘a form of therapy’ – who, in addition to 24 novels, wrote numerous plays and screenplays, hundreds of essays and reviews, and thousands of letters.

Having edited a collection of Greene’s letters, Richard Greene, no relation, has now produced what Ian Thomson in the Evening Standard called ‘a long-needed antidote to “dirty linen” biographers who have sought to expose the darker shade of Greene and in consequence lost sight of the books’. In the Spectator, Nicholas Shakespeare concurred: ‘Taking the high view that his subject is “one of the most important figures in modern literature” and that previous biographers “lost sight of what mattered” in focusing on “the minutiae of his sexual life”, he gives us a nicely written and well-judged cradle-to-grave portrait that needed to be conventional and unshowy, and is all the better for it.’

But a cautionary note was struck

Graham Greene: compulsive writer

Biography & Memoir

by John Walsh in the Sunday Times: ‘Less successful is Greene’s treatment of the knotty religious cruxes that hover over his subject’s key novels…

The trouble isn’t Richard Greene’s grasp of metaphysics; it’s that, to 21st century readers, discussions of damnation and God’s mercy sound redundant.’

FEATHERHOOD CHARLIE GILMOUR W&N, 288pp, £16.99, ebook £8.99

destructive father-son relationships.

Helen Davies wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘[Gilmour] attempts to piece together his relationship with Williams... The result is a sincere and searing tale of loss, addictive despair, the redemptive power of love, the natural world and a shit-dropping, feather-moulting, talking magpie.’

STEPHEN HAWKING

A MEMOIR OF FRIENDSHIP AND PHYSICS

LEONARD MLODINOW Allen Lane, 240pp, £20, ebook £9.99

POLLY SAMSON

Charlie Gilmour and his rescued magpie

Gilmour himself, in the Observer, explained his struggle to understand the father – Heathcote Williams – who abandoned him as baby: ‘I thought I would never solve the riddle of the man, never find out why he flew from fatherhood...

‘From a distance, Heathcote – conjuror, poet, anarchist – seemed like a man possessed of powerful magic... but I knew him as a jumble of secondhand stories and images. The year [he] died, I began writing [this] book of my own, a memoir about an abandoned magpie. While caring for the magpie, I made an unexpected discovery. Heathcote, too, had an intense bond with a wild bird – a jackdaw that lived with him not long before he met my mum.’

In the Evening Standard David Marsland said, ‘There is much that will forever bind the two [men]. Not least, the eerie coincidence that both rear wild birds... Benzene, Gilmour’s bird, is a chick rescued by his future wife and her sister. Reluctantly taking over its care, Gilmour finds this proxy-baby gives his shambolic days a purpose. Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by

The author of this book about Stephen Hawking is in an ‘almost unique position’, wrote Jim Al-Khalili in the Guardian. ‘A fellow physicist and science writer, [Leonard Mlodinow] worked closely with Hawking over many years during which they co-wrote two bestselling books: A Briefer History of Time and The Grand Design, the collaboration on and writing of which forms the backdrop for this memoir.’

Mlodinow’s account is ‘full of genuine affection [and] doesn’t shy away from Hawking’s intense focus, selfcentredness, unpredictability and the difficulties faced by his wives and carers’.

Steven Poole in the Telegraph thought the book was ‘tremendously entertaining in its anatomy of the nitty-gritty of co-authorship, and the frustrations that often drove Mlodinow, after a particularly unproductive evening at Hawking’s house, to seek out a few pints at a Cambridge pub that did after-hours lock-ins’.

Despite it being a ‘compelling read’, however, James McConnachie in the Sunday Times had reservations: ‘For all the anecdotes and conversations, and all the excellent biographical and scientific summaries, Hawking the man feels elusive. Mlodinow clearly knew and liked him, but I finished the book unsure of whether or not I did.’ A statement with which Tom Whipple in the Times agreed: ‘At the end we are left with as good a picture as we are likely to get of a man who was surely the most improbable global celebrity of the early 21st century. Yet I’m not sure how much closer we really are to knowing what was going on behind that twitching cheek and lopsided smile.’

SYLVIA PANKHURST NATURAL BORN REBEL

RACHEL HOLMES Bloomsbury, 976pp, £35

Sylvia Pankhurst had lots of lives – neglected daughter, talented artist, prolific writer, dedicated member of the Women’s Social and Political Union founded by her mother and sister, breakaway socialist suffragette in the East End, pacifist campaigner in the First World War, lover of Keir Hardie, correspondent of Lenin, unmarried mother, anti-fascist campaigner, Ethiopian national treasure – no wonder, then, that Rachel Holmes takes nearly a thousand pages to tell her story.

‘It’s as complete a telling as the most exacting historian or psychologist could wish for’ Reviewers did not complain at the length of the book – Lucy Davies in the Telegraph described it as ‘complete a telling as the most exacting historian or psychologist could wish for’ and wrote that she had wolfed it down. She revelled in such details as Sylvia’s diet as an impoverished art student in the 1900s – lentils and cocoa – and in Holmes’s avoidance of hagiography.

Gerard DeGroot in the Times was at pains to point out that the book’s size was not the result of ‘a collection of facts carelessly assembled; it is

Emily Pankhurst: led a lot of lives The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 13

Biography & Memoir instead a sophisticated symphony of intriguing and complex analysis, delivered in mellifluous harmony... feminist theory is used as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer’.

Amanda Foreman in the Sunday Times suggested that ‘the genius of Holmes’s fascinating and important biography is that it approaches Sylvia’s life as if she were a man. The writing… is dense and serious, as befits a woman who never wore make-up and didn’t care about clothes... Rather than dwelling on moods and relationships, Holmes is interested in ideas and consequences.’ This made it ‘wonderfully refreshing’.

teacher who called her daughter overly exuberant aged two. If only she mocked others more often.’

MORE THAN A WOMAN CAITLIN MORAN Ebury, 288pp, £20

TIME OF THE MAGICIANS THE INVENTION OF MODERN THOUGHT 1919-1929

WOLFRAM EILENBERGER TRANS SHAUN WHITESIDE Allen Lane, 418pp, £25

THE HUNGOVER GAMES SOPHIE HEAWOOD Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £14.99

Journalist and Guardian columnist Sophie Heawood was a celebrity interviewer in Hollywood when she became pregnant after a one-night stand with a musician. This memoir documents a life turned upside down, from riotous single-living on Sunset Strip to motherhood in East London. ‘[It is] a comedy in which she is the hapless goofball, crashing from one indignity to the next,’ wrote Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. ‘But woven into the sprightly prose and self-mocking humour are moments of painful truth and profundity.’ In the Observer, Barbara Ellen also liked it ‘Her unvarnished take on doing it alone is a must-read for anyone out there, floundering, scared they’re doing it wrong. The writing is great in The Hungover Games, but the humour and honesty are even better.’

Eleanor Halls in the Telegraph admired the ‘refreshingly unapologetic’ writing but found the goofballing OTT – Heawood tending to send herself up yet to come over cautious when it came to other (famous) people. ‘Every now and then, Heawood’s jokes are rather too obvious in their rigging, and a little too corny to land.’

Halls thought that ‘Heawood should have more confidence – her analysis of how Britons, Californians and New Yorkers all reacted to her due date being the 10th anniversary of 9/11 made me laugh out loud, as did her recommendation of a “long and sexual holiday” to the nursery 14 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

the hard-won wisdom of middle age’.

Moran discovers that out of the stress and anxiety of middle age, emerges a fearlessness combined with kindness: ‘You become tougher. You are gentler.

You automatically presume everyone has a secret sorrow. Because they almost always do.’

Caitlin Moran: touchingly honest

In 2011 Times columnist Caitlin Moran published her massively successful part-manifesto, partmemoir book, How To Be A Woman.

