The Oldie February 2022 issue 409

BARRY HUMPHRIES ON HOLLYWOOD WOMEN PETER YORK

THE SLOANE RANGER TURNS 40

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen February 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 409

Burton, Taylor and me My megastar student play – David Wood Kingsley Amis at 100 – Roger Lewis The mummy returns – Eleanor Doughty on Tutankhamun I found a Roman temple – Michael Keulemans

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Kingsley the King page 20

Features 13 Keith Chegwin, TV’s real Mr Nice Guy Esther Chilton 14 Burton and Taylor go to Oxford David Wood 19 The Queen’s divine right to rule Reverend Peter Mullen 20 Kingsley Amis’s centenary Roger Lewis 23 Don’t give me any more presents! Caroline Flint 24 The Sloane turns 40 Peter York 26 I found a Roman temple Michael Keulemans 30 My Hollywood women Barry Humphries 32 The golden age of car accessories Chris Mitchell 36 The lovely Duchess of Argyll Lady Colin Campbell 44 Jeremy Lewis Prize: the winner

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was mesmerism? Deborah Nash

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Peter York on the Sloane Age page 24

12 Modern Life: What is the metaverse? Richard Godwin 28 Small World Jem Clarke 34 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 35 Country Mouse Giles Wood 38 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 39 School Days Sophia Waugh 39 Quite Interesting Things about ... February John Lloyd 40 God Sister Teresa 40 Memorial Service: Eric McGraw James Hughes-Onslow 41 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 42 Readers’ Letters 44 I Once Met… Elizabeth David Ann Morrow 58 History David Horspool 59 Media Matters Stephen Glover 61 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 61 Rant: Tea cosies Edward McParland 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

My mother-in-law, the Duchess page 36

Books 47 What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, From Someone Who Knows, by Wendy Mitchell Frances Wilson 49 Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, by Sofi Thanhauser Nicola Shulman 51 Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom, by Ramachandra Guha Nikhil Krishnan 51 Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb, by Eric G Wilson Hamish Robinson 53 White Debt, by Thomas Harding Nic Liney 55 The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World,

by Edward Shawcross David Gelber 57 Free Love, by Tessa Hadley Jane O’Grady

Travel 80 Earl who found King Tut Eleanor Doughty 82 Benton End revisited Harry Mount 85 Letter from America Daniel Koch 86 On the Road: Willard White Louise Flind Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If you have any queries, please email help@ subscribe.theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions, Rockwood House, 9-16 Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH

89 Taking a Walk: Snettisham, Norfolk Patrick Barkham

Arts 62 Film: The 400 Blows Harry Mount 63 Theatre: Habeas Corpus William Cook 63 Radio Valerie Grove 64 Television Frances Wilson 69 Music Richard Osborne 66 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 67 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 69 Gardening David Wheeler 69 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 70 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 70 Restaurants James Pembroke 71 Drink Bill Knott 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 76 Getting Dressed Brigid Keenan 79 Bird of the Month: Coal Tit John McEwen

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The Oldie February 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes think he has the world’s greatest voice…

HULTON DEUTSCH / GETTY

Dolly: singer and novelist

Move over, Dickens and Tolstoy! Dolly Parton is publishing her first novel.

The great country singer has written Run Rose Run, out on 7th March, with the mega-selling American novelist James Patterson.

Rose is ‘a star on the rise, singing about the hard life behind her. She’s also on the run. Find a future, lost a past.

Nashville is where she’s come to claim her destiny… Run Rose Run is a novel glittering with danger and desire.’

What energy Dolly, who’s 76 on 19th January, has. She’s also releasing an album of the same name – Run Rose Run – with 12 original songs she was inspired by the book to write and record. Tracks include Firecracker and Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.

What an inspirational idea – for writers to record albums inspired by their books. Still, it’s hard to think of writers with exceptional musical talents like Dolly – though surely Jeffrey Archer must

As the last issue of The Oldie reported, the new film Operation Mincemeat tells the tale of the great 1943 British intelligence coup – when the body of a Welsh tramp was dumped off the Spanish coast, with false Allied invasion plans in his pocket.

‘Wallet litter’ was placed in the tramp’s wallet – items such as his girlfriend’s picture – to make him look convincing. Now Oldie-reader David Shacklock has sent in his ‘pocket litter’ – the items he found in an old tweed jacket before

it was downgraded to gardening status.

Here is the list of what he found in the jacket’s pockets: angle bracket with one-and-ahalf-inch screw; hearing-aid battery; remainder of packet of Polo mints; packet of vine eyes; picture-hook nail; two lengths of garden-plant tie (rubberised); length of garden-plant tie (plasticised); shaped wire-holder for loo roll; packet of staples; length of coarse string; length of twine; uneaten Cafe Crisp; metal washer; 5p coin; 1p coin; wiring screw eye for brick wall; Zebra biro; ‘Xtra strong’ tote bag; cable tie; clothes peg; drawing pin.

Among this month’s contributors David Wood (p14) played Johnny in Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968). He was in Aces High (1976). He set up the Whirligig Theatre and wrote The Gingerbread Man (1976).

Rev Peter Mullen (p19) is the former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. He is Chaplain to the Honourable Company of Air Pilots and the London Stock Exchange.

Have any other readers managed to squeeze so much pocket litter into a single item of clothing?

January 5th was the 120th anniversary of the birth of poet and novelist Stella Gibbons (1902-89).

It is also 90 years since the publication of her first and best-known novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

Oldie contributor Mark Bryant met her in 1983 at one of her monthly tea parties in her mock-Tudor house on the Holly Lodge estate, north London. She smoked an occasional cigarette and complained of a rheumatic thumb, which she said made reading paperbacks difficult as she was unable to hold them open.

Sherry and snacks were served. Stella asked Mark to open two bottles of white wine, remarking, ‘My two vices are the Wine Society and having my tea cloths laundered.’ She added that the greatest

Lady Colin Campbell (p36) is better known as ‘Lady C’. She is the author of Meghan and Harry: The Real Story and The Real Diana. She was in the 2015 series of I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here.

Peter York (p24) wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr in 1982. He co-founded the management consultancy SRU. He is the author of Dictators’ Homes (2005).

Warm comfort: Stella Gibbons (1902-89) The Oldie February 2022 5

also suggested to the police at the height of the Yorkshire Ripper case that they might want to question a lorry driver called Peter Sutcliffe.

Important stories you may have missed Ploughing and hedging society makes plans for next year Glamorgan Star Hens to be fed maggots Times Chase the pudding event will go ahead this weekend Dorset Echo

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6 The Oldie February 2022

‘Hey! This is really affecting my mental health’

inventions of modern times were Tide washing powder and paper napkins. An avid admirer of Noël Coward (her ‘greatest treasure’ was a personally inscribed collection of his plays), she was reading the complete works of Shakespeare in bed.

A Winter’s Tale was her favourite so far.

At another tea party, Mark mentioned to her that he was editing a charity anthology about wildlife. She immediately copied out for him her poem The Giraffes – originally published in T S Eliot’s magazine The Criterion and much admired by Virginia Woolf.

Mark also helped maintain her rather wild garden.

‘I was always rather relieved that I did not discover “something nasty in the woodshed”,’ he remembers, echoing Cold Comfort Farm.

‘She gave me a cutting from a peace rose. More than three decades later, that cutting is now a bush in my own garden and every year the beautiful flowers remind me of a very kind, generous and muchmissed friend.’

Stories of cancel culture have become so depressingly frequent that it is cheering to hear of an oldie bucking the trend.

Jim Murray, a former Fleet Street tabloid crime hack, has for the past 20 years made a living by publishing his annual Whisky Bible, which does for whisky what Hugh

Johnson’s wine guides used to do for clarets and burgundies.

Last year, Murray fell foul of the #MeToo brigade for comparing, amid his thousands of tasting notes, a handful of whiskies to beautiful women.

All hell broke loose in America and here. Some of the big distillers sent him to Coventry, bookshop chains refused to take his book and Murray faced financial ruin.

Undaunted, he has produced his 2022 Bible in his normal jaunty style, with just as many pages as ever, complete with a defiant foreword attacking the joyless puritans who tried to silence him. Murray’s readers have sent him a blizzard of supportive messages.

As far as the Twitterati are concerned, Northamptonbased Jim is as unfazed as you might expect from a man who in his newspaper career had East End gangsters cracking their knuckles at his door. Jim

Ellen Jovin, grammar queen

The Old Un has found a new pin-up – in New York.

Ellen Jovin is a blonde, blue-eyed grammar teacher with a folding table, a few dictionaries and some foreign language books.

She sits for an hour or so at New York park entrances – and answers grammatical questions. The most frequently asked one concerns the Oxford comma.

Ellen has studied 25 languages besides English. In 1999, with her husband, Brandt Johnson, she started Syntaxis, a communication-skills training firm. Her book, Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian, will come out in the summer in America and Britain.

After she’d posted her sign to set up shop, it took less

‘We’re just not right for each other. I mean, I’m right, but you’re not’

than a minute to receive her first question. People don’t seem too self-conscious to speak to her. She doesn’t restrict the conversation to grammar. You can say whatever you like – as long as you learn to say it correctly.

Barry Fantoni, 81, the cartoonist and Oldie contributor, has compiled a poetry anthology, Poems You May Have Missed.

In 1963, Barry joined Private Eye, where he created the heroically bad poet E J Thribb.

Thribb sadly doesn’t appear in the anthology.

Fantoni put it together after Edith Gryce, editor of the Toronto Poetry Forum, died in 2016. Her companion Dorothy Bellingham was going through an old filing cabinet when she found an unmarked folder with over 100 poems. Some were typed. Others were scribbled on scraps of paper and cigarette packets.

Remembering that Edith spoke warmly of meeting Barry at a poetry festival, Dorothy sent him the poems.

And now he has put together his favourites in the book.

You’ll find, among others, Betjeman, T S Eliot, Horace, Kipling, Larkin and Yeats.

Some of the poems, Barry says, ‘appeared to be little short of outright parodies’, written by an unknown hand.

‘I set aside the matter of authenticity when choosing the poems in this collection and hope you will do the same,’ he adds.

So there’s an extra pleasure when you turn each page of Poems You May Have Missed – is this the real thing or not?

Fantoni: EJ Thribb’s creator

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Howzat! Jim Laker took 19 Test wickets in one match

The great Surrey and England cricketer Jim Laker (1922-86) would have made his century on 9th February 2022.

Laker is best remembered today for his still-unequalled feat of taking 19 Australian wickets in the Old Trafford Test match in 1956. A phlegmatic character, at the end of the match he simply took his sweater from the umpire, slung it over his shoulder and trudged off the field, his face deadpan.

Laker then got in his ancient Morris Minor and drove himself back to his home in London, stopping on the way at a pub where the locals were crowded round the television set, watching the highlights from Old Trafford.

No one recognised him.

A few years later, the recently retired Laker published an autobiography called Over to Me. The cricket authorities of the day were outraged by the book, which among other things dared to criticise the popular England captain Peter May. Surrey promptly withdrew Laker’s honorary membership of their club. That meant he was obliged to line up and pay his half-a-crown admission fee at the turnstiles if he fancied returning to any of their grounds.

Happily, several years later, the fuss blew over. Laker went on to a second career as a BBC television commentator, where his pronouncements, carefully rationed, were widely regarded as gospel. He died in 1986, aged just 64.

Shredded duck with hoisin sauce, pomegranate and spring onion on ciabatta

Oldie readers may generally think of distance in miles but Whitehall, brooding on Brexit, is still itching to go metrical.

Officials take quiet satisfaction from getting ministers to say the k word (kilometre) at the Commons dispatch box. In the informal competition among departments, transport and planning are the prime performers, but there was a crafty effort recently by the Ministry of Defence.

It briefed defence correspondents on the Royal Navy’s new Sky Sabre missiles

‘I’ve been noticing some changes in their migration patterns’

and issued statistics about their range versus that of rival missiles. These were stated in kilometres. The Times duly trotted out the MOD’s figures.

The Daily Telegraph converted them into miles.

Navy old-timers will be above all this. Rather than dirty their hands with ‘m’ or ‘km’, they prefer cables, fathoms, knots, leagues, nautical miles and the toise, which is surely overdue a comeback.

Many congratulations to Oldie-reader Ella Stein, who turned 106 on 2nd January 2022.

Born in London in 1916, she is still a keen pianist, playing Chopin, Beethoven and Mozart. Sadly she lost her husband, a doctor, at a young age when they were living in Czechoslovakia. She worked as a welfare officer for the British Army and later for the United States Air Force in Labrador, where she met Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra. She still lives in Canada.

The question is – are you our oldest reader, Ella? Are there any older oldies reading this issue?

The Oldie February 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

I’ve given up telly – except for one show

The news and Succession are too unpleasant. Give me Bargain Hunt When my mother was in her midnineties and on her way out, the one delight in her life was watching – and rewatching – The Sound of Music.

She would sit quite close to her TV screen, nodding happily as Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp children strutted and warbled their stuff across the Salzburg hills for the umpteenth time. In her final year, my mother must have seen that film a thousand times.

I am a little alarmed to report that something similar is happening to me. I am hooked on a daytime TV show called Bargain Hunt. Do you know it? It’s been going since 2000, though I discovered it only during lockdown. The premise is simple: two teams of two people (the Reds and the Blues) have an hour at an antiques fair and a budget of £300. Each team is challenged to buy three items which they later sell at auction – hopefully for a profit, more often at a loss.

Why do I love it so? It’s 45 minutes of positivity, featuring everyday British people of every type and hue, assisted by a diverse array of antiques experts who know their stuff but don’t take themselves seriously.

It’s hosted by a series of mildly eccentric but superbly professional and unfailingly jolly presenters who all have day jobs as real-life auctioneers.

I like these experts so much that I have reached out to some of them via Twitter, and three of them – David Harper, Charles Hanson and Charlie Ross – have now become proper friends.

My wife and I no longer watch the news on TV – not ever. It’s repetitious and depressing. There’s been trouble in the Middle East since Biblical times.

Prime Ministers have been on the ropes since before those stories started about Gladstone and his fallen women.

Pandemics have been an on-off plague for centuries. Climate change has been playing merry hell with the environment since the Ice Age. We don’t need a nightly

Reds don’t give me the blues: the red team on Bargain Hunt

dose of despair. When I turn on the telly, I want a lift. That’s why I abandoned Succession. I can see it’s well done, but it’s a struggle to keep up with the dialogue without subtitles, the bad language is relentless and the characters in the story are all irredeemably unpleasant. Who needs that? I don’t.

The only TV programme my wife and I now choose to watch – truly, the only programme – is Bargain Hunt. There are 60 series and coming up for 1,900 past episodes in the archive. Even if we live to be as old as my mother, Bargain Hunt will see us out.

Bargain Hunt is the only TV programme I watch. I do catch other TV programmes through being on them. Thanks to appearing on Celebrity Gogglebox, I get a smorgasbord of all that’s on offer on the box and I’m a regular on ITV’s This Morning, which I love because, like Bargain Hunt, it has a positive vibe.

It also has a friendly green room where I get to meet whoever happens to be hot at the minute, whether it’s the winner of Strictly Come Dancing or Brian Cox, the star of Succession. I feel I’m in the swim without having to get wet.

I appear on a lot of TV quiz shows. I have won Pointless Celebrities three times – each time paired with a ‘celebrity’ of whom I hadn’t heard and who didn’t know who I was either. My most recent Pointless partner was Baga Chipz, 32, a star of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a sharp cookie and now a good friend.

Recording that episode, I met up with Robin Askwith, 71, the actor best remembered for his near-naked appearances in the saucy Confessions of… sex comedies back in the 1970s.

Robin started out with ambitions to work in serious cinema, and when he found himself appearing in panto one year with Ian Botham, he wailed inwardly, ‘Has it come to this?’

The great director Lindsay Anderson, who had once been his mentor and cast him in two of his films (if… and Britannia Hospital), came to the panto and told Robin afterwards, ‘It was wonderful – pure Brecht.’ Robin said to me, ‘I have no idea what he meant, but it transformed how I felt completely.’

Valentine’s Day is coming. Will you be sending your best beloved a card or a well-phrased love note? Or even a poem by you that they have inspired? Talking to a group of young people about love letters a while ago, I didn’t get very far.

One of the youngsters thought a love letter was a kind of contraceptive – a French letter post-Brexit. None had ever sent or received a real love letter.

‘How do you let someone know you feel about them?’ I asked. ‘Text them an emoji of a smiley face,’ suggested one young Juliet. ‘And if you really fancy them?’ ‘A smiley face with the tongue hanging out,’ said young Romeo.

Mercutio chipped in: ‘If you really, really fancy them, it’s got to be an aubergine. Everyone knows that.’

Gyles’s memoir, Odd Boy Out, is published by Michael Joseph The Oldie February 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Writer’s block? I’ve got reader’s block

Computers have destroyed my attention span – and my love of books matthew norman In the vexing matter of the New Year and the laval eruption of fresh optimism that supposedly comes with it, I cleave like a barnacle to the guidance of the late Enver Hoxha.

Addressing his people at the dawn of 1967, the Albanian dictator underscored a hard-won reputation for wanton cheeriness. He said, ‘This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand,’ continued Marxist-Leninism’s very own Mrs Mopp, ‘it will be easier than next year.’

If only as an antidote to the ‘boosterish’ inanities of our own beloved leader, Hoxha’s aperçu cannot be quoted too often.

There will, however, be those who disdain that analysis, or affect to do so in flight from the seasonal blues that afflict the God-fearing at this calendrical point even in times far less bleak than these.

There will even be those, though the tradition appears thankfully close to extinction, who have made New Year’s resolutions. God bless them, every one.

If they choose to sign a health-club contract, paying £650 for the 27 minutes on a rowing machine they will somehow concertina into the 12 months ahead, they deserve nothing but credit.

Personally, I have neither the funds nor the requisite powers of self-delusion for that. The lesson of a treadmill bought in a moment of deranged optimism, and officially reassigned the duties of a coat rack within a week, is a tough one to unlearn.

Yet somewhere in the remote wastelands of the mind, there lingers an echo, ineffably faint but just about audible, of that urge for improvement.

To this end, I am welcoming 2022 by adorning the bedside table with five neatly stacked piles of books.

Represented among the 25 volumes are novels by Gogol, John Grisham, Ayn Rand, Sebastian Faulks, Turgenev, 10 The Oldie February 2022

Robert Harris and Margaret Atwood.

The poetry section runs the impressive alphabetic gamut all the way from Angelou (Maya) to Ayres (Pamela).

By way of the medical, meanwhile, there is a newly purchased tome on cognitive behaviour therapy, and a much older one entitled Living With Angina (a curiosity in the absence of any such diagnosis, perhaps, but no doubt a riveting page-turner for all that).

In the faith that the above has already established an enviably eclectic literary taste, I will conclude the catalogue there.

But I do feel honour bound to add this: however dazzlingly quixotic the array of bedside books, one minuscule barrier remains to be hurdled.

I cannot read.

By this, I stake no claim to illiteracy.

Technically – and here I assume that you are much the same; if not, quite frankly, you’re wasting your money on this publication – I can look at letters and discern from them not only words, but also, more often than not, what those words mean.

What I am incapable of doing is reading a book. I am a chronic and perpetual victim of reader’s block.

How this came to be, in the light of my passion for books in bygone days, is a matter of zero interest to you, and little more than that to me.

Is it that the countless thousands of

‘You’re not just a number here. You’re a number who hasn’t been fired yet’

hours spent reading on a computer have played merry hell with the synaptic pathways (whatever they might be)? Is it the fracturing of the concentration span by the instant-gratification culture of the era? Or is denying myself one of the greatest joys available to humanity a kind of self-punishment; some manifestation of impeccably justified self-loathing?

There may be another contributory factor, and that is the rise of the audiobook. Reader’s block, even in as gruesome a case as this, cannot extend to the spoken word.

Even publishers appear to appreciate this. A friend, the comedian and writer Mark Steel, has written an account of how he, adopted at a week old by a working-class couple in Kent, finally traced his biological parents half a century later.

In Who Do I Think I Am?, he relates how he discovered that he, a livid teenage Trotskyist and dedicated foe of vulture capitalism, had been sired by a certain Joe Dwek, a Jewish refugee of post-Suez Cairo who spent the 1960s and ’70s in Mayfair, fleecing Jimmy Goldsmith, Tiny Rowland and others of that charming asset-stripping ilk at a game, backgammon, of which he became world champion.

It is a truly extraordinary story, exquisitely told (and narrated), and it is in no good bookshop near you because it is available solely in audio form. This is a travesty for which I thank the good Lord above. Were it available in printed form, there would now be 26 books beside the bed, each bearing an approximately 0.00 per cent chance of being read this side of 2023. Or, come to that, Doomsday.

Nothing changes, as U2 taught us back in the 1980s, on New Year’s Day. Or as Enver Hoxha so nearly put it, this year is going to be another right old bastard, and you needn’t be a voracious reader of anything to know that.

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The TheOldie OldieOctober Month 2016 11

what was mesmerism?

Mesmerism was a popular pseudoscience of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It was named after its originator, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), a Vienna-trained German doctor. He developed the theory that all living things and inanimate objects possess an invisible energy or ‘vital’ force that flows through numerous channels in the body.

Mesmer argued that when someone’s ‘flow’ was blocked, illness ensued. Good health could be restored by an animal magnetiser or mesmerist. This person would use eye contact to induce a trance, combined with touch (such as hand strokes), to provoke a convulsion or crisis that would unblock and therefore heal the patient.

Mesmerism gained a significant following in Europe, particularly in Paris, where Anton Mesmer settled in 1778. As his patient numbers increased, he conducted group sessions with an eccentric array of equipment, including a mattress-lined ‘crisis room’ for violent convulsions, and several tubs filled with iron filings and mesmerised water.

The doctor often ended his sessions by performing on a glass harmonica, an instrument also played by Benjamin Franklin, who later sat on the scientific commission in Paris to investigate the existence of Mesmer’s magnetic fluid.

The commission concluded that there

what is the metaverse?

The metaverse is a bit like the internet but in 3D. Like a massive computer game, it spills over into real life. It is where we will spend a good deal of time in the future, if Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, gets his way.

Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for the metaverse at a massive launch event in October. Facebook will henceforth be known as Meta.

There were some confusing graphics 12 The Oldie February 2022

‘Her mind governs the world’: Annie De Montford (1836-82)

was no evidence to support the theory.

It wasn’t long before mesmerism moved out of the medical domain and into the music hall as a form of hypnotism, illustrating the fine line that existed between medicine and quackery, science and superstition.

Even in Mesmer’s own life, medical practice and entertainment were entwined. Earlier in his career, he befriended a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who later lampooned Mesmer’s profession in Così fan tutte (1790). In the first act, Despina the maid is disguised as a doctor who conducts magnetic therapy to cure two fake Albanians, a turning point in the plot.

In England, mesmerism became popular through the reputation of practitioners such as Jules Denis Dupotet (1796-1881) a Frenchman who treated epileptic girls at the North London Hospital between 1837 and 1845.

Meanwhile, the daughter of a Leicester mill worker changed her name to Annie De Montford (pictured) and toured the music halls of England. Billed as one of the wonders of the age, she performed mesmerist seances on the stage between 1872 and 1882. ‘Her mind governs the world’ proclaimed the posters at the height of her fame.

During the 1830s, mesmerism crossed the Atlantic to the United States, where it held particular fascination for horror writer Edgar Allan Poe. Poe saw potential in the eerie drama of the remedy, and in 1845 published The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar.

In this tale, the narrator conducts an experiment to test the powers of mesmerism on his dying friend, M Valdemar, by placing him in a trance and postponing his death – although not preventing it.

In one of the chillest endings in horror fiction, the patient fails to wake beneath the mesmerist’s hands and instead melts away into a ‘nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable – putridity’.

The story was believed by many to be a true account of a treatment gone horribly wrong.

Although Anton Mesmer’s theories could not be proved and were later discredited, they helped focus attention on the part played by the mind in the healing of bodily disease. So they were a precursor to hypnosis therapy, and shared similarities with the Chinese martial art qi gong.

Deborah Nash

of fish swimming in a forest. There was a digital cartoon of Zuckerberg dressed in a spacesuit in his virtual home. There was a cameo from former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (now Facebook’s £2.7-million-a-year vice president of Global Affairs). He popped up to ask Zuck a few vague privacy questions.

The overall idea is to use virtualreality (VR) technology, as developed by the Facebook subsidiary Oculus Rift, to reimagine the internet as a series of spaces you can walk (or float?) around – as opposed to a series of sites you click around.

Zuckerberg said he wanted to create ‘the feeling that you’re really there with another person or in another place’. He later elaborated: ‘Instead of just viewing content, you are in it.’

According to reports, he basically wants us all strapped into his metaverse, all the time. He believes that connecting people is just a good thing in itself. Which reminds me of Flaubert’s objection to the railways – which he thought would simply allow stupid people to go and be stupid in other places.

If all of this seemed a little bit

not-quite-ready-yet, that’s because it isn’t. The launch was widely seen as an effort to distract investors’ attention from the deep doo-doo in which Facebook – sorry, Meta – is currently sitting.

Initially conceived as a way to optimise the objectification of female Harvard students, Zuckerberg’s company has, since 2004, grown into the world’s largest social network. It has around three billion users and has swallowed the likes of Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Rift.

But its near-unfathomable size and power mean Facebook is increasingly distrusted by users and legislators.

Facebook currently stands accused of everything from breaching antitrust laws to spreading anti-vaxxing propaganda, encouraging teenagers to kill themselves and auto-generating pages for white-supremacy groups.

Zuckerberg didn’t come up with the metaverse. The term originates in Neil Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian novel,

‘You cleared all hurdles to becoming junior partner, Murtaugh, but you failed the swimsuit competition’

Snow Crash. Stephenson’s metaverse consists of a single 41,000-mile-long street, circumscribing a black, spherical planet, owned and operated by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group.

Apparently, Facebook engineers revere the novel unironically.

Epic Games, the giant behind the online computer game Fortnite, already describe their world as a metaverse. Cryptocurrency investors see the metaverse as crucial to the

dream of a decentralised digital domain.

I wonder how many of us will want to follow Zuckerberg into his virtual world, given the mess he has made in the actual one. Imagine a Facebook friends’ group, rendered as a quasi-physical environment. Imagine not only your clicks but your every move harvested as a data point.

It sounds like hell. I hope Nick Clegg is comfortable there.

Richard Godwin

Cheggers, TV’s real Mr Nice Guy Keith Chegwin, affectionately known as Cheggers, was a big part of my childhood – growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I could be found glued to Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, starring both him and Noel Edmonds, and Cheggers Plays Pop. He would have turned 65 on 17th January 2022. When he died, on 11th December 2017, aged only 60, I felt a tug of sadness.

I thought back to when I first met him, in 1988. Well, I actually sat inside his house a while before I met him.

My boyfriend at the time (I was 17) lived just round the corner from Keith and knew him and his daughter’s nanny, Maria (whom he went on to marry some years later) well. Keith had even taken him in to Going Live!, the Saturday-morning show he was appearing in at the time with Phillip Schofield, and he’d had a scene in that.

He couldn’t wait for me to meet Keith too and gushed about what a funny, kind man he was.

Of course, the time we went round (it hadn’t exactly been arranged), Keith wasn’t there. But Maria made us welcome and we sat and chatted to her.

Admittedly, I was disappointed not to meet one of my childhood television heroes, and wondered if I would actually ever get to meet him.

When I did, it was unexpected. We

Brown Sauce, the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop band: Keith Chegwin, Maggie Philbin and Noel Edmonds. John Craven at the wheel (1981)

were walking down Newbury High Street and there he was. He stuck out his hand in greeting. I went to take his, but before I did he whipped his hand away, stuck his thumb on his nose and wiggled his fingers, cheekily saying, ‘Naa-na-nanaa-nah!’

I could feel my face heating up, my hand still in mid-air. I didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Ever the professional, Keith clearly saw my discomfort and apologised. He let out a giggle, and I felt myself joining in.

‘I just can’t help myself,’ he said. ‘It’s a curse!’

He swiftly changed the subject and asked me questions about me, taking an interest in what I had to say. He knew just how to put people at ease. By the time we parted, I’d almost forgotten our initial greeting.

I met Keith several times after that. Each time, he made me smile and laugh. He’s been described by many as a ‘television legend’. He certainly was – but Keith was more than that: he was one of the most genuine people you could ever meet.

Esther Chilton The Oldie February 2022 13

Aged 21, David Wood was in a student play with two megastars – and got to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world

Burton and Taylor go to Oxford

I

n 1965, when I was in my final year at Oxford, reading English, news came through that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were coming to town. They were going to appear in an Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Burton would play Faustus. Taylor would play the nonspeaking role of Helen of Troy.

The play would be directed by Professor Nevill Coghill, the Oxford don who had been Burton’s tutor during the war years, when he was at Exeter College.

In November, a postcard arrived in my college pigeonhole, from Coghill, asking me to play Wagner.

On 1st February 1966, Burton and Taylor rolled into Oxford, literally, in their splendid green Rolls-Royce, driven

by Gaston Sanz, their loyal chauffeur and bodyguard.

We all trooped off to the ballroom of Oxford’s most famous hotel, the Randolph, and performed a runthrough of the play. The Burtons watched with concentration and no hint of condescension.

I had the chance of exchanging a few words with Elizabeth, and was immediately hypnotised by her warm smile and friendliness. She joked that she knew every line of her non-speaking role. Burton told us that he knew his part, but not as well as he thought he did. He said that when working through them, a lot of Marlowe’s lines had started coming out as Burton’s lines!

14 The Oldie February 2022

The film poster for Dr Faustus (1967)

When rehearsals started the next day, it became clear that Burton had indeed done his homework. Although he used a script, he used it more for writing notes than as an aidemémoire. At first he spoke quietly and unemphatically, but his characteristically melodic tones were excitingly apparent.

Burton’s calm concentration involved a lot of smoking. Whenever he felt the need to light up, he placed a hand over his shoulder, whereupon the trusty Gaston would approach, place a

cigarette between his outstretched fingers, then light it from behind.

Coghill, then aged 66, directed Burton quietly yet enthusiastically. Burton rarely questioned his blocking or interpretation.

He was quoted as saying, ‘He is as near to a saint as any man I know.’ A few amendments were insisted upon.

No actor was allowed to get too close to him. Perhaps he knew he needed a magic circle of space around him to portray his power.

After rehearsal, we sometimes accompanied Burton to the Apollo pub across the road. He seemed very relaxed over a pint of bitter. It must have been a relief that there were no paparazzi clicking away, and that the pub regulars took little or no notice of him.

He took no chances, however. Gaston came too, and never kept his eyes off him, even escorting him to the Gents. Gaston paid for our drinks. We had already noticed that Burton, like royalty, never carried anything in the pockets of his camel jacket. Gaston looked after the cash and the cigarettes.

At one point, a photographer came in and was granted a shot, but Burton, clearly from experience, made quite sure that he was surrounded by undergraduates, both male and female, in such a way that the photo couldn’t be cropped to imply he was privately entertaining one young lady.

Later that week, Elizabeth came to rehearsal. Afterwards, she came to the pub with Richard and a group of us.

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

Left: Burton and Taylor at Merton College with Nevill Coghill (right) Above: Burton at the Apollo pub, Oxford Below: Burton, Taylor and (behind her) Coghill at the Dr Faustus press conference. David Wood (left) smokes

Simply dressed in black slacks and jumper, wearing the minimum of make-up, she chatted to us in a happy and relaxed way. I found myself sitting at her feet. She noticed that I was wearing an old sweater, with my elbows poking out from frayed holes. A typical student sweater. I suppose I thought it was arty.

