The Oldie magazine July issue and Oldie Review of Books

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July 2020

£4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 389

In search of Peter Sellers Roger Lewis on the actor’s mad genius

Their f inest hour – The Battle of Britain by Leo McKinstry Northern exposure – Melv yn Bragg’s Cumbria Martin Jarvis on Just William

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9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man 13 The decline and fall of Eng Lit Matthew Norman Liz Hodgkinson 12 Olden Life: What was the Banda 14 Their finest hour – in their machine? Christine Wharton finest planes Leo McKinstry 12 Modern Life: What is a 16 Peter Sellers, the mad galliard? Benedict King magician Roger Lewis 36 Town Mouse 19 The oldie easy riders Tom Hodgkinson Peter McKay 37 Country Mouse 20 The day Alec Guinness shot Giles Wood the audience Michael Cole 40 School Days 20 My ideal home? An old shop Sophia Waugh Ray Connolly 40 Golden Nuggets 22 Naked truth of modelling Christopher Sandford Deni Brown 41 Home Front 24 Reaching for the stars – in their Alice Pitman dressing rooms Jenny Bardwell 43 Profitable Wonders 26 Hunter on Hampstead Heath James Le Fanu Hunter Davies 44 Letter from America 28 Martin Jarvis, Comedy King Edward Kosner Valerie Grove 45 Postcards from the Edge 29 Clement Attlee: unobtrusively Mary Kenny brilliant Francis Beckett 46 God 30 The Way They Lived Then: Sister Teresa Oxbridge Balls Dafydd Jones 46 Memorial Service: 34 Searle & Sprod: a tale of James Ramsden two jailmates Nick Newman James Hughes-Onslow 38 The widow’s lonely lot 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Susan Hamlyn Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 51 I Once Met… Keith 5 The Old Un’s Notes Waterhouse Joseph Connolly 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 51 Memory Lane

Features

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

Melvyn Bragg goes home page 82

63 Media Matters Stephen Glover 64 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 64 Rant: Long-winded books 65 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 53 British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Tanya Gold 55 The Edwardians and Their Houses: The New Life of Old England, by Timothy Brittain Catlin Lucy Lethbridge 55 Walking the Great North Line,

by Robert Twigger Will Cohu 57 How to Cook a Wolf, by M F K Fisher Edward Behrens 59 The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year, by Tim Ecott Charles Foster 61 Four novels by Irmgard Keun Paul Bailey

84 Overlooked Britain: Home, sweet Gothic home Lucinda Lambton 86 Taking a Walk: Bardsey, pleasure island Patrick Barkham 87 On the Road: Nicola Benedetti Louise Flind

Arts 66 Netflix and Film: A Rainy Day in New York and Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich Harry Mount 67 Theatre: Shakespeare for Every Day Nicholas Lezard 67 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Roger Lewis 69 Music Richard Osborne 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

82 On top of the world in Cumbria Melvyn Bragg

73 Gardening David Wheeler 73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 81 Bird of the Month: Kittiwake John McEwen

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The Old Un’s Notes How to buy The Oldie during the lockdown The Old Un is afraid that many W H Smith shops and some independent newsagents have closed – so buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be easy.

There are three ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for

£4.75 (free p & p within the UK) at: www.magsdirect.co.uk.

2. Order a digital edition at www.pocketmags.com for £2.99; scroll down to the Special Issues section.

3. Buy a 12-issue print subscription for just £47.50 and receive a free book – see

page 47. And if you want to buy a 12-issue subscription for friends for as little as £8, see our special offer on page 7.

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

website, including Barry Cryer’s jokes. Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best pieces. Go to www. theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box, above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.

J K Rowling has just revealed a few tantalising glimpses of her next book.

The Ickabog takes place in two scrumptious-sounding places: Chouxville, famous for its cakes, and Kurdsburg, renowned for its cheeses.

There are strong memories here of a classic French children’s book, Fattypuffs and Thinifers by André

are Fattyborough, not far from Mount Bulge, and Thiniville. The two countries go to war over the disputed island of Thinipuff.

The book is marvellously prescient about the modern division in life between the obsessively fit and the self-indulgently fat. The

Thinifers spend all day in the gym, like ‘mechanical figures which never stop moving’.

‘They scarcely eat anything, they drink nothing but water and they even work without being made to.’

Meanwhile, the Fattypuffs live off chocolate éclairs ‘as fat as motor-tyres and cream

buns as big as bath sponges’.

Their trains and houses are bulging