It seemed to reach the parts other feminists couldn’t reach. In More Than A Woman she discovers that in middle age you no longer have the privilege of being absorbed in your own problems; it is everyone else’s that matter now.

Christina Patterson writing in the Times warned that the reader is in for a shock. There is a chapter on married sex, on ageing, housework and caring for parents as well as the pain of dealing with Moran’s daughter’s agonising eating disorder. It is about ‘how to keep the whole exhausting show on the road without going mad’ and is ‘packed with insights that feel like revelations’. Moran is ‘touchingly honest about her own failures, and touchingly generous in her entire approach to life’.

Moran is ‘great at the observational stuff’, said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. She found her ‘very funny’ while her feminism is full of commonsense. Holly Williams in the Observer enjoyed the ‘comically exasperated look at the faffy demands of fortysomething life: the never-ending to-do list, the furious multitasking’. While for Lorraine Berry, writing in the Los Angeles Times, this book ‘celebrates

Time of the Magicians is a group biography of four influential philosophers of the early years of the 20th century: Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Cassirer.

Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Rée observed that being subjects of a group biography didn’t make them a group. They ‘had hardly anything in common apart from the fact that their mother-tongue was German’, and ‘if they had all ever met over Kaffee und Kuchen – which they certainly did not – they would probably have disagreed about everything’.

Eilenberger says that they captured the ‘spirit of the age’ and that the 1920s were a golden age of philosophy – but they went in different directions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are the patron saints of two schools of philosophy barely on speaking terms, Benjamin has a ‘cultish’ following, and ‘as for poor old Cassirer, he seems to have no followers at all’.

Rée applauded the ‘freewheeling gusto’ with which Eilenberger tells his tale, but cavilled at the neat notion that in the Twenties these men were singing from the same philosophical hymn-sheet. At times the author was ‘reduced to tying his magicians together by means of biographical chatter’.

Oliver Moody in the Times had no such reservations, thinking the book – ‘a literary sensation in Germany’ – was ‘worthy of the hype’: ‘a tremendous feat of scholarship, but […] also a technical masterpiece, knitting together the four men’s love lives, money troubles, ontological anxieties and the wider ferment of the Weimar republic with uncommon dexterity’.

Back on the bookshelf LUCY LETHBRIDGE admires the author Isabel Colegate’s skill at recreating so vividly the atmosphere of the past The author Isabel Colegate, who was 89 this year, is the author of 14 books, 13 of them novels. Her first, published in 1958, was The Blackmailer (in the process of being not only reprinted but made into a film) and her last one, which appeared in 2002, was also her only non-fiction: a study of hermits and solitaries called A Pelican in the Wilderness.

But Colegate’s best known novel is probably The Shooting Party, published in 1980. Set in a grand Edwardian country house in 1913 where guests have assembled for a shooting weekend, it returns to the prevailing theme of almost all Colegate’s novels: a society on the edge of change. For the modern reader, who knows what is looming in 1914, how the bubble in which these privileged characters exist will be so violently burst, the descriptions of the autumnal meadowlands of Sir Randolph Nettleby’s Oxfordshire estate and the mannered conversations in the drawing room of Nettleby Park are equally unsettling.

This world will be as destroyed by the Great War for young James, the beater who lays traps for rabbits with his skinny silent colly bitch (‘a perfect poacher’s dog’), as for Lionel Stephens, the brilliant up-andcoming barrister who is one of Sir Randolph’s guests.

When in 1984 The Shooting Party was made into a film, the lead roles went to James Mason as Sir Randolph and John Gielgud as Cornelius Cardew, the antibloodsports campaigner: they were themselves then representatives of their own pre-war golden age, an elegy within an elegy.

The Daily Telegraph reviewer called The Shooting Party ‘Stylish, funny and infinitely subtle. It is as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass.’ Colegate is a very specific writer, her descriptions based on precise and careful observation, polished without being at all shiny.

Her skill at recreating so keenly the manners, feelings and atmosphere of this particular moment of the historical past must have been in part due to the fact that she had been born in its shadow in 1931. If the conversation and language in The 16 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

Shooting Party feel authentic and unstrained, it is because her characters speak like characters she has encountered: she will have met a real Edwardian. She has a sharp, unsnobbish eye for class distinctions now almost completely gone or at least radically changed. She told Rachel Cooke that she was glad those divisions have now gone: ‘There is still all sorts of snobbery, in all sorts of directions, but not like in those days.’

Colegate was the youngest of the four daughters of Sir Arthur Colegate, who was a Tory MP, and they were

Colegate had always felt on the outside of her parents’ world brought up in a large house in Shropshire where her father’s constituency was The Wrekin. She was interviewed widely this year to mark the reprinting by Bloomsbury of her Orlando King trilogy and she told Lucy Scholes of iNews that although she was never a rebel, she had always felt on the outside of her parents’ world – the ideal place as it turned out for a novelist to be: ‘I have always wanted to stand aside and look at things, if only to myself.’

The Orlando novels, written in the late 1960s and early 70s, begin with

the hunger marches of the 1930s and work from pre-war Britain through conflict to post-war Cold War, ending in the Suez Crisis. The trilogy is a re-working of the Oedipus myth, starting with her handsome, charismatic protagonist Orlando King’s arrival in London and charting his rise to power – and finally his fall: ‘I put a lot of emotion into those three books,’ she told Cooke, who asked her whether the novels had a particular resonance today. ‘I found myself possessed by the story. I was extraordinarily interested in the history of that time – the period after the war – and with all the ways in which life changed. Perhaps it’s that as time goes on, people seem to get more interested in that period not less. This is curious. It’s possible that its importance is still sinking in.’

Colegate didn’t go to university (‘I have no education at all’) but instead, in the early 1950s, went to work for the publisher Anthony Blond in a ‘little back room’ in London. It was an exciting time and she found that Blond trusted her intuitive taste and judgement on books and their authors. Together they found and published several ‘eccentric’ figures who had had an exciting war, escaping for example from prisoner of war camps. Perhaps it honed too the interest so evident in Colegate’s fiction of the high drama and intensity of huge shared events like war.

Through Blond, she met Michael Briggs, the chairman of the Bath Preservation Trust. They were married in 1961 and together spent decades renovating Midford Castle, a glorious 18th-century gingerbread Gothick folly. (And which, marking another twisty corner in the tunnel of 20th-century social change in Britain, they sold to the Hollywood star Nicholas Cage in 2007.). Colegate produced a novel every few years but, in the self-deprecating style of her pre-war generation, has firmly resisted any temptation to get precious about the business of being a writer. ‘I don’t think you go about feeling proud of your own books,’ she told Cooke firmly. ‘You just hope for the best. Then again you don’t want to start thinking: I wonder if I could have done it better. Because then you’d get terribly depressed.’

Current affairs

Stirling Moss in an Aston Martin in 1958: driving is ‘really – dangerously – exciting’

WHY WE DRIVE

ON FREEDOM, RISK AND TAKING BACK CONTROL

MATTHEW CRAWFORD Bodley Head, 368pp, £20, ebook £9.99

Philosopher Matthew Crawford is a passionate advocate of living at full-throttle: ‘there is a certain tonic in being scared shitless’. A previous book made the case for ‘working with your hands’ and now he advances the unfashionable proposition that driving cars is really – dangerously – exciting. As Tim Adams put it in the Guardian, Why We Drive is Crawford’s ‘riposte to the future of driverless cars’. It ‘gets under the bonnet of one of the more insidious assumptions of the artificial intelligence revolution: the seductive idea that most people desire ease, passivity, “frictionless” interactions with the world of objects.’

In the Times, self-confessed petrolhead Melanie Reid enjoyed a ‘part portentous cultural philosophy, part funny anecdote, part evisceration of Big Data’. Crawford, she noted, ‘does a great demolition of Big Data’s vision of progress, the “creeping colonisation of the space for skilled human activity”, leaving us more time to scroll our screens’. It’s the passive submission to the cult of safety that is the enemy of human flourishing. As Adams put it: ‘A well-constructed tweet will never provide the satisfaction of a reconstructed gearbox.’