‘You can’t go around like that!’ laughed Elizabeth. ‘Richard’s got lots of sweaters. I’ll bring you one.’

The next day she brought me two, one beige and one a burgundy colour. One even had ‘Beverly Hills’ on the label. It

was a very kind gesture. I don’t think I ever wore them, but maybe it is significant that I still have them, souvenirs of an unforgettable encounter.

I remember one afternoon going to collect Sheila Dawson – my girlfriend, understudying Elizabeth Taylor and playing one of the dancers – from the Burtons’ suite at the Randolph. Girlish giggles greeted me. I discovered Sheila and Elizabeth like excited schoolgirls, kneeling at a dressing table. Elizabeth was handing Sheila priceless jewels to try on. A necklace; some earrings.

Elizabeth wasn’t showing off her possessions – rather enjoying the fun of a dressing-up game.

The Burtons had, in those few days, taken over our lives. It was a uniquely special time, yet Richard and Elizabeth had somehow made our participation in their rarefied world both natural and enjoyable. I wrote a card to my mother and stepfather: ‘The excitement continues – they both are very charming and sweet – very relaxed and natural – and she is very intelligent, I think – Sheila has rehearsed the Helen scene with him several times!! D.’ I was clearly bewitched!

Six days before opening night, we were all asked to attend the press conference, which took place on the Playhouse stage.

Sitting at a table in the centre of the stage sat Burton and Taylor. They were quite casually dressed, he in a lightcoloured cardigan, she in black slacks and a fur wrap.

Richard graciously acknowledged Coghill. ‘I thought since Professor Coghill started me off,’ he said, ‘I should finish him off.’

He said that, in a few years’ time, he would like to play Lear, once he had gained a bit more weight. Elizabeth, who had so far said very little, leaned towards Richard and whispered in his ear. Richard reported that she had offered him some of her weight. They had only recently finished filming Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Elizabeth had, for artistic reasons, put on extra pounds.

Elizabeth maintained a jokey attitude, saying that, as Helen, ‘All I do is kiss Richard and move around.’

The Oldie February 2022 15

TRINITY MIRROR / MIRRORPIX / ALAMY

She said she thought she should appear masked from head to foot, because it wasn’t easy to show a face that would launch a thousand ships. Her determination not to take herself too seriously was appealing and diplomatic.

Maria Aitken, who played the Good Angel, watched Burton and Taylor from the wings. She later said, ‘At the dress rehearsal, I can honestly say that when they kissed it was the single most electrifying moment I have ever seen in well over half a century of theatregoing.’

Opening night was on 14th February, St Valentine’s Day. The audience did truly gasp when they saw Elizabeth. Jenny Moss, who played Lechery, wrote to me: ‘I learned that the secret of Elizabeth Taylor’s glowing make-up and smooth skin was ordinary Johnson’s Baby Powder – rubbed into the skin, it gives a subtle matt sheen.’

After each performance, the Burtons would host a reception in their suite at the Randolph. Sheila and I were fortunate enough to be invited regularly. The guests included members of the Burton family and other Welsh guests, including Harry Secombe and Stanley Baker.

On one occasion, Richard regaled the guests, in his unique, unforgettable voice, with the poem Chapel Deacon

by Welsh poet R S Thomas. It has the memorable first line ‘Who put that crease in your soul, Davies?’ Also at the party was Gwydion Thomas, the poet’s son, who was in Dr Faustus, playing the 3rd Scholar.

All I remember from the week of performances was that we lived in a fantasy world, where everything revolved around the play.

Towards the end of the week, we students invited the Burtons to a celebratory meal after the show. We took them to La Cantina, a restaurant in Queen Street. It was a happy occasion, with little formality. The Burtons had become our friends.

Towards the end of the evening, Sheila didn’t feel well. Suddenly I felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to see an anxious Elizabeth. ‘Sheila’s puking in the john,’ she told me. ‘I’ve cleaned her up.’

Sheila and I were bundled into the Rolls, and driven by Gaston back to my digs in Little Clarendon Street, while Richard and Elizabeth walked back to the Randolph. A typically kind gesture.

Their generosity continued. After the final Saturday night performance, they threw a lavish party for us all. Back in the Randolph ballroom, where we had performed the run-through for them less than three weeks earlier, they entertained 16 The Oldie February 2022

Liz: the face that launched 1,000 ships

the cast and backstage team with free-flowing food and drink.

We sang a selection of our comedy songs, which seemed to go down well.

Richard and Elizabeth said nice things, then listened as we told them we were preparing a new musical revue to tour and play the Edinburgh Festival.

We found ourselves asking if the Burtons would become our patrons. Not only did they agree, but they offered to give us £250, a tidy sum, towards our running costs. It wasn’t long before we had new letterhead paper, with the words ‘WSG Productions, Patrons: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’ proudly emblazoned at the top.

Well after midnight, realising that the dream was coming to its conclusion, everyone said their fond farewells. Sheila and I approached Elizabeth.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she smiled.

At first we didn’t understand, but then realised that she was talking about the planned recording taking place next day. HMV, the famous EMI Records label, had asked to make an LP record of the production. We explained to Elizabeth that we had not been called for the next day’s session in London.

Sheila did not have a speaking role, and my few lines as Wagner were to be recorded at a later date.

‘But you must come!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘See you there!’

The next morning, having borrowed enough money for our train fares, we set

off for Oxford Station. This meant walking past my college, Worcester. I popped into the Porter’s Lodge to see if there was any post in my pigeonhole.

I found a note. It was from Morgan, the Burtons’ assistant agent. It asked me to ring him urgently at the Randolph.

‘Thank heaven I’ve found you!’ exclaimed Morgan. Elizabeth had given him instructions to offer to drive us to London. She had been most insistent, Morgan said. Not wanting to incur her displeasure, he had delayed his drive to town, determined to locate us. Sheila and I walked the short distance up Beaumont Street to the Randolph, where Morgan was waiting, with a very impressive Jaguar. As he raised the boot to drop in our modest luggage, we noticed it was lined with a deep pile of unopened Burtons’ fan mail.

Soon we were enjoying a smooth and comfortable ride to Hampstead, where we were warmly welcomed by Richard and Elizabeth and his brother Ivor and his lovely wife, Gwen, in their cosy house in Squire’s Mount, just off Hampstead Heath. The six of us enjoyed lunch and a relaxing chat before it was time to set off for the recording studio in Putney. It was in the home of the independent producer Denis Comper.

Gaston drove Richard, Elizabeth, Sheila and me in the Rolls. We rang the doorbell. Comper and his wife were staggered to find Elizabeth Taylor on their doorstep. Burton was expected, yes, but Elizabeth’s non-speaking role in the play meant they had never dreamed of her attending.

‘I’m here to make the sandwiches,’ announced Elizabeth. And she did. For several hours she entertained us in the improvised green room upstairs, while Richard and some of the student cast recorded excerpts from the play.

The climax came for me at midnight.

The next day was my 22nd birthday. As midnight struck, Elizabeth Taylor wished me many happy returns and kissed me on the lips. I glowed with pleasure, and still glow at the memory of this spontaneous gesture of affection.

It wasn’t a sensual kiss, rather a sincere acknowledgement of the friendly and warm relationship that Sheila, my fellow student actors and I had enjoyed with this very special lady and her very special husband.

It marked the culmination of a magical, unique and truly unforgettable time.

David Wood’s Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss and Other Brushes with Hollywood (The Book Guild) will be published in July

On her Platinum Jubilee, Reverend Peter Mullen salutes the sacred monarch and her Coronation, rooted in the Old Testament

The Queen’s divine right to rule

THE PRINT COLLECTOR / ALAMY

B

ring out the best wine, make merry and be thankful for Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee.

She ascended the throne on 6th February 1952 – 70 years ago.

But what are we celebrating and what is the monarchy? All the newspapers and garish series such as The Crown treat it as a soap opera, an opportunity for the lascivious enjoyment of a peep show.

They say the monarchy is the Royal Family and call it The Firm – but it isn’t.

Since the Puritans and the republicans of the 17th-century Commonwealth, there have always been scoffers and mockers who despise our monarchy.

There is a burning politics of envy, begun by the constitutional writer Walter Bagehot and perpetrated on the public ever since. This envy is based on a colossal deceit. Our hypnotised celebrity culture regards the Queen as useless, as indeed Bagehot did. He allowed a moderate importance for the monarchy, but it was only as part of what he called ‘the dignified aspect of the constitution’.

His attitude is exquisitely described by the writer C H Sisson (1914-2003): ‘So Trooping the Colour must be regarded as a leg show of guardsmen, the crown as a bauble and the Coronation itself as something for the illustrated papers. The Queen was dignified in Bagehot’s phraseology – which meant she was not much good. She was for fools to goggle at.’

This is the deceit – to claim that the Queen is only a constitutional ornament to add colour and romance, while the real business of government goes on in the counting house. But Bagehot was mistaken, as those who copy his denunciations of the monarchy today are mistaken.

Of course, the Queen does not meddle in the policies of whatever Cabinet of Ministers she is obliged to rule

over at any particular time. But then the Cabinet Minister is not hands-on in the running of his office either. His job is to secure the integrity of his department. That is why ministers resign – or used to, anyway – when their departments err gravely. The Queen secures the integrity of the nation as the Minister secures the integrity of his department.

When we salute or pray for Queen and country, we are saluting and praying for one and the same thing. The Queen embodies the nation that is beyond the latest round of trade figures, the fluctuations in the value of the pound and the comings and goings of particular Prime Ministers.

The laws of the land are the Queen’s laws, just as the language we speak is the Queen’s English. But her role is even more profound. Look at the first line of the order of service for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2nd June 1953: ‘In the morning upon the day of the Coronation early, care is to be taken that the Ampulla be filled with Oil for the anointing, and, together with the Spoon, be laid ready upon the Altar in the Abbey Church.’

This is about sacral kingship. The Coronation rite refers back to the anointing of kings in the Old Testament, to Samuel, Saul and David; and to when Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King.

Fittingly, Handel’s marvellous anthem by that name was sung at the Coronation in the Abbey. This was a holy event.

That’s why it’s extremely unlikely that the

Queen will ever abdicate – she sees her work as a religious duty.

As the Archbishop said, ‘Bless and sanctify thy chosen servant Elizabeth... Receive the Ring of kingly dignity and the seal of Catholic Faith.’

The historic English settlement means the Queen is Supreme Governor of both Church and State. She is obliged to declare herself a Christian monarch and to promise to defend the Church of England. This is why the suggestion that the next monarch should be described as ‘Defender of Faiths’ is mere moonshine and a sort of clowning. The monarch, in her person, stands for the reality of truth.

And this truth is a particular truth the truth of the Christian creeds.

Over her long life, our gracious Queen has served us; and will anyone say she has not suffered? Her service and suffering aren’t merely personal, the service and suffering of one Elizabeth Windsor – though it is that, too.

But the sacred monarchy means that she serves and suffers for the whole realm and in the whole realm: for she is the whole realm. Queen and country. One and the same. These are awesome and holy things.

As Shakespeare put it in Troilus and Cressida, ‘There is a mystery in the soul of state which hath an operation more divine than our mere chroniclers dare meddle with.’

God save the Queen and scatter her enemies! No bunch of celebs can embody our nation. This is a role only the monarch can fulfil.

Vivat Regina! Long may she reign!

Rev Peter Mullen is the former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, and St Sepulchrewithout-Newgate in the City of London The Oldie February 2022 19

Kingsley Amis was an awful chauvinist – and the funniest writer in history. Roger Lewis salutes him on his centenary

All hail the King

Hilly and Kingsley Amis with Sally, Philip and Martin Amis, Swansea, 1956

DANIEL FARSON/GETTY

I

t’s a good job that, a century after he was born, the works of Sir Kingsley Amis CBE aren’t generally in print, as they’d be hastily cancelled, with students and lecturers running a mile.

The attitudes on parade in his novels are very much, shall we say, of their time – the fifties through to the seventies – and harden in the end into a sort of caricatured Garrick Club gruffness, or a Colonel Blimpishness.

Those attitudes are nevertheless startling, even to his admirers, and were always misogynistic, chauvinistic. Take a Girl Like You, for example, published in 1960, is basically about rape, and how an arrogant male (Patrick Standish) is ‘justified’ in behaving as he behaves if 20 The Oldie February 2022

the female in question, Jenny Bunn, is beautiful and provocative – as if, underneath, despite protests, she’s asking for it.

In Amis’s world, sex, pretty much a chap’s full-time occupation, alleviates the tension caused by women – who are (according to Stanley and the Women [1984] and Difficulties with Girls [1998]) an alien band going in for superstition, religious mania, folklore, horoscopy and witchcraft, and who are generally less rational than your chaps.

Amis is also dated in that the London (or Swansea) he describes is already historical. People drink and drive with impunity and park easily. The middle classes and ordinary people such as

journalists live in big houses in nice districts. Pub landlords are disagreeable ‘characters’. Cabbies are opinionated Cockneys. Asians running corner shops are a novelty. And everyone sneers at the ‘queers’: ‘Right, on your way, brother.

Out. I’m not having you in my house. Go on, hop it… There’s nothing says I got to have one of you in here, OK? Not yet, there isn’t. Any moment now but not yet.

So out.’

The point of Amis, archaic sexual opinions aside, is that all the incidental business, the notes on human behaviour, is the funniest in the English language – not excluding Evelyn Waugh. If my copies of Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard

Jacobson have long since been dumped in the charity shop, I will always revere Amis and keep him on my shelf, for being at his best when he’s recording hardly anything at all. For example, two men sitting down for a drink: ‘ “Well, how are you today?” asked Charlie. A duff question on second thoughts.’

He never strived for his effects. Unlike in Anthony Burgess, the vocabulary is very plain. The comic genius is in the syntax – ‘The traffic going the other way was much lighter but no faster, thanks to some extensive roadworks with nobody working on them’; ‘On his way to what people probably meant by the checkout, he noticed…’; ‘He answered the question, or anyway spoke while looking at her’; ‘His shoulder grazed but did not dislodge a framed photograph on the wall showing a row of men in hats standing outside a thatched cottage in Ireland or some such place.’

It is ‘some such place’ that is perfect.

The Old Devils (1986), which justly won the Booker, remains the best (if possibly only) account of my mob, the English-speaking South Welsh. Amis brilliantly skewers the existence of well-off retirees, who loaf about all day in the vicinity of the Gower Peninsula, boozing and arthritically committing adultery.

The pretentious lunacy of the bilingual road markings prompted a classic line: ‘They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/ Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before.’ The grim Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg crowd

Amis and Larkin erected a Berlin Wall of pillows down the middle of the bed – the Welsh Language Society – still smart at that one.

Amis, an only child, was born in London a century ago, on 16th April 1922. He was educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin. No doubt academics have already investigated the influences the one had on the other, but it is rather miraculous that the country’s leading novelist and leading poet formed their alliance early.

What they had chiefly in common – apart from a mutual love of jazz and a hatred of intellectual showing-off – was an instinctive grasp that something special and ineluctable about England

Kingsley Amis with The Old Devils, which won the 1986 Booker Prize

and Englishness was disappearing: ‘More houses, more parking allowed, more caravan sites…’

Both men were at the forefront of the notion that more will mean worse, particularly in the field of higher education, where they were to be employed.

In 1949, after war service in the Royal Corps of Signals, and a desultory stab at graduate studies back in Oxford, Amis obtained a post teaching English at University College Swansea. Larkin, meanwhile, was by now a sub-librarian in Leicester. They visited each other – and Amis began writing what was to be his satire on academic life, Lucky Jim, published in 1954 to acclaim. It has even been published in Korean and Serbo-Croat.

Larkin, however, was filled with chagrin. His address, in Dixon Drive, Leicester, gave Amis his hero’s surname (Jim Dixon), and he felt a lot of his own jokes and situations had been appropriated. His girlfriend, the snaggletoothed harridan Monica Beale Jones, became the first of Amis’s monster women, Margaret Peel, with her terrible taste in clothes and overbearing manner.

It is fair to say that thereafter their friendship was mostly epistolary – for example, Amis visited Hull, where Larkin spent 30 years, only to attend Larkin’s funeral – but I know of at least one strange meeting, as told to me by Mavis Nicholson, who in her youth had been one of Amis’s students.

Amis and Larkin were invited for drinks at Mavis and Geoff Nicholson’s house, near the Old Vic, and became too drunk to get themselves home. So Mavis said she’d put them up – if they didn’t mind sharing a bed.

It amused Mavis no end to see they

erected a big Berlin Wall barrier of pillows and bolsters down the middle of the bed, and their shoes were placed on the floor in such a way as to facilitate a fast getaway, if necessary. So who wasn’t quite trusting whom?

In 1946, Amis married Hillary (Hilly) Bardwell and treated her appallingly, having affairs all over the shop, leaving her to raise the three children – one of them, of course, the future writer Martin.

From Swansea, the family moved to Peterhouse, Cambridge. There were stints in Princeton.

But Amis no longer needed to rely on academe for a living – and he rather indulged himself as a libertine, as disclosed in the 1963 offering, One Fat Englishman. The antihero/Amis persona is Roger Micheldene: ‘Roger, why are you so awful?’ ‘Yes, I used to ask myself that quite a lot. Not so much of late, however.’

Amis and Hilly divorced in 1965.

And aren’t the novels always about this? Patrick Standish is a monster, carrying on much as Amis did, with his roving eye. This became an Amis theme – the temperament of the shit. He was fascinated by how awful people can be and get away with it, the charm switched on and off. For instance, Ronnie Appleyard in I Want It Now, Sir Roy Vandervane in Girl, 20 (a perfect role for Peter Sellers), right up to Alun Weaver in The Old Devils.

Interestingly, with Jake’s Thing and The Alteration, the subject became that of impotence – the waning of lust in middle age. Alcoholism was the cause.

As Zachary Leader demonstrated in his huge biography, all of this had parallels in Amis’s own life during his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, which ended in 1983.

In a rather comical arrangement, Amis went to live in the basement flat of a Primrose Hill house occupied by Hilly and her latest husband, who happened to be Lord Kilmarnock. The Kilmarnocks became Amis’s servants, having pickled-onion sandwiches ready for when he returned, blind drunk, every afternoon from the Garrick.

Barry Humphries and I were nearly crushed to death when Amis fell down the Garrick stairs.

It was only when he’d more or less lost Hilly that he realised her importance to him – the novel You Can’t Do Both (1994) poignantly explores the ramifications of either settling for one partner or settling instead for being a lonely has-been rake. Amis died of a stroke in 1995, aged 73, the oncehandsome man hugely bloated by cortisone and single malt.

The Oldie February 2022 21

Caroline Flint doesn’t want flowers, chocolates or endless packaging.

Conversation – in the flesh or online – is a much bigger treat

Birthday presents? I’d prefer your presence

I

n our family at the moment, life is quite hard.

My beloved husband is ill – slowly dying. He has led a good life and is very old but, I am not really ready to lose him. I still enjoy his company and his wit. We chat and debate (and argue) after 57 years of happy marriage – so we are very blessed.

But, as all carers know, his demands are frequent: ‘Please can you give me my other glasses. Please can you pick up the remote control from the floor. Please can you move my leg; it feels sore and stiff.’

At least he always says please and thank you.

Every 20 to 30 minutes, he needs my attention. I also cook the lunch and

I was reduced to a sobbing wreck at my birthday, surrounded by flowers phone for different services. I collect books from the other room and replace what he is reading. It takes all my time and all my attention. After all, I am 80, very frail and weak and unable to walk properly.

So when my birthday was approaching, I asked everyone to refrain from sending presents. None at all, please. Presents are such a responsibility.

My best present is your presence.

Best of all is if you visit and have coffee or tea (made by you).

Second best but still very enjoyable is a FaceTime phone call and a chat, or Zoom. If those are unmanageable, you could try a phone call or a letter – but please No Presents.

I should have saved my breath. I am

The gift of love: FaceTime

aware that this is a first-world problem and that I sound like a spoiled and over-indulged woman. I know that people I love only wanted to show that they loved me.

But I was reduced to a sobbing, hysterical wreck at my birthday, surrounded by flowers, which are a lot of work. They have to be taken out of their large cardboard box; the ends cut off; a vase or container searched for; flower food put in. They are lovely, but I am too frail to carry anything as heavy as water, so they’re a huge strain – and then what happens when they die?

And the cardboard box – who takes that to recycling? I can’t. I rarely leave home. Everything comes in huge cardboard boxes – so much packaging.

Then come the cakes, scones, jam and cream – all lovely but overwhelming.

That small box of florentines in the biggest cardboard box they could find.

I have always had problems with my weight. I try to eat sensibly – not to gorge on scones and jam.

And what about the chocolates? At least I could put those in the entrance hall of our flats. Anyone who fancied one could help themselves. And again – more cardboard boxes to dispose of.

Thankfully, my son, who lives nearby, answered my call for help. I gave him the cakes, scones, cream, cheese and jam.

I may give him the voucher for a tea

for two at a posh restaurant. I haven’t left my flat for nearly a year – why did my friend feel compelled to buy me something I can’t use and she couldn’t afford?

I’m sorry to be ungrateful but I made it quite clear I didn’t want presents.

They are overwhelming when life is overwhelming enough. But the pleasure a visit brings is unbelievable. My husband perks up: someone fresh to talk to. Someone with new views, who has been to see a new play or film, or to the Children’s Park in Kew Gardens, or the latest exhibition at the V&A. All of this is listened to intensely, discussed or laughed at. Occasionally, there are tears or criticism.

I loved the description of the new Tube stations. Or the bike ride our sons did from Betws-y-Coed to London – all grist to the mill. All enjoyable. All worthy of discussion.

When people come to see me, they don’t need to bring anything. But if they do, I get them to put the flowers in a vase or serve the cake and take the cardboard box with them.

FaceTime is a delight. Twice or more times a week, our daughter pops up on a screen in our sitting room, eating her lunch or dinner and chatting to us at the same time. Bringing in the fresh air of her life in the country, the doings of our youngest grandchild, the bats outside of an evening.

Zoom brings an old school friend into our sanctuary, to tell us what she has been doing, where she has been, how her grandchildren and children are faring – such a treat and a million, billion times better than a burdensome present.

So what I am really trying to say is that if someone says that they don’t want any presents – they mean it. Presents are a tremendous burden when you are already overburdened.

The Oldie February 2022 23

End of the Sloane Age Forty years after writing the Sloane Ranger Handbook, Peter York finds the tribe has been exiled from Sloane Square to the country

T

Bettmann / Getty

he idea of Sloane Rangers – the native population of the bestselling Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (Ebury Press, 1982) – started with what I call a Martian moment, a ‘Have you seen it?’ sensation.

Back then sci-fi film writers – rather like David Icke today – used to trade in the idea of strange creatures, like Martians who’d taken human form.

In their films, brave, observant, strong-chinned heroes would talk about that little something they’d noticed – such as green blood – that wasn’t 100 per cent familiar.

My Martian moment came with the late Ann Barr (1929-2015), deputy editor of Harpers & Queen in the 1970s, and it was about recognising those girls: uncannily similar upper-middle class girls working in smart London.

You’d see them on the Tube – all in the same Gucci and Hermès kit – and

Queen of the Sloanes – Lady Di in 1981 24 The Oldie February 2022

fantasise about introducing them to each other: ‘Caroline, meet Caroline.’ I was working with girls like that in my proper job as a Boy Executive in Belgravia too.

My first writing about Sloanes – massively edited and improved by Ann, in Harpers & Queen magazine as was (it’s now called Harper’s Bazaar) – was a huge hit in a relatively small pond: Sloane Land itself and among London media types. It wasn’t Big in Barnsley or Bolton then.

But we’d get letters from Army wives in BAOR 40 in Germany, saying their husbands’ muckers or their Hampshire cousins were just like that. Absolutely.

That we’d got it spot-on.

I got the credit for the brilliant anecdotes and details Ann had extracted from her own early low-tech version of Facebook – writing to everybody in Sloaneshire, asking for Sloane stories.

By 1981, the Sloane was a fairly famous idea, an easy word for a posh bird (and men too – we’d done Sloane Ranger Man in Harpers & Queen the following year, explaining their secret language, ‘Wa-Wa’). And that Sloane Ranger credit had helped me get my first book published, in 1980.

In 1981, Harpers & Queen’s charming Irish leftie publisher, Stephen Quinn (later the legendarily suave publisher of Vogue) told me proudly that Harpers & Queen was getting its own sub-imprint with Ebury Press, the UK Hearst Group’s book business.

He asked me what books we should do. I wrote a list of four can’t-miss titles.

The one at the top – I’ve forgotten the rest, of course – in huge letters was THE SLOANE RANGER HANDBOOK. It was, obvs, because of Diana. Princess Diana, who married Charles in 1981, meant just such a Sloane was the most famous girl in the world. And everyone wanted to know everything about her. I said we had to do it. And quickly.

As a massive bestseller, with two follow-up books, SRH took Sloane

Tribal Bible: Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) by Ann Barr and Peter York

culture from a secure and secret thing to being a very public one. For the newly aspirant world of the ’80s, Sloane became part of the dressing-up box – something to pick and mix. And part of the fashion cycle. The clothes, the interiors, the events, the posh brands were what people wanted, rather than deeply-held beliefs.

Sloanes were widely confused with aristocrats, whereas they were really a sub-set of the upper middles. They seemed then to be an important, settled layer – arguably the marzipan one – in our national cake, with the monarchy at the top and the toffs providing the icing.

If the Sloanes became suddenly, unwittingly, fashionable in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade – after the Big Bang (1986) – they couldn’t have been more out, more wrong. The go-for-it, free-market era did more to undermine Sloane culture than all the various post-war Labour governments, high taxation and the three-day week.

During the later 1980s, the Sloane world started to split and then to fragment under the new pressures of money, ambition and globalisation.

The first big split was between London

and the country. The new City investment banks, owned by people from New York, Tokyo and Hamburg, rather than PLU, culled the Sloanes.

But then they massively rewarded the ones who remained. A huge gulf emerged between younger, rich City and media Sloanes in London, who lived an increasingly shiny, luxury-brand life, and their identically reared country cousins. The country cousins were stuck in the old Sloane jobs, running toffs’ estates or being partners in nice, county-town law firms.

‘Rich Caroline, poor Caroline’ – an acute Harpers & Queen article of 1986 – pointed up the divide between Rich City George and his Caroline (George is on £300K a year – in 1986!) and Poor Julian who’s on something more like £25,000 (about £75K now, and actually not so dusty when the national average was £8.5K-ish). That meant massive belttightening and ingenuous little jobs for Poor Caroline: selling tiny antiques, making spinach roulade in industrial quantities for sale, taking in PGs – in order to maintain their grip on What Really Matters In Life.

What mattered then was having a place in London and a foot in the country; a house, however battered, in an OK county. And private education – which meant elaborate, impoverishing saving schemes and tapping up kindly old parents. And buying some equally battered 18th-century portraits for the drawing room at the bin end of an auction so the house could look the part.

By the end of the decade, smart Sloane survivors in London were consciously drabbing down the vowel sounds but smartening up the dress codes, avoiding anything that said old-world amateur.

Going modern.

And the Sloanes moved. In London, they had to, as New People, many of them from Other Lands, took over those nice central London postcodes – SW1, SW3, SW7 – Sloanes had thought of as theirs. As London became the World City, the smartest bits were taken over by Russian oligarchs and Indian and Chinese billionaires, and South Ken fell to smart young European City types.

Sloanes migrated south and north, from Battersea down to Wandsworth, Balham and the very borders of Tooting.

And up north to Queen’s Park and Kensal Rise. This meant meeting completely new kinds of people as neighbours.

At the same time, the most delicious front-of-Country Life old houses in nice counties, in good nick and accessible from London, began to command a hefty

Bloody nice blokes – plus totty – at Ascot, 1986

premium as these new global people cherry-picked them, too. In fact, the international rich cherry-picked everything delicious in the old Sloane world. There were scary reports of Eastern European plutocrats’ children in famous British schools carrying on their parents’ vendettas in brutal ways!

Money, education – especially for girls – and globalisation of practically everything tore that very homogenous Sloane culture apart. It wasn’t just ’80s greed-is-good ambition, though London Sloanes felt it intensely, keeping up in the big law firms and the smarter PR companies. There was also the whole UnSloane business of self-expression.

Self-expression meant Sloane women getting into every kind of therapy as practitioners. Reading your chakras in SW3. Psychotherapists in SW10!

By the noughties, commentators were

Tim Nice-But-Dim (Harry Enfield)

complaining that the acting trade – a ‘being profession’ – was dominated by people like Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West. Would there ever be another generation of Michael Caines and Terence Stamps, they asked?

By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all?

It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves. (Made in Chelsea was a positive festival of international rich kids, not Sloanes).

Diana was a major cautionary tale. Sloanes had loved her at the beginning (her ‘Shy Di’ portrait in that three-row pearl choker on the cover of our book said it all!).

But Her Own Story as it developed had them confused and disapproving.

From 1981 to 1997, it became clear that Shy Di wasn’t a Muddling Through Sloane at all, but a headstrong aristocrat.

Slimmed-down, she’d become a fashion plate and knocked about with an international set of gay fashion designers and pop stars – rather than the people who’d shyly hoped they were her own folk.

And then there was Tim – Tim Nice-But-Dim, the brilliant comic creation of Private Eye’s Ian Hislop and his school friend co-writer Nick Newman for Harry Enfield. All three knew the second-tier life from the inside.

Tim, first seen in Harry Enfield’s Television Programme in 1990, is an affectionate portrait of a born loser: a trusting amateur with no saleable skills, but with a touching faith in the toff Establishment (‘bloody nice bloke’ is his favourite endorsement), City slickers and media smarties who dismiss him as a bumbling idiot.

Things end really badly for Tim. Conned out of everything he’s got (shades of the disastrous Sloanedecimating Lloyd’s Names disaster of 1997), he ends up sleeping in a cardboard box outside the Lloyd’s building.

Peter York and Ann Barr wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) The Oldie February 2022 25

I found a Roman temple In 1954, Michael Keulemans, 11, was playing on a London bombsite when he discovered the Temple of Mithras

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hen I see all the petty health and safety and regulations governing children’s lives today, I realise how lucky we were as young lads in the 1950s. We had the freedom to roam, pretty well wherever we wanted.

When I went on The Oldie’s ancient Roman tour around the City of London this winter, we visited the third-century AD Temple of Mithras in the basement of Bloomberg’s brand-new office block.

In 1954, as a boy of 11, I would ride up to the City with my schoolmates Bob and David on our bikes. We would explore the ruins of the bombed-out Victorian offices that littered the Square Mile. Bits of brick basement walls were covered in rosebay willowherb, bracken and buddleia – all good for romping around on a Saturday morning.

On one of our sorties, I spotted something quite different on a bombed site in Walbrook. Among all the stubs of red brick, there was a curved piece of ragstone walling interspersed with a row

of red bonding tiles halfway up. I knew immediately what it was.

I dashed up to the Guildhall Museum and reported my find to Norman Cook, the curator.

Soon the site was got ready for the redevelopers and Professor W F Grimes, director of the Museum of London, arrived with his team of archaeologists.

They discovered that my bit of curved wall was part of the apse of a Roman temple standing by the bank of the River Walbrook. Many spectacular discoveries were made, such as the marble heads of Mithras, the sun god, and Serapis, the corn god, along with a sculpture of a jolly drinks party presided over by Bacchus.

So great was the public interest that queues stretched down the road every day for a chance to see the excavation.

I ended up in the Star (pictured) and on the front page of the Evening News!

After that, I was allowed on to pretty well any building site in the City. I clambered down ladders into 30ft-deep trenches, looking for Boadicea’s tell-tale

Roman holiday: Michael stars in the Star

band of ash when she set fire to Londinium in 61 AD. I scoured spoil heaps for Roman pottery, had cups of tea in the workmen’s hut and went to the museum to discuss my finds with the curator.

By the time I was in the second year of secondary school I was almost an expert on Samian ware, could date most Roman coarse pottery and had a museum of my own in our school library. If kids were allowed such latitude and given such encouragement today, I bet they would complain less about boredom – and get up to less vandalism and petty crime.

Come and stay at Villa Cetinale, near Siena, with Harry Mount, 15th-20th October 2022 Villa Cetinale is one of the most famous villas in Italy – a dreamy 17th-century palazzo in a fold of hills just south of Siena. Designed by the late Baroque Roman architect Carlo Fontana in 1680, it was built as a hunting lodge for Cardinal Flavio Chigi, a nephew of Pope Alexander VII – his nipote, from which the word ‘nepotism’ is said to derive.

Lord Lambton bought the villa in 1977 and it is now owned and run by his son and daughter-in-law, who refreshed the decor and now let the entire villa, complete with 13 bedrooms, pool and world-famous garden.

This is an unmissable opportunity to stay at this breathtakingly beautiful villa. Do check it out at https://www. villacetinale.com/privaterental

We will try to spend as much time at the villa as we can while also visiting Tuscany’s greatest cities. Limited to 21 guests.

ITINERARY Saturday 15th October Arrival Depart London Heathrow with BA at 2.10pm; arrive at Pisa Airport at 5.25pm.

Transfer to Villa Cetinale in time for dinner.

Sunday 16th October Panzano and free afternoon Morning tour of the villa and garden, then lunch in the hilltop village of Panzano for the menù della vacca intera at Dario Cecchini’s famous butcher restaurant.

Monday 17th October Florence A gentle day in Florence with a resident English guide. Dinner at the villa.

Tuesday 18th October Pienza and La Foce Morning tour of less-renowned Pienza, followed by tour of the beautiful La Foce (www.lafoce.com). Lunch at Dopolavoro La Foce, and dinner at the villa.

Wednesday 19th October Siena and free afternoon Thursday 20th October Pisa and home Depart for Pisa after breakfast; lunch en route at Quattro Gigli in Montopoli in Val d’Arno; afternoon tour of Pisa. Depart Pisa Airport with BA at 7.55pm; arrive at London Heathrow at 9.10pm.

Prices from £2,275 per person. Full information at https://theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours For all enquiries, please contact Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.ukm 26 The Oldie February 2022

Small World

My gangfight on the buses

When the teenagers attacked, I had to use all my Spider-Man powers jem clarke

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents…

STEVE WAY

One of the greatest pleasures of public transport is eavesdropping, even in these masked-up times.

The unmasked and masked merrily mumble loudly into their mobile phones, sharing their digital dirty laundry. I am often amazed on the early-morning commute at how many people have friends and loved ones who are willing to accept casual chatty calls before 8am.

If I received a call at that hour, I would expect a lifeboat operator informing me an immediate family member had been rescued from some extreme aqua-terror.

I would not expect Shelley (for it was she on the bus) phoning and asking me if I wanted her to get me a carrot-shaped soft toy from Aldi because they’ve got loads in and she’s on her way there now, and incidentally had I seen what Josh was wearing last night – dickhead!

Recently, I was on the top deck with a Deanne, who was explaining loudly to Kelsey that Donna had gone to court for shoplifting: ‘All she’d nicked was some shampoo and they’re prosecuting her.

I think it’s disgusting.’

Meanwhile, Marie was explaining that she’d gone back with ‘Lally’, despite his

28 The Oldie February 2022

saying that he was going to chop up her mother and post her through Marie’s letter box. Marie rationalised Lally’s thoughts: ‘Even Mam said he was only saying that ’cos he loved me.’

As an extremely short man, I also like imagining that new travellers may not be able to guess my standing height. My uncle explained to me that people are actually the same height from the hip to the shoulder: ‘It’s the leg length what buggers it up for us lot, Jem.’ He was referring to my family’s inter-generational lack of height.

So, on a bus, I always imagine a new persona for myself: a grizzled ex-boxer who now spends the afternoons hawking the pool halls for a patsy to play eight ball for money. In fact, I was a man despatched by his overly demanding mother to the neighbouring town’s Card Factory condolences section. She told me, ‘We’re entering the business end of the year for burials, and some haven’t lived the sort of life that deserves Clintons.’

My alter ego served me well, when a bunch of sinister post-compulsoryeducation adolescents got on and sat directly behind me. I knew they would be trouble. One had a blue diamond earring.

Unless you’re in showbusiness or a 17th-century buccaneer, it’s the signature jewellery of a non-compliant bus-user.

They began singing the theme from the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. They’d been inspired by the American comic

book I was reading. My shoulders find a broadsheet very tiring.

As their singing became bawdier, one tapped me on the shoulder, saying, ‘Excuse me, mate, is Green Goblin in this issue? Do you fancy Mary Jane?’

Closing one eye and gurning slightly, I transformed into a Popeye-like face.

Turning round, I growled, in a voice reminiscent of the demon from The Exorcist, ‘All right, the fun’s over, kids.

I don’t want to hear another sound from ya. No Spider-Man songs. No nuffin’, ya get me?’

There was silence. I internally congratulated myself on my stellar performance. Then one piped up, ‘Who do you think you are? The Grinch?’

I roared back ‘Yeah, I’m the Grinch ’cos I’ll make sure this is your last Christmas!’

I overdid the volume. My roar silenced the entire bus. All conversations ceased.

No comeback even from the culprits. I then sat for ten minutes, wondering if the silence was out of embarrassment more than fear, but hey ho.

As each bus stop went by, I suddenly realised that at some stage I was going to get off, and then the trio of quite tuneful tearaways would see how tiny I was. I thought, ‘What if they chase me? Even my local street-smarts and knowledge of passages won’t compensate for my game leg and portly wobble!’

It was almost my stop. There was no sign the surly students were getting off. It began snowing outside. I was literally a sitting duck (well, not the duck part).

Then the boys moved to get off the bus – miraculously, one stop before mine! As they passed me, the blue-studded boy turned and said to me, ‘You take care, pal,’ with steely eyes that wished the opposite.

Emboldened, I nodded with my one good eye. In a pantomime-Blackbeard voice, barely disguising my relief, I said, ‘Oh, I’ll take care, all right. No one will take more care than me! People call me the caretaker – trust me!’

When I got off the bus, I clutched my Card Factory bag a little tighter, and said a silent prayer. The Spider-Man of Cleethorpes had had a narrow escape.

My Hollywood women When Barry Humphries lived in LA, he met the movie greats – crazy Zsa Zsa Gabor, rude Lauren Bacall and amorous Audrey Hepburn

U

ntil now I have never spoken of my dalliance with Audrey Hepburn.

At the time I was married to my present wife and, in disclosing the following account of that far-off episode to the prurient perusers of this popular periodical, I have sought her reluctant approval.

Ever and anon, in the final decade of the last century, I lived in Los Angeles, the cultural capital of the Pacific. At the time, one of my best friends was the famous hostess Connie Wald: elegant, gracious, with flowing white hair below her shoulders, she was the widow of the producer Jerry Wald (Key Largo, Mildred Pierce, An Affair to Remember) and one of the prototypes of Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? Connie’s ‘salon’ included Betsy Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan and, not seldom, there were the screenwriters Ivan Moffat and Gavin Lambert and the Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore.

Present also were the ghosts of the old Hollywood elite, and if I sat down in a comfortable chair in the large oldfashioned cinema room, Connie might exclaim, ‘My, Barry loves Groucho’s

30 The Oldie February 2022

favourite chair.’ Or ‘Oscar Levant always noticed that Lautrec, Barry.’

It was always very flattering to be in Connie’s company on Bedford Drive. She gave us all the warm, fuzzy feeling of being at the centre of the real Hollywood, to which the rest of LA was but the drab periphery.

Connie’s house, modest beside the stuccoed porticos of her grandiose neighbours, was an original white clapboard two-storey farmhouse, with a white picket fence – one of the original houses on the flats of Beverly Hills.

Behind her home, she had a simple but comfortable guesthouse where Audrey Hepburn used to stay. ‘She’s a big fan of yours, Barry,’ Connie would say, annoyingly.

Audrey was never staying there when I visited, but I imagined her. Vividly.

The only other ‘salon’ that might be compared to Connie’s was in the Valley, on a leafy street in Studio City.

It was a boxy fifties home, overgrown with the creepers and with the ubiquitous pool, belonging to that whilom juvenile actor Roddy McDowall, child star of National Velvet, How Green Was My Valley and many other movies of the forties and early fifties. I remember seeing Roddy as a boy when he starred

with Monty Woolley in Nevil Shute’s wartime movie The Pied Piper.

The first thing I noticed in Roddy’s hospitable house was a warmly inscribed photograph of Stravinsky, in the guest loo. At his Sunday-evening soirées, you might dine with his old co-star Elizabeth Taylor, or with Maureen O’Hara, Anjelica Huston, Dennis Hopper or Esther Williams.

Roddy’s favourite epithet was extraordinary.

‘What was Jean Arthur [or Mary Astor, or Irene Dunne] like?’

‘Extra-or-din-ary!’

On one memorable night, his neighbour, the screen cowboy Gene Autry, appeared.

As a boy, I had possessed his pearlhandled pistol. The pearl wasn’t real, but the pistol, which could be loaded with caps, was one of Gene’s most successful items of merchandise. Almost real, like in the movies. I even had his recording of South of the Border, a hit song from late 1939 and constantly played on our family wireless. I always associated it with the war, just begun.

Roddy told me that his mother had often taken him to the movies when he was very young and, when he became a child star, or ‘moppet’, he was astonished to discover that most of his screen idols

were still alive and moreover surprisingly young. He became the self-appointed carer for older and sometimes forgotten stars from the early days of Hollywood and would take soup to nursing homes, and the gift of his immense kindness.

One night at Roddy’s, standing at the buffet, cautiously spooning dollops of a cartilaginous curry onto our plates, Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘The food here is always a crock of shit, but we come for the guests – or most of them.’ I was left to wonder into which category this beautiful woman had consigned me.

At some time in the late eighties, Dame Edna ‘interviewed’ the Hungarian actress and personality Zsa Zsa Gabor.

The famous star so enjoyed the experience that when I was living in LA, Zsa Zsa threw a party in my honour, naively supposing I was a celebrated personage myself. Her old Hollywood friends obediently attended, and a couple of entertainment channels sent camera crews. I suspected Zsa Zsa had sold the party to cover its costs, which, as it turned out, would have been exiguous.

When Vincent Price arrived with his wife, my mother’s old school friend the actress Coral Browne, there was a blaze of camera lights, which quickly subsided when my wife and I appeared on the Gabor doorstep. Who were we? Gatecrashers?

Overdressed catering staff?

Zsa Zsa had married a nice fellow, her ninth husband – who, according to malicious gossip, had been her hairdresser. A grateful and elderly Austrian client of his had adopted him so that he could acquire her title. (All Austrians are titled, with the exception of Hitler.) So now our celebrated hostess called herself the Princess Von Anhalt.

Few of our friends turned up that night, suspecting a hoax, since the invitations – in pencil on a scrap of lined paper – contained several serious misspellings. Zsa Zsa showed us over the house, which was filled with portraits of herself, though unlike the narcissistic collections of Helena Rubenstein and Suzy Solidor*, hers were in the chocolate-box school.

The only food on offer was provided by a very large and impressive vending machine on the terrace. Behind its glass

front, frankfurters impaled on silver spikes revolved, and at the touch of a button these prosaic delicacies would be extruded when required by peckish guests. To persuade her bewildered friends of my importance, she had arranged for a large TV screen to display that section of Dame Edna’s TV show in which Zsa Zsa appeared, but the mechanism broke down.

Coral Browne muttered to me, ‘Sorry, darling, but Vincent and I have had enough – we’re fucking off’.

In an attempt to rescue the event, the Princess importuned a very reluctant Kathryn Grayson to sing, without accompaniment, After the Ball Is Over in her tremulous coloratura.

I had been to that hotel in the 1960s, when I was abducted

by Salvador Dalí’s wife A man approached me, introducing himself as Don Lebowic. His next remark startled me. ‘What would you do, Professor Barry, if I told you to fuck off?’

Taken aback, I answered, ‘Oh. I suppose I would go away.’

‘Grrrrreat!’ he exclaimed, his face now wreathed in smiles. ‘And in that case, Professor, don’t leave the country. I’m gonna subpoena you.’

I might have asked why. It appeared that, a couple of days before, Zsa Zsa had been involved in a traffic incident on Rodeo Drive, resulting in a small abrasion to somebody’s Porsche. The traffic cop arrived on the scene to be met by a cataract of protestations of innocence from the famous movie star.

Unable to get a word in edgeways, the exasperated traffic cop told her to ‘fuck off’.

So she did. She got into her Rolls and drove away – only to be arrested and taken to prison for leaving the scene of an accident.

Several chastening hours later, Don Lebowic sprang her from prison. His task was now to prove that ‘fuck off’ means ‘go away’ – not just ‘shut up’. But Zsa Zsa

was already basking in the headlines of the LA Times. At the party, she made a long speech to the gathered throng about her fear of incarceration. ‘But, dahlinks, all those lesbians, zay vill pounce on me … zay vill never leave me alone!’

So why had Don Lebowic, her attorney, pounced on me to appear in court for the defence? Apparently, I had been on Irish television a very long time in the past, discussing colloquial English.

Somehow, Don had taken this shred of information and turned me into a distinguished professor of philology who could adjudicate on the complex meanings and interpretations of ‘fuck off’, and its Hungarian variants.

Admittedly, an English accent, even a colonially corrupted one like mine, goes a long way in Hollywood.

One evening, in black tie, we attended a private event in the Versailles Room at the St Regis Hotel in New York. It may have been an AIDS benefit dinner, or at least an occasion that attracted a theatrical crowd.

I had been to that illustrious hotel only once before, in the 1960s, when I was forcibly abducted by Gala, the wayward wife of Salvador Dalí. It was a remarkable episode, and if the editor of The Oldie were to enhance my fee, it is an episode that would profoundly interest my readers.

My wife and I left early and just as we entered the lift, I saw across the carpeted expanse outside the Banqueting Room a small group surrounding the unmistakable figure of Audrey Hepburn.

As the elevator doors slowly closed, she saw me. She recognised me.

She ran towards the bank of elevators.

She thrust her face between the inexorably closing doors and kissed me softly on the lips. Then she was gone.

Perhaps, my dear readers, one of the great romances of the 20th century had been brutally thwarted by Mr Elisha Otis. *Lesbian chanteuse and nightclub hostess on the Côte d’Azur From left: Audrey Hepburn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen O’Hara, Coral Browne, Anjelica Huston, Lauren Bacall, Esther Williams, Jean Arthur, Mary Astor, Irene Dunne, Nancy Reagan

The Oldie February 2022 31

Not just furry dice...

For 30 years, Chris Mitchell was a leading light in car accessories.

He’s now written a book about the industry’s golden age

I

n 1962, Chris Mitchell started work for a car business, Robin Sturgess Accessories.

Throughout the 30 short years of a somewhat strange industry, he was everpresent. His hectic career began on a whim and boomed during the 1970s and ’80s.

In the 1990s, the trade sadly dwindled.

This golden era of the ‘automotive aftermarket’ – tagged the lunatic fringe of the motor trade – might be frowned upon these days. But, back then, before the internet, much depended on the somewhat extreme and often hilarious doings of ambitious characters, ready to take a risk.

Right: Robin Sturgess; Formula 1 World Champion Graham Hill opening the Leicester premises, 1968; Chris Mitchell

Arthur Daley sticker, 1991 Below: Les Leston ad, 1963

The Backflash was a huge seller, 1983 32 The Oldie February 2022

Left: Ken Harris of Autoplas made rear window slats ‘à la Lamborghini’, 1981 Below: Naval Jelly, 1978

Left: 1962 flyer Below right: Slick 50 ad, 1985 Below left: Knuckle Buffer, 1990

Not Just Furry Dice (£14.99) by Chris Mitchell is out now

The Oldie February 2022 33

Town Mouse

The Beatrix Potter diet is good for you tom hodgkinson

As a town mouse, I’ve had to adjust to a somewhat richer diet. I eat more processed foods than was my custom when I lived in the country.

In the Beatrix Potter version of the tale of the town mouse and the country mouse, Timmy Willie’s diet consists mainly of unprocessed food that he finds in the hedgerows and gardens.

The first foodstuff he consumes is a vegetable which he finds in a hamper that transports him to the metropolis: ‘After eating some peas, Timmy Willie fell fast asleep.’

In the city, Timmy Willie finds that the foods on offer disagree with him: ‘An excellent breakfast was provided for mice accustomed to eat bacon; but Timmie Willie had been reared on roots and salad.’

After eating the sophisticated spread provided by Johnny, we hear that ‘his appetite failed; he felt faint’.

A few years ago, like Timmy Willie, I lived on roots and salad. Our little mice, now teenagers, complain that they were made to subsist on nettle soup. Vegetables came from the garden and eggs from our hens. There were no breakfast cereals and we foraged for sorrel, wild garlic and parasol mushrooms.

When Johnny Town-Mouse visits Timmy Willie, he is given similarly simple fare: ‘You have come at the best time of all the year,’ says Timmy Willie, joyfully. ‘We will have herb pudding and sit in the sun.’

Johnny Town-Mouse does not seem terribly impressed by the herb pudding and gets in the next hamper back to London, where he is presumably looking forward to a fun meal of crumbs, sugar and smears of jam.

My disappointment today is that I’ve been sucked into buying cheap food from the many supermarkets all around me.

34 The Oldie February 2022

I buy piles of cheap beer, bacon, chicken, sugary cereals and biscuits from my local Tesco Metro every week.

What happened to those laudable Timmy Willie tendencies? The organic, locally sourced food?

Back in the country, we managed to avoid shopping in supermarkets altogether and instead bought meat from proper butchers. Beer came from the supplier and we even found a farm that sold unpasteurised milk.

The key issue is price and convenience. The supermarkets tempt us in with unbelievably cheap prices.

Unlike the households of Beatrix Potter’s

Edwardian utopia, we now spend comparatively very little on food. As much as a third of an average family’s income would be spent on food in the late-19th century. That remained the same up until the 1950s, according to a Which? report. Today, the average household spends a mere 10 per cent of its income on food.

In some ways this is a good thing – the poor are not in danger of starvation. It also means that we buy an exotic range of foods from all over the world.

Farmer and author James Rebanks, who loves the old ways, remembers the expansion of the supermarkets in the 1970s in his book English Pastoral (2020), His grandmother didn’t trust ‘shop-bought food’. Everything was homegrown or locally produced.

But then things changed. ‘In my childhood, my mother’s friend Anne, from up the village, was always popping round and telling us how cheaply she had bought a lump of gammon, a bag of frozen chips or some washing powder…

She said having a vegetable garden was a waste of time because she could buy everything from the store much more cheaply than you could grow it.’

Rebanks’s dad sadly concludes Anne is right.

‘That autumn,’ the author recalls, ‘the vegetable garden was sown with grass, and we bought potatoes from town.’

It’s true. The few bunches of carrots I laboured so hard for each year in the vegetable garden can be bought in a supermarket for three quid. You’d have to really enjoy digging the earth for that transaction to make sense.

I will not give up. There are ways of bringing a bit of Timmy Willie’s bucolic idyll into the city. And we all know what they are.

First order your vegetables in a hamper to be brought up from the country in a cart. It’s the same principle as the Edwardians, only it’s now called ‘an organic veg box scheme’.

You can also eat far less and far better meat, and buy it from expensive places such as Waitrose, or the butcher.

Be more veggie. Grow a few herbs on the windowsill.

And if all else fails, you could move out of the city, like Timmy Willie. ‘It might be that your teeth and digestion are unaccustomed to our food,’ Johnny Town-Mouse says to the mouse of simple tastes, adding tactfully: ‘Perhaps it might be wiser for you to return in your hamper.’

The story ends with Timmy Willie back home, happily munching an enormous strawberry.

Country Mouse

A colour-supplement countryman? Me? giles wood

Leafing through a weekend colour supplement, I find that yet another former urbanite currently sees himself as a Wiltshire countryman.

This time, the famed chef and restaurateur Marco Pierre White was describing a typical Saturday at the hotel in Box Hill where he now lives and works.

I have a relationship with White – not that he knows it. I met the fan of stock cubes some years ago, while stumbling around the basement of a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge. I must have been looking for the gents. All I can remember was opening a door I shouldn’t have into a busy kitchen where stood the strikingly charismatic giant, his unforgettable face glowering beneath a chef’s hat.

‘Are you Marco Pierre White?’

I enthused.

‘No,’ came his emphatic reply.

Lesser Wiltshiremen might have wilted, no pun intended, at their attempt at affability being so rebuffed.

But I didn’t take it as a personal insult.

Instead I reversed happily out of the kitchen, grinning at the quickwittedness of White’s response, which I dined out on each time the famous name was mentioned.

Yet, as I read of White’s plans to turn the 14 acres around his hotel ‘at the top of

the hill, with views all the way to Bath’, into a nature reserve, a different ‘historic’ insult resurfaced in my brain. This one, by contrast, I had found troubling.

Twenty-five years ago, when staying with a Norfolk fruit-farming friend, and seeing his woodsmen poised to clear a spinney of goat willow, I protested that it was the host of the purple emperor butterfly.

‘You’re not a real countryman at all,’ retorted Desmond. ‘You are a coloursupplement countryman.’

His implication was that, unlike him, with his real lived experience on the land, who viewed goat willow as an invasive weed, I had ‘mugged up’ all my rural knowledge from reading the colour supplements of weekend newspapers.

I was in danger of becoming one of the species all farmers dread – ‘an ecologist with a clipboard’.

There may have been an element of truth to the gibe, which is why it wounded. And why reading Marco Pierre White’s Saturday prompted me to turn the tables and accuse him of being a colour-supplement countryman.

1. White has an acer plantation of 600 trees. Planting a monoculture of one species is unwise in an age of globally derived imported tree diseases.

‘When you said they should learn where their food comes from, I thought you meant a visit to a city farm or something’

2. He is planting acres of cow parsley.

Why? Cow parsley is a coarse, rank weed-like thistle. Both are pleasant to look at but cow parsley is a wayside herb that, along with docks and nettles, comes unbidden readily enough. Its rightful position remains in the second tier of desirable species. No, Mr White, you should be planting yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor).

Yellow rattle parasitises grass, allowing finer wild-meadow plants to gain a foothold.

Colin Tudge, the science writer and broadcaster, tells us that we already have solutions to the problems of biodiversity loss and soil erosion.

But, sadly, according to the wildlife trusts, a generational step change in policy has just been missed in the latest round of inducements to farmers.

We green-blobbers thought we might join more progressive countries in banning glyphosate.

‘Could you farm in the event of a glyphosate ban?’ I asked a local farmer at a recent lecture in a village hall.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Glyphosate is a real life-saver.’

No doubt this amiable rustic, a third-generation tenant farmer, views himself as a ‘real’ countryman and the likes of rewilders like me and Marco Pierre White as flies in his ointment.

‘You can’t eat trees,’ he observed.

Don’t get me wrong, Mr White – we need dynamic people like you in the country. I wouldn’t even mind more Soho Houses or Babington Houses, so fed up am I with dankness and isolation.

Another dynamic incomer, the insurance supremo Robert Hiscox, has converted a Methodist chapel into a state-of-the-art indie cinema in our local town of Marlborough.

Here you can carry your drinks and upmarket ‘nibbles’ from the bar into the deep-seated comfort of the spanking new auditorium and escape from what Waugh’s Mr Salter, editor of the Daily Beast, disliked about the country, namely ‘its solitude and self-sufficiency, its bloody recreations, its darkness and silence and sudden, inexplicable noises’.

It was with a certain wry amusement that I also got round to reading the property-news headlines (in a colour supplement): ‘Rural buyer’s remorse is the newest property trend’. Now that really rang a bell. Not a day goes by when I myself don’t wonder whether a property in Barnes might deliver more bird sightings at its wetland centre than we see down here in Wiltshire.

And, what’s more, Mary could walk to the shops.

The Oldie February 2022 35

The Duchess of Argyll was kind, loyal – and the victim of snobs and an evil husband. By her stepdaughter-in-law, Lady Colin Campbell

Marg of Arg was a real star

ALLAN WARREN / ALAMY

S

o Marg of Arg is back in the news, nearly three decades after her death, thanks to the BBC’s treating us, over three nights at the peak Christmas viewing period, to A Very British Scandal.

And what a scandal it was: the longest, costliest and nastiest divorce in Scottish legal history – a trauma Margaret never got over.

She could not see it, but she remained shell-shocked by the whole thing. Not the least of it was the unjust outcome. Lord Wheatley found against her on a technicality, ruling that because she had had the opportunity to commit adultery, he would assume that she had done so.

It is no secret that Margaret and I were great friends. We were what is now called trauma-bonded, through the experience of being married to father and son: the Duke of Argyll – aka Big Ian – and Lord Colin Campbell. We shared parallels from which neither of us recovered entirely.

It is a pity that the producers didn’t see fit to approach either her son, Brian Sweeny, or me, for we would have gladly steered them in the direction of the truth.

Having the facts, as they did, without appreciating their relevance, they missed the chance truly to vindicate her.

The producer Sarah Phelps claims she had a long-standing interest in Margaret and her story – of misogyny and a woman who was in advance of her times.

That may sit well with the Sisterhood, and make for good marketing, but it misses the point. Margaret was a woman very much of her time. She was the victim of snobbery rather than misogyny. She was dismissed as a rich American – she had spent the first 14 years of her life in America, but was Scottish through and through. Meanwhile the judge, a humblyborn and devout Roman Catholic, 36 The Oldie February 2022

A great style icon: the Duchess of Argyll (1912-93)

couldn’t wrap his head around a duke’s being both a cad and a liar.

As it is, he bought Big Ian’s lies wholesale. Meanwhile, Margaret’s splendid defence of herself – and, it has to be said, of the many homosexuals who were named as potential lovers and whose reputations she nobly protected – was dismissed as the denials of a hussy.

As a result of Sarah Phelps’s failure to contact those of us who actually knew where the truth lay, the Bastardy Case was almost entirely incorrect. Figuring in the third part of the series, it kicked off the whole sorry saga that the divorce became.

Margaret was set up by Big Ian, as my father-in-law was known in the family.

His heir, the Marquis of Lorne, was Little Ian, an unfortunate moniker as he was nearly a foot shorter than his father. She

agreed to take the rap for him, after his second wife, the American heiress Louise Clews, got wind of the fact that he was claiming that her two sons, Ian and Colin, were not his progeny. She came to England to issue writs, and Big Ian convinced Margaret that their rocky marriage would improve if she accepted responsibility for his statements. I can’t remember now who Little Ian’s father was supposed to be, but Colin’s was allegedly Prince Dmitri of Russia, the Tsar’s nephew.

As Margaret said to me, ‘How could I have known whether he was sleeping with Oui Oui [Louise’s nickname] when the boys were conceived? I didn’t even know him then.’ Margaret was under a penal notice not to discuss the case and was terrified she’d be sent to prison if she did in any depth. So the person who was forthcoming about the whole matter was my sister-in-law, Lady Jeanne Campbell.

It was Jeannie who told me the whole sad, sick, sorry story – and what a saga it was.

Margaret came out of it like the Dumb Bunny she kept on calling herself – but Big Ian? More like Satan, a name he reserved for Margaret, as Oui Oui prevailed and the divorce got underway.

Then he determinedly set about destroying the woman he had once loved.

And why? My supposition, based primarily upon what Jeannie told me, was that he was embarrassed to have been embroiled in the Bastardy Case, and was determined to shift blame away from himself onto Margaret.

It didn’t help that she was trying to wean him off purple hearts, and he was determined to remain on them. And there was also the small matter of the £250,000 he wanted from her for a quiet divorce.

When she refused to oblige, telling him, ‘You can’t divorce me. You have no grounds,’ he retorted with words to this effect: you’ll see what I can come up with.

POPPERFOTO / GETTY

Left: The Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Inveraray Castle, 1960 Right: Paul Bettany and Claire Foy in A Very British Scandal

Incredibly, Margaret did not realise that Big Ian had a precedent for their divorce: that of his great-uncle Lord Colin Campbell against his wife, Gertrude.

Running from 1883 to 1886, that divorce had the distinction of being the longest, nastiest and most sensational divorce case in English legal history.

Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise was the couple’s sister-in-law. Her brother the Prince of Wales was declared as co-respondent – unnamed because there was no sufficient evidence to justify his inclusion. Although it was the greatest scandal of the Victorian age, it had been forgotten by Margaret’s time.

Forgotten by everyone but Big Ian – and unknown to Margaret until I told her, to her consternation, about it.

Margaret was undeniably gutsy. She had dignity. She had a much better sense of humour than she was given credit for, but she undeniably took herself very seriously.

Although Claire Foy is a good actress and captures Margaret’s dignity, it is a pity the producers could not have replicated Margaret’s style more accurately. She was a great style icon. She helped to put such eminent designers as Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies on the map.

The series not only fails to capture her chic and polish, but also gets her hair wrong. Very wrong. And Margaret was proud of only having three hairstyles throughout her life, none of which

features in the series. In fact, she once reprimanded me for wearing my hair in too many different ways. ‘You will confuse the public,’ she said, pointing out that both she and the Queen believed in tonsorial constancy and neatness.

The series presents Margaret as progressive, but she was very much a woman of her time. In those days, when shining socially was a valid outlet for a lady’s energies, she was one of society’s brightest stars. She was unabashedly elitist.

She was also kind-hearted, loyal – and a great dog-lover. Big Ian once said, ‘If Margaret loved me as much as she loves her dogs, I’d be the happiest man alive.’

She exulted in being The Whigham, the greatest debutante of all time, then the celebrated Mrs Sweeny (as in Cole Porter’s You’re the Top) and then the captivating Duchess of Argyll.

She wasn’t so keen on being the notorious Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, and was irritated by the fiction that she prized titles more than she really did.

What she valued was quality, and she would gladly have traded being a duchess for becoming the wife of Bill Lyons – the American businessman in the famous ‘headless man’ intimate photograph with her.

When that didn’t happen, she held her head up high, didn’t deign to acknowledge the whiff of scandal that surrounded her after the divorce, and was surprisingly unstuffy. She could be very down-to-

earth, despite relishing the ivory-tower existence she had had until the year before her death in 1993, aged 80.

But she was very much a lady, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. She didn’t believe in frightening the horses.

She was fastidious, too. Tony Marecco, an old friend of hers – formerly married to Lady Ursula Manners, sister of her son-in-law Charles, Duke of Rutland – once said to me he had never seen any evidence of Margaret being the raver Big Ian had portrayed her as. Tony said she was so exacting that ‘I can’t see her allowing any man to “muss” her hair.’

I remember visiting her at Eaton Mansions, where she was living, between her moving out of the Grosvenor House Hotel and into St George’s Nursing Home, in 1992. ‘I should’ve died last year,’ she said. ‘I’ve outlived the life I was meant to live.’

She loved publicity. She used to make the point that she was a far bigger star, long before she married him, than the Duke ever was. It annoyed her that people seemed to think that being the Duchess of Argyll was what had ‘made’ her. She had ‘made’ him, she would say – quite justifiably.

Some might say she had lived by the sword of renown and died by it as well. I would say she lived with dignity, despite finding herself in extremely undignified circumstances. Brian, her son, summarised it best when he said, ‘Mummy was more wronged against than wronging.’