In the New Statesman, Bryan Appleyard thrilled to the trip. ‘This love of cars spills over into Crawford’s

philosophy and his politics, which are neither of the right nor the left and certainly not of the centre. But he is a conservative in the mould of his hero, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

From him he derives an “affection for the present”, cherishing what actually exists rather than mourning the past or aspiring to the future. And nothing has more actually existed for the past 130 years than the car.’

LEFT OUT

THE INSIDE STORY OF LABOUR UNDER CORBYN

GABRIEL POGRUND AND PATRICK MAGUIRE Bodley Head, 384pp, £18.99

Jeremy Corbyn blindsided the establishment, twice: emerging from the backbenches to seize the leadership in 2015, and then delivering a shock electoral success two years later, resulting in a Tory minority government. The ‘mainstream media’ has struggled to penetrate the internal dynamics in his insurgency. Left Out, the work of two young journalists at the Times

Jeremy Corbyn: in and out

and Sunday Times, focuses on the last two years of the Corbyn project, ‘from Glastonbury to catastrophe’ last December. It reveals how Karie Murphy finally wrested control of the party machine from recalcitrant Blairites, how John McDonnell and Corbyn fell out over the Skripal poisonings and the antisemitism crisis, and how the Brexit compromise unravelled – almost, it seems, by accident.

After the model of Tim Shipman’s All Out War, this is very much an SW1 account, and a first draft of history. Phillip Collins, in the Times, was tart about the genre: recording what cakes were served in which committee room for each crucial meeting, the authors risk ‘confusing what mattered with what merely happened’. Collins went on to credit Pogrund and Maguire with telling a coherent story, the ‘rumbling of a political idiot’, which vindicates those who always saw Corbynism as a ‘leftist indulgence’. But Jim Pickard in the Financial Times argued that Left Out offered a ‘generous insight’ into Corbyn’s movement; demonised figures like Karie Murphy are allowed to defend themselves – and quite effectively. Stephen Bush, in the New Statesman, questioned the authors’ political nerdiness: ‘the problem with Corbynism was about morality’ not just ‘organisation and strategy’.

However, as Pickard pointed out, there is no shortage of such commentary elsewhere: this is a story that bears retelling.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

BRITAIN, AMERICA AND EUROPE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

KIM DARROCH Wm Collins, 400pp, £20

Sir Kim (now Lord) Darroch was until recently the British ambassador in Washington – until the leaking of his caustic report on the Trump presidency caused him to be withdrawn when the Donald tweeted: ‘We will no longer deal with him.’

This is Darroch’s account.

Jon Sopel in the Guardian enjoyed it: ‘Collateral Damage is a sharply written book, full of dry and wry observations of a lifelong public servant who, having spent his career shunning the spotlight, suddenly finds himself at the heart of a media firestorm.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 17

Current affairs

Donald Trump: we won’t deal with you

Sopel wondered whodunnit. Who leaked the not-all-that startling news that the Ambassador didn’t think much of Trump? In the Sunday Times, Max Hastings deplored the dependency on internet communication which has made diplomatic candour so ‘perilous’.

He thought the book slightly ‘banal’ (everyone the ambassador meets is ‘a thoroughly decent human being’) though he enjoyed some of the ‘bleakly comic detail’ about efforts to make contact with the White House.

In the Times, Edward Lucas noted approvingly that Darroch (with a lower second in zoology from Durham) was not the ‘Oxbridge brainbox’ customary in the Washington embassy. Though Darroch is gregarious, the book is ‘admirably un-gossipy. He writes wryly rather than gushingly about the social whirl.’ Lucas concluded: ‘Startlingly unreflective about his own buttoned-down personality (he was abandoned by his mother at the age of six), he delivers sharp insights about others; crisply critical about their decisions, while fairminded and even kind about them as people. Readers will get the feeling that he prefers to pack a punch rather than make a splash. Now he has done both.’

CYNICAL THEORIES

HOW UNIVERSITIES MADE EVERYTHING ABOUT RACE, GENDER AND IDENTITY – AND WHY THIS HARMS EVERYBODY

HELEN PLUCKROSE AND JAMES LINDSAY Swift, 352pp, £20 MARK TAYLOR

American academics Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay became briefly notorious when they pranked a 18 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

number of scholarly journals by submitting deliberately ridiculous pieces replete with academic jargon – many of which were accepted for publication, including one which reproduced sections of Mein Kampf with some feminist social justice theory sprinkled in. Their new book was summed up by Jonathan Church in Quillette as ‘a history of ideas which, in challenging unifying narratives and universal values, have come to threaten free speech, honest debate, and the valuing of reason itself’.

In the New English Review, Daniel Sharp praised ‘a lucid analysis of Social Justice, its roots, its evolution, and its effects’ while in the online magazine Lit. Frances Weetman applauded their analysis of what lies behind the deliberately vague and obfuscating language of ‘woke’ politics. ‘Cynical Theories is not for the faint-hearted. It tackles complex philosophical ideas that perhaps should never have found popular support outside of a university classroom. But it is a necessary and timely addition to modern critiques of Social Justice ideas; and, most importantly, it is the first mainstream book to argue against these ideas from a left-wing standpoint.’

The books’ pages of the mainstream UK papers ducked the debate – except in the Times where Douglas Murray waded in: ‘Frauds and fools have consistently pushed out their peers. Meaningful research has been stigmatised in favour of “social justice activism”. In Cynical Theories Pluckrose and Lindsay go to the root of this poison tree, exposing its origins and its consequences.’

FAKE LAW

THE TRUTH ABOUT JUSTICE IN AN AGE OF LIES

THE SECRET BARRISTER Picador, 400pp, £20, ebook £9.99

The Secret Barrister is an anonymous blogger and barrister whose first book – Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken – became a best-seller.

Will they (preferred pronoun) manage the same again? The fake law of the title refers to the reams of disinformation which appear in the tabloid press and are worked into speeches by central government – basically stories in which the law is made to look an ass. Examples

include the illegal immigrant who escaped deportation because of his cat (made up) and the homeowner who went to prison for attacking a burglar (more complicated than the headlines allowed).

Thomas Grant in the Times praised the arguments as ‘measured, reasoned and founded on the hard bedrock of fact’. He promised readers would come away from the book feeling that their minds had been ‘purged’ by a valuable contribution to the Enlightenment project of

‘As a journalist, reading an attack on the media rankles a little’ ‘purveying truth and slaying mendacity’. Rosamund Urwin in the Sunday Times admitted that as ‘a journalist, reading an attack on the media rankles a little’. But she described the book as ‘well written, both punchy and providing concise explanations of complex laws’.

Philip Johnston in the Telegraph also confessed to a resistance to ‘books that seek to defend a particular profession from the alleged scourges of my own industry’. He argued with SB for taking as ‘gospel’ the Supreme Court’s ruling in favour of Gina Miller when she challenged the government for proroguing Parliament last year. ‘Why was the Supreme Court’s ruling unanimous?

Is there not something about its aggrandisement that is worthy of discussion, even in the terms employed by the tabloids which SB dismisses as “hysteria”, or are we just supposed to go along with it?’ But Brexit quibbles aside, critics – including Johnston – were united in enjoying if not agreeing with the Secret Barrister’s latest offering.

TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY

THE FAILURE OF POLITICS AND THE PARTING OF FRIENDS

ANNE APPLEBAUM Allen Lane, 224pp, £16.99

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian who has spent large parts of her life in Britain and Poland. Her survey of the rise of

Current affairs nationalist and far right parties in Europe and America doubles as a memoir of the last 20 years and begins with an account of a New Year’s Eve party in 1999 given by the author and her husband Radek Sikorski at his partially restored estate in Poland. It ends with another party two decades later, when ‘about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half’. This is partly reflective of Polish politics – Sikorski having previously served as Foreign Minister was on bad terms with the ruling Law and Justice party – but also of divisions on the right in Britain, America, Hungary and Spain.