The Oldie February 2022 37

Postcards from the Edge

Beautiful currency never loses value

TOBY MORISON

The first euro notes were dull and impersonal. The new ones must feature great Europeans, says Mary Kenny

I’ve always maintained that the designs on the euro currency were utterly dreary.

So I am gratified that Christine Lagarde, head honcho of the European Central Bank, has announced that euro notes are about to undergo a re-design.

The main problem with the present notes is that they wholly lack a vital ingredient that makes us relate to a currency. They lack a human touch.

I said that to the powers-that-be, many times over, when the euro was first launched 20 years ago, but of course they didn’t listen.

They just produced this vapid-looking currency, composed of imaginary bridges, notional arches and fictional, vaulted windows – the reason being that they didn’t want to associate the single currency with any personal figure associated with any particular nation.

This in itself was quite symbolic of the European Union’s lack of confidence in European culture. And nervousness that there might be bickering between the 19 nations that use the euro as to who gets the €50 note and who gets the fiver.

But if the EU really believes in the traditions of European civilisation, then it should just go ahead and put some great Europeans on the new notes – Charlemagne, Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, St Vincent de Paul, Rembrandt, Sibelius… There’s no shortage.

Alas, the EU is nervous about creating 38 The Oldie February 2022

divisions – or even, perhaps, about reviving national pride. Lagarde plans to engage in extensive public consultations before getting the re-design started.

I mightn’t be much of a financial expert, but I do realise that, as the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, has said about communication, ‘Be interested in the people.’

Banknotes that show remarkable characters from the past – Churchill, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, Michael Faraday (or those exquisite old French currency notes that depicted Cardinal Richelieu, Saint-Exupéry and Napoleon) – tell us the tale of a life within the context of history. Nothing is more compelling than a human face and the story of a life.

Forty per cent of adults in the eurozone – which includes Ireland – have known no other currency than the euro, and 70 per cent of the 342 million people who use it are content with its monetary functions. So give them something a bit more interesting to look at than an imaginary bridge. Even filthy lucre can have a human aspect. ’Tis said that cash is going out of style and that within a few years every developed society will be cashless, but I don’t believe it. There’s nothing as handy and flexible as that pound – or even euro – in your pocket.

If there is a Sinn Féin administration in Dublin in the future – it’s now the most popular party with young people – it may well embark on another round of erasing the ‘colonial’ past from Irish life. That is, everywhere, all the fashion.

Many Irish letterboxes, though painted green, still bear the monograms of the British monarchs who presided over the operations of the Royal Mail – Victoria, Edward VII, George V. There is talk of scraping off this insignia of the ‘colonial’ past.

There have also been voices calling for

the removal of all mentions of the word ‘royal’ in Irish institutions, such as the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Dublin Society, home to the legendary annual horse show.

The satirist Oliver St John Gogarty once maliciously described the Royal Irish Academy as ‘a contradiction in triplicate’, saying it wasn’t royal, Irish or an academy.

Actually, the RIA is, these days, a source of distinguished research and scholarship and produces a constantly updated Dictionary of Irish Biography.

It can be accessed online in all public libraries – with superbly written narratives of every notable Irish life since St Patrick. Even if Mary Lou McDonald comes to reign supreme, I imagine the Royal Irish Academy will want to uphold its brand.

I have frequently informed visitors to our town of Deal that the local pier is exactly the same length as the Titanic.

I’ve been wrong. The Titanic was 882ft 9in long, whereas Deal Pier measures 1,026ft. Another case of legend being more beguiling than fact!

Perhaps Deal Pier should be re-named after the late Duke of Edinburgh, who opened it in November 1957. Its predecessor was destroyed by a Dutch cargo ship in January 1940, after being struck by a sea mine.

Prince Philip was a true cultural European, who, as Gyles Brandreth informs me, spoke flawless French, good German and passable Greek.

It’s a welcome sight to see wooden street seats appearing in London’s West End. They’re lovely, with a kind of planted, floral extension. Street seats are essential for oldies when they’re shopping or walking, and wood nicely insulates the derrière. It’s dismaying to see photographs of granite street seats appearing in Paris – maybe rain-resistant, but bum-freezing.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Who’s to blame for a child’s death?

I was recently attacked by a friend. She appeared to be holding me to account for the horrific death of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes.

‘What I want to know is,’ she shrieked, ‘where were the teachers? What do you lot do?’

All I can say is that somewhere there is a teacher asking herself that exact question, torturing herself with the thoughts that if she had done this or that, it would all have been different.

But in answer to ‘What do you lot do?’

– a lot. Anyone who thinks we trot out some facts about Hamlet and ignore the children in front of us is hideously wrong. Thank God there are very few Arthur Labinjo-Hugheses. But there are many children in need in this country and you can rest assured that the schools do everything we possibly can to help them.

We are sent endless advice on how to spot the signs of danger. Since September alone, I’ve been sent documents on gang culture (watch out for the kind of dogs the students acquire), knife crime (very low in Somerset), peer-on-peer abuse, abuse, honour-based abuse, trafficking, sexting, upskirting, absconding … the list goes on and on. And we read the documents, mentally skim through children we are already worried about,

and if need be alert those in charge of safeguarding.

But paperwork is one thing. We need to know about the individual children who are in our care – and during the school day, we are in loco parentis. We know the children who are looked after by social services and we watch them like hawks. Are their clothes clean? Are they turning up to school? Are they becoming more withdrawn?

As Englishmen and -women, we are perhaps too unwilling to ‘interfere’ with other people’s families, but it doesn’t take too long in teaching to strip away that false sensibility. Then we report something and it’s all innocent and we feel like fools. But we have to stiffen our spines and be prepared to make the same mistake again. I reported a child who had huge bruises on his upper arm – we are given maps of where bruises are suspicious. It turned out he had been paintballing at the weekend. The next child I reported for a suspicious bruise had indeed been hit by someone at home.

During lockdown, we were expected to ring and talk to children in our tutor groups and their parents regularly. The children I was responsible for were 15 and 16; they could communicate clearly with me. Even so, it was not until they returned to school that I heard

some of the real stories of what had gone on. Thank heaven that, although there were some bad stories, none of them was remotely in the league of Arthur’s case.

The teacher who was ringing Arthur’s family was dealing with a manipulative adult and a young child who might easily not be very clear on the telephone. What was she to do? She was just a small cog in a big wheel.

Many, many people played a small part in Arthur’s death, and not all of those people are professionals. The teacher believed his stepmother, Emma Tustin. The social services believed Tustin. The grandmother believed the social services. The neighbours presumably noticed nothing or believed Tustin. Every single one of those people will have been in agony when they heard the truth. Every single one of them will blame themselves out of all proportion to the blame they actually bear.

Yes, every step on the way to his death – and that of the more than 50 other children who died last year as a result of abuse or neglect – should be investigated.

Everything possible should be done to ensure every base is covered for every child in need in the kingdom.

But let’s not forget: there are two people who are really to blame for Arthur’s death. His father and his stepmother.

Quite Interesting Things about … February February was known to the Anglo-Saxons as Solmoneth, ‘mud month’.

Starting in February 2021, Iceland was shaken by 50,000 earthquakes in three weeks.

On 2nd February 2013, Notts County FC were beaten by Hartlepool United 2-1. Hartlepool’s scorers were Hartley and Poole.

Florence Green, the last surviving veteran of the First World War, died on 4th February 2012, 15 days short of her 111th birthday. Asked what it was like to be 110, she replied, ‘Not much different to being 109.’

could fund the NHS from Boxing Day to 12th February.

On Valentine’s Day 2020, the zoo at San Antonio, Texas, held a fundraising event. For $5 you could name a live cockroach after your ex and watch it being fed to an animal.

The money spent on Christmas presents in the UK each year

On 18th February 1913, Pedro Lascuráin resigned as

President of Mexico after holding office for less than an hour.

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

The Oldie February 2022 39

sister teresa

The grim, mouldy life of the sloth We are now into January, and I have been thinking of a New Year’s resolution concerning sloth.

It is not a pretty vice. At worst, and when carried to extremes, it causes a huge amount of trouble to other people. I found inspiration in Proverbs 26:13-14: ‘There is a lion in the street, says the idler: a lion in the square! The door turns on its hinges, the idler on his bed…’ It would be difficult to be much lazier than that.

On a first reading, these lines are comical, but a little thought soon sobers us up. As we all know, lions are to be found in zoos or in the wild, not in towns.

One of the drawbacks of sloth is the way in which its sufferers tell ridiculous lies in order to get out of having to take action.

Lounging around in bed all day isn’t a very good idea from many points of view – not least hygiene. In Life on Earth, David Attenborough describes the three-toed sloth in grim detail: ‘It spends 18 out of 24 hours soundly asleep. It pays such little attention to its personal hygiene that green algae grow on its coarse hair and communities of a

parasitic moth live in the depths of its coat producing caterpillars which graze on its mouldy hair.’

Human flesh, in the wrong circumstances and not properly cared for, can be heir to all sorts of specialised fungi and blights which cause itching, irritation and sores. These in turn need medical attention. Sadly, it is possible even to fall into a vicious circle of having unpleasant ailments and then being too lazy to ensure they are cured.

Easy does it: Sloth in Mantegna’s Virtue Triumphant over Vice (c 1502)

I then went to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:15-29. I think this is the only occasion where Jesus refers directly to sloth, and he condemns it in no uncertain terms.

The antihero is the lazy servant. He is interested only in himself. His attitude towards his master is just a grudging acknowledgement of power, without a trace of proper regard, let alone love, for him.

The servant’s lack of disciplined industry causes his downfall. I have an actor friend who is exasperated when people claim that Shakespeare is too difficult for them. ‘For heaven’s sake, make an effort!’ he says.

It is not the degree of aptitude that matters, but the care and thoroughness with which it is exercised.

Neglect and love are incompatible.

Someone who really loves doesn’t offer lame excuses but is on the alert, so as to please and, in return, to be pleased.

Without bothering to take action over love, we are shadowy and insubstantial figures who are in danger of missing out on everything.

Memorial Service

JIM WILEMAN / GUARDIAN / EYEVINE

Eric McGraw MBE (1945-2021) Eric McGraw, founder of the prison newspaper Inside Time, was remembered at St Bartholomew-the-Less, by Smithfield Market.

Former Prisons Minister Sir Peter Lloyd, later Chairman of New Bridge, the charity for reintegrating ex-prisoners, led the tributes. John Bowers, a former prisoner who said he had spent several years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, told how he had first met Eric in 1990 when he was finishing a sentence at Feltham. ‘My self-worth was in the gutter, but Eric invited me to become a national trainer for New Bridge, training volunteers to write and visit prisoners.

Eric was very much instrumental in my rediscovering my humanity.’

40 The Oldie February 2022

The former MP and convict the Rev Jonathan Aitken took the service. Novelist Lady Rachel Billington, daughter of famous prison visitor Lord Longford and herself a regular contributor to Inside Time since 1991, recalled the paper’s origins. It grew out of a riot at Strangeways Prison in 1990, when Eric, then director of New Bridge, attended the inquiry into the riot conducted by Lord Woolf.

She said, ‘Eric came away thinking, “What the prisoners need is a voice.” And there – bingo! – there was Inside Time, a voice for prisoners in 1990 and still a voice today. Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. How about money? How about copy? Printers? Designers? That was the point about Eric. He saw the pathway

ahead and was unperturbed by the poison ivy, brambles and marauding beasts.’

There have been 270 issues, with 60,000 copies a month. It is delivered free to all UK prisons, visitor centres, detention centres, special hospitals and courts. Eric always preferred to work from home in Taunton, where he and his wife Svetlana ran a restaurant, Svetlana’s.

His favourite customers were the local police who enjoyed regular Friday evenings there.

‘The newspaper Eric McGraw founded over 30 years ago, Inside Time,’ added Jonathan Aitken, ‘is a success story of 20th-to-21st-century journalism. It is a rising star, editorially, financially and reputationally. Eric’s legacy is here to stay.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Will the pandemic imitate the Plague?

The Great Plague died out – coronavirus might be similar theodore dalrymple

‘When shall we be free of this evil?’

This was a question, asked by Transylvanian peasants in Dracula films starring Christopher Lee, that engraved itself on my mind more than 50 years ago. Now I’m beginning to ask the same question about COVID-19.

Only six days ago (as I write this), an article in the New England Journal of Medicine said an Israeli study gave us hope that an end to the pandemic was conceivable. It demonstrated that the death rate from COVID-19 of those who had had a third dose of mRNA vaccines was reduced by 90 per cent by comparison with those who did not.

Theoretically, such a result has to be interpreted with caution. Those who received the third dose of vaccine might have differed from those who did not by more than their vaccination status, but still it was an encouraging result. It is unlikely that anything other than the booster accounted for it.

Within the account of the Israeli study were the following words that might have given us pause: ‘Israel deployed the vaccines rapidly [once they became available] and, accordingly, the incidence of COVID-19 dropped from almost 1,000 cases per million persons per day in January 2021 to 1 to 2 cases per 1 million persons per day in June 2021.’

However, the emergence of the b.1.617.2 (Delta) variant and the reduced efficacy of the BNT162b2 (BioNTech Pfizer vaccine) over time led to a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in Israel and in other populations that had been vaccinated early, such as the US healthcare workforce. By August 2021, Israel had the highest incidence of COVID-19 in the world.

I do not, of course, wish to encourage conspiracy theorists and other human fauna whom the pandemic has called forth – by suggesting the high rates of immunisation and subsequent high rates of infection with the new variant were

causatively related – but these words might nevertheless have alerted us.

Along came the Omicron variant, with its multiple mutations, greater transmissibility and ability to evade humoral immune responses, and optimism soon gave way to despair.

The effect of the new variant on hospitalisations and death rates is as yet unknown. It does not seem to cause more serious disease than the previous variants; if anything, the reverse. But that is not quite as reassuring as it sounds. Even a low rate of serious disease in a population of million can lead to a large number of cases relative to the intensive-care beds available. That’s especially the case in a system as poorly organised as the NHS. Thereby, a strain is put on hospital services.

On the other hand, rapid transmission of a new variant without causing an excess of serious cases could be a ‘good thing’, in the Sellar and Yeatman sense of the phrase. It might

induce higher states of immunity against future variants, should there be any and should the Greek alphabet allow it. Only time, experience and data will tell.

Past great epidemics and pandemics – far greater than this – have died out, for reasons not entirely clear. The Great Plague in England died out after the epidemic of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666 cannot explain this. Flu has remained endemically epidemic, as it were. But there has been nothing like the Spanish variety since 1920. Most of the deaths from the latter, though, were caused by secondary pneumonia, which nowadays, but not then, would be treatable.

How reassuring is it that all previous pandemics have eventually petered out?

The past is a guide, but not an infallible one. I am mindful of what Bertrand Russell said in The Problems of Philosophy: the chicken that is pleased to see the arrival of the farmer who has fed it every day of its life is surprised to have its neck wrung in the end.

The Oldie February 2022 41

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The Queen’s Bad English

Norman Ackroyd’s Tondo SIR: I read with interest about Sister Teresa’s love of the Taddei Tondo (January issue) and remembered that I produced a version about 20 years ago for the RA and Royal Warrant Holders.

I am a great fan of and subscriber to The Oldie and always read Sister Teresa’s column.

Norman Ackroyd, London SE1

On stage with Spike SIR: Barry Humphries’s story of his appearance with Spike Milligan (December issue) revived a very happy memory for me. When my wife and I attended The Bedsitting Room at the Comedy Theatre, unfortunately I had misread curtain-up time and we arrived half an hour late. As we were stumbling around in the back stalls in total darkness to find our seats, Spike yelled ‘Stop the show – put the lights on! Come up here, you.’

He would not accept my excuse for our late arrival but said, ‘I know you two have been snogging and forgot the time.’ He rehearsed all that had transpired onstage before our arrival, then sent me back to my seat with a bottle of champagne.

I had no idea I was treading the boards with two comic geniuses until I read Barry’s article.

Rapunzel, the later years 42 The Oldie February 2022

Hand-etched copper plate print of Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo in the Royal Academy, by Norman Ackroyd

At a later date, I occupied an adjacent urinal at a film première with a third comic genius, Sir Billy Connolly, but that’s another story.

The arrival of The Oldie is the journalistic publication highlight of each month for me.

David Sherman, London N3

Workers or shirkers?

SIR: While I enjoyed Benedict King’s evocative stroll down the lost world of commuting (‘End of the line’, December issue), his description of city dwellers ‘getting up at 7ish and knocking off at 6ish’ is, I fear, an anachronism.

Today’s city dwellers never appear to be at their desks before 10am and are nowhere to be found after 4pm. Worse still, they have all become Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday workers (I’ll leave you to generate the acronym) who if you are lucky will deign to respond to communications only on those days, unless of course they are ‘away from their desk’ for lunch.

Many years ago, in my office it was suggested that we should ban weekends as they clearly disagreed with staff, who were often ‘sick’ on a Monday and thus unable to come to work. On can only assume that is now the case with the start of the new working week, which leaves us with Wednesday and Thursday – but only if that’s not too much trouble…

Bryan McAlley, North Chailey, East Sussex

SIR: On reading the response received by Gyles Brandreth from Her Majesty the Queen’s assistant private secretary (November issue), I was horrified to see a comma splice in the first sentence of the second paragraph. Is there anything less elegant – less befitting of a secretary to our Gracious Majesty – than a comma separating two complete sentences?

Shame, I say, shame. Mr Tom Laing Baker shall not rise in his current profession until he reads thoroughly that modern grammar Eats, Shoots & Leaves

by Lynne Truss and acquaints himself with the elementary error of his ways.

Carolyn Strauss, Ottawa, Canada

John Lewis in the fifties SIR: The review of Family Business (September issue) has brought back memories of working at Jones Brothers in north London 70 years ago.

The John Lewis Partnership provided a happier, more family-like workplace than the other big department stores. But most of the staff did not use the clubs, places in the country and other amenities on offer because they had a very ‘posh’ tone imposed by phalanxes of formidable sales ladies from the cosmetics counters, whose make-up and hair-dos made them look imperious. There were many kind, affable but hopeless oddballs on the personnel side, appointed on a whim after a chance encounter with Spedan Lewis.

Spedan and his father had an aversion to women with ginger hair; the personnel departments were supposed not to employ them and so kept a list of the ones they did, so that they could be ushered into the ladies’ toilets if a visitation was imminent. But Spedan was generous and wrote to me personally, offering a huge promotion without any interview, when he somehow heard that I had obtained a degree while working.

Fond memories, but it seems that the JL Partnership has been professionalised now.

Raymond Roberts, Zimbabwe

on the A12. I remember the Super being the astronomical price of 6s/7d! One incident that stayed with me was when a customer drove his Jaguar S-Type on to the forecourt, leapt out, tossed me the keys and told me to fill up ‘both sides – and turn it round if you need to!’ I think, fortunately for him, by the time he returned from the Little Chef, I was still looking for the second filler cap.

As for Robert Jackson’s mysterious Redex – this was called UCL, or upper cylinder lubricant. We dispensed it at 1d a shot, and in hindsight it may have been beneficial to the engine, but rather more doubtfully to the environment. As the convention seemed to be one shot per gallon, this could add up to quite a few pennies, and as it came under ‘Sundries’, I fear that very little of it, to my undying shame, found its way to the till.

Miles Harrison, Moulton, Northampton

Jack Tripp’s quip SIR: I much enjoyed your piece on the great pantomime dame Jack Tripp in the Christmas Special Old Un’s Notes (January issue). I recall many years ago being taken by my mother to see him as Nurse Ribena in Babes in the Wood at Sadler’s Wells, London.

Nurse Ribena was snoring loudly in bed as two burglars climbed in through her window. She sat bolt upright, turned to the audience and said, ‘There are two strange men in my bedroom, and I must ask one of them to leave.’

Francis Chamberlain, Alresford, Hampshire

Cinderella v Sleeping Beauty SIR: In her review of BBC1’s Virtually Home (January issue), Frances Wilson

compares the colour-changing aspect of the programme to Disney’s animated film Cinderella. Unfortunately Frances’s memory has failed her. The film she was thinking of is my favourite Disney animation, Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella had only the one fairy godmother, but Aurora had three, each favouring a different colour. The colour-changing scene is when Aurora dances with Prince Phillip. The film featured a new style of artwork, a soundtrack written by Tchaikovsky and a cast of evil creatures led by Maleficent. Brilliant!

John Blackburn, Wetherby, West Yorkshire

Not such a happy birthday SIR: Eleanor Doughty (‘Not such a happy birthday’, January issue) recalled my French teacher at a West Midlands grammar school in the 1950s. She was an identical twin, with her birthday on 25th December. She assured us that they used to get one present rather than four.

By contrast, when my younger brother was born on 13th December, my parents said that until he was old enough to decide that he wanted a ‘super present’, he would always have separate gifts.

Josephine Mander, Ulverston, Cumbria

Joy of petrol stations SIR: My apologies for being a bit slow off the grid in response to Robert Jackson’s Memory Lane contribution (November issue), and indeed Simon Cockshutt’s letter the following month. I was also their precise contemporary, and worked at Shell’s Oasis garage near Chelmsford

Real Operation Mincemeat SIR: Considering this is The Oldie, Harry Mount seems to be rather youthful in his review of the new film Operation Mincemeat (January issue).

I thought it was just younger film audiences that required every historical event to be made into a Jason Bourne- or superhero-type experience, paying more lip service to CGI, bangs and whistles and a complete disregard for accuracy.

Operation Mincemeat was superbly enacted and required no excitement, gratuitous sex or violence, just exceptional skill and judgement.

Those of us who enjoy the filming of historical events are fed up with the seemingly endless drive to add drama and excitement at the expense of accuracy. I will certainly be looking forward to seeing it and re-reading Ben Macintyre’s excellent book.

David Donati, Crickhowell, Breconshire

Tommy Trinder’s duchess SIR: At the height of the undoubtedly cruel publicity surrounding the Duchess of Argyll scandal, I do remember one genuinely hilarious quip.

At a charity fundraising dinner in a hotel somewhere near Heathrow airport, the auctioneer was Tommy Trinder.

At one point someone shouted out that an item on offer would suit the Duchess.

Trinder’s response was instant: ‘The Duchess of Argyll? She shouldn’t have married the Duke of Argyll, she should have married Plymouth Argyle!’

Oliver Trigg, Worthing, West Sussex The Oldie February 2022 43

I Once Met

PICTURE KITCHEN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Elizabeth David Elizabeth David died 30 years ago, on 22nd May 1992, aged 78. An exceptionally private person, she became famous in 1960 with the publication of French Provincial Cooking, when she introduced whiffs of the Mediterranean to postwar British palates.

I remember well her message in delicate handwriting, agreeing to lunch but at a place of her choosing. The 1976 lunch was at Tante Claire, while aperitifs were at her house in Chelsea. My first sight of her was of a small figure in a white blouse and woolly hat, in her kitchen. She was hunched over an ancient cookery book, with an open bottle of white wine. Her face lit up when she spotted a receipt for pumpkin.

She had a reputation for being acerbic but was a delight. After a glass or two of wine, she mournfully recalled, in Mitfordian tones, the ‘dustbin cookery’ of 1950s Britain. ‘You cannot imagine how difficult it was to even find a clove of garlic. And if you were lucky, you might get a tiny bottle of olive oil from the chemist’s.’ Pet hates included ‘smoked salmon rolled round potted shrimps … repulsive’. And she was appalled by ‘the dreadful things done to avocados; like filling them with prawn cocktail or crab – horrible’.

As for stock cubes, words failed her.

Quiches had been ‘ill treated’ in Britain and were often ‘unspeakable’, bearing little resemblance ‘to the wonderful tarts of Alsace and Lorraine’.

‘Fresh tomatoes cut into flower shapes’ were ‘an abomination’, and as for using ‘tinned tomatoes’, this prompted a rolling of pretty brown eyes at such idleness.

At the restaurant, the maître d’ recited the menu. Silence. My guest said all she wanted was ‘a glass of water’ but proved not averse to sharing a bottle of Gewürztraminer.

When crescents of bread were brought to the table, she picked one up and studied it. ‘These are awfully good,’ she told the waiter. ‘Did you make them yourselves?’

Almost affronted, he bowed, saying, ‘Of course.’

Her cinnamon-coloured fish soup was served with aioli and croutons. After a

sniff and a taste, it had, she said, a ‘regrettable hint of bitterness because the fish stock has been simmered for too long – so it hits the back of your teeth’.

Growing up with ‘no idea about cooking, as the servants did it all’, she was sent to France as a teenager – luckily to Provence. It was in the Var that she first tasted ‘a delicious daube, beautifully scented with bay leaf’ and jam as a pudding made with green melon and lemon.

She rarely went to restaurants. At home, she tended to cook vegetarian dishes and chicken only occasionally as it was almost impossible ‘to get hold of old scratchers’. Poussins were dismissed as ‘rather dreary, poor immature little things’.

Her verdict on lunch was ‘The scallops were a triumph, quite simply one of the most delicious things I have eaten for a long time.’ Not so her pudding: ‘Jesus Christ, what is that? It really is awfully ugly,’ she said, when presented with an ice cream and raspberry coulis.

Elizabeth David was unaware of how many lives she had touched. ‘If I have reached a few people,’ she said gently, ‘that would be lovely.’

It was. Thank you, Elizabeth David CBE. Ann Morrow

The Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing Memories of life in a Headingley laundry – this year’s winner of the annual award in honour of our late deputy editor In summer 1974, I returned home to Leeds after my first year of teacher training, and took a holiday job at Headingley Laundry.

The grim building, familiar since childhood, was yards from my old junior school. As children, we trooped to assembly in the adjacent institute, beneath the laundry’s steam clouds. But I had never been inside.

To enter it was to enter a Dickensian scenario, peopled with an unknown Leeds. Though built in the 1920s, it resembled a Victorian sweatshop.

My ear strained to attune to the workers’ accent and unexplained phrases under the mind-shattering din of machinery.

The boss, Dave, introduced me to Vicky, whose front teeth were rotten. She told me to ‘clock in’. Others made a swift, nonchalant movement, but the hostile box never grabbed my card and I stood uselessly, pink with humiliation.

44 The Oldie February 2022

Our hours were ‘8 while 4’, with 30 minutes to chew speechlessly our sandwiches on the wall outside. Inside, sitting was forbidden. Twice daily, hot chocolate, at 2p a plastic cup, was brought to our machines by a small, aged, bandy-legged Susie. Conversational attempts were impossible. When I told Vicky my favourite film was Women in Love, she grimaced: ‘’Kin’ell, sahnds like lesbians.’ One blank-faced lady, there for decades, was completely wordless.

The machines were sinister. The shirtdryer became the Flying Ghost Machine.

You dressed the torso shape in a shirt, pressed a switch and it reared up, headless, arms flailing wildly. The floor, like damp earth, was filthy. ‘Tekkit reewash’ was the instruction when anything fell.

Most feared was the calender [yes, that is how it’s spelt] – a vast, high structure. Climbing aloft, we clipped a sheet’s corners into metal grabbers,

which at lightning speed whipped it away forcefully. Miss the moment and the sheet was rent audibly asunder.

Some, of thick, creamy cotton, smelled strangely sweet. These bore a black, inked word: ‘DEATH’. They were from the hospital mortuary.

At the pillowcase-folder, stultified with boredom, I counted, reporting to Dave when I had folded a thousand.

‘Go an’ fold a thousand more,’ he responded. Starved of colour and stimulation, I was elated by one printed with Magic Roundabout characters.

After a month, my father offered me the £16 weekly pay to leave.

The laundry, now demolished, steamed on into the 1980s. My school is now a popular café; the institute featured on BBC’s A House Through Time. But whenever I pass, I see, smell and shudder at the summer of 1974.

Jane Bower, Cambridge

Books My brain drain FRANCES WILSON What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, From Someone Who Knows

By Wendy Mitchell

GARY WING

Bloomsbury £14.99 The first symptoms of the brain disease that is destroying my mother and derailing our family became apparent seven years ago. It had probably been lurking around, undetected, far longer than that.

Dementia camouflages itself until the neurological damage is well underway.

There is no cure. Unlike with cancer, the diagnosis comes without aftercare.

Despite the fact that it afflicts one in 14 people over the age of 60 and one in six people over the age of 80, we have very little understanding of what it is like for those who have this cursed condition.

Currently 50 million people worldwide live with dementia; it is estimated this will increase to 152 million by 2050. So we’d better all buy this godsend of a book.

Everything I know about dementia comes from What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, From Someone Who Knows. That means everything I know about dementia I have known since yesterday, when I absorbed the book in a single sitting.

I didn’t realise, until then, that my mother can probably no longer see the colour black. What she sees instead is emptiness. A black tablecloth looks like ‘a giant sinkhole in the middle of the dining room’. When I visit her in my black coat, black scarf and black trousers, I look like a floating head, half of which is covered by a mask.

She could have a similar problem with whiteness, meaning that mashed

potatoes and chicken disappear on a white plate. In order to see white food, it should be served on a plate that is yellow or blue.

I now also understand that her taste buds will have changed: her beloved cup of tea probably tastes like swede. When she’s eating with other people, all she hears is the deafening clang of cutlery.

This book follows on from Wendy Mitchell’s bestselling memoir Somebody I Used to Know (2018), where she described being diagnosed, aged 58, with young-onset Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t planned on being around this long, Wendy confesses on her first page, but ‘Here I still am.’

Her aim is to share what she has learned so far, in the hope that ‘it will help you to live the best life you are able to with the disease, or support someone you know far better’.

Now in her mid-sixties, she is holding on to her independence, still living alone in her village and taking regular country walks with her camera (in northern Europe, a third to half of those living with dementia live alone).

She has no carers, but her daughters keep a close eye on her. They have trackers on their phones so they know at any point where their mother can be found.

Alarms on Wendy’s iPad remind her to eat (she no longer feels hunger) and Alexa, the household computer, tells her to take her medication. A technophile, she continues to blog, tweet and Zoom.

What she has to say, Wendy warns us, may come as a surprise. The first surprise is that amnesia plays such a minor role in living with dementia.

She explores the major effects of the disease on six areas of her life: senses, relationships, emotions,

The Oldie February 2022 47

environment, communication and attitude. The chapter on the senses is as extraordinary as anything by Oliver Sacks. The memory of a smell, such as burning wood or cat pee, is released from the past in what is known an ‘olfactory hallucination’. These hallucinations can be so real that the fire brigade might be called to tackle a non-existent blaze.

Wendy also explains how, when confronted with a flight of stairs, she needs first to decipher whether she is approaching an escalator or a slide. If the steps are all the same colour, she has no idea where to put her feet. Patterned carpet is the worst.

Meanwhile, the challenge of looking for a phone or spectacles comes from no longer being able to picture what a phone or spectacles look like.

Touch becomes more important than ever: a ten-minute massage makes all the difference to someone who is feeling disengaged from their world.

Communication, Wendy reminds us, need not always be verbal, but it is important to keep talking, even when there is a confused response. After all, we chatter lovingly to babies despite the fact that they can’t understand us.

The most surprising revelation of all is Wendy’s admission that ‘I feel guilty for the happiness I have found and wish that I could give some of it away’.

What does happiness mean when you live from moment to moment? ‘Seeing a bird singing away to its friend, being out for a trundle, capturing a squirrel peering out from the trunk of a tree.’

Wendy Mitchell is a life-saver.

Frances Wilson is author of Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence

Shirty about clothes NICOLA SHULMAN Worn: A People’s History of Clothing

By Sofi Thanhauser

The book follows a familiar groove in the field of recent non-fiction. Taking a commodity of some sort – a food type, a colour, an invention – the writer narrates its history, so as to show how the ramifications of a single thing can influence the world in unexpected ways.

The message is that by knowing enough about one thing, you can know about everything.

In this case, it is true. Older than fire and newer than the latest news, clothing is a titan of market forces, absorbing millions of workers, man hours, countries of land, seas of water and all the ingenuity that man can bring in the name of vanity and profit: ‘There is scarcely a part of the human experience … that the story of clothes does not touch.’

Thanhauser has organised the book by textile: linen, silk, cotton, rayon and so forth. With admirable concision and formidable scholarship, she plots the course of each textile from its inception, more interested in its effects on what and who make the clothes than in those who wear them.

Much of the story of clothes is about harm. Good grief. At a time when the government has decided to take up cudgels, once more, with the cocaine trade, this book makes you realise how we choose the harms we demonise. The history of clothes is a history of death, sickness, exploitation and destruction of land. When you realise that the great majority of our clothes derive from petroleum and cotton, it could hardly be otherwise.

Historically, cotton is the greatest rogue in the pack. Cotton drove the slave trade in more ways than one, as African slavers exchanged it for humans, but there is so much more. Witney’s famous cotton gin could use only American short-staple cotton. Hence the necessity for the weavers of India, where fine

Allen Lane £20 Now and then in the life of a book reviewer, a book comes along that makes you glad to be one.

Glad because otherwise you would probably never find this book among the thousands published monthly, and no less glad for being able to tell a lot of people about it without becoming a public menace.

Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn falls plumb into this category, to the extent that I, your reviewer with COVID-19, have limped from my sickbed to spread the word.

‘Either he’s a cuckoo or we should switch to low-fat worms’

muslins originated, to import cotton from the US. Cotton exhausts land. Its depredations drove the expansion westward to the Pacific. It produces a hideous monoculture wherever it is grown, guzzling water to the extent that the Aral Sea is now sunk to ‘a few oversalinated pools’.

Silk seems innocent enough, unless you are a silk caterpillar larva, dying a martyr’s death in boiling water to loosen your cocoon’s threads. Silk quality depends on the health of the mulberry leaf. In the Yangtze Delta, the silk capital of the world, industrialisation has so encroached on the mulberry orchards that the population is collapsing. ‘My heart is dying’, says the otherwise businesslike owner of a Yangtze silk factory.

The trajectory of textile consumption, as with most post-industrial fashion, is to grow downwards and outwards. New textiles begin as a luxury goods for the elite, and then flow out into a mass market, driven by industrial processes on an unimaginable scale. This was the case even with petroleum-based synthetics. In 19th-century Paris, fashionable women wore ‘silky and smart rubber clothes … that reproduce Scottish patterns and taffetas’ (one of many sentences that make one wish this book were illustrated). Such were the parents of our modern synthetics, evil buggers that they are.

It turns out that the principal ingredient required to synthesise rayon is carbon disulfide, a powerful poison which deranges the central nervous system. Thousands of textile workers fell ill and died from its effects; in some places, they still do.

Unlike with cocaine, the social harms associated with clothes are not violent or lawless; more a slow choking. This is partly because the labour force is predominantly female. Cloth-making traditionally begins as a cottage industry.

The home work involved is practical for women with children. And then, inevitably, industrial expansion obliterates those features of the job that work to their benefit: autonomy, choice, creative agency. Workers they remain, but as factory drones, not makers or sellers.

Thanhauser begins this book by saying she likes clothes, and so do I. But by the end, I liked them less.

Nicola Shulman is author of Graven with Diamonds: The Secret Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy The Oldie February 2022 49

India’s white heroes NIKHIL KRISHNAN Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom

By Ramachandra Guha William Collins £25 The story of Indian nationalism in the 20th century lends itself naturally to the romantic style.

It has heroes and heroines galore, all marching non-violently in homespun cotton. It has tales of chivalry, low cunning and renunciation. Most of all, it has a formidable and picturesque villain in the British Empire. Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982) is the most familiar telling of the story in this style.

But, even in Attenborough’s telling, there is plenty of room for figures who crossed national and racial lines to take the Indians’ side. There was the Anglican cleric Charles Freer Andrews who persuaded Gandhi to bring the special style of non-violent resistance he had developed in South Africa to India. Even more memorably, there was the admiral’s daughter Madeleine Slade (a luminous performance by Geraldine James), who threw herself headlong into the austerity called for by Gandhi’s movement.

Slade – rechristened Mira Behn by Gandhi – is one of the figures at the centre of Ramachandra Guha’s book on a history of British (and Irish and American) allies of the Indian anticolonial movement. His protagonists are unified not only by their whiteness and foreignness, but by the fact that they were willing to court arrest and spend substantial periods as political prisoners in India, braving malaria, typhoid and dysentery, learning to live as the Indian poor do, far away from the big cities. Nothing about them was dilettantish; nothing insincere.

Guha begins with the epic tale of Annie Besant, a firebrand secularist who became the figurehead of the Indian branch of that peculiar movement theosophy. He gives us American missionaries whose Christianity is either abandoned or transformed by its encounters with Indian religions. There are journalists who become invaluable chroniclers of the nationalist movement.

And there are political figures of considerable importance in their adopted countries, such as B G Horniman and Philip Spratt.

A prolific writer of great fluency, Guha has been a vocal (and embattled) opponent of the Hindu nationalism that

has dominated India’s politics in recent years. He was, for years before then, a stern critic of the Marxism that once dominated the higher ranks of the country’s academia.

He is the author of admired histories, first of environmentalism and then of cricket. More recently, he has written ambitious political histories of independent India and a two-volume biography of Gandhi which managed to say something new about that much written-about man. He treated his friends and associates as figures of some heft in their own right, not just as dogsbodies for the Mahatma.

This new book serves, in effect, as a companion piece to the biography. Even when Gandhi is but a distant presence, he remains a guiding spirit to the book’s protagonists. His greatest virtues are much in abundance: a man always in the process of making up his mind; a tireless letter-writer who never received a letter to which he did not at least try to reply, however obscure his correspondent.

But taking on the perspective of Gandhi’s western acolytes also allows Guha to bring Gandhi’s less attractive attributes into focus. Faced with Mira’s desperate entries to ‘allow her to attend to his needs large and small’, Gandhi gave her ‘one specific task: to observe, and minutely record, his bowel movements’. She did so, with all the precision and care of a laboratory scientist.

Is this, to give it its most generous possible interpretation, Gandhi preaching his belief in the dignity of the body, the same belief that made him insist that his followers be willing to clean lavatories? Or is it a simple device of humiliation, an assertion of his power over followers who promised utter submission? Guha’s narration of the episode is so deadpan that it is hard to know what he himself makes of it.

Guha is a liberal, secular humanist. He can be ill at ease in the face of grand

passions – romantic, religious and political. His tone, when the archives force him to confront such things, is one of bemused detachment. But the bemusement comes out of real sympathy and affection.

Every now and then, one wishes he would pause to ask a hard question or two about his characters: how much was earnest commitment, how much mere vanity? Guha rarely calls into question the good faith of his cast. But it is a sign that he has done his job as a historian that there is as much in these pages to feed the case for the prosecution as for the defence.

Nikhil Krishnan is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge

Lamb to the slaughter HAMISH ROBINSON Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb

By Eric G Wilson Yale University Press £25 On 22nd September 1796, the 21-yearold Charles Lamb returned from his work at East India House to the family lodgings in Little Queen Street to find that his older sister, Mary, had stabbed their invalid mother through the heart with a kitchen knife.

‘I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp,’ Lamb wrote to his school friend Coleridge days later. ‘She is at present in a mad house, whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital… My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.’ Urging Coleridge to write, but not to visit, he adds ‘mention nothing of poetry’.

The poetry in question, which soon reasserted itself as a priority, was Lamb’s contribution of four sonnets to Coleridge’s first collection, Poems on Various Subjects. Two of the sonnets were love poems addressed to ‘Anna’, Ann Simmons, whom Lamb had met while visiting his grandmother in Hertfordshire.

Her rejection of Lamb seems to have led directly to his own short spell in a ‘mad house’ in Hoxton in the winter of 1795. His recovery was swift, and by May he is already joking with Coleridge that he has ‘got somewhat rational now’ and doesn’t ‘bite any one’.

But madness was not the only trial hanging over the family. The lodgings in Little Queen Street were a step down from Lamb’s childhood home in the Inner Temple, where the father, John Lamb, had served as factotum to the prominent barrister Samuel Salt.

The Oldie February 2022 51

There the boy Lamb had had the run of Salt’s library, and it was through Salt’s patronage that he was sent to Christ’s Hospital, where he formed the core of his coterie of friends. He was not among those, like Coleridge, who were sent on to university, because he stuttered and was therefore judged unfit for holy orders.

Hence, again through Inner Temple patronage, he was immediately set to work as a clerk – first, briefly, at South Sea House, and subsequently at East India House, where he remained for the rest of his working life. In the year Charles left Christ’s Hospital, 1789, Samuel Salt’s death deprived John Lamb of his position and uprooted the family from their haven in the Inner Temple.

Charles’s small earnings as a clerk became immediately indispensable.

By the time of Mary’s attack, John Lamb was probably senile. Indeed, the strain of looking after her ageing relatives and supervising a disagreeable apprentice mantua-maker – the work by which she contributed to the family income – may have tipped Mary over the edge. The father died in 1799 – the aunt, who had embarrassed the schoolboy Charles by bringing him titbits wrapped in her apron to the school gates, having preceded him in 1797.

Thus the parameters of the brother and sister’s coupledom were laid down early: straitened circumstances, the threat of madness and a stigma that made marriage or children all but impossible for either. Asked how he liked children, Lamb was apparently the first to reply, ‘boiled’.

They moved lodgings frequently, occupying rooms in the Temple again and in Covent Garden at the height of their small affluence. Charles’s breakdown never recurred, but he battled with alcoholism.

Mary’s bouts of insanity became more frequent as she grew older. Charles watched over her assiduously. Guests who overexcited her – notably Coleridge – would be asked to leave. If

she became too torpid, he was known to apply a hot kettle from the hearth to the top of her head. If the straightjacket was not at hand, he would improvise with an overcoat. On their one trip abroad, to France in 1822, he was obliged to commit her to an asylum in Amiens and return without her.

Yet, in spite of these travails, their lives were full of mutual affection, conviviality and friendship. To the age that followed, they seemed to embody perseverance sustained with the innocent, if eccentric, humour said to characterise Essays of Elia.

An up-to-date, comprehensive, birth-to-death biography of the brilliant but elusive essayist situating him in relation to his friends Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt et al would certainly be welcome. Three eminent scholars of the Romantic period are on hand with back-cover blurbs to tell us that this is exactly what Eric G Wilson’s DreamChild is. But the writing is often too clumsy for it to serve as either a work of reference or an engaging narrative for the general reader.

Not so sweet Demerara NIC LINEY White Debt

By Thomas Harding Weidenfeld and Nicolson £20 In White Debt, Thomas Harding asks two questions about the British slave trade: how do we remember the past, and whom should we hold responsible for it?

Important questions, and ones very much at the forefront in recent years, as institutions are renamed and statues tumble. It is no accident that Harding begins with an account of Colston’s statue in Bristol.

Harding identifies a need to tell a more complex and unsettling history of Britain’s slave trade. Unlike America, where the crimes and consequences of slavery are both factored into its

geography, Britain has a past that can seem elusive. Its slave history is conveniently placed behind a Caribbean cordon sanitaire, more identifiable with Wilberforce and the Emancipation Act than with what preceded it.

Harding’s literary calling card is his often ingenious combination of family history and History with a capital H. In Hanns and Rudolf (2013) and The House by the Lake (2016), he explored his Jewish ancestors against the backdrop of Germany in the Second World War. Here, Harding turns to a more disquieting aspect of his family history: its complicity in slave labour in the 19th century, and the complexities and ambiguities, both past and present, that such a legacy implies.

The primary story of White Debt is an account of the ill-fated revolt of nearly 10,000 slaves in Demerara, present-day Guyana, in 1823. It was instigated by atrocious conditions and a tragic misinterpretation of an amelioration decree, and – after initial successes – brutally repressed.

It’s an arresting and meticulously researched narrative. The horrors of slave conditions and the repression of the rebellion are paraded through Harding’s deft handling of a mountain of source material without ever becoming gratuitous. Casual violence, rape, and torture brush up against sanctioned executions and corporal punishments.

More insidiously, superstition, hearsay and groupthink seep like poisonous gas through Demerara’s colonial society, often as brutal and destructive as the violence itself.

Harding structures his account around four men. Jack Gladstone was the slave who headed the rebellion. John Smith was the hapless chaplain universally distrusted by the plantation owners. John Cheveley was a young man from Essex, forced abroad by financial hardship, and an unwilling actor in the repression. And John Gladstone, father of William and owner of several plantations in Demerara, was holed up in Seaforth House in Liverpool, swatting at abolitionists from the sidelines.

Each character comes equipped with his own set of complexities and contradictions. Class, religion and the hard facts of financial gain variously inform a willingness to dehumanise or to be complicit in the act.

The second story Harding tells here, spliced into his account of the Demerara uprising, is about his family’s involvement in the slave trade, his subsequent research trip to Guyana The Oldie February 2022 53

and an intense reflection on the issue of reparations and personal responsibility.

Harding’s account shares an affinity with Alex Renton’s excellent Blood Legacy (2021), which unpacks his family’s direct involvement in West Indian slavery. But where Renton’s ancestors were direct players, Harding has to reach a bit further to establish a connection. His ancestors’ tobacco business, Glückstein and Co, bought tobacco from American plantations. The family has thus ‘made at least part of its money from slavery’, a fact that leaves Harding stumbling ‘blurry-eyed’ around Georgetown, Guyana.

Harding’s second story is less successful. He canvasses a wide number of opinions but does little with them to mount an argument. Chats with family and friends on the matter leave him feeling grumpy and misunderstood.

The real head-scratcher is that there is no connection between Harding’s personal account and that of the Demerara uprising. Harding claims, ‘I wanted to find an example that captured what British slavery was like in a microcosm.’

But where the seamless transition between personal and general history in his previous books works so powerfully, the gap between the two stories here jars throughout. There is a whiff of opportunism that, once detected, is difficult to remove. The book closes with a whip-round among the Harding family to drum up a scholarship. The family wants to remain anonymous, but Harding disagrees. The book will put an end to that.

What is best in White Debt is what is best in Harding’s other works: a compelling historical narrative, and the herding of vast quantities of material into a well-shaped and evocative story. The case for reparations is, and will be, one of the most important and necessary conversations of the century. But this book adds little to the debate – certainly nothing new.

Sad Max DAVID GELBER The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World

By Edward Shawcross Faber £20 If you’ve encountered Emperor Maximilian of Mexico before, there’s a good chance it was via Edouard Manet’s painting of his execution in 1867 in a dusty yard in Querétaro. Nothing so distinguished Maximilian’s life as the manner of his leaving it.

Piranesi’s The Smoking Fire (1761) in his Imaginary Prisons. From The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain’s Most Terrifying Prison by Nicholas Guyatt (Oneworld, £25)

The portentous title of Edward Shawcross’s new history of Maximilian’s ill-fated rule in Mexico acknowledges as much. Almost unavoidably, the shadow of the firing squad looms over his narrative from the start.

Maximilian was born in Vienna in 1832, the second son of Archduke Franz Karl. Although not the direct heir to the Austrian crown, his elder brother, Franz Joseph, acceded to the throne in 1848 following a palace coup precipitated by the revolutions of that year.

Maximilian, as Shawcross neatly describes it, was struck with a classic case of younger-brother syndrome. Openminded and romantic, in contrast to the martinet Franz Joseph, Maximilian was an archduke in search of a role.

He served for a brief time as commander-in-chief of the Austrian navy and as governor of the province of Lombardy-Venetia. His liberal policies, however, angered Franz Joseph and in 1859 he was dismissed. As he approached the age of 30, Maximilian – married to Carlota, a daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium – reached an impasse.

The stalling of Maximilian’s career coincided with the hatching in Paris of a plot to depose the republican regime of President Benito Juárez in Mexico and erect a monarchy in its place. Its leading lights were Emperor Napoleon III and a

group of Mexican exiles led by José María Gutiérrez de Estrada.

Napoleon wanted to punish Juárez for renouncing Mexico’s debts to France, Estrada desired a more conservative regime in his country, and both hoped to contain the increasingly covetous United States by enmeshing its vulnerable southern neighbour in the European alliance system. Needing a European prince to serve as its emperor, they alighted on the ambitious yet footloose son of Europe’s most illustrious dynasty.

The first half of the book focuses not on goings-on in Mexico but on the intrigues in the chancelleries of Europe.

They led, in 1861, to a French invasion of the country and to Maximilian’s agreement to assume the throne once Juárez had been deposed. With America embroiled in civil war, Napoleon figured, the invading army would have only to dispatch crude Mexican militias to become masters of the country.

As it happened, it took two years for French forces to fight their way across mountains and along primitive roads to reach and capture Mexico City. When Maximilian and Carlota arrived in 1864, much of the country remained in Juárez’s hands.

The calamitous manner in which Maximilian’s reign ended colours Shawcross’s account of his three years in Mexico.

The Oldie February 2022 55

The emphasis throughout is on the tenuousness of the regime he established in Mexico City: his reliance on the French occupying army to keep his enemies at bay; the mounting debts his government accumulated; his dependence on foreign advisers; and his inability to please either conservatives or liberals.

There is a tragic quality, too, to his descriptions of Maximilian’s efforts to ingratiate himself with his new subjects, which saw him riding around the country, for months at a time, mounted in traditional Mexican style with a sombrero on his head.

Maximilian comes across as an honourable but ultimately frivolous figure, a man more concerned with ancestry, precedence and decorating Chapultepec Castle, his hilltop residence just outside Mexico City, than with the serious business of governing. Missing from this crisp narrative is any real consideration of Maximilian’s constitutional reforms and his attempts to modernise the country by building railways and telegraph systems. Had the winds of diplomacy not changed in the mid-1860s, might these have helped Maximilian embed his regime?

Shawcross’s approach is also surprisingly old-fashioned. There are battles, treaties and negotiations aplenty, but there is little sense of the public square.

We never really learn, for instance, what Mexicans made of this queer import from Mitteleuropa, or how monarchy fused with Mexico’s rich folk traditions.

That said, Shawcross’s account of Maximilian’s fall is both gripping and moving. In 1866, Napoleon decided that, with Prussia assurgent in Europe and Juárez keeping up a guerrilla campaign against Maximilian’s government, he could no longer afford to maintain French troops in Mexico. Shawcross’s description of the French evacuation calls to mind the recent American withdrawal from Afghanistan. In desperation, Carlota travelled to Paris to beg Napoleon to change his mind. When he refused, she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered, though she lived on until 1927.

As Juárez’s forces closed in, Maximilian passed up the opportunity to escape to Europe, determined not to desert his post. It was while leading his ragtag Mexican army on the frontline at Querétaro that he was betrayed, arrested and court-martialled by republican soldiers – and that his immortality was secured.

David Gelber is Assistant Editor of Literary Review

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Sixties casualties JANE O’GRADY Free Love Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape £16.99 Free Love opens with a 40-year-old woman, Phyllis Fischer, sitting at her dressing table by an open window. She’s relishing the sounds and smells of a wealthy London suburb on a late summer evening: ‘The steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics…’

While she titivates the butter- and garlic-laden dinner (it is 1967 and, being ‘an adventurous cook’, she has read Elizabeth David), her nine-year-old son hurtles out of the garden, pretending to shoot her at the kitchen door.

She staggers and groans in pantomime response before luxuriantly sinking her face into his hair and thinking, ‘This happiness can’t last.’

An Eden about to be despoiled, and anyway only dubiously Edenic, is Tessa Hadley territory. The Fischers’ dinner guest, 25-year-old Nicholas, with his ‘loosely spontaneous’ movements, outrages the conventions Phyllis lives by, making her Arts and Crafts home seem stultifyingly bourgeois. Currents of antagonism, mortification, vanity and lust charge the dinner-party talk.

Phyllis and Nicholas go out into the dark to rescue a child’s sandal from a garden pool. Stirring its muddy depths, he ‘seemed to breathe in the vegetable, tropical, hothouse flowering of Brazil’, feeling that, ‘under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged’.

But he has, after all, been reading Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. Hadley skilfully conveys how would-be wildness is inevitably clogged with self-conscious construction. It is pique at Nicholas’s apparent recoil from her touch, and anxiety about ageing, that breed Phyllis’s attraction to him. While they kiss, a version of her life story is ‘spooling through her mind’.

Phyllis leaves her husband, teenage daughter and young son. Her ‘free love’ is costly, though quite how much is unclear.

While portraying her deserted family’s bleakness, Hadley seems to suspend

judgement on how harmed any of them is. She subtly plays with the novel of adultery.

The counterpart to Phyllis is the older woman, Jean, for whom ‘hyperbole usually came closest to what one really felt’, who should have left her marriage 25 years ago. Phyllis has far less reason to leave hers, and less capacity for feeling.

She ‘knew that her betrayal of her husband and children was wrong, but in the same impersonal dulled way that she knew from school about the Treaty of Vienna’. She is reminiscent of the protagonist of Hadley’s first novel, Accidents in the Home.

She realises that, unlike a 19thcentury heroine, she has no repression to break free of, no fear of punishment and guilt. The ‘things that should have shamed her... had lost their voices’.

Finely calibrated reflections on emotion, however, slice away readers’ feelings too. The heady promise of the first chapter is never fulfilled.

Hadley is best at the bourgeois and the turbulence underlying it than at turbulence itself. That the old world is ‘crumbling’ and ‘turned on its head’ is a constant refrain.

Its objective correlative is the demolition of the coming Westway in London’s W10: bedspread-curtained houses and exotically provisioned shops ‘abutting into nothingness’; the A-Z rendered obsolete.

Phyllis pursues liberation and ‘a new continent of experience’ among the ethnically mixed youth in the bedsits of an art-nouveau erstwhile hotel.

But Ladbroke Grove is less vivid than the lush, suburban gardens, and the counterculture characters are thinly drawn. Their shifting, borderless relationships and smoky ad hoc parties are somehow seen through perspex. We never smell the marijuana or feel the ‘intoxicating freedom’ Hadley describes.

Her visiting daughter says that Phyllis now has ‘ideas’. Certainly she realises that ‘everything [is] much more terrible than she had allowed herself to see’.

She contentedly dishes up meals to random, unspecified guests, or makes love ‘under the wide sky’ with a man for whom she is just one in a succession of women. The nearest anyone gets to revolution are second-hand reports of the ’68 Paris riots.

Maybe that is what Hadley intends to portray – sixties rebels playing at outrage and subversion; the lopsidedness of ‘liberation’ that exploits women. But does she really mean it to be this lacklustre?

The Oldie February 2022 57

History

2022 – a historic year

There are epic anniversaries, from the Rosetta Stone to El Alamein david horspool What historical anniversaries can we look forward to this year?

As Eleanor Doughty writes on page 80, it was a century ago, in 1922, that Howard Carter chiselled away at the plastered door in the Valley of the Kings to reveal those ‘wonderful things’. The treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun went to Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, only later beginning their globetrotting.

But even if London doesn’t have Carter’s most famous discoveries, you can see in the British Museum the object that gave him and his fellow Egyptologists the tools to decipher the secrets of the pharaohs: the Rosetta Stone.

Carter happened to make his discovery during the centenary of one of the greatest of linguistic breakthroughs, made by the French scholar JeanFrançois Champollion, using the stone.

In 1822, Champollion worked out that the hieroglyphs of this Ptolemaic priestly decree, inscribed on a piece of granodiorite in 196 BC, ‘recorded the sound of the Egyptian language’ (in the words of the museum’s curators). As the stone was also helpfully inscribed in Greek and Demotic Egyptian, the work of translation could begin.

Champollion, by the way, was building on an insight by the British polymath Thomas Young. The spirit of scholarly exchange across the Channel had apparently survived the Napoleonic Wars: there’s hope for us yet in these post-Brexit times.

The Rosetta Stone was a spoil of those wars, discovered by Napoleon’s soldiers and then transferred into British hands, following the failure of his Egyptian campaign, under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria.

It has been in the museum ever since, except for a brief stay on the Royal Mail’s underground line during the First World War, to save it from the Zeppelins. Oddly, 58 The Oldie February 2022

it doesn’t seem to have been moved when more effective bombers returned in 1940. More recently, there have been rather politer enquiries from Egypt to have its treasure back, with predictable results.

If you’ve had enough of arguments like that, the museum’s big exhibition at the beginning of the year happily has no such complications.

The World of Stonehenge, opening in February, celebrates ‘the human story behind the stones’. I always want to know more about the astonishing organisation and ingenuity of the people who, around the same time that the Egyptians were building the pyramids, brought the twoto five-ton bluestones 180 miles from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain.

Actually, it would be wrong to say there are no contemporary complications surrounding Stonehenge – though, as far as I know, no one has suggested repatriation of the bluestones back to Wales. The proposal to dig a tunnel underneath the ancient landscape – which will almost certainly disturb as yet untapped archaeological riches – will enter a new phase in the coming year, when the building contracts are supposed to be issued.

How that squares with the declaration by a High Court judge that the scheme (despite government approval) was unlawful is another Stonehenge mystery.

The 1,500-year timeframe experts give for the building and reshaping of the stone circles suggests construction problems are not solved quickly in these parts. Eighty years ago, in 1942, our

Universal key: the Rosetta Stone

problems were rather more urgent. A new book published

by Taylor Downing in January 2022, Britain at the Brink, argues that 1942 was the year when the country was in most peril – more, he thinks, even than in 1940.

It was also, of course, a year of Allied victories. Britain and Montgomery prevailed at the Second Battle of El Alamein. The Soviet Union had been through the crucible of invasion and in 1942, at Stalingrad, were engaged in the greatest battle of the war. Earlier the same year, the Americans, who had not found it easy to bring their superior strengths to bear on the Japanese, finally did so in spectacular style at the Battle of Midway.

Two other books to be published in the coming year remind us what was at stake for civilians caught in the grip of total war. The Betrayal of Anne Frank

by Rosemary Sullivan, published in January, is history as true crime. The author follows a cold-case team led by an ex-FBI agent as they attempt to discover who it was who told the Germans where Anne and her family were hiding in the Amsterdam annexe.

Then, in March, the military historian Halik Kochanski will publish Resistance, a historical survey across Occupied Europe that aims to demonstrate how complex – and dangerous – were the decisions taken by ordinary people under Nazi rule.

It’s good to take the long view. It reminds us that whatever troubles lie in wait in the year to come, our forebears were often faced with greater ones: from enemy action to shifting some impossibly big rocks from Wales to Wiltshire.

Media Matters

Did I cook Boris’s goose at the Garrick?

The truth about the dinner that, critics say, might bring down the PM stephen glover Am I responsible for the political downfall of Boris Johnson?

Readers may recall an item in my column in the December issue about a dinner I organised with my friend Neil Darbyshire at the Garrick Club. The guests were people – mostly men, but a few women – who have written leaders over the years for the Daily Telegraph.

The Prime Minister was among them.

This dinner has given rise to some wild stories now accepted as fact. It is almost universally believed that, in the course of it, Boris had his ear bent about the Tory MP Owen Paterson. He was allegedly persuaded, in particular by the journalist Charles Moore, to exempt Paterson from a disciplinary process in the Commons and set up an alternative system. The scheme blew up, Paterson resigned and the PM was accused of sleaze.

On the Left, Marina Hyde has written in the Guardian of a ‘fateful repast’ during which the ‘mid-Mesozoic influencer Charles Moore cemented a plot to stop Owen Paterson – rulebreaking MP for ultrasafe North Shropshire – from having to serve a mere 30-day suspension from Parliament’.

Columnists on the Right have made similar accusations. Matthew Parris wrote in the Times of ‘a convivial dinner with Brexiteer Moore [who] stiffened [Johnson’s] resolve’. Andrew Neil declared in the Daily Mail that ‘there would never have been a by-election [in North Shropshire] in the first place if Boris hadn’t listened to a bunch of Tory toffs who urged him over dinner in the snooty all-male Garrick club to intervene to save their mate Owen Paterson’.

For a time, in a rather lazy way, I went along with this version of events. I had put myself far away from Boris, and so didn’t hear his conversation with his neighbours. However, I knew he was seated opposite Lord Moore, who three days earlier had written an impassioned

defence of his friend Paterson in the Daily Telegraph. What could be more natural than that Moore should try to convert the PM to his cause?

Except that what may seem natural does not constitute proof. Having made extensive enquiries, I am as sure as I can be that neither Moore nor anyone else used the dinner to buttonhole Boris.

My first witnesses are those who sat on either side of the Prime Minister.

Dean Godson and Harry Mount (editor of this magazine) can recall no conversation about Paterson, though they can’t rule out that one took place while they were speaking to someone else. What is certain is that neither of them would have wished to persuade Boris of Paterson’s innocence.

Moore, whom I have known for more than 40 years, though he could scarcely be described as a friend, is my chief witness. I do not believe that he would lie to me. He says he did not at any stage during the dinner attempt to persuade the Prime Minister of the rightness of Paterson’s cause, and no conversation on the matter took place.

I accept that some may be less inclined to take Moore’s word than I am. If so, they should consider a further point. He says that when he arrived at the dinner, he already knew that the Government intended to give its backing to Tory MPs

‘Yes, I know the story about how you started off working in the post room.

Thing is, Bob, you still work there – so get the hell out of my office’

fighting Paterson’s corner and set up new disciplinary arrangements. He adds that he briefly told the Prime Minister of his pleasure at this development when he saw him at the Garrick.

The dinner took place on Tuesday 2nd November, and Boris left around 10 o’clock. That morning, the Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, had expressed the view in a podcast for ConservativeHome that the system that had found Owen Paterson guilty of lobbying, and deprived him of the opportunity of calling 17 witnesses, was defective.

In other words, hours before the dinner, the Cabinet Minister responsible had intimated that the Government would support Tory MPs rallying to Paterson’s cause. The die was already cast. By the way, I should say that in my view Moore’s journalistic defence of Paterson was misguided, and the Government was wrong to try to change the system. But that is another matter.

Another myth was created by that dinner. The New European – an obscure anti-Brexit newspaper – has alleged that Johnson joked about feeling ‘buyer’s remorse’ at having married Carrie Symonds, causing ‘a number of raised eyebrows around the table’.

This is untrue. I can’t exclude the possibility that the PM said this to one or two people, though it seems unlikely.

But there was certainly no general statement to this effect capable of raising eyebrows. Boris didn’t mention Carrie in his speech – the only occasion on which he addressed the gathering.

So I can’t claim any part in the Prime Minister’s downfall. It was a wholly innocent, quite enjoyable dinner about which a lot of rubbish has been written. I might add that Boris Johnson is the only guest who has not paid his share, and that three of his police bodyguards wolfed sirloin steaks at my expense.

The Oldie February 2022 59

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

I – the egomaniac’s favourite vowel

TOM PLANT

I am now breaking one of the few rules I try to observe when writing this column: never start with an ‘I’. Though you may be able to infer things about me from what I write, the column is not about me.

It is about words and stuff, and that is where I’m now heading, specifically, to the slenderest word in English, ‘I’.

‘I’ is an oddity in another respect: it is the only pronoun written in the upper case whether or not it starts a sentence.

It’s tempting to say it is the only word of any part of speech with this distinction, but ‘O’, at least when used as an interjection, is given the same treatment.

Think of ‘O dear’, ‘O my God’, ‘O for the wings of a dove’ and all those hymns – nearly 100 of them in my edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern – that begin ‘O’. They are often sung during Advent, when St Bridget of Sweden’s Fifteen Os, 15 prayers all beginning ‘O’, may also be read, and at Christmas, when O Come, All Ye Faithful is belted out at every turn.