Separate chapters are given to developments in each of these countries, interspersed with portraits of friends and acquaintances named and shamed for supporting extremist nationalist parties. It is not a book about the dispossessed but about members of educated elites going over to the dark side. In the Spectator – where Applebaum used to work as deputy editor – Douglas Murray took the author to task for daring to quote Boris Johnson at a private dinner in 2014: ‘Nobody serious wants to leave the EU.’ This, to Murray, was a ‘significant betrayal of confidence’ in a book littered with similar examples. But John Kampfner in the Guardian judged the book ‘all the more powerful’ for the fact that it was ‘intensely personal’.

David Goodhart in the Literary Review also thought that Applebaum ‘uses her insider knowledge to good effect’.

WHY THE GERMANS DO IT BETTER

NOTES FROM A GROWN-UP COUNTRY

JOHN KAMPFNER Atlantic, 312pp, £16.99

Kampfner, a half-British, halfSlovakian Jew with a High German surname, is a former editor of the New Statesman. He lauds post-WWII Germany as a success story, celebrated for its stability and prosperity, without giving ‘enough credit to enlightened American leadership’, considered Lionel Barber in the Spectator. What is more, Kampfner fails to acknowledge Germany’s ‘rotten corporate culture with its deep connections between management, workers and local politicians (and family ownership). This is the consensual system which Kampfner would presumably like to export to the UK, minus, of course, the corruption.’

Both the Wirecard and Volkswagen scandals ‘have exposed a cosy, insulated business culture hostile to anything which might challenge its most cherished habits or methods’.

Anne McElvoy, a former foreign correspondent in Germany, reviewed the book for the Observer. This ‘polemic’ treads ‘the line between curiosity and sententiousness. It taps smartly into the hunch that Germany has got a lot of things right that Britain has not, not least in the recent response to Covid-19.’ Yet ‘being grown up means responsibility in the wider world and here the record is chequered. The laggardly approach to raising defence spending... armed

JEREMY-GUNTHER-HEINZ JAHNICK

About turn: radical right protesters in Calais in November 2015

forces beset by interminable internal problems and a determination to plough on with the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project reflect a fragmented geopolitical outlook in Berlin. The price of the “grown up” – corporatism that powers the German economy – is also that a lot of dubious stuff gets swept under the carpet, as the saga of the car industry and the still unfolding emissions scandal shows.’

GREED IS DEAD POLITICS AFTER INDIVIDUALISM

PAUL COLLIER AND JOHN KAY Allen Lane, 208pp, £16.99, ebook £9.99

In Greed Is Dead, the economists Paul Collier and John Kay argue that the acquisitive individualism widely held to be at the centre of capitalism and, by extension, prosperity, needs dethroning. Actually, they argue, humans ‘have become successful not by being selfish and smart, but by being social’. Their critique, said Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times, argues that we’ve ended up with ‘a toxic mix of “extreme elite individualism” on the left and the “possessive individualism” of market fundamentalists on the right’.

This focus on the individual is a relatively recent development, a departure from the communitarian norms that have contributed to human thriving for most of history.

They argue that to undo it, we need to devolve more power, need ‘less top-down management, less respect for “the model” and more for what works. We need, in other words, more common sense.’ Their analysis in this ‘breezy, no-nonsense guide’ ‘is a mini economics lesson […] clear, punchy and largely convincing’.

Other critics agreed. The Telegraph’s Clement Knox called it ‘a fine, incisive polemic’, while Literary Review’s Richard V Reeves described the authors as ‘two of the most thoughtful economists writing today’. The FT’s Delphine Strauss shared the view that much of what they argue is ‘common sense’, but said that in light of that perhaps they painted the lily: ‘They are largely convincing’, but ‘many of their policy proposals are familiar, and do not depend on the intellectual framing they are given here’.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 19

Children’s books Ideas for Christmas from EMILY BEARN The recent death of the 77-year-old Northern Irish author Sam McBratney has robbed children’s fiction of one of its best-loved voices.

A former teacher, McBratney wrote more than 50 books, but will always be remembered for Guess How Much I Love You (Walker, 32pp, £6.99), the story of Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare, and their efforts to measure their immeasurable love for each other. (‘I love you right up to the moon – and back.’ / ‘I love you as high as I can hop.’) This is a story no child should be without – and there is now a board book version, aimed at readers as young as two.

Even if Christmas lunch is cancelled by Covid, there will be plenty of festive picture books to feast on. 12 Days of Christmas (Frances Lincoln, 32pp, £10.99) is the Bristol artist Lara Hawthorne’s beautifully illustrated version of The Twelve Days of Christmas; and follows her equally enchanting Silent Night (Frances Lincoln, 32pp, £10.99). A Dancer’s Dream (Simon & Schuster, 64pp, £14.99) by Katherine Woodfine tells the story of a young ballet student in 19th-century St Petersburg, who is chosen to play the lead in The Nutcracker. With sumptuous illustrations by Lizzy Stewart, this is a Christmas book that will endure long into the New Year. Snow Ghost (Bloomsbury, 32pp, £12.99) by the Cambridge poet Tony Mitton, with illustrations by Diana Mayo, uses a lyrical rhyming text to tell the story of a ghost flying through the snow-filled skies, searching for a place to call home. In The After Christmas Tree (Scallywag Press, 32pp, £12.99), Bethan Welby imagines the heart-rending plight of a small fir tree, stripped of its decorations and discarded on a freezing pavement in January. And Snow Woman (Andersen, 32pp, £6.99), by the ever popular octogenarian David McKee, tells the story of two children with differing views as to the gender of their ‘snowperson’. With its teasing play on gender stereotype, this thoroughly modern tale was in fact first published in hardback more than 30 years ago.

The theme of gender continues to dominate all areas of children’s

publishing, seen not least in the relish for rewriting fairytales. Among the recent rush of titles intended to tear up the rules are Fearless Fairy Tales by James Kay and Blue Peter’s Konnie Huq (Piccadilly Press, 176pp, £14.99), whose heroines include Sleeping Brainy, who wants to be Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman & Jonathan Plackett

From top: The After Christmas Tree, A Dancer’s Dream, 12 Days of Christmas

(Faber, 208pp, £20), which includes stories such as ‘Handsome and The Beast’ and ‘Jacqueline and the Beanstalk’. For those of a more nostalgic mindset, A Natural History of Fairies by Emily Hawkins (Frances Lincoln, 64pp, £20) reveals the secret world of fairies through the notebooks of a 1920s botanist, writing for her young niece. The result is a triumph of anatomical detail, in which we learn everything from how reed fairies

achieve their camouflage, to which species of water fairy has webbed feet.

The Ghost of Gosswater (Chicken House, 320pp, £6.99) is another glutinous gothic thriller by the prolific Lucy Strange. This time, her heroine is 12-year-old Lady Agatha Asquith, who is cast out of her ancestral home by her wicked Cousin Clarence, and finds herself embarking on an eerie quest to unlock the secrets of her past. Fantasy lovers will find plenty of scenic thrills in The Castle of Tangled Magic (Usborne, 416pp, £7.99) by Sophie Anderson, the much acclaimed author of The Girl Who Speaks Bear. Her latest novel tells the story of a young girl who stumbles into adventure in a magical kingdom ruled by a scheming wizard. And don’t miss The Wolf Road (Everything with Words, 352pp, £8.99), a stunning debut novel by the Norfolk poet Richard Lambert.