Aha, you may say, these examples are all the first word of a sentence. However, ‘O come, O come Emmanuel’ shows that this ‘O’ is indeed always written as a capital – unlike ‘a’, the commonest of single-letter words, which is lower case in similar repetitions, as in ‘A horse, a horse!

My kingdom for a horse!’ The special treatment given to ‘O’ can also be seen by comparing it with ‘oh’, a synonym with all the same qualities except an exemption from the rules about capitals.

So English has two words that appear only as capitals – but why should it have any? The big ‘O’ is a minor oddity, since it seldom occurs as a word and nearly always starts a sentence. In contrast, ‘I’ is

Tea cosies When was the last time you saw a tea cosy?

You are cold and weary and would love a cup of tea.

one of the commonest words. People who try to measure how frequently words are used rank it seventh, tenth or 11th, depending on their criteria. What justifies the capital treatment?

It all started with the Greeks, who took a vertical line used as a symbol by the Phoenicians and adopted it as the letter iota. The Romans borrowed that for their alphabet, and later clerics and scholars followed suit. Then, in the 13th century, English-speakers, referring to themselves as ic, ich, ik and similar variants, shed some letters and wrote just i. Some also began to use j as an alternative to i.

The dot – which makes i and j the only letters in the alphabet to have two components – came in to distinguish i from other uprights in letters such as m, n and u. The scribes considered this miserable little stroke with a spot on its head inadequate for a job involving the mighty self.

Soon the more dignified capital became standard – Chaucer was an early adopter with The Canterbury Tales – and the arrival of the printing press late in

the 15th century consolidated the change.

If it’s self-importance that lies behind the emergence of ‘I’, has it had an effect on English-speakers? We all know some very English people (mostly men) who can talk of little but themselves. The Isle of Man, it used to be said, was famous for its wheneyes, the retired bores who opened every utterance with ‘When I…’ But surely such types are everywhere.

It might be argued that the self has from the outset played an unusually prominent role in the United States.

America is, after all, the home not only of rugged individualism, but also of self-advancement through hard work, a deep suspicion of government and a hostility to socialism. The constitution, which enshrines individual rights like no other, was drawn up in the heyday of philosophical individualism. Yet to hang all that on a capital ‘I’ would be stretching it.

Still, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could simultaneously put our politics to rights and get rid of all those wheneyes by demoting ‘I’ to ‘i’? Oh, yes: let’s banish self-important columnists, too.

‘Where’s the difficult listening?’

You stop at an outdoor café.

There is a draught. The table – or the chair – rocks on the uneven pavement. You wait for service before – impatiently, and uncomfortably masked – entering the premises to enquire about ways of attracting service.

The tea arrives.

By now, your table is in the shade and the wind, busy at scattering the litter under your table, feels sharper than before. But the tea is welcome, and the milk is

usable once you have removed the black fragments freshly blown into it.

Life will be perfect with the second cup. You reach for the cosy-less metal (!) teapot (which is a bad ‘pourer’, and was not heated initially). You pour the now bitter liquid, overbrewed from the tea bag, only to discover that the shade, the wind and the radiating power of naked aluminium has left you with cold tea.

You pay, depart and vow to

start the BBTTCC – the Bring Back The Tea Cosy Campaign.

EDWARD MCPARLAND

SMALL DELIGHTS Remembering where you left your car in the multistorey carpark.

VALERIE CROSSLEY, SUSSEX

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk The Oldie February 2022 61

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE 400 BLOWS

EVERETT COLLECTION INC / ALAMY

When The 400 Blows came out in 1959, it launched François Truffaut (1932-84), only 27, into the movie stratosphere. It was his first film and he won the award for Best Director at Cannes.

Now a newly restored version of The 400 Blows is being shown across the country (from 7th January). And Truffaut’s masterpiece, Jules et Jim (1962), will be released nationwide from 4th February.

Over 60 years on from that staggering debut, the French New Wave is looking a little old hat, I’m afraid.

You can see why The 400 Blows was revolutionary at the time, in its gritty approach to real life and realistic acting – which still looks realistic today.

‘The 400 blows’ is a French

expression, meaning ‘raising hell’ or ‘going for broke’. In the film, it’s 14-yearold Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who’s raising hell. Doinel is like a French Just William – wild at his Montmartre school; wild with his glamorous mother and Jack-the-lad stepfather.

Léaud (b. 1944), who went on to work with Truffaut in four more films, is a complete natural: half-scamp, half mini-James Dean. Even as his crimes get worse – bunking off school, smoking and drinking before graduating to stealing a typewriter and going to jail and a French borstal – you can’t help being charmed by his scruffy good looks and cheeky, ironic dismissal of authority.

The qualities of the French New Wave are all here, even at this early stage.

There are the long tracking shots of Doinel fleeing his borstal through the French countryside. There’s the palpable feeling of existential despair. As Truffaut said in 1961, ‘The New Wave is neither

New Wave: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959) 62 The Oldie February 2022

a movement, nor a school, nor a group – it’s a quality.’

You do get a completely natural feel for late-1950s Paris. The streets of Montmartre, where Doinel does his bunking off, look straight out of a documentary: grimy and austere but still sublimely beautiful under the grey skies.

The greatest scene is when Doinel goes to a puppet show and Truffaut films a group of Parisian schoolchildren at length – transfixed, sometimes laughing, sometimes open-mouthed with excitement. At this moment, it’s more a gripping historical document than a feature film.

In 1959, it was a real achievement to represent real life so convincingly. But most real life isn’t that interesting, particularly with such a basic plot: naughty boy bunks off school; naughty boy goes to prison; naughty boy escapes.

The conversations, like most real-life conversations, are pretty boring and transactional, salvaged only by Léaud’s powerful charm. The little flashes of comedy – such as the PE teacher who leads his schoolboys through Paris, blowing his whistle, doing physical jerks, while they all bunk off behind him and hide in doorways, as he remains oblivious – show the French love for simplistic, not very funny slapstick.

Benny Hill did it better.

You can see how the most excruciatingly boring art films – British and American, as well as French – grew out of the New Wave. They have that confidence in not having much of a plot or any interesting dialogue; the selfindulgent shots that go on far too long.

The 400 Blows is too original to be boring. Do go along to watch the birth of a movement – and to see how well the French dressed then: perky bras, battered trenchcoats, tailored suits.

Just don’t expect many laughs or to be that interested.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK HABEAS CORPUS Menier Chocolate Factory What on earth were they putting in our bedtime cocoa in the 1970s?

Watching Alan Bennett’s scrumptious bedroom farce, I can conclude only that Ted Heath’s government must have been trying to raise the birth rate by spiking the nation’s supplies with some fiendish aphrodisiac.

Virtually everyone in this play is absolutely gagging for it. Either we were getting far too much sex back then, or not nearly enough (I can’t work out which).

Written by anybody else, this would merely be a bawdy romp – some of the gags are decidedly risqué by modern standards – but imbued with Bennett’s brilliant wit, it somehow becomes sublime.

Habeas Corpus is bursting with so many wonderful aphorisms that I wasted much of the first act trying to write them down (‘As paranoids sometimes have enemies, hypochondriacs sometimes have diseases’). However, the bons mots fly by so thick and fast that in the end I gave up and just sat back and enjoyed the show.

And what a lot there is to relish!

Plays with small casts are all very well, but it’s generally far more fun watching bigger troupes, and Bennett has written 11 super parts. These players are clearly enjoying themselves but, as with all good farceurs, their characters remain deadly serious. As Bill Shankly might have put it, keeping a straight face in a bedroom farce isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that.

As befits any decent farce, the plot is absurdly intricate: two middle-aged doctors are lusting after the same woman, who is young enough to be their daughter – not knowing that she might actually be the daughter of one of them, and the prospective daughter-in law of the other. The buxom wife of one of these randy doctors is lusting after the other, while her flat-chested sister-in-law opts for a hands-on breast enhancement to improve her romantic prospects (I told you the gags were risqué).

If you think this sounds a lot like a Carry On (or even one of those Confessions films), you’d be absolutely right, but thanks to Bennett it feels far more sophisticated – positively elevating, in fact. Critics have likened it to Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, but to me it feels closer to a classic Restoration Comedy (Bennett even gives his characters

Farcical Alan Bennett: Jasper Britton (right) as the lascivious Dr Arthur Wicksteed

Restoration Comedy names: his celibate cleric is called Canon Throbbing).

Reviewing the London première, in 1973, Michael Billington – of this parish – called it ‘gorgeously vulgar’ (the part of Felicity Rumpers was played by Madeline Smith, who also writes for The Oldie). That production, starring Alec Guinness, thrived in the West End but when it transferred to Broadway, starring Donald Sinden, it didn’t do so well.

Bennett blamed the cluttered set (the West End production was sparsely staged; the Broadway show was more realistic). ‘There is just enough text to carry the performers on and off, provided they don’t dawdle,’ he observed. ‘If they have to negotiate doors or stairs or potted plants … they will be stranded halfway across the stage.’ Accordingly, the director of this production, Patrick Marber, has opted for a minimal setting, and it works a treat.

Marber is one of Britain’s leading directors (and an eminent playwright) and the biggest tribute I can pay him is that he lets his actors get on with it. I’m sure making it look so easy must take a lot of hard work and expertise, but I wasn’t at all aware of it, and that’s exactly how it should be.

There are so many fine performances that it seems unfair to pick favourites, but honourable mentions must go to Jasper Britton as the lascivious GP Arthur Wicksteed (the part first played

by Alec Guinness), Dan Starkey as Sir Percy Shorter, President of the BMA, his

pompous, pint-sized rival, and above all to Ria Jones as the omniscient cleaning lady, Mrs Swabb.

Lighting designer Richard Howell deserves a special shout-out for his lovely evocations of the shifting colours of the south-coast seafront (the play is set in Hove) but the star of the show is Bennett’s script. After all the sexual shenanigans, his play ends on a wistful, elegiac note. His line about long shadows lengthening across the lawn of life stayed with me long after I’d forgotten all the jokes. I didn’t even need to write it down.

Until 26th February: www. menierchocolatefactory.com

RADIO VALERIE GROVE The seasonal question ‘Has Radio 4 lost its golden touch?’ is back. The answer is ‘No, but…’ Much of the network is hoary, cosy and aimed, frankly, at us: GQT to tell us what to do in the garden; You and Yours to warn against the plausible, soft-voiced Scotsman calling to discuss your bank account – dial 159. Here, every hour, is the dreadful News confirming that everything’s getting worse; but sweet Evan Davis will smooth things over. And here is Barry Cryer and the Clue gang to make you laugh out loud.

People have been threatening to switch off Radio 4 for ever. The reasons for our discontent vary. A new controller, too many boring women, or annoying Americans, unfunny comedy slots, hectoring Nick, gabbling Amol. They The Oldie February 2022 63

NICK WALL

know we will ricochet back to our home service, triggered by the pips, or Bells on Sunday, or Brain of Britain, or birdsong.

But wait…

The other day, I ran into Nigel Rees.

‘Congratulations on your 500th,’ I said, having heard the quincentennial edition of Quote… Unquote, the show he devised in 1976. Nigel was en route for a farewell lunch with BBC colleagues.

One more programme to go – ‘Then I’m off! Freedom!’

Since nobody is more devoted to his programme than Rees, who sends out to quotation-lovers (inc moi) a quarterly QU newsletter of queries and revelations, I questioned his cheeriness. If I only knew what he’d had to put up with recently… ‘What?’ ‘Woke.’

Quotations, which you thought were immutable – having been written or spoken in the distant past and set in stone – no longer pass the woke test.

Including some of our favourites. ‘ “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun,” ’ said Nigel. ‘That’s completely forbidden.’ Coward’s verse, written in 1955, ‘reflects colonial attitudes’. Nor was he allowed to quote Nigel Molesworth saying, in 1956, ‘he is a girlie’ about Fotherington-Thomas (responding to ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky’ etc).

So it’s curtains for QU. As for Radio 4’s new film programme, Screenshot, Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones started off annoyingly – discussing Spielberg’s West Side Story remake without having seen it. OK, they did telephone lovely Rita Moreno, star of both movies, now aged 90, who spoke with insight and wisdom. But then they brought in a ‘professor of film’, Martha Shearer, who declared that teenagers did not watch the original movie in 1961 because it was ‘for their parents’. What utter nonsense. In 1960, my 14-15-yearold cohort all went to see it on stage, then the movie, and played the LP for ever more. West Side Story was absolutely for us. Still is.

Prof Stuart Russell’s Reith Lectures unnerved me, as do all mentions of brave new worlds: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, avatars and algorithms.

What would Lord Reith make of it? His name was invoked in Archive on 4’s reverent tribute to Piers Plowright, creator of perfectly composed radio features, who died last year. Reith said radio producers would always be ‘obscure, shadowy and mysterious’ figures but, as one producer said, people know the names of playwrights, poets and film-makers. They should also recognise the radio craft of Plowright and co.

64 The Oldie February 2022

‘B&B – are you sure?

I thought I was full board’

Salutations also to Sarah Shebbeare (for Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart); to Eilidh McCreadie for Roy Foster’s On Seamus Heaney, splendidly read by Adrian Dunbar; to Clive Brill for Eileen Atkins’s reading of her memoir; to Reduced Listening, the oddly named production company, for the innovative music mixes on Radio 3’s Late Junction; to Jandaprods (the Martin Jarvises) for Just William; to Karen Rose for the play Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, co-written by Ray Davies, the famous Kink.

And, in 2022, to Helena (Tunnel 29) Merriman, who writes, presents and produces her new series, Room 5.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Eighty years ago, George Orwell complained about the decline of English murder. There is scant evidence of that decline in our television schedules.

The more English the murder, the better: all we need is a rural community, a vintage car and an iconic hat to get the nation purring like a cat with a kipper.

Magpie Murders (BritBox), adapted from his own book by Anthony Horowitz, is a cracking little play on nostalgia-noir, a story within a story by a master of the

genre (Horowitz, who has written two Sherlock Holmes sequels, also created Foyle’s War and adapted the novels that became Midsomer Murders).

Alan Conway (Conleth Hill) is a thoroughly unpleasant bestselling author of whodunnits with a country mansion, an ex-wife, a delinquent son, a down-atheel twin sister and an insolent little boyfriend he found on the internet.

To know Conway is to hate him, and everyone, except his publisher, has a reason to wish him dead.

Atticus Pünd, on the other hand, the detective in Conway’s fiction (played by Tim McMullan), is an example of human perfection: mellifluous, melancholy and drab in his 1950s raincoat. He sees all those clues that the idiot coppers manage to miss. Oh, the joys of a good formula!

The first episode begins with Conway at the keyboard, hammering out what will be Atticus Pünd’s final case, Magpie Murders.

‘There is nowhere more dangerous than an English village,’ he writes, ‘and in Saxby on Avon everybody had a reason to wish Sir Magnus dead.’ Sir Magnus is duly decapitated in his ancestral pile, Pye Hall. When Conway submits the manuscript to his publisher, it is minus the vital final chapter. Conway’s body is then found at the foot of his tower and his editor, Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville), is despatched to find the missing pages.

While the idiot local copper says it’s suicide, Susan thinks Conway was murdered and that the clue to his killer is in the lost chapter.

Manville, who played Cathy in the sublime Mum, and will be Princess Margaret in seasons 5 and 6 of The Crown, is cool and complex and utterly at home as a sizzling 65-year-old commitment-phobe trying to save her publishing company from going bust.

What is it about female detectives of a certain age? Do we all have a nanny complex, like Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet? When Susan Ryeland isn’t

The Great English Murder: Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan in Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders

Ed McLachlan

‘When did you first notice you were getting the Munchies, Mr Jones?’

dashing down country lanes in her swish headscarf and red sports car, we can watch Vera (Brenda Blethyn) in her fishing hat, off-roading her Land Rover.

It seems churlish to complain that the 11th season of Vera (the first two episodes of which were aired last summer before filming was interrupted because of COVID) is a bit, well, samey. Samey-ness is, after all, the genre’s selling point, but 40 solid servings of meat and two veg would sate anyone’s appetite.

In episode 4, As the Crow Flies, a teacher is found at the bottom of a cliff.

‘Looks like she fell,’ says Aiden, Vera’s dishy but dim sidekick (Kenny Doughty).

‘Fell, or was she pushed?’ asks the whip-sharp DCI Vera Stanhope from Northumberland and City Police.

Already examining the body, in his PPE gear and black boots, is Vera’s nemesis, Malcolm the glib pathologist (played by comedian Paul Kaye, otherwise known as spoof celebrity-interviewer Dennis Pennis). Things always pick up when Malcolm is around.

What is it about the TV pathologist?

It’s probably best not to go there.

Remember how Morse was driven crazy by the sultry Grayling Russell, and Lewis eventually got lucky with Laura Hobson?

Neither woman can hold a candle to Fleur Perkins in Midsomer Murders, who once got married in Vegas and now

rides with a biker gang called Ladies of Leather. The only point of slogging through the 24 seasons of Silent Witness was to watch first Amanda Burton and then Emilia Fox carve their way through some poor sod’s liver.

The English nostalgia fest concludes with the final episode of Art on the BBC (BBC4). In Turner, Light and Landscape, Lesley Primo explores ‘how BBC film-makers have got to grips with Britain’s most famous artist’. In other words, the BBC make a film about Turner based on footage from all the BBC’s other films about Turner and conclude that there has been no decline at all in the BBC’s standards of Turner criticism.

Pretty lifeless stuff – where’s the pathologist when you need them?

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE COME TO THE CABARET! I wonder what thoughts went through John Kander’s mind when news came through in late November of Stephen Sondheim’s death at the age of 91.

John Kander, 94 and still with us, composed the music for Cabaret, the regime-changing 1966 musical based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye Berlin that’s playing (until 14th May) at

London’s Playhouse in a suitably showbiz yet absorbingly thought-through new staging by Rebecca Frecknall.

Seeing Cabaret even as the Sondheim obituaries were coming through was a curious experience. The obituary facts were broadly right, but the perspectives were often awry.

Radio 4’s Last Word introduced Sondheim as ‘the most influential musical-theatre composer of the last 70 years’. It’s a line that pretty well sums up the current state of arts coverage in our mainstream media, with its perpetual craving for hyperbole and its lack of factual accuracy.

‘The last 70 years,’ indeed!

Sondheim was barely out of graduate school in 1951. In fact, two decades would pass before Company (1970) and Follies (1971), the shows with which he’s said to have revolutionised the musical. Except that it wasn’t him; it was his friend, the director Hal Prince.

It was the 28-year-old Prince who’d saved West Side Story and seen it to the stage. And it was Prince who dreamt up Cabaret, the first successful ‘concept musical’ in a world where rock and pop – electronically driven, commercially impregnable – were threatening to hole Broadway below the waterline.

John Van Druten’s cosy 1950s rom-com and film I Am a Camera had sanitised Isherwood’s Berlin even more than (at the time) Isherwood himself had done, airbrushing out the narrator’s sexuality, the rent boys, the lesbian hookers and the abortion. The Nazis were retained, for local colour.

Prince changed all that. Working with writer Joe Masteroff and lyricist Fred Ebb, he created a show that interwove Isherwood’s ‘book story’ with the phantasmagoric world of Berlin cabaret, used both as a metaphor for the collapse of Weimar Germany and as a ‘Could it happen here?’ question about 1960s America.

Avant-garde Soviet theatre was one inspiration; another was a cabaret Prince had seen in Stuttgart, where the master of ceremonies was a camp and strangely sinister dwarf. With the multitasking Joel Grey on hand, and Olivier’s Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer as an added layer of inspiration, they placed their emcee centre-stage.

It took 30 years, and director Sam Mendes, to play the musical in a cabaret setting, exploiting to the full the Weimar degeneracy, and leaving uncut the pay-off line of the emcee’s gorilla song, ‘If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all’.

Frecknall’s achievement is to The Oldie February 2022 65

The score by John Kander, classically trained and an opera-lover in a way Sondheim never really was, has long been revered by musicians for its depth, inventiveness and lightly-worn sophistication of musical means.

Some critics accused him of writing ersatz Weill. ‘It’s not Kurt I hear when singing your songs,’ Lotte Lenya told him. ‘It’s Berlin itself.’

‘If she thinks that,’ mused Kander, ‘then f*ck everyone else.’

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON A TRIBUTE TO TRIBUTE BANDS

MARC BRENNER

Willkommen! Eddie Redmayne as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret

produce a show that respects the book and avoids the pitfalls. Men in fishnet tights are out. Circus tricks are in, with Eddie Redmayne – a shoo-in for this repertory since his student days – giving a masterclass in shapeshifting: a hunched clown in one scene; a pantomime Mephistopheles or Aryan overlord in another.

I didn’t see Judi Dench’s Sally Bowles in the 1968 London première, but Jessie Buckley comes close to Isherwood’s real-life Jean Ross, the posh English schoolgirl who defected to a culture and a profession with which she was ill-equipped to cope.

Frecknall even solves the problem of the Isherwood figure, turned by Van Druten into an all-American, heterosexual romantic lead. Prince and Masteroff let him be, leaving Kander and Ebb, Hollywood’s longest-serving composer-writer team, to draft 18 songs for him, none of which was ever used.

If song doesn’t work, well-directed acting does. Omari Douglas plays Cliff as a clever, relaxed, sexually ambiguous, black American. More 1960s James Baldwin than 1930s Christopher Isherwood, and none the worse for that.

One of Prince’s more daring initiatives was to cast Kurt Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, as Isherwood’s antisemitic landlady, Fräulein Schneider. This meant softening the character by adding a love interest, the well-heeled Jewish fruiterer Herr Schultz. Her song What Would You Do?, following the breaking of her engagement to Schultz for fear of Nazi reprisals, is one of the score’s – indeed, music theatre’s – greatest numbers, superbly delivered by Liza Sadovy.

66 The Oldie February 2022

Ever since Pink Floyd willingly went on stage to jam with a Pink Floyd tribute band, cover acts have enjoyed something of a comeback.

Lead singer David Gilmour, bassist Guy Pratt et al jammed along to Comfortably Numb in Fulham Town Hall with Australian Pink Floyd at David’s 50th in 1996 – a festivity for which the tribute band had been booked as, one assumes, an ironic joke.

But it’s not obvious who the joke is on any more.

Australian Pink Floyd have played Glasto, a festival cast in theory to showcase the absolute cream of musical creativity. And the Oasis tribute band – consisting mainly of a bloke in fringed tonsure and parka ‘playing’ Liam – has done sets at the Isle of Wight.

Now even you will recall Noasis.

It was formed in 2006, and has played more than 1,100 live shows, including one in a pub in Yorkshire that became global news this winter. A blizzard trapped folk who’d turned up to a Noasis gig in the highest pub in the British Isles for three nights, leading to endless ‘Snoasis’ and ‘Wonderwall of snow’ headlines.

So here’s the question, pop-pickers.

Should these cover cowboys and tribute session musicians, playing record retreads, be taken more seriously as artists in their own right?

Is this late-onset recognition unmerited – or overdue?

Tribute bands are often younger than the original artists, and play the greatest hits of the pop stars in their pomp – which is what folk want to hear. They cost less dosh, too, especially now our greatest rockers are knocking on a bit and charge for tickets to their live shows as if there’s no tomorrow.

These bands are cheaper to book and far less expensive to see – an Adele ticket will set you back hundreds next year.

They’re a lower risk for the promoter, and everyone in the audience knows they won’t get any dreaded new material. Win, win, win!

Arguments against? They are OK for corporate parties or a billionaire’s birthday. But they should not take up space at true music festivals, ‘real music’ fans and critics complain.

Well, who better to judge than the original rockers themselves?

Noasis’s Twitter page describes the group as ‘the nation’s favourite Oasis tribute band’. So I asked the real Noel Gallagher whether he had ever booked Noasis, as David Gilmour had booked Australian Pink Floyd.

‘Not sure I could stomach a night with a guy who pretends to be Liam Gallagher,’ our Noel said.

Given the age of our golden oldies, I conclude, tribute bands are performing a much-needed service.

‘Tribute bands are an absolutely legitimate genre,’ says Guy Pratt, bassist of Pink Floyd. ‘They keep older music alive in the same way orchestras playing Mozart or Beethoven do.’

Case closed!

Noel (left): ‘Not sure I could stomach a night with a guy who pretends to be Liam’

Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU FRANCIS BACON MAN AND BEAST Royal Academy to 17th April This is another of last year’s scheduled shows that seems at last to be taking its place on the starting line.

One advantage of the delay is that a book intended to accompany it, Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (HarperCollins, £20), not only was published on its due date, but has been declared art book of 2021 by the Times.

Stevens and Swan are an American husband-and-wife writing team, whose previous book, de Kooning: An American Master, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It is a lively and informative account of a tempestuous life.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Peppiatt, author of many Bacon biographical studies. In the previous generation, his predecessor as the authority was David Sylvester, who wrote in 1975 that ‘Everyone feels (whether

they like the work or not) that Bacon is saying something that matters about the times in which we live.’ The bracketed phrase is important. I don’t believe that I could live for long with a Bacon on my wall, because even the mildest of them provokes emotional turbulence.

As this exhibition shows, Bacon was a deep reader, drawing on philosophy, medical textbooks and poetry as well as popular imagery, to create the monsters that stalked his world.

His obsession with gaping mouths and teeth had unlikely godparents in Poussin, Battleship Potemkin and Ludwig Grünewald’s 1923 Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche. It would be interesting to know whether another of his obsessions, the animal side to human nature – which is the subject matter of this exhibition – owes similar debts to literature and film.

Transformations between man (or woman) and beast were a 20th-century staple, from Clemence Housman’s 1896 The Were-Wolf to An American Werewolf in London (1981), by way of Kafka, Henry Hull and Lon Chaney Jr. So often, Bacon’s dogs and bulls appear to have undergone some such metamorphosis, and the beast inside his twisted humanity is scarcely disguised.

One of his earliest influences was Nietzsche with his query: ‘Truth as Circe – Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?’

The Oldie February 2022 67

David Heald (NYC)

Slices of Bacon. Left: Study for Bullfight No 1, oil on canvas (1969). Above: Head VI, oil on canvas (1949). Below: Study for Chimpanzee, oil and pastel on canvas (1957)

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER WELSH WIZARD Quite how I navigated myself to Farmyard Nurseries for the first time 30-odd years ago, sans satnav, I’ll never know.

Its shop lies secluded among the Carmarthenshire hills, accessible for the last mile on a narrow single-track lane.

But find it I did, and on several occasions hauled back to Herefordshire great quantities of hellebores when we began making the garden at Bryan’s Ground.

The shop stocks garden sundries only – no ‘designer’ tea towels, overwhelming potpourri or tacky knick-knacks. It has extensive, well-stocked plant-display areas – with propagating polytunnels – and a woodland garden.

Hellebores are the passion – well, one of many passions – fostered by Farmyard’s owner, Richard Bramley. As a 21-year-old some four decades ago, he migrated from Leicestershire to south-west Wales to help on his father’s 100-acre dairy farm.

But the milking parlour was not for him. It had to be plants, plants and yet more plants – coupled with a compelling desire to set up his own nursery to propagate and sell them.

Largely self-taught (as the best gardeners seem to be), he began by buying from a local wholesaler who seemed to specialise in everything. He also begged seeds from merchants whom he repaid with more seeds when the plants he raised successfully fruited. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the nascent nursery grew as he also began to pick away at his father’s acreage.

Richard, his partner, Hazel, and daughter, Ruth, live nearby. I asked if he had another, private garden at home. ‘Yes, I do live off site but the word “live” is a bit of a misnomer; “sleep” might be a better word.

I live at the nursery – seven days a week.’

It was his grandmother’s whiteflowered orientalis hellebore that triggered his addiction to the genus. On one of my recent visits, I was shown tunnels housing some 5,000 young hellebores for sale this spring. It seemed a lot to cash in on in such a sparsely populated corner of the world. ‘I could sell 20,000,’ he cries, unhesitatingly.

How? Why? His seed-raised youngsters in four-inch pots retail for just £2.99. More mature plants cost between £6 and £8. For his highly desirable doubles, he asks no more than a tenner – a fraction of the price asked by big commercial garden centres.

Farmyard’s sensible and highly successful pricing policy extends across the whole nursery.

Apart from his treasured hellebores, Richard holds National Heritage Collections of Sarracenia (carnivorous plants) and the unspeakably beautiful, spring-flowering Primula sieboldii alongside large specialist collections of auriculas, asters, crocosmias, day lilies, begonias and impatiens. You might be surprised how beautiful and varied these are, beyond the ubiquitous hangingbasket kinds. There are hostas, salvias and sempervivums, too.

Trundling around the nursery, you’ll find an assembly of little-known roscoeas and enough saxifragas to satisfy the most avid of collectors. And I haven’t even mentioned the trees and shrubs.

Any regrets, Richard? He laughs: ‘I should have started earlier – maybe at the age of one … apparently I was a gardener at the age of two. Seriously, though, I would have loved to be involved in some sort of plant-collecting

Green fingers: Richard Bramley of Farmyard Nurseries

escapade … they sound amazing.’

And what gets you out of bed each morning? ‘Being able to indulge in my hobby every day of the year … and to get whatever plants I want under the pretence of business, many of which are totally unprofitable – but who cares about that?’

If Carmarthenshire is off your map, Farmyard Nurseries offers a mail-order service (farmyardnurseries.co.uk); or you can buy and collect from its shop in Carmarthen town centre.

Blooming satisfaction is guaranteed.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD NASTURTIUMS My memories of nasturtiums go back to prep school, when I would pick the leaves of the flowers from the masters’ garden.

Their peppery taste was a welcome treat after the unappetising blandness of school meals.

In the bleak winter, when little is standing in this kitchen garden, except for leeks, perpetual spinach and the last of the Brussels sprouts, I look forward to spring planting and to some colour.

Nasturtiums will fit the bill.

Known also as Indian cress, the plants come in a range of colours, from creamy yellow to orange to red. There are well over 50 varieties, some, such as Empress of India, with dark green leaves. They could be planted next to rows of lettuce or rocket, for instance, as edging along a path between beds of vegetables. Or they will look good surrounding taller The Oldie February 2022 69

plants such as climbing beans or sweetcorn. One may not be replicating a classic French potager, but the nasturtiums will provide edible flowers as well as leaves. And the seeds can apparently be used in place of capers.

Seeds from a packet can be sown under cover, in well-drained soil, from March. The plants, when established, thrive on neglect, requiring no feeding and little watering, otherwise they will produce leaf at the expense of flowers.

Although most plants are annuals, they will self-seed and, in my experience, often grow again the following year.

Perennial nasturtiums, usually trailing or climbing plants, should be bought as young plants. They can be grown in containers and trained over fences and walls.

While enhancing the look of a kitchen garden, nasturtiums will also lure aphids away from other plants, as well as attracting pest-eating hoverflies. With high levels of vitamin C, the plants are thought by some to be a herbal form of penicillin.

An exaggeration, perhaps, but I do feel that they have been doing me good over the years. The leaves are well worth using in a salad and, remembering my first encounter with them, I still like to munch the leaves as soon as they are picked.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD DELI DELIGHTS Welcome news in the depths of winter – a time when all sensible folk are considering hibernation till spring.

Deli specialist Glynn Christian, of mutiny-on-the-Bounty descent, has gathered between hard covers a lifetime’s knowledge of what to do with the little treats you’ve squirrelled away in the back of the cupboard.

Mr Christian’s encyclopedic masterwork, Taste!, doesn’t concern itself with recipes but provides everything you’ll ever need to know about larder stores. It’s all there, from beans to vinegars, by way of such esoteric treats as friar’s beard (a samphire lookalike recommended for seafood pasta); flying-fish caviar, iridescent green fish eggs much favoured in Japan; and freekeh, last year’s most fashionable grain food (wake up there at the back).

The book, subtitled How to Choose the Best Deli Ingredients, will earn its keep on the shelf for sage advice on all things bottled, canned or dried. It also represents the voice of experience on how to store and serve various types of cheese, from fresh curd to aged Parmesan.

70 The Oldie February 2022

Once cut, wrap cheese tightly in waxed paper or clingfilm; store in the coldest part of the fridge. It mustn’t moulder at room temperature.

Mr Christian’s splendid sardines on toast Canned sardines, you’ll be happy to hear, improve with age: six months, say the Portuguese canners, is ideal. And it doesn’t matter if the oil is olive or sunflower because, after some time in the tin, you can’t tell the difference. If the fish was fresh when canned, the fillets will be white and creamy, but if pink or tinged with red, the fish was frozen before it was packed (not so good). Eat mashed with a drop of sherry vinegar, straight from the tin on hot toast.

Or grill one side but not the other of a slice of thick, fresh white bread and place the sardines on the untoasted side. Put this back under the grill and wait till the oil soaks into the crumb and everything sizzles and browns. ‘Simple but splendid.’

Ruth Nieman’s oven-baked freekeh risotto Burnt green wheat, an ingredient with a subtle, nutty, smoky flavour, has been long appreciated on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. It’s given the north Italian treatment in Ruth Nieman’s comprehensive survey of biblical grain foods, Freekeh, Wild Wheat and Ancient Grains.

150g freekeh 60ml olive oil 1 large leek, finely sliced 1 parsnip, peeled and chunked 1 fennel bulb, trimmed and sliced 2 garlic cloves, sliced 1 green chilli, sliced 125ml white wine 60ml tomato passata 50g sugar snap peas, trimmed and sliced on the diagonal Salt and pepper Soak the freekeh in a bowl with enough

cold water to cover for 5-10 minutes.

Drain and reserve. Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas 6.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a roomy pan and fry the leek and parsnip for a few minutes, stir in the garlic and chilli and fry a little, season with salt and pepper, then add the fennel slices and cook till the vegetables are beginning to caramelise. Stir the soaked, drained freekeh into the vegetables. Add the wine and passata and bubble up. Add enough boiling water to cover (about 500ml), reheat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, till the freekeh is beginning to soften. Stir in the sliced sugar snap peas and transfer the pan to the oven for 10 minutes, till the flavours have blended and the grains are soft.

Serve warm, dressed with a little more olive oil – if the fancy takes you.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE TUSCAN LONDON It’s impossible to sit in a trattoria in Italy without wondering why on earth London can’t replicate the simple perfection of their menus.

Three years ago, I was taken by a friend to Sabatino’s, my dream trattoria in Florence. Pasta dishes were just €4.80 and main courses were €6.20. The house wine, served in small Pyrex tumblers, was €6 a litre. I considered emigrating.

Throughout lockdown, I pined for that happy lunch. I was still pining in October until Russell Norman, the best front-ofhouse man ever, invited me to lunch at his new Florentine restaurant, not two minutes from Farringdon station, on the Cambridge-Brighton line.

I knew it would be amazing. Russell’s entry to the gastronomic hall of fame was guaranteed when he introduced smallplate dining to London in the shape of Venetian cicchetti at Polpo back in 2008.

If Russell opened a Greenlandic brasserie, I’d be there yomping down penguin burgers with seaweed pickle.

Astride an elk, if required.

What I didn’t know is that Russell had actually bought Sabatino’s and transported it right down to the check tablecloths and menu typeface to the Little Italy that Clerkenwell once was. We started with coccoli, those fluffy balls of dough. Then we shared a triumphant pappardelle con coniglio (bunny to you) before the pork and fennel salsicce.

‘Sausage’ is just not an accurate translation. Proper salsicce like these are simply not in the same genus as a childhood chipolata. Each bite reveals another twist of offal. At Russell’s insistence, we shared his tiramisu.

Russell was also kind enough to warn me that it gets quite noisy in the evening.

And the delicious Venetian house red is just £7 a glass. So book that lunch table soon and start dreaming of Santa Croce.

I’ve only ever been to the docks area of Liverpool. So, on leaving Lime Street station, I was completely unprepared for the extravagance of the Athens of the North; St George’s Hall and the Walker Library and Art Gallery would make Palladio stop in his tracks. There’s no actual record of him taking a ferry across the Mersey or sweating in the Cavern Club but our Scouse cousins sure made him one of theirs.

Sadly, Liverpool isn’t awash with good restaurants, which belies its fame as the party city of the north. Yet my Token Northern Friend, David, took me to La Lunya, which is as authentically Catalan as Brutto is Florentine. You enter through their deli of Iberian treats. Then on your left is their long elegant bar.

David is a wonderfully greedy man who likes to order 12 dishes when three would do, but then confesses to being full after four bites and in dire need of a cigarette. Unfortunately, I was not brought up to leave something for Master Manners but rather to leave no hoof, claw or wilting parsley untouched.

So I was left to work my ravenous way through gambas pil pil, 5J Iberico jamon de Bellota, calamari (which were getting cold so I thought it best to wolf the lot while they had some crunch in them – needless to say, Marlboro Man claimed they were his favourite), tomato bread, croquetas, padron peppers and albondigas. If only restaurants in Spain were so authentic.

Brutto, 35-37 Greenhill Rents, London EC1M 6BN; msha.ke/brutto; tel: 020 4537 0928; main courses: £12-£16 Lunya Liverpool, 55 Hanover Street, Liverpool L1 3DN; lunya.co.uk; tel: 0151 706 9770; tapas £6-£8

DRINK BILL KNOTT A CASE FOR THE WINE SOCIETY What is in store for wine-drinkers this year? A maelstrom of price hikes, supply chain disasters and frost-stricken vintages?

Or the sunny uplands of new trade deals and a couple of quid off a bottle of Penfolds Grange? And what should we be drinking? Is orange the new rosé?

As I have seen the drivers from the Wine Society more often than my family over the last year and a half, I thought Pierre Mansour, a buyer for the society

since 2003 and its chief buyer since 2017, would be a great man to mark my card.

If you thought the Wine Society was just an old-fashioned, genteel sort of club for claret-swillers, think again. It has 180,000 active members – ‘We didn’t expect to reach that number for another two years,’ Pierre says; it is selling 50 per cent more wine than before the pandemic.

This year’s expected turnover is £140m.

There have been growing pains – the old warehouse is creaking at the seams – ‘but we’ve made some changes, and now we can dispatch twice as much wine from the same space’. That remark brought to mind Ian Carmichael’s hopelessly naive Stanley Windrush from I’m All Right Jack.

So what should we be ordering? Pierre would happily talk about the society’s 1,400 or so wines all day. So it seemed wise to narrow him down to Spain, where he is the society’s head honcho. On my last few visits to various Spanish wine regions, I’ve been struck by how a new generation of winemakers are reviving old vineyards and tearing up rulebooks, and Pierre concurs: ‘The younger producers are really pushing boundaries, and getting so much better at focusing on the quality of the fruit. Garnacha [aka Grenache] is really exciting. In Spain, it’s always played second fiddle to Tempranillo but, like Pinot Noir, it expresses a sense of place, from the rich and powerful Priorats to the higher altitudes in the north, where it’s pure, fresh and vibrant.’

And great value for money. Pierre singles out Zorzal, a family-run estate in Navarra, where winemaking brothers Xabi and Iñaki are younger than most of their vines. Their entry-level Viña Zorzal Garnacha 2020 is a mere £7.25. The supremely elegant, single-vineyard Malayeto Garnacha 2018 is £14.50.

There are rumblings of change in Rioja, too. The society has championed terrific, old-school wines from La Rioja Alta but Pierre has a penchant for the more modern style of the Muga bodega, too: ‘Their wines aren’t super-modern, but they have impeccable fruit, as well as being aged in French and American oak.’

He recommends the Muga Reserva 2017 (£16): ‘It’s a bit like how BMW remodelled the Mini, keeping the style but making it more modern and functional.’

White Rioja, too, is back in fashion.

The society’s fresh, nutty, own-label version (£8.50) is from Bodega Classica’s ultra-modern winery in Rioja Alta.

Life membership of the Wine Society is £40, including £20 off your first order, although with no obligation to buy. Every wine writer I know is a member.

If you are not, and you love wine, I can think of no better New Year’s resolution.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a tangy Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire; a pink crémant that no fridge door should be without; and a rich Syrah that would make a perfect partner for a beef stew. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Les Secrets de Sophie, Bougrier, Touraine, France 2020, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 Crisp, dry and refreshing Sauvignon Blanc, with extra complexity from lees-ageing and a long, citrus-spiked finish.

Grande Cuvée 1531 de Aimery Rosé, Crémant de Limoux, France NV, offer price £14.99, case price £179.88 Lovely pink fizz from the south of France: the perfect pick-me-up on a drab winter’s day.

Waddesdon Syrah, Rothschild Collection, Pays d’Oc, France 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Another wine from Rothschild’s great-value Waddesdon label: an inky, food-friendly Syrah with firm tannins and a hint of spice.

Mixed case price £149.88 – a saving of £24.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

Call 0117 370 9930

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price.

Free delivery to UK mainland.

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 22nd February 2022.

The Oldie February 2022 71

SPORT JIM WHITE ADIEU, TENNIS GOLDEN OLDIES For once, many of us find ourselves wishing Novak Djokovic wasn’t such a prat.

By the time you read this, it seems unlikely the anti-vax conspiracist will have been sufficiently reconciled with authority to play in the Australian Open, the first grand slam of the new season.

When it comes to COVID, Djokovic likes to do things his way, convinced his fitness will protect him from all viral assault. But the Aussies are not ones to yield to celebrity or status. To them, it doesn’t matter who he is. If he hasn’t followed their rules on vaccination and lockdown, he will not be playing. And, if he fails to heed their insistence, how we will miss him.

Because if he doesn’t participate, of one thing we can be certain: we will witness a complete changing of the guard. This will represent the proper end of an era: the first time in an age that none of the fab four of men’s tennis will be in the mix when the prizes are decided.

Because, at the time of writing, Rafael Nadal has contracted the virus, Andy Murray is a man held together by sticking plaster and Roger Federer is about to enter his 42nd year. Even if they were to make it to the draw, none of them is going to win it. The most we can hope for is a romantic throwback charge to the latter stages before chronology takes its inevitable toll.

Djokovic was the old order’s last chance – the final one of the quartet still in tournament-winning contention. If he is obliged by his idiosyncratic beliefs to miss out down under, then the door is open wide.

For well over 15 years, the four of them have dominated the game, been in charge and brooked no opposition. For all that time, no one else has been allowed anywhere near the silverware.

Between them, they have won an astonishing 63 grand slams. Now, for this coming season, it finally looks as if time on their era has been called.

This should be an exciting development. It is the chance for someone else – someone new and fresh.

But the problem for the men’s game is that no one really cares about who comes next. Or even knows who they might be.

The glorious foursome’s era of total control has meant an entire generation of players have withered in their shadow.

No one comes close to their renown.

Well, apart from Nick Kyrgios, though he 72 The Oldie February 2022

is largely famed for his capacity for selfdestruction and is frankly about as likely to win in his home tournament as I am.

And it means that the game finds itself suddenly bereft of the kind of star names that bring wider attention and make tournaments talking points. Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Andrey Rublev – the other four that make up the current world top five behind Djokovic – are not exactly characters discussed over kitchen tables across the world.

Where once relationships could founder on disagreements over who was better – Nadal or Federer, Djokovic or Murray – no one is going to fall out over whether Zverev’s backhand is superior to Medvedev’s. No one, beyond a few in the know, is getting over-exercised about Tsitsipas’s extended toilet breaks. The Speaker of the House of Commons has not been seen embarrassing himself in his enthusiasm for Rublev, in the ostentatious, look-at-me manner John Bercow used to fail to conceal his ballooning man crush for Federer at every Wimbledon.

Tennis needs us to care. And the truth is that if Djoko isn’t in it, few of us will worry about who wins the men’s Aussie Open.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD GRAND THEFT AUTO PREVENTION Car thefts in 2020 were down to 89,000 in England and Wales – 24,000 fewer than in 2019.

The drop is attributed to fewer lockdown journeys, better vehicle security and a police crackdown on ‘chop shops’ – places where stolen vehicles are broken up. Compare this with the 1990s, when an average of 300,000 vehicles were stolen each year.

But it’s not all good news. That 2020 figure represents an increase of 20,000 since 2013 – and the rate is still increasing. Why? One reason is ‘electronic compromise’ – in other words, someone hacking into your car’s electronics and taking control of it. This is usually achieved by Thief A standing by your car with an electronic device. The device amplifies the car’s electronic security signal while Thief B stands by your front door with a similar device that amplifies the signal from your electronic car key. The signal is relayed to Thief A who unlocks your car and drives it away as if he has the key.

Tracker, the vehicle tracking and security company, say that 93 per cent of thefts they recorded in 2020 were carried

out in this manner. Another electronic device – like the first, available online – programs a key fob to duplicate your electronic key. Overall, about 36 per cent of car thefts now involve electronic manipulation.

Fortunately, you can guard against such techniques. Ford are introducing ‘sleeping key fobs’, which deactivate your key when it’s not in use. Or you can block its signal yourself by keeping it – when in the house – in a Faraday pouch or an old tobacco tin (remember them?) lined with kitchen foil. Or simply use a mechanical gear stick or steering-wheel lock. They’re a bit of a fag to fit and remove whenever you go out, but they’re a significant deterrent to a thief who doesn’t want to spend time struggling with them outside your house. It’s easier for him to go to the Range Rover next door, which doesn’t have one.

Simple, commonsense measures are also effective. Park in your garage or out of public sight if you can (many thefts are opportunistic rather than planned). Or park in a well-lit part of the street – 85 per cent of thefts happen at night – and have your windows etched with your registration number and VIN (vehicle identification number). Or park in such a way that a quick getaway is not easy ie tight against other cars. This may also deter catalytic-converter thieves.

There are more radical if unconventional measures. Some 37 per cent of stolen vehicles are less than five years old. My father, a farmer, never locked his car, never even took the key out and never had a car stolen. He always had old bangers that no selfrespecting thief would look at. But you don’t have to go as far down-market as he did – there are plenty of unfashionable but reliable 10- to 20-year-old cars you can leave where you like and be confident they’ll stay put.

In 56 years of car ownership, I’ve had three stolen. One was a Mark 2 Jaguar left for one night only on a London street.

The next was a Range Rover Classic stolen from outside our rural home and the third a Land Rover Defender stolen from the local station car park.

The lessons were: first, they were all collectable cars targeted by thieves: second, they were all parked in exposed places: third, none was alarmed or protected with a sturdy steering lock.

The Defender had a cheap steering lock which, the station camera showed, took the thief less than two minutes to overcome – another lesson there.

Its successors have all been protected by a heavyweight Thatcham-approved Disklok. Until next time?

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Going, going, gone – online Despite what some people may claim, the internet has not changed any of the rules of economics.

But it has massively increased the size of the marketplace for both buyers and sellers. No venerable industry has grasped this more readily than one of the oldest: auction houses.

There are hundreds of them dotted all over Britain. They have always been effective at packing in the bidders. In the 19th century, some auctioneers laid on transport and booze. Then came

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

Overpriced computer https://tinyurl.com/webster409 An American auction house that sold a 46-year-old Apple computer for $500,000. It originally cost £666.66 – devilment indeed.

1921 Census findmypast.co.uk/1921-census The 1921 Census has just been digitised. It’s important. The 1931 Census was destroyed by fire.

The 1941 Census was cancelled – so it has crucial information. To pay for the digitisation, it isn’t free for three years.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

telephone bids – and now the internet.

The technology to broadcast auctions live online has been around for 20 years and is now almost universal, even at the smallest sales.

The auction still takes place in a room chock-full of furniture, china, toys, silver, books and who knows what else. The auctioneer still sits at a rostrum with a gavel. The difference is that, as well as the buyers in the room, the auctioneer is watching a computer showing bids made in cyberspace.

One regional auction-house representative told me half their lots are now sold to internet bidders, and the proportion has been growing.

Online bidders are from all over the world, too.

When you’re bidding online, you sometimes see the auctioneer working; you always hear them too, and see the catalogue entry and pictures of what is being sold. This hybrid of the real and online worlds works well.

It seems that we need the presence of the human auctioneer, cajoling and persuading, to lend a little urgency and, to some extent, entertainment to proceedings. So much more fun than the sterile worlds of eBay and Amazon.

From the buyer’s perspective, it also offers the priceless ability to set up searches of hundreds of catalogues automatically. If there is a particular painter or vintage toy you crave, the online platforms will scan all the catalogues daily, and email you if something you might want appears.

Two of the biggest – the-saleroom. com and easyliveauction.com – have more than 1,000 auction houses on their

books in Britain alone and they each offer this service entirely free.

I recently bought a painting this way. Alerted by the-saleroom.com, I looked at it online, did my bidding online, paid online and organised the shipping online, and it’s now hanging on my wall. The shipping cost more than the painting, but it was much cheaper than making an 800-mile round trip to Truro to bid, which I might have done 20 years ago.

An insider at an auction house tells me the system was a godsend during lockdown. Their auctions were conducted entirely online; the auctioneers were sitting in an empty room talking to themselves and feeling a bit silly, but the sales were a success.

Initially, there was a certain amount of resistance from some of their older clients, but many now prefer to view the items in person and then bid online.

A couple of warnings: First, bidding online may incur an extra premium – as much as five per cent plus VAT, on top of the auctioneer’s normal commission, which itself is usually at least 20 per cent plus VAT. However, by no means all auctioneers impose this extra charge. So make sure you check before you bid.

Secondly, bidding online is just as much a commitment as bidding in the room. If your bid wins, you are on the hook, even if you got carried away or were clumsy with your mouse.

Still, it’s a free spectator sport; there’s no need to buy a thing and it costs nothing to watch an auction. So if you fancy yourself as bit of a Lovejoy, why not have a look?

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Your even more f lexible friend Credit cards are disappearing – at least as physical pieces of plastic.

After Barclaycard arrived in the UK in 1966, credit cards developed slowly. Now yesterday’s flexible friend is changing almost day by day.

Originally, credit-card purchases were authorised through zip-zap machines – 74 The Oldie February 2022

manual imprinters that slid backwards and forwards. Checkout staff could telephone your bank for authorisation – a particularly slow and often unsuccessful method. Shopping got faster when the magnetic stripe was added and security improved with chip-and-pin.

More recently, radio-frequency identification has created contactless payment – so we can pay for goods with a flick of the wrist. But customers still need to produce a plastic card.

A half-step towards ditching cards came with ApplePay, where a customer loads existing credit- and debit-card

information on to a digital wallet on an iPhone and makes payments by holding the mobile phone over a card reader.

Google Pay, Amazon Pay and others have followed, and added the option to smart watches, but the starting point is still a physical card.

More recently, credit-card providers have launched accounts, with cards, that operate through apps on a phone or computer. This gives greater security and the ability to change spending limits and pins, block the account and check your latest spending wherever you are.

It is a small step from here to abolishing plastic cards altogether. In the UK, this has been done with some debit and pre-paid cards. And now NewDay, the lender behind Amazon’s credit card, has launched Bip, a credit-card account without a card.

There is even a discussion about whether credit cards as a form of borrowing will survive at all. These days, young people prefer spreading the cost of purchases through buy-nowpay-later (BNPL) schemes such as Klarna, Clearpay and Laybuy. These are largely interest-free. Because they are not technically credit, there is no consumer credit protection, but

‘They’re testing for sleaze run-off’

their arrival has transformed attitudes to borrowing.

Another progression is to combine the credit features of a credit card with BNPL. Tymit has the first account like this and other banks, including traditional ones, are planning the same system. Monzo has added a virtual credit card to its BNPL scheme.

Some card companies, such as Zopa and Keebo, have connected with open banking – where you give your bank permission to share your data with third parties. With the supply of information about your direct debits and savings, the

interest rate is calculated according to your individual creditworthiness.

These app-based schemes on their own work when you are shopping online.

To pay for goods in shops, you need to download your card details to a digital wallet on a mobile phone or smart watch.

The next generation of chips will be even smaller – so tiny, in fact, that they will be implanted in wearable devices such as jewellery, rings, watchstraps, bracelets and key fobs.

If people who do not, or cannot, use new technology feel left behind, the feeling will only get worse.

The Oldie February 2022 75

Getting Dressed

The literary wizard from Oz

Dafyyd Jones

50 years ago, publisher and writer Carmen Callil founded Virago brigid keenan For her latest novel, Melbourne-born Carmen Callil, 83, went back to her roots.

Oh Happy Day is an account of poverty, deprivation and cruelty in England in the 19th century – when her great-great-great grandfather was transported to Australia for stealing.

Some of Callil’s other ancestors fled or were deported to the new world from Lebanon and Ireland. But she concentrates on the English story because she sees parallels with this country now and then: elites getting richer while the poor get poorer and refugees are treated inhumanly.

Her first novel, Bad Faith, also had a personal angle. It told the dark story of the French Jews and Nazi collaborators during the war. She wrote it because her psychiatrist and friend had discovered that her father, Darquier, had been one of the villains, and died by suicide as a result.

In 1959, Callil, now 83, sailed from Australia in the opposite direction to her ancestor. Her arrival in Britain was a disappointment: ‘I had never been in a more depressing place: grim and grey and poor and everyone seemed to have bad teeth.’

She soon took off for Italy and returned only in 1963. Her uncle, who had looked after her family after her father died when she was nine, told her to do a ‘proper job’. So she went to work for Marks & Spencer, ‘in the skirt department – pencil skirt department’.

But, after two years, she got bored inspecting skirt stitching in factories.

She placed an ad in the Times: ‘Australian BA wants job in book publishing.’ She spent the next five years working successfully for various distinguished publishing houses.

Callil moved from conventional publishing to Ink (an Australian-run countercultural paper) and then to Spare Rib, the women’s lib magazine. In 1972, 50 years ago, she started her own publishing company, Virago, using an inheritance from her grandfather. Virago celebrated women and their lives, and neglected women writers. It was a huge success – their elegant, dark green covers have become familiar to us all.

76 The Oldie February 2022

Left: coat from Missoni; loafers from A Piedi. Right: Callil at her desk at Virago, 1981

‘The late 1960s and the 70s and 80s were divine … I loved being in England.

There was a great sense of hope.’ Then came Margaret Thatcher. ‘She started the downturn; then George Osborne with his austerity – I don’t believe in making poor people even more deprived – and now Boris and Brexit.’ She despairs.

‘Maybe my siblings were more sensible, staying in Australia.’

Callil, made a dame in 2017, once argued that no one ever changed the world by being ‘mimsy’. She had a daunting reputation, but she has mellowed. Petite and slim, she has always had an eye for good clothes but says she doesn’t buy them any more – ‘Because what’s the point?’

Still, she goes on to tell me enthusiastically about two agnès b shirts she bought in a sale recently. She ‘passionately adores’ agnès b clothes.

In the 1960s, Callil lived in Chelsea, down the road from Mary Quant. She was a big fan. ‘I used to squeeze my thunder thighs into her miniskirts, but I never wore Biba – I didn’t have that titless straight body. I had boobs and a waist. I think my shape is more French than English.’

Her favourite shop in the world is Monoprix, the French supermarket chain, she says. Then she has another think and decides that, after all, perhaps

Armani and Missoni are her favourite designers. She has bought only one thing from each: a suit from Armani and a coat from Missoni (see picture). ‘It was 20 years ago and I had just had my first advance. I paid £1,000 for it but, then again, I am still wearing it…’

She used to like shopping at her old employer M & S, but buys only bras and knickers from them these days. She prefers Uniqlo and Brora – ‘but Brora only in the sale’.

Her hair is trimmed regularly by Monika, who comes to her house. She once tried to colour it brown herself, but ended up with a big white patch on the side of her head. So she gave up on colour. ‘It costs a fortune to have it dyed – £200? I couldn’t spend that on my hair every couple of months.’

As for shoes, she likes Birkenstocks or Candice Cooper for comfort; Thierry Rabotin for posh. In lockdown, she treated herself to a pair of glittery black loafers (pictured) from A Piedi.

Callil never exercises, ‘All my friends are doing Pilates but I absolutely loathe exercise. It is so boring. So my body can just go hang.’ She has what she calls ‘various decrepitudes’ – including cancer of the lung: ‘Everyone in publishing and journalism smoked … you could tell where our parties were by clouds of smoke billowing out of the windows.’

Coal Tit

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The most magical bird contact is to have a songbird feed from the hand.

The tremulous, prickly weight is breathtaking – literally, because if you breathe noticeably, you can cause instant flight. To attract the shy coal tit (Periparus ater), smallest of titmice at ¼ ounce, to your hand is to receive the order of merit.

Lord Grey of Fallodon achieved this during a cold Northumberland January.

It took him a few days, but thereafter a coal tit followed him around. This contrasted with his renowned success with robins: ‘The tit could follow me anywhere unmolested; no robin could do so without trespassing on another territory and being involved in a fight.’

Grey wrote in The Charm of Birds that Londoners have an advantage: ‘More birds are to be seen, free and tame, in London than on any country estate.’

That was a century ago. It is even truer today, with notices prohibiting birdfeeding, largely because it attracts rats. In St James’s Park, famed for its pelican-led collection of decorative waterfowl founded by Charles II, the most meagre and undesirable offering will create a feeding frenzy at any time of year – and especially in hard weather, with roseringed parakeets the star attraction.

None of this has much to do with the fine art of feeding songbirds. On margins of the ‘floriferous shrubberies’ at St James’s Park, part of the architect John Nash’s 18th-century landscaping, a few practised regulars succeed. Novice imitators turn away disappointed, arms aching after ten minutes that have seemed like an hour.

Those who have garden feeders at home will recognise what a prize it is to gain a wild bird’s confidence. Even in my retirement, the patience and discipline required to tempt a bird to settle on a hand is hard to find. The coal tit’s shyness distinguished it at my birdfeeder and among a park hand-feeding

colony, where it never ventured closer than a few feet.

It is not because it is a precarious minority. The growth in the now 660,000 UK population, boosted by a preference for conifers, makes it one of our most numerous birds.

Proliferation of conifer-planting means coal-tit fans should head north or west. Its greatest abundance is in Ireland, where the white cheek is tinged yellow.

Kim Courtauld at Auchinellan, Argyll, finds half a dozen waiting for him every morning on the dead-branch perch provided – ‘as if to say, “Come on, where’s my breakfast?” ’. His immediate colony numbers about 30.

They prefer whole peanuts, which they

hoard for later consumption by hiding them in the abundant moss encouraged by that wet, pure climate. Marion Campbell, in her 1963 historical novel Lances and Longships, set in medieval Argyll, writes that the bird was called ‘the little monk’, the white patch on its head likened to a monk’s tonsure.

‘Is it not the sign to us that these matters were shown to our fathers by angels?’ marvels one character.

Auchinellan also offsets the declining southern trend in bullfinches, black grouse and cuckoos – and it has dogfriendly holiday cottages to rent.

The 2022 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie February 2022 79

A hundred years after Lord Carnarvon found Tutankhamun’s dazzling tomb, Eleanor Doughty talks to his great-grandson

The Earl who dug up King Tut

ALEX MACNAUGHTON / ALAMY

I

t must be peculiar to have one of the last century’s most remarkable events associated with your family.

This is something George ‘Geordie’ Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon, knows a lot about. In recent years, the Carnarvons have been best known as the custodians of Highclere Castle, the Hampshire stately home at which Julian Fellowes’s ITV drama Downton Abbey was filmed.

But a century ago, ‘Carnarvon’ meant ‘Egypt’, rather than Sunday-night television. That’s thanks to the 5th Earl’s involvement in the discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of Kings, near Thebes.

This year is the centenary of that miraculous event. In November 1922, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and the archaeologist Howard Carter made a hole in a sealed door that would open the world’s eyes to a golden reality.

‘Can you see anything?’ Carnarvon asked.

‘Yes, wonderful things,’ said Carter.

Howard Carter is well known, but the 5th Earl of Carnarvon has passed into historical oblivion. This, says his greatgrandson, from an armchair in the morning room at Highclere, ought to be put right.

‘People have written books about Carter, and he deserves the respect he gets, but Great-grandfather often misses out.’

The Wikipedia entry for the 5th Earl describes him as ‘the financial backer of the search for and excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb’. But he was much more than that.

Lord Carnarvon says, ‘He funded it, but he also started doing the job himself first. He wasn’t sitting here sending money to Egypt – he was actually in Egypt. It was a pretty brave thing to do.

He took himself out to the middle of nowhere down the Nile, and just started digging.’

80 The Oldie February 2022

From Downton Abbey to the Valley of the Kings: George Carnarvon with his great-grandfather, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, at Highclere Castle

Since 1793, earls of Carnarvon have been called Henry or George with no exceptions, and this George Carnarvon was born in 1866. In 1895, he married Almina Wombwell, the daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, and the couple had two children – Henry, the 6th Earl, and a daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, who was with her father at the time the tomb was discovered. He succeeded to his father’s title aged 23, and was, writes his son in his 1976

memoir No Regrets, ‘a great tease’, ‘one of the best shots in England’ and a keen golfer.

Most importantly, he was a pioneer of motoring – and it would be this hobby that would lead to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. When, in 1903, he was involved in a serious motoring accident, he had to be ‘nursed back to life’, explains the current Lord Carnarvon. ‘His doctors advised that, instead of persisting with motor cars,

Far left: Howard Carter (1874-1939) and Lord Carnarvon (1866-1923) open the tomb in 1922

MICHAEL VENTURA / WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE / ALAMY

Left: Gold mask of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun (1341-1323 BC)

he ought to enjoy a warm climate in the winter.’

And so off he went – to Egypt.

After he’d been allocated an area for excavation, in the first season he was there in the early 1900s all he found was a mummified cat.

Lord Carnarvon chuckles. ‘Can you imagine having all those people working, with all the dust, stone, and rubble – it would have gone on for weeks – and all you have at the end of it is this creature?’

Nevertheless, Carnarvon persisted and, in 1907, he joined up with Howard Carter, who had been working in Egypt since 1892.

Discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb was ‘very poignant for Carter’, says Lord Carnarvon. ‘He started at Amarna [the city built by Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, in 1346 BC], and ends at Tutankhamun’s tomb, which was full of Amarna-style art. When he first looked into the antechamber, he could barely believe what he was seeing.’

It seems almost bizarre now that a county aristocrat could just happen upon one of the world’s most important archaeological finds. His great-grandson seems almost reluctant to take seriously his family’s legacy, though this could be modesty. When I ask him when he first learned about Tutankhamun, he says ‘at school’. I try again, asking whether as a child he was aware that it was his family’s discovery.

‘Yes, I was, but there were three sets of

amazing things going on at once in Greatgrandfather’s time – the cars, Egypt and de Havilland. He encouraged [the aviation pioneer] Geoffrey de Havilland’s work on his first flight, which took off in September 1910 from one of our fields.’

Is it surreal, that link with history?

‘It is strange, but there are tons of families who have got connections with things around the world,’ Lord Carnarvon demurs.

Still, he is ‘very proud’ of his greatgrandfather’s work with Carter, and their tenacity. ‘It shows that if you persist at something long enough, it may not work but you can pull off something amazing.’

It’s sad, he says, that his greatgrandfather ‘died in the hours of his triumph’. This came in April 1923, after Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito and the bite became infected.