Aimed at slightly older readers, the plot evolves around a 15-year-old boy who survives a car accident that kills his parents, and is haunted by the wolf that caused the crash. Less lyrical, but equally engrossing, is Love Frankie (Doubleday, 432pp, £12.99), the 111th book by the golden oldie Jacqueline Wilson, which tells the story of a love affair between two schoolgirls. Wilson, who lives with a woman, explains that she has not previously focused a plot around a gay character because she tells stories about children with problems, and does not see ‘any problem whatsoever with being gay’.

Finally, it would not be Christmas without a gift edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’ – but these days the pictures are likely to be very different from those of Lewis Carroll’s original illustrator John Tenniel. In Macmillan’s sumptuous new edition (320pp, £25), Wonderland is re-imagined by the illustrator Chris Riddell, who depicts the heroine as a short-haired brunette, similar to Carroll’s real-life inspiration, Alice Liddell.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 21

Miscellaneous

AN ELEPHANT IN ROME

BERNINI, THE POPE AND THE MAKING OF THE ETERNAL CITY

LOYD GROSSMAN Pallas Athene, 214pp, £19.99

Is there no end to the talents of Loyd Grossman, former Masterchef presenter, pasta-sauce tycoon, cultural campaigner, broadcaster and scholar? His most recent book, highly praised (‘elegant, lively and informative’) by Michael Prodger in the Sunday Times, is about Gian Lorenzo Bernini, genius of the high Baroque, and how his partnership with his patron Pope Alexander VII transformed Rome. The ancient Egyptian obelisk, discovered in 1665, is situated in front of the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, and perches on the back of a whimsical and glorious marble elephant created

by Bernini. Grossman recalled in the Daily Telegraph his first encounter with it: ‘That was the moment – a dreamlike convergence of Egyptian, Baroque, Gothic, pagan and Christian – that Rome had me.’

His book is full of intriguing detail: 17th-century Romans were mad for ancient obelisks but why the elephant? Prodger filled us in: ‘Bernini may have come across the pairing in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an erudite and influential book of 1499 that contained a 22 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

Bernini self-portrait as David, close-up

woodcut of an elephant supporting an obelisk, and he had toyed with the idea in the 1630s when designing a garden ornament for the Barberini family. He might also have heard of the sensation caused a century earlier when the king of Portugal gave Pope Leo X an elephant; the poor animal died from constipation exacerbated by the half kilo of gold given as a laxative.’

Oldie editor Harry Mount, writing in the Catholic Herald, enjoyed ‘a scholarly yet thoroughly jolly book’.

The way Bernini’s elephant ‘sweeps aside its tail, about to defecate’ is an example of the sculptor’s ‘shocking audacity’. Throughout Rome, wrote Mount, ‘you will find Bernini’s angelic touch’. The sumptuously produced and lavishly illustrated An Elephant in Rome is a highly readable tribute to the artist who could turn ‘stone into flesh’.

thousand miles, carving its way through gorges fringed with cloud forest, skirting the mysterious megaliths of San Agustín, growing fat and turbid in its lower reaches, and finally debouching into the Caribbean at the Bocas de Ceniza (the “ashen mouths”), where its tonnage of silt turns the sea grey.’

Wade Davis, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society among other distinctions, has been visiting Colombia for nearly 50 years.

The Spectator’s Hugh Thompson paid tribute to Davis’s ‘love and knowledge’: ‘When Davis tells you about yopo, the seeds of a forest tree that contain one of the most powerful hallucinogenic agents known to man, a tryptamine “that does not distort reality as much as dissolve it”, you know he speaks with authority.’

In the Financial Times, Boyd Tonkin was full of praise: ‘Davis draws on his botanical background to survey the astonishing “biological bounty” of a country with 26,000 native flowering plants and 1,932 bird species. He explains why the longcherished coca leaf, in its unprocessed state, is “more useful and less irritating” than coffee or tea. He plumbs the river’s past as a conduit for music, for myths, for ideas, as well as gold, coffee, tobacco and cocaine.’

It was left to Jenny Coad in the Times to admire the rugged adventurer but also to wonder if his prose was not a bit much, providing this choice example: ‘To slip one’s hand into the river is to return to the point of origins, to connect across the eons to that primordial moment, impossibly distant in time, when celestial bodies, perhaps frozen comets, collided with the earth and brought the elixir of life to a lonely, barren planet spinning in the velvet void of space.’

THE WILD SILENCE RAYNOR WINN

MAGDALENA

Michael Joseph, 288pp, £14.99

WADE DAVIS

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, written in her mid-fifties, had the wild and unexpected success that writers dream of. And this triumph seemed all the more inspiring (and poignant) as it was a memoir of lives destroyed being slowly put together again. Winn and her husband Moth lost everything to a bad investment and days later learned that Moth had

RIVER OF DREAMS Bodley Head, 401pp, £25

The Magdalena is, wrote the Guardian’s Charles Nicholl, ‘the great arterial river of Colombia. Rising in the rugged moorlands of the Andean páramo 12,000ft above sea level, it flows northwards for nearly a

Miscellaneous a terminal illness. Their response?

They set off to walk the 630-mile coastal path. For her second book, Winn revisits the theme of walking but the couple are no longer homeless as an admiring reader has given them a rundown Cornish farm to rewild.

Raynor Winn: rewilding in Cornwall

Adrian Tempany in the Observer noted that settling down is a challenge. No sooner are they in their new farm but ‘they’re off again, to Iceland to walk its southern highlands. As the book opens, Moth has begun a degree, but in the confines of a converted chapel they are renting near Fowey, and without a physical connection to the land, he is deteriorating. Winn already feels that “a dark sense of enclosure had borne down on me and I had to get out.”’ In I-Online, Rory Sullivan enjoyed the ‘wide-eyed wonder’ of Winn’s chronicle of rewilding, ‘beautifully describing the visits of deer, toads, curlews and herons, as well as the apple orchard from which monks once made cider’.

In the Times, Cathy Rentzenbrink was among many who found the book, like its predecessor, at heart a deep love story: ‘It is mainly about her enduring passion for Moth, the “wild, unstoppable” man who has spent his life turning left when told to go right and who has always been most himself in the wide embrace of the natural world.’

THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD

ANDREW WAKEFIELD’S WAR ON VACCINES

BRIAN DEER Scribe, 416pp, £16.99

This ‘definitive account of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent attempt to link the onset of autism in children

with the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine could not be better timed’, argued Dominic Lawson in his Sunday Times review, since ‘the so-called anti-vaxxers are gaining ever more traction in the US, where Wakefield now lives – fêted by sundry Hollywood actors and the odd politician. Indeed, Donald Trump – before he became president – backed Wakefield’s claims (with the typically Trumpesque twist that he himself had discovered the alleged connection between autism and the vaccine).’

Wakefield was struck off by the GMC ten years ago, largely as a result of Deer’s investigative journalism for the Sunday Times, but is otherwise unscathed and also now a wealthy man as a result of his cult status in the US. Deer shows that ‘Wakefield had been privately proposing to the Royal Free schemes based on his research in which he would be “suitably incentivised by the allocation of equity”. This aspect of the affair is especially pungent, given that Wakefield’s supporters contrast his self-proclaimed morality-driven approach with the financial motivations of “big pharma”.’

In the Times, David Aaronovitch felt that ‘what should amaze the reader of Deer’s book... is the weakness, venality, vanity and slowness to action of the medical establishment and its publications and institutions in the face of a rogue doctor. Most of the things that Deer did should have been done by the profession itself. Had he not so assiduously turned every one of Wakefield’s stones over, the man would probably still be licensed to practise here.’

WOMEN IN THE KITCHEN TWELVE ESSENTIAL COOKBOOK WRITERS WHO DEFINED THE WAY WE EAT, FROM 1661 TO TODAY

ANNE WILLAN Scribner, 305pp, £20, ebook £11.99

Anne Willan has been a celebrated figure in US gastronomical circles for nearly 60 years. The founder of the La Varenne cooking school in Paris, she is the author of 30 cookbooks and winner of the prestigious James Beard Prize. No better person then to look back at the great food writers of the past and how they influence us

‘No better person to look back at the great food writers of the past’ still. And she includes recipes.