Lord Carnarvon doesn’t make much of the so-called ‘mummy’s curse’, and the speculation that this is what killed Carnarvon. ‘It was bad luck, really – pneumonia is what is on his death certificate.’

Carnarvon’s death came as a blow to his son. He recalls in his memoir how he felt the next day: ‘I awoke early to the sudden realisation that my name was no longer [Lord] Porchester but Carnarvon… it dawned on me that my soldiering days must come to an end and with them a life of comparative freedom.’

Returning to Highclere with some items from Egypt, he shut them away.

The current Lord Carnarvon says, ‘You would think that the story of his father finding Tutankhamun’s tomb is the most romantic thing of all, but he never talked about it. It was somehow just an annoying subject. I find it very strange, but it was something that caused his father to die, and gave him all the grief of running Highclere.’

When, in 1987, he too died, his son, the Queen’s former racing manager and Lord Carnarvon’s father, was surprised to learn that Highclere was a repository of Egyptian artefacts.

The current Lord Carnarvon says, ‘When the inventories were being done after my grandfather’s death, the butler said, “M’Lord, there is of course the Egyptian stuff.” My father said, “What Egyptian stuff?” and they found all of these objects that my father just didn’t know about.’

Lord Carnarvon has no desire to discover any tombs. With his wife Fiona he has built a permanent Egypt exhibition at Highclere, and the couple visit the country when they can.

The exploring bug hasn’t been completely lost. He is just a different kind of adventurer.

‘I’m interested in new technologies – I’m an investor in some fintech companies. Fiona and I try to use the latest ideas to tell people about Highclere. While it’s not digging up tombs, some of that gene has been inherited.’

The Oldie February 2022 81

Benton End revisited

BENTON END HOUSE & GARDEN TRUST/ MAGGI HAMBLING / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES/ IPSWICH BOROUGH COUNCIL

For 40 years, a Suffolk manor house was home to Britain’s finest artists, gardeners and writers. Now it’s reopening. By Harry Mount

‘I wish to goodness you’d never set foot in Benton End,’ Maggi Hambling’s mother told the artist.

But, Hambling says, ‘It was too late.’ In 1960, the 15-year-old Hambling took her first two oil paintings to Benton End, a 16th-century Suffolk manor house – known as ‘the Artists’ House’ – in the nearby town of Hadleigh.

One of the artists, Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978), known as Lett, answered the door. The other artist, his partner, Sir Cedric Morris Bt (1889-1982), was having dinner. After dinner, both artists carefully examined the pictures.

Hambling writes in Benton End Remembered, ‘I received encouraging – though completely contradictory – criticism from each of them. I finally left what in Hadleigh was considered a notorious house at 9.30 in the evening.

My mother thought I had been sold into the white slave trade.’

Benton End had an instrumental effect on Hambling – ‘It made me who I am… Lett taught me the importance of the imagination.’

Cedric and Lett bought Benton End in 1940 and moved their East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing there.

From 1937, the school had been in Dedham, Essex, until it burnt down in 1939. At Benton End, Cedric created a garden famed for the irises he bred and painted.

The school was instrumental for a critical group of artists and writers: Vita Sackville-West; John Nash; Constance Spry; Elizabeth David; Ronald Blythe; Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

Kathleen Hale (1898-2000) was so intrigued by Cedric and Lett, whom she met in Paris in 1922, that they starred in her books. Cedric is the dancing master in Orlando’s Home Life (1942). Lett is the Katnapper in Orlando the Marmalade Cat: His Silver Wedding (1944). Just as in the book (pictured, right), Lett really did darn a hole in his jacket with white wool and then paint on a pattern in watercolour.

One of the first pupils at Benton End was 17-year-old Lucian Freud. His portraits of 82 The Oldie February 2022

plants and gardens will be in an exhibition at the Garden Museum in 2022.

A new exhibition at Firstsite, Colchester, reveals what an artistic and intellectual crucible Benton End was. Maggi Hambling’s moving portraits of Lett are on show. So are Cedric’s pictures of Benton End and the burnt school at Dedham.

Lucian Freud is represented by a 1973 portrait, Small Head. There’s a fine 1955 drawing of John Nash by Hugh Cronyn.

After Cedric’s death in 1982, Benton End was sold. But now it is to be an art school and prized garden once more, after a revival of interest in Cedric Morris’s pictures and gardening contributions. In 2015, former Sissinghurst head-gardener Sarah Cooke’s display of Benton End irises was much prized at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. In 2018, two exhibitions opened in London: Cedric Morris: Artist-Plantsman at the Garden Museum, and Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden Wall at Philip Mould & Co Gallery.

Having seen those shows, Rob and Bridget Pinchbeck, a philanthropist couple, stepped in and bought Benton End in 2018. They then transferred ownership to the Garden Museum.

The plan is to restore Cedric Morris’s garden in 2022. Some of his plants have survived his 40-year absence and others are being returned. The house will be restored, with an exhibition gallery and rooms dedicated to the art of the garden.

There will be workshops, events and masterclasses, both non-residential and residential. Courses will cover horticulture, fine art, creative writing and photography.

Bridget Pinchbeck says, ‘It was Ronald Blythe, author and friend of Cedric and Lett, who best summed up the experience of Benton End: “The atmosphere was one of intellectual freedom. Everything was discussed. It was bohemian in the best sense. The whole atmosphere was exciting and liberating.” He added, “The greatest crime at Benton End was to be boring!” ’ Garden Museum Director, Christopher

Top: Cedric Morris’s Benton End, Suffolk, 1947. Middle: Benton End today, with Iris ‘Benton Apollo’. Bottom: Cedric Morris in His Garden, 1957, by Glyn Morgan

It was an unconventional relationship which produced a freedom and magic alchemy for those who lived, worked and studied at Benton End. ‘Lett and Cedric were open about their homosexuality at a time when it was illegal to have such a relationship, and they also conducted a fight against the philistinism of the day,’ says the writer Ronald Blythe, still happily with us at 99.

Lett cooked delicious meals and peppered the conversation with insights.

‘Mischievous and sometimes wicked, he liked to dramatise situations and delighted in stirring up scandals,’ said Hale.

Inside, Benton End was a world of stylish disorder. The gardener Beth Chatto (1923-2018), who first met Cedric in the 1950s, remembered bunches of drying herbs and ropes of garlic hanging from hooks on a door: ‘Shelves were crammed with coloured glass, vases, jugs, plates with mottoes –a curious hotchpotch.’ Maggi Hambling recalls Lett proudly showing Elizabeth David around his larder, lifting the silver lid from a tray of cold collations – ‘and out flew a moth’.

The prevailing gods at Benton End, in the house and the garden, were wit, knowledge and freedom of thought.

Frances Mount says, ‘Cedric helped me to realise that I could achieve what I wanted to do. He allowed people to be themselves. It was very free. There was nothing orderly except for meals. There was no sense of anybody being cajoled into doing something.’

Here’s hoping the new Benton End will breathe life back into those old household gods.

From top: Frances Hodgkins’s Portrait of Cedric Morris, 1930; Maggi Hambling’s Lett Sleeping, 1975; Cedric Morris’s Mixed Flowers, 1947

Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing is at Firstsite, Colchester, until 18th April

CHELMSFORD MUSEUM/TOWNER EASTBOURNE/THE CEDRIC MORRIS ESTATE/THE LETT-HAINES ESTATE/KATHLEEN HALE

Woodward, says, ‘It will be a hybrid of the Garden Museum and the heritage of Benton End and its neighbourhood. It will not be a museum, but once again a house where things happen.’

Benton End has been dubbed a British Giverny, after Claude Monet’s Normandy garden. It has also been compared to Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse and Bloomsbury salon.

Still today the house is bewitching, with its rambling, half-timbered extensions, diaper brickwork and heavily mullioned windows. In the sprawling garden, you can still make out the ghosts of its soon-to-be-revived past.

Frances Mount, a garden expert and nursery-owner (and my aunt) who worked at Benton End from 1971-79, remembers, ‘It was very much a painter’s garden with much use of strong colours put together, such as orange poppies with scarlet and lots of small plants like old-fashioned pinks and dianthus which concentrated the eye.

‘Cedric was not a botanist and was vague about Latin names, but he knew how plants were formed. I think he could not have painted flowers in the way he did without an intimate knowledge of the shape of plants.’

The garden was testament to Cedric’s extraordinary horticultural skills. He was the first person in Britain to produce a pink iris; he bred an oriental poppy, Papaver orientale ‘Cedric Morris’. As a breeder of bearded irises, he was peerless.

His irises are usually preceded by ‘Benton’: Benton Damozel; Benton Ophelia; Benton Fandango.

He then painted those irises in a robust, original way. Kathleen Hale said, ‘He would begin calmly at the top left-hand corner of the canvas and paint down and across until he had completed the whole picture. He never made any corrections, which accounted for the freshness and spontaneity of his painting.’ Lett, by contrast, Hale said, painted in a low-colour, intellectual, weird, abstract, erotic way.

Cedric was a baronet, born into a family of Swansea industrialists and iron founders. Lett, born in London and educated at St Paul’s, fought in the First World War. He married twice before he began his relationship with Cedric in 1919.

Top right: Kathleen Hale’s Orlando’s Home Life – Cedric as Dancing Master

Right: Lett paints his jacket in Orlando’s Silver Wedding

The Oldie February 2022 83

Letter from America

New York State – the American England As a native New Yorker, I feel completely at home in Bedfordshire Daniel Koch

Is New York State the closest thing there is to England in America?

It’s like England. Roughly the same size. There is a huge metropolis in the south-east corner everyone knows about.

The rest is countryside and there’s a string of post-industrial cities across the north. I’m from one of them – Oneida, New York.

This is how I explain to someone in England what I mean when I say I’m from New York. They usually think they’ve met a ‘genuine’ New Yorker, only to find they’re talking to someone from some obscure place they’ve never heard of.

Geographically, the similarities are significant. New York State’s land area is approximately 47,000 square miles.

England’s is 50,000. New York City and London have 8.8 million and 8.9 million inhabitants respectively.

England is part of the island of Great Britain. New York State is also surrounded on most sides by water. The Atlantic touches the southernmost parts of the state. Its northern and western borders are the shorelines of two of the world’s largest lakes, Erie and Ontario, and it is bounded on the east by Lake Champlain. England’s highest mountains are found in its northern Lake District.

New York’s are in its (also northern) Adirondack Park.

The north-south divide exists in both England and New York State. Upstate New Yorkers feel that their lives and those of the people living in and around the south-eastern metropolis are poles apart. Just as in England, property values in the south-east are extraordinarily high compared with in the north.

Economically, there is a huge gap between the big city – and its suburbs – and the rest of the state. Just as in England, New York’s northern cities – Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and Schenectady – used to be great centres of

industry and manufacturing and experienced a dramatic decline in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, as those kinds of jobs disappeared.

As in England, the north-south divide in New York even extends to differences in speech and accent. Most upstate New Yorkers speak what is called Inland North American English. Phonologically, it is far more like what you will hear in Michigan or eastern Wisconsin than what you’ll hear in southern New York State. New York City (like London) has phonological variations all its own.

Politically, too, New York may be more like England than any other American state. In both England and New York, geographically small, densely populated urban islands stand out from the expanses of countryside around them.

The countryside votes conservative; the urban areas go for the left-of-centre option. Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca and Albany hardly need labelling on the 2020 New York presidentialelection-results map, they stand out so clearly as Democratic. The same can be said for Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull in Britain’s 2019 equivalent – Labour heartlands.

There is a closer similarity in New

‘Keep up the good work, and one day you may be press one’

York manners and mindset to English ones than you would say for most other American states. New Yorkers are in general a bit more reserved than people in warmer places such as Florida and California; a bit less friendly than our neighbours in the Midwest and Ontario; a bit more open to ideas that some Americans brand as ‘Socialist’ (like a national health service, for instance) than residents of Nebraska or Wyoming.

There are plenty of ways that New York is not at all like England, of course.

It’s much colder in winter and much hotter in summer. Its non-native history is far shorter than England’s. There is no royal family, aristocracy or medieval buildings. The comparison may be more flattering to New York (as a mere one in a family of fifty states) than it is to England, as a nation of its own and a onetime top-ranking global power – which it arguably still is, and certainly still is as a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

Like England, New York has had its setbacks in the last 50 years. It used to be number one in most things – population, power, prestige, productivity. It was known as the Empire State – and that is still its official nickname. But it has been eclipsed in most of those areas by the sunny states of California, Texas and Florida. Its deindustrialisation was a painful process that during the ’70s and ’80s made it something of the ‘sick old man’ of the United States (a phrase uncomfortably familiar to the English, who lived through those same decades).

Let’s hope these similarly-sized chunks of land have taken their knocks now. They may never regain the measure of their past predominance, but they’ve both still got plenty to them. They’re not done yet.

Daniel Koch is from upstate New York.

The Vice Master of Bedford School, he writes for the Washington Post The Oldie February 2022 85

On the Road

Caribbean king At 75, Jamaica-born Sir Willard White is still singing across the world – from Amsterdam to New York. By Louise Flind

Anything you can’t leave home without?

I have to decide where home is.

Sometimes I leave the so-called home without certain things and I have either to replace them or do without. I have a conscious philosophy – what’s happened in front of me I cannot change; I can change my reaction to it.

Where did your musicality come from?

I don’t know. I’m a product of slavery. The system was devised so that family connections were broken up. There wasn’t really any music in my family. My father was a good whistler. My mother sang when she was in the kitchen.

Where is home?

My home is in me… I live in Paris now because my wife is Parisian and I also live in London. But I spend my life going from one contract to the next. When I left Jamaica, various things disturbed my equilibrium and I have discovered I have to make peace with where I am.

Do you travel light?

I do my best to travel light but I’m not very successful because my shoes take a lot of space – they’re only 13½.

What’s your favourite destination?

It’s like having a favourite child. Don’t have one – otherwise the others get neglected. I love going to Amsterdam and New York.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Are you kidding? On school trips, we’d go from Kingston to the north coast to Ocho Rios and that was sort of my holiday, but as I look back now my whole life was a holiday…

What’s your favourite place in Jamaica?

All of St Ann. 86 The Oldie February 2022

What was your Jamaican childhood like?

I was born in the Parish of St Catherine in Ewarton about 32 miles from Kingston.

My parents had a little farm run by my mother, and I was sent to Kingston when I was five to school. There I was with my father, and holidays were spent in the countryside with my mother. They weren’t separated.

Where did you stay when you went to the Julliard School in New York?

I stayed at 270 Clarkson Avenue, Brooklyn, with my aunt at the end of ’68. New York was a wonderful shock.

What was Maria Callas like?

She was most intimidating without trying to be intimidating, because of her energy, sheer stature, notability, elegance and captivating personality. It was quite daunting. And she was totally warm – uncompromising but not in a negative fashion.

What is your favourite opera house?

I love Amsterdam, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera.

What are your favourite operas?

Die Entführung, The Damnation of Faust and The Ring.

And your favourite aria?

Il lacerato spirito from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra which Madam Callas coached me on.

How has your voice changed as you’ve grown older?

I’ve discovered my voice is actually my guide. It teaches me things and every day it has a potential difference because every day my body is changing.

How much singing do you do nowadays?

I’m doing The Coronation of Poppea at that little opera house, the Vienna

Staatsoper. I’ve reached an age of respectability [he says, laughing].

What is your favourite bit of London?

Getting off the train at Charing Cross station and walking through Trafalgar Square to either the English National Opera or Covent Garden.

How was lockdown?

Lockdown was quite educational. I felt my voice was changing because I had to reflect on who I am, what can I do and my self-respect, which was a little bit fragile before.

Do you work on a plane/train?

Sometimes, and in the street – my head is always thinking about a better way of singing or doing a phrase.

Do you lie on the beach?

Not for very long, because my skin is already dark and I get very hot.

What’s your favourite food?

Ackee and codfish. Ackee is the national fruit of Jamaica; it grows on a big tree.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

My first acquaintance with frog’s legs was quite strange and quite delicious.

Do you have a go at the local language?

My German was best but now my French is better – and I speak a smattering of Dutch.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

In Bali, in accommodation made from palm leaves and raised above the ground.

What’s your biggest headache?

Insensitive travellers in airports, and self-important people giving stewardesses a hard time.

Sir Willard White will be in Rigoletto, Opera North, 22nd January to 1st April

Taking a Walk

A million birds? It’s normal for Norfolk

GARY WING

patrick barkham

We rarely encounter an abundance of species other than our own Homo sapiens in Britain.

Not so at Snettisham on an icy winter’s afternoon. A bitter wind swept from the Arctic straight into the Wash, keeping people at bay but blowing in the tide – and many thousands of birds.

The Wash is one of the biggest estuaries in Britain, a vast expanse of salt marsh, mudflats, sandbanks and grey, blue and silver water. It is a spectacular place – though the muddle of caravan parks, shacks and flooded tracks at its edge called Shepherd’s Port was unprepossessing.

I began my walk in the RSPB car park on the remains of an old military site where concrete led into hummocks of brambles. The space was shared with King’s Lynn Angling Association who had erected tall, otter-proof fencing around deep, old gravel quarries, now fish ponds.

BANG! BANG! Gunshots rang out from all sides. It took me a moment to realise that they must be a deterrent to scare away cormorants, which love to swoop like black bats on to the lakes and help themselves to its carp.

I took the track north back to Shepherd’s Port where the land seemed sunken down, broken and vexed by water. There were huge puddles everywhere, and signs warning of floods.

The ribbon of shacks, sheds and bungalows built on the shingle sea bank on the rim of the Wash had not been gentrified, unlike most of north-west Norfolk. Everything was made tatty by the scouring salt wind and salt water.

Any metal was rusted. Any paint was flaking. The place shared the bleak, end-of-the-world spirit of Dungeness.

There was a sailing club, but an everso-’umble one, a scattering of shipping containers and other flotsam and jetsam.

As I turned south beside the Wash, the shacks petered out, to be replaced by scrubby Suaeda vera, or sea-blite, and more brambles.

The sun lowered, the land darkening as if shrinking from the silver majesty of sand, sea and sky. Wind turbines and tiny dark dots which were the trees of Lincolnshire were just visible on the far horizon.

As the wind bit and the sun flashed briefly in the western sky, the mudflats turned deep purple. Where

the tide washed over, the mud became sheened with metallic turquoise, even though there was no blue in the scudding-cloud sky.

A group of oystercatchers picked their way over the mud. I’m used to seeing 20 but here there were 500.

Then a larger pulse of birds rose up, moving sinuously against the horizon.

They looked like a murmuration of starlings, but these were bigger, stockier, wading birds – knot, which spend summers in the Arctic Circle.

Every autumn, the knot in Greenland and Canada fly south to enjoy a balmy British winter. The Wash’s mudflats are as appealing to knot as Benidorm is to the British: 220,000 of them fly here each winter to feast on cockles and other muddy inhabitants.

The tide walked steadily in, improbably covering this arena with water, and the entire bird population of the Wash was pushed to its edge.

With each wave, the knot hitched up their proverbial skirts, rose up and relocated so they wouldn’t get wet. As the knot were driven closer by the tide, the noise of thousands of wingbeats hit me: a vigorous, high-pitched squeal not unlike the sound of a jet engine.

The departing sun left an unearthly pink glow on the horizon and revealed a blizzard of birds: pink-footed geese flying in, shelduck, bar-tailed godwits and starlings. Every species in their hundreds – except for the solitary short-eared owl that looped over the sea bank.

A few hardy birders watched from a wooden hide, and I admired the darkening scene until ice entered my bones. Then I staggered back to the car, shivering with cold and wonder.

I parked in RSPB Snettisham car park PE31 7RA (left off Beach Road) and walked north and then south in a loop.

But there is immediate access to the estuary edge if you prefer to skip the shacks. A nice, day-long round takes in the rewilded estate of Ken Hill The Oldie February 2022 89

Genius crossword 409 el sereno Across

Down

1 Numbers racket involved in exams (8) 5 Unproductive chap needing answer for energy (6) 9 & 14 Worn item that’s good for the density of carpeting (8,4) 10 Single bishop cutting most of additional reflection (6) 12 Drama at sea with sick old creature (9) 13 Person who assumes right on view (5) 14 See 9 16 Plymouth Brethren originally loaded with cargo of different plant (7) 19 Crude product of poor soil by river flowing west (7) 21 First of popes has no time for counterpart (4) 24 Sponges may see spouses have a change of heart (5) 25 Appearance in public of seaman involved in industrial action (9) 27 Seethes, essentially stifling proposals (6) 28 Approach of hospital before treating colitis? (8) 29 Relaxes, accepting one takes another examination (6) 30 Cleverly placed statue by empty lorry (8)

1 Nasty experience of gold trade (6) 2 Visions of Spain, wearing shorts (6) 3 Moved slowly, being uncompromising – not hard! (5) 4 Wool product getting zero returns after loan goes bad (7) 6 Toff needs time with the French classical teacher (9) 7 Sanction covering old Republican president and flyer (8) 8 Fighting doctor’s honour, getting room in theatre (8) 11 My pence may produce pound (4) 15 Failed to turn out as expected? (9) 17 & 22 Trouble with courage that’s found in bed (3,5,6) 18 Dancing shoes for those who trip? (8) 20 Beginning, having raised decent amount of cash (new) (4) 21 Cushions prisoners taking sick (7) 22 See 17 23 Delicate, say, lacking heart to accept credit (6) 26 Something cast in gold for so long (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries.

Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 9th February 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 409 Across 1 Throat affliction (5) 4 Slight setback (6) 9 Weather (7) 10 Of the kidney (5) 11 Regular (4) 12 Go off subject (7) 13 Attempt (3) 14 Cunning; chief (4) 16 Trial (4) 18 Chop (3) 20 Undirected (7) 21 Dispatched (4) 24 Eiderdown (5) 25 Hand over (7) 26 Blanching (6) 27 Perhaps (5)

Genius 407 solution Down 1 Kudos (6) 2 Come together (5) 3 Warmth (4) 5 Water (8) 6 Own up (7) 7 Burnish (6) 8 Indigent (5) 13 Menace (8) 15 Dismissal; extraction (7) 17 Confined to bed (4,2) 18 Whispered comment; digression (5) 19 Go hungry (6) 22 Emissary (5) 23 Marine mollusc (4)

Winner: Peter Cliff, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire Runners-up: Erika Fairhead, Aberdeen; Alan McWilliam, Edinburgh

Moron 407 solution Across: 1 Calf, 4 Hoarse, 7 Ale (car for sale), 9 Stir, 10 Dripping, 11 Rig, 12 Idea, 13 Engraver, 16 Bloodcurdling, 19 Sveltest, 23 Dawn, 24 Aid, 25 Hangover, 26 Evil, 27 Tar, 28 Closes, 29 Shed. Down: 2 Antediluvian, 3 Farrago, 4 Hedge, 5 Aping, 6 Sepia, 8 Once in a while, 14 Nouns, 15 Rid, 17 Dot, 18 Ladders, 20 Legal, 21 Elves, 22 Tarts.

The Oldie February 2022 91

Competition TESSA CASTRO Two of the USA’s great heroes of the past were somewhat embarrassed by this deal played at the Cavendish Club in New York.

Sam Fry Jr, esteemed declarer, achieved the rank of Life Master in 1936, aged 27 – one of the very first to reach such status.

The deal was written up by Helen Sobel, one of the all-time greats, in her book All the Tricks. Sobel was the stronger half of the Sobel-Goren partnership, although Charlie Goren is the more famous.

West led the jack of clubs to East’s ace, declarer winning East’s ten-of-spades return with the ace, West discarding (a club). Plan the play.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

West

North ♠ 764 ♥A843 ♦A842 ♣8 5

♠ ♥ K 10 6 2

♦ K 10 6 3

♣J 10 9 7 3

South ♠ AKJ532 ♥Q97 ♦9 ♣KQ4

East ♠ Q 10 9 8 ♥J4 ♦QJ53 ♣A 6 2

The bidding at table one South West North East 1 ♠ Pass 2 ♠ (1) Pass 4 ♠ end

(1) Best, even though South’s One Spade opener could have contained only four spades – yes even in the USA. The Five-card Majors system became standard there in the 1950s, and this deal was played in the 1940s.

Fry cashed a top club, ruffed the third (winning) club, finessed the jack of spades, cashed the king and gave East the fourth spade. At this point, East switched unnecessarily to the jack of hearts, giving declarer a second heart trick.

Game made.

If East had led a diamond, declarer would have almost certainly lost two heart tricks (although he could succeed via an intrafinesse, leading to the nine, and subsequently running the queen).

Fry was congratulated for inducing the misdefence, and Sobel for publicising the deal. But they both had a blind spot – the route to ten tricks is much simpler, and requires no help from East.

After winning the ace of spades, cross to the ace of diamonds and ruff a diamond.

Cash the king of clubs, ruff the (winning) queen of clubs, and ruff a third diamond.

Cross to the ace of hearts and ruff a fourth diamond. Now exit with a heart, knowing you must come to the king-jack of spades.

‘Oh !?$*£!’ said Fry, apparently, when Sobel (who eventually worked out the superior line) informed him he had not been so clever after all.

ANDREW ROBSON 92 The Oldie February 2022

IN COMPETITION No 275, you were invited to write a poem called Bricks. Steve Kenyon gave a vivid picture of the Bungamati Brickworks, Kathmandu, after the 2016 earthquake. John Edwards brilliantly collected brickish references from Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Elton John, U2, the Jam and Iggy Pop. Commiserations to them, to Sarah Nute, Frank McDonald and Mary Hodges, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Katie Mallett for her poem about St Erkenwald’s, Southend.

Offset each joint, the way a family Binds all its members with the greater force Of close-knit sturdy solidarity.

D A Prince

When the wrecking ball was there to smash the walls To clouds of dust and rubble and the glass, Including the rose window, into shards And the altar where the priest conducted mass

The way was steep, We all kept mum And soon we wished We had not come.

Into a heap of stones, did anyone Consider that those formal rows and tiers Of bricks absorbed the sound of solemn prayer And songs of praise made for a hundred years.

‘What bricks you are,’ Miss Gibson said, ‘Now follow me, I’m going ahead.’

She led the way, Along the path.

We followed after For a laugh.

But when we reached The humble dwelling And gave our gifts Our hearts were welling.

Imogen Thomas

Following him, playing around on sites Of half-built houses while he checked each wall Was straight and true, I learned theodolites And keeping level, picking up a haul Of out-of-classroom lessons. Then, which sand Goes into mortar, water, what’s the mix; Watching the trowels spread it quickly, and Getting to know some of the brickies’ tricks.

The book, discovered at a Christmas fair, Shows pictures of a brickyard in the cold.

The men wear braces, shirtsleeves, greasy caps, Their brows are lined; they could be young, or old.

Each face is strained, resigned; the work is tough.

I marvel that they stood it. Did they earn enough?

England expanded on these working men; For centuries they broke their backs and hands To shape the clay, to bend, to stand To raise the thronging buildings of this land, The great, the gabled, chimneyed, terraced, tall, The modest home, the Court, the Lodge, the Hall.

In Flemish bond, and English, England spread, And now the brickies are all gone, all dead.

Yet in these red-leaved days of dying fall, The sun recalls them, down the garden wall.

G M Southgate

And bricks, and more; the local flettons, laid In various bonds, slowly built up. How strength Grows from their closely fitted patterns, made Together and secure. The wall’s length – Long stretchers and small headers – how each course

COMPETITION NO 277 Once, when I owed the taxman money, I’d jump awake as the postman opened the garden gate.

A poem, please, called Morning Sounds.

Maximum 16 lines. We still can’t accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do e-mail them (comps@theoldie.co.uk – please include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 277’, by 10th February.

I rescued two, left whole amid the sea Of broken masonry, and took them home, Put them in my garden where they served To lift a potted pelargonium And they were holy bricks, I told myself From that poor church, possibly the nave Once loved by all who met to worship there Who campaigned for its life, but could not save.

Katie Mallett

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The Oldie February 2022 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside I left Mum to die alone

Q

My mother died last year and I’m still tormented by the fact that, despite all my efforts, she died alone. I’d set up a rota with my family so there was someone with her all the time during her last days, even at night. But when it was my shift, she was asleep and I just sneaked out to make a quick phone call. When I came back, she had died. I just can’t forgive myself.

How could I have been so selfish? My stupidity haunts me, particularly in the middle of the night. Did she wake and call for me and find me not there?

I replay the scene endlessly.

Annabel D, Hythe I feel so sorry for you. But console yourself with this. I don’t know if you have ever kept pets but, when they’re on their way out, both cats and dogs often sneak away to die on their own. It’s a natural instinct for some animals – and humans – to want to die alone. There’s sometimes an exhausting pressure to stay alive when you’re surrounded by loved ones, and it can be a blessed relief when they pop to the loo or nip away so there’s the chance to leave this world feeling calm, and completely at peace. It may be no coincidence that your mother died when you left the room.

As far as she was concerned, I’m sure you did just the right thing.

A

My autistic grandson

Q

I’ve always felt I was a little different from other people.

Although I have friends and I held down a good job doing research, I’ve always been aware of not fitting in.

Eventually I found a woman who didn’t seem to mind my moods and occasional

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

98 The Oldie February 2022

remoteness, and we had two lovely girls who seemed very happy. Now I’m a grandfather of an eight-year-old boy. I recognise my characteristics in him and we spend hours in what might be called rather nerdish pursuits. But now he’s been diagnosed with autism and of course everything slots into place. I asked my wife if she thought I was autistic and she said, ‘Yes, probably, just a bit.’ I wish now I’d been diagnosed earlier. It would have prevented a lot of heartache.

AF, by email I would say that a diagnosis is a two-edged sword. For some people it’s a huge relief, and means that they can accept being a square peg in a round hole rather than spending their lives trying in vain to fit in. Others regard it as a kind of death sentence, certain that their lives are over before they’ve begun. My feeling is that you ought simply to congratulate yourself on living your life successfully, despite the odds, and be thankful you have a loving family and a fulfilled life. And what a treat the relationship with your grandson must be – for both of you!

A

Boiling with anger

Q

I’ve had to have a new boiler and, with it, a new thermostat and timer. I’m ashamed to say I simply can’t understand it. The boiler man tried to explain it and eventually I pretended I understood, but all I want is a simple dial I can twist to turn the heat up and down as I want throughout the day. I’m often in tears, particularly when the heat comes roaring on in the middle of the night. Do you know how I could get it changed back to an old-fashioned timer with a dial?

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A

I’m afraid not. And, like you, I’m frequently in tears – and I mean real sobbing tears – when I can’t understand a bit of software.

Have you got a WhatsApp group in your street? Suggest to a techie-minded neighbour that he or she set one up and then you’ll have access to a gang of the kindest people who live locally, one of whom would be glad to come and fix your thermostat permanently. The WhatsApp group is one bit of technology that is worth getting to grips with. A local one can make you feel much less alone.

Am I too well-dressed?

Q

I always try to look smart, but my daughter’s just told me – in a very kind way, I have to say – that my grandson doesn’t want to be taken to school by me because of the way I dress. Apparently he gets teased. I love bright colours and fun hats and at 75 I still wear purple lipstick, fishnet tights and gold high heels. I love crazy dressers such as Zandra Rhodes and Iris Apfel.

But I also love my grandson. Do you think I should dress down for him?

MW, Colchester Much as I’m a slave to how I look, I would never dream of giving up a loving relationship for the sake of fashion. On granny days, dress down.

Ditch the hats and the jewellery, and get a plain black jersey and skirt, black tights and black shoes. And keep the make-up subdued. You’ll still look smart but you won’t look outrageous. And, on the other days, you can go madder than ever.

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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