The earliest entry into Willan’s hall of fame is Hannah Glasse, the 17th-century English author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

Thereafter her women are American – including Amelia Simmons, author in 1796 of the first New World cookbook, and going down through the centuries to Alice Waters and, of course, the redoubtable Julia Child (Willan’s often-mentioned great chum). Robin Mather in the Chicago Tribune particularly enjoyed the Simmons chapter, noting that the author’s ‘deep understanding of culinary history’ comes into its own on the details: ‘She describes the equipment that a cook of Simmons’s era would have at hand to cook over an open fire, from the three-legged skillets called spiders to Dutch ovens to spits for roasting. She notes that

Anne Willan: celebrated for 60 years

Simmons offers a variety of sturdy pastries to use to build a pie shell for meat pies for readers who didn’t have pie pans.’

In the Sunday Times, Victoria Segal found the biographies a bit cursory but enjoyed the surprises.

‘Today’s enlightened vegans might be shocked that Hannah Woolley in 1670 included a recipe for almond milk.’ She regretted, however, that Willan ‘has no time for recent developments such as the effects of Instagram chefs or wellness gurus’, pointing out that ‘food doesn’t always have to be a matter of good taste.

Novelty – as chaculato-loving Woolley would have known – can also be illuminating.’

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 23

Nature place in the world without a guide,” Svensson comments, “without inheritance or heritage and existentially alone.” The same, he implies, is true of a working-class boy who becomes a writer.’

THE BOOK OF TRESPASS CROSSING THE LINES THAT DIVIDE US

NICK HAYES Bloomsbury Circus, 464pp, £20 Herdwick sheep may safely graze and pasture where a shepherd guards them well

ENGLISH PASTORAL AN INHERITANCE

JAMES REBANKS Allen Lane 304pp, £20

Five years ago James Rebanks, a Cumbrian farmer who had dropped out of school then read history at Oxford in his 20s before returning to the Lake District, published The Shepherd’s Life, a much-admired account of his work with Herdwick sheep. English Pastoral, a book about farming, deserves to do as well if not better. The first part, Nostalgia, is a hymn to the grandfather who taught him to read the fields and sky, and showed by example the rhyme and reason in the ‘old ways’. After his grandfather’s death Rebanks ran away to Australia, where he tried to learn lessons about a different sort of farming while feeling homesick for crooked fields and drystone walls.

The second part of the book – Progress – describes his attempts to work with his father, modernising the farm. Antibiotics and pesticides are in, grazing is out. Then the author reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and changes direction. In Part III, Utopia, Rebanks has retreated to his grandfather’s farm on the fells where he has planted thousands of trees, rerouted the river to create wetland areas, and is no longer trying to earn a living solely from the land.

Blake Morrison in the Guardian hailed the memoir/polemic as belonging ‘in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry’.

Julian Glover in the Evening Standard described it as having ‘the raw power of a three-act Ibsen play.

Jamie Blackett in the Telegraph compared his descriptive powers to those of Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie. Several reviewers quoted 24 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

Rebanks’s vision of cobwebs hanging from the rafters of a barn ‘like tangled pairs of women’s tights’.

THE GOSPEL OF THE EELS A FATHER, A SON AND THE WORLD’S MOST ENIGMATIC FISH

PATRIK SVENSSON, TRANS AGNES BROOME Picador, 240pp, £16.99, ebook £8.99

Swedish journalist Patrik Svensson, still reeling from the global success of his first book, excitedly outlined to the Observer why eels are so fascinating: we have no real idea how they reproduce except that they travel thousands of miles to the Sargasso Sea to do it. ‘You can call it a mystery, but it’s also just a crazy fact. No one has ever seen eels breed, and no one has ever seen eels in the Sargasso. It becomes a philosophical question: how do we know the things we do?’

In the Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson loved ‘a captivating blend of memoir and nature writing, Svensson recalls fishing for eels with his late father, who introduced him to the ways and wiles (and taste!) of this most elusive of creatures. It sparks a journey to discover all he can about the extraordinary life-cycle of the European eel, taking in science, literature, folklore and much more besides.’ Joe Shute in the Daily Telegraph found ‘a stillness to Svensson’s writing that perfectly suits the eels and his enigmatic father, a road paver. “I can’t remember us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to catch them,” the author writes. This is a book about tenderness, slime and savagery.’ And in the Times, James McConnachie was full of praise for the ‘unshowy but potent’ writing. ‘“Every eel seeks its

Nick Hayes’s barricade-storming book on roaming rights threw up some startling statistics. Boyd Tonkin laid them out in the Arts Desk: ‘Even with recent, grudging adjustments to the law, people in England have the “right to roam” over only 10 per cent or so of their native country, and to boat down a mere 3 per cent of its waters. The length of public footpaths has actually halved, to around 118,000 miles, since the 19th century.

Hereditary aristocrats still own “a third of Britain”, even though foreign corporations now run them close.

Hayes wants to understand how this theft of access happened, how the old shared culture of the “commons” gave way to absolute rights of ownership.’

William Atkins in the Guardian thrilled to Hayes’s adventures, in the thoroughly English spirit of Cobbett: ‘Chapter by chapter, we follow him over walls and through hedges into the private landholdings of England, including Arundel Castle, Boughton House (the Dukes of Buccleuch), Highclere Castle– and the Sussex estate of Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail.’

Reviewers piled in with their experiences. In the TLS, Sara Hudston kicked off with a meandering anecdote about being out riding with her posh friend Amanda. Tonkin dropped that he had lunched twice with the Duke of Buccleuch (‘genial, generous, green-minded’) and Bradley Garrett in the Literary Review came clean: ‘As an explorer who writes about urban infrastructure and spends a lot of time underground, I always enjoy the immersion of the outdoors but lack the vocabulary, and perhaps imagination, to record my experiences in convincing prose.

Hayes has no such problem – his writings, whether on wild woods or manicured estates, are honey for connoisseurs of adventure.’

Fiction

Ingmar Bergman and Linn Ullmann: fictionalised portrait of a splintered family

UNQUIET LINN ULLMANN Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, £14.99, ebook £14.99

© AB SVENSK FILMINDUSTRI

Linn Ullmann is the novelist daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. She has written a novel about her parents because, she writes, fiction is ‘the only way of breathing life into them’. The characters in Unquiet are unnamed but their lives cleave to the known facts. The narration switches between first and third person, but the presiding intelligence is always that of the daughter of the couple who worked together but never lived together, and were lovers for a few years in the late 1960s. ‘I was his child and her child, but not their child, it was never us three.’

The girl, as she is sometimes called, spends a month every summer at Hammars, Bergman’s famous house on the island of Faro, where she gets to know some of her half siblings – there are nine children, and five mothers. She spends the rest of her childhood following her mother across the Atlantic or abandoned with her grandmother in Norway. AO Scott in the New York Times compared the novel to ‘a collage-like group portrait of a family splintered from the start, an attempt to isolate the mother, the father and the daughter and plot their points of intersection’. Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times called it ‘a unique work, non-linear yet effortlessly lucid, full of grace and restraint’.

Threaded through the book are

transcribed excerpts from six conversations which the author held with her father in his final months and Lowdon was confident that Bergman aficionados would fall on the transcripts – ‘even for sceptics who (whisper it!) fell asleep halfway through Wild Strawberries, they form a moving, clear-eyed portrait of old age’. Boyd Tonkin in the Spectator described the fatherdaughter dialogues as crackling ‘with deadpan comedy routines and killer asides’ and praised the daughter for skewering the father’s narcissism ‘as grief and infirmity ring down a slow curtain on a lifelong melodrama of love-struck creativity’.

PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE Bloomsbury, 272pp, £14.99

Susanna Clarke had a huge success with the historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) and then slipped into silence, broken only by a slim volume of short stories.

Critics agreed that Piranesi was worth the wait for a second novel. In the Times Sarah Ditum called it as ‘close to perfect’, and Jonathan Barnes in the Literary Review wrote that ‘all of the strengths of Clarke’s writing are to be found here, and none of its flaws’.

Piranesi is an innocent young man who believes he has always lived in the House, a labyrinth of halls and vestibules cluttered with statues, in homage to the vertiginous creations of the protagonist’s namesake.

Piranesi meets weekly with the only person he knows who also inhabits the House, whom he calls The Other.

The Other is secretive and suspiciously well-dressed, while Piranesi gets about in rags.

Eventually Piranesi encounters a visitor and cracks appear in the House’s foundations, shattering his delicate grasp on reality.

‘All of the strengths of Clarke’s writing are to be found here, and none of its flaws’ Piranesi is an intricate novel.

Where Jonathan Strange worked traditions of 19th-century novel into fantasy, magical realism is on the menu here. Noah Berlatsky in the Observer wrote that ‘Borges, Calvino and Marquez go through the Narnian wardrobe this time, rather than Austen, Trollope and Dickens’. He argued that this made it ‘less accessible’ than Clarke’s previous work while allowing that ‘in terms of invention and beauty, it’s a fitting heir to Clarke’s first book’.

SISTERS DAISY JOHNSON Jonathan Cape, 192pp, £14.99

Daisy Johnson was the youngest author ever to make the Booker shortlist with Everything Under (2018). Sisters is a similarly disturbing novel that marries folksy fable to psychological drama. July and September are teenage sisters now living with their mother Sheela in a suitably eerie house in the Yorkshire Moors. They moved from Oxford after something unspeakable The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 25

Fiction happened at school. The girls are only ten months apart, inseparable, and share an intense psychic connection. The novel is told from July and Sheela’s perspective, but never September’s. September is domineering, cruel, elusive. Does she even exist?

This is Johnson’s take on classic horror: in the New Statesman, Anna Leszkiewicz detected whiffs of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King (Johnson has professed her debt to the latter).

Erica Wagner in the Guardian found parallels with du Maurier’s Rebecca, and called it ‘a tour-de-force of attraction and repulsion, of intimate disgust’. It’s undoubtedly an unsettling ride. John Self in the Times described it as ‘a book less likely to cheer you up than screw you up’, and Leszkiewicz admitted to squirming through particularly gruesome scenes. But Sisters is not trammelled by genre or gratuitous brutality, and Leszkiewicz praised ‘Johnson’s commitment to her characters, her interest in complex relationships and power dynamics, her atmospheric style and an unresolved, ambiguous ending’ which all ‘elevate the novel beyond its plot’.

JUST LIKE YOU NICK HORNBY Viking, £16.99

When Lucy, a white English teacher at a North London comprehensive and single mother, starts an affair with her babysitter, a black football coach and would-be DJ 20 years younger, their relationship is described as ‘delicate, like a houseplant, with no ability to survive

out in the world’. Just Like You charts the near death and miraculous survival of the houseplant as Brexit washes over them leaving them more than ever exposed in their differences: Joseph hasn’t thought about the EU, but his parents want out, Lucy and her friends are dismayed Remainers.

Sam Leith in the Guardian found little in the novel ‘to challenge or discomfit. But why should there be?...

It’s not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story.’

But Joanna Briscoe in the Observer thought that ‘the metropolitan elite have rarely been so successfully pinned…and left to squirm’. She also described the book as ‘almost TV-ready, as page after page of

‘Just Like You is not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story’ breathtakingly recognisable dialogue is laid out like a screenplay, and even texts seem lifted straight off the phone’. Claire Allfree in the Evening Standard complained that while Hornby remained a genial scrutiniser of social mores, ‘from a sentence-bysentence point of view he’s becoming flabbier with each passing novel’.

Also his attempt to capture the urban slang of Joseph’s friends was the ‘literary equivalent of dad dancing at a wedding’. But what sort of wedding do dads not dance at?

V2 ROBERT HARRIS Hutchinson, 320pp, £20, ebook £20

Nick Hornby: novel is ‘almost TV-ready’ 26 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

Nazi Germany’s V2 rockets were widely regarded as Hitler’s last throw at devastation before succumbing to defeat in World War II. The rockets were brutal, expensive and inaccurate. Robert Harris’s new novel was written mostly during lockdown, itself a time of international political turmoil. David Marsland in the Evening Standard, appreciated the context; Harris has written about ‘toxic futility and the ferocious propaganda needed to fuel it. His timing, unlike the workings of the rockets he writes about, is

Robert Harris: impeccable timing

impeccable.’ The ‘pace is relentless’, though occasionally Harris ‘stops the story dead to hover over a detail that brings the horror of the V2 to life’.

The story is told through two perspectives, that of Dr Rudi Graf, a (fictional) friend and longtime collaborator of Wernher von Braun, the real-life head of the Nazi rocket programme, and (fictional) Kay Caton-Walsh of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Alex Preston in the Observer, found the character of Kay underexplored, while the conflicted Graf is presented ‘with subtlety and sensitivity – this is what Harris does best, the decent man caught in the jaws of history’.

Robert Shrimsley in the FT liked the structure; the double narrative follows ‘Harris’s signature technique of weaving a personal thriller on to a major historical tapestry. As so often with Harris, the joy is in the history as much as the story.’

MAYFLIES ANDREW O’HAGAN Faber, 288pp, £14.99

Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, about friends Tully and Jimmy, is set over 30 years starting in the 1980s Ayrshire of his own youth. It was widely praised. The Tablet’s Anthony Gardner condensed its theme of life in friendship and death: ‘How should you respond when your best friend asks you to help him die? This is the dilemma facing Jimmy Collins, the narrator of this ambitious new novel.

Three decades of mutual loyalty persuade him to say yes; but as the moment draws near, his inner conflict becomes more and more intense.’

Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian found Mayflies a ‘funny and plangent

Fiction book shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a “litany of small tragedies”, these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either.’

In the Scotsman, Allan Massie was full of praise: ‘Love and death are art’s two great subjects, the inescapable ones. Both are explored here in a delicate, scrupulous prose.

Mayflies is that rarity: a novel about death that is life-enhancing. You can read it in a long afternoon. It will stay with you and you will want to read it again.’ And in the Times, John Self thought it ‘entirely unexpected; a joyful, warm and heart-filling tribute to the million-petalled flower of male friendship’.

may not be all that much that stays with you. Certainly not the prose, which is never very exciting. The Glass Hotel is a plot- and conceptdriven, highly visual novel that would work just as well on screen. That doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable — but you just might find yourself wondering why you’re reading it rather than watching it.’

documentary or nonfiction’. Sarah Ditum in the Times described sections as ‘scathingly funny’. Max Fletcher in the Spectator thought ‘the impact of the ending’ might have worked better if there weren’t so many characters to remember.

SUMMERWATER

Chatto, 368pp, £18.99, ebook £9.99

SARAH MOSS Picador, 208pp, £14.99

THE GLASS HOTEL EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL Picador, 320pp, £14.99, ebook £8.99

STILLER BEOBACHTER

Emily St John Mandel has followed her bestselling Station-11, set in a post-pandemic wilderness, with a novel that, as Beejay Silcox observed in the Guardian, ‘exists in the same universe, in a time before the outbreak. Mandel has not penned a ticking-clock prequel; rather, her new novel is a portrait of everyday obliviousness, the machinery of late neoliberalism juddering along with characteristic inequity. This is a tale of Ponzi schemes, not pestilence.’ In the Evening Standard, Phoebe Luckhurst thought it ‘elegant, evocative and assured’. At its centre, wrote Luckhurst, is the Hotel Caiette, on a remote tip of Vancouver Island: ‘In its orbit move Mandel’s characters: Vincent, beautiful, vulnerable and sad; her half-brother Paul, an addict whose sadness manifests as spite; Jonathan Alkaitis, the smooth New York money man who owns the place; Leon, a mildmannered shipping executive passing through and caught in the crossfire of the novel’s grand plot.’

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was bowled over by ‘the real deal, psychologically astute, morally wise – and all done in stingingly beautiful prose’. Only Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times had doubts. Mandel is a ‘terrific storyteller’ but ‘when you’ve finished oohing and aahing, there

Testing: torrential rain at a holiday park

Summerwater is set over the course of a day of torrential rain at a holiday park in the Highlands and reads like a thriller. Each chapter introduces us to the residents of a different cabin, and to their most intimate thoughts, via a series of intense, stream-ofconsciousness inner monologues.

Several critics honed in on the newly retired doctor whose wife has early stage dementia. The doctor is discovering ‘moments in his retirement that seem to be the opposite of dancing, a daily game of hide and seek in which the object is to avoid the beloved’. Other members of the cast include a husband who won’t sit down to pee even once the children are in bed because, thinks his wife, ‘in his head the masculinity police are watching even in the middle of the night’.

Melissa Harrison in the Guardian wrote that Moss’s metier was to observe ‘the way we subtly edit ourselves and one another – the limits that puts on us, as well as the strengths it creates’. She also praised the ‘simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech’ which made the novel feel ‘almost like

ISLANDS OF MERCY ROSE TREMAIN

Rose Tremain’s 14th historical novel is set in the 19th century, straddling Dublin, Bath, Paris and Borneo. Her characters interweave across these strongly contrasting backdrops, their stories joining together in search of places of solace, and meaning to life.

Stephanie Merritt, in the Observer, wrote that the novel contains ‘familiar Tremain themes: desire, purpose, the elusive rewards of art and the small acts whose consequences ripple outwards’. It is steeped in metaphor; neat, orderly Bath contrasts with the jungle of Borneo. The protagonist, Jane Adeane, a gifted nurse, contrasts with the colonialist, wittily called Sir Ralph Savage. He is nursing the brother of the suitor Jane has rejected. Jane seeks her road to self-discovery, Sir Ralph builds a road through the Borneo forest that leads nowhere.

‘Sir Ralph is not harmless – he is a symbol of the evil and madness of colonial power’ Norma Clarke, in the TLS, said that while ‘Sir Ralph is a figure of fun, he is not harmless’. He is a ‘symbol of the evil and madness of colonial power’. Layered like a victoria sponge, Islands of Mercy ‘is a quietly mischievous evocation of the Victorian era as it ought to have been. Tonally, Tremain mixes the serious with the ludicrous.’

Alex Peake-Tomkinson, in the Spectator, found the novel full of ‘hectic sexuality as well as yearnings for solace’, but regretted that ‘all this searching is never entirely easy to take seriously or to wholly engage with’.

The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020 27

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First novel PAUL BAILEY hails a triumphant debut by Douglas Stuart Douglas Stuart, the author of this beautiful and startling first novel, Shuggie Bain, was born and raised in Glasgow, in conditions of nearpenury. He is now a successful fashion designer in New York City.

Shuggie Bain is, in one crucial sense, an account of his coming to terms with a past that would have left others, less resilient than he, permanently embittered.

The book is unashamedly autobiographical, but not in the fashionable, self-referencing manner of much recently lauded auto-fiction.

Indeed, it might be accounted old-fashioned by comparison, given Stuart’s empathetic understanding of characters he treats with a refreshing absence of condescension and knowingness. He lets his people live on the page, in the vividly reimagined city and its dismal outskirts he knew as a child. The spirit of such diverse Glaswegian writers as Alasdair Gray and William McIlvanney informs the compelling narrative, reminding this particular reader of the adage that a Glasgow funeral is guaranteed to be livelier and more entertaining than an Edinburgh wedding.

Hugh, known as ‘Shuggie’, is the only son of Agnes and Hugh (‘Shug’ or ‘Big Shug’) Bain, a womanising cab driver with a chat-up line best described as ‘basic’. When one of Agnes’s friends, Ann Marie, confesses tearfully that she loves him, he drives his taxi into the dark corner of an empty car park, meets her gaze in the mirror, consults his watch and says, ‘Aye, well, take yer fucking knickers off then. I’ve only got five minutes.’

This balding charmer is Agnes’s second husband. The first, Brendan McGowan, is a dull, reliable Catholic, with whom she has had two other children – a determined girl called Catherine, and a boy they christened Alexander, but who prefers his nickname ‘Leek’. They are already teenagers when they make their appearance, living with their increasingly drunken mother and wayward stepfather in a council flat in a high rise tower block rented by Agnes’s parents, William and Elizabeth Campbell, alias ‘Wullie’ and ‘Lizzie’.

Catherine and Leek, in their different ways, are desperate to escape, and it’s Catherine who 30 The Oldie Review of Books Winter 2020

succeeds in doing so, marrying a cousin of Shug Bain, named – perhaps with a hint of authorial mischief – Donald Jnr. The younger Donald has landed a lucrative mining job in South Africa and his bride is overjoyed at the prospect of sunlight and sobriety.

The core of Shuggie Bain is set in Pithead, a mining town built to accommodate miners and their families when the industry was thriving. In 1982, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies, it’s now a stark blot on the landscape. An exasperated Shug, fed up with her uncontrolled jealous rages, dumps Agnes and her ‘weanies’ in a tiny terraced house he’s procured for them.

He then goes back to his latest woman.

Agnes, who has wanted to have her own place with her own front door, hates her new home on sight.

Her neighbours, the wives of unemployed men eking out a living of sorts on benefits, have let themselves go in ways she finds depressing and physically upsetting.

For Agnes is proud of her beauty. In her youth, she was compared to Elizabeth Taylor, and she has never forgotten the compliment. Even her false teeth have a pleasing whiteness

‘Agnes’s neighbours have let themselves go in ways she finds depressing and physically upsetting’

and regularity, like those sported by Hollywood stars. She brushes them with a little bleach every so often to keep the enamel from yellowing. She dresses tastefully and won’t go out until she has put her ‘war paint’ on.

Her youngest child Shuggie loves to watch her as she prepares herself to face a world that is blind to the qualities he sees in her. He is radiantly happy when she stops drinking and finds herself a job, earning money that she doesn’t spend on booze.

Agnes attends AA meetings in a respectable part of Glasgow, in the company of a ‘better class of alcoholics’. She falls for a decent man at last, the red-haired Eugene, who treats her as a gentleman should treat a lady. That the relationship eventually collapses is due in part to Eugene’s politeness and solicitude.

His quiet insistence and misplaced confidence that she can have a small glass of wine with her dinner ensure what the reader is dreading will happen – as, alas, it does, with harrowing results.

The novel does justice to everything it lights upon, from the long-standing religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, to the quick cunning that’s necessary for survival among the dispossessed, to the endless inventiveness of the language of the city’s streets. Chapter 17 alone contains comic writing of a Dickensian darkness. There’s a heartbreaking sequence in which the deaths of Wullie and Lizzie are related.

The near-farcical and the bleakly tragic are matched perfectly throughout. Leek is an enchanting creature, but most of the men here are a sorry lot, in thrall to their genitals. Ultimately, it is Agnes who prevails – a bejewelled, war-painted, maddening Mother Courage, killing herself by degrees. She survives into her fifties, when her queer baby boy is on the verge of manhood, ready at last to realise his unrecognised desires and enjoy the life ahead of him. He had a ‘good year once’ with the mother whose fortitude Douglas Stuart celebrates in his triumphant debut.

Shuggie Bain, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is published by Picador (448pp, £14.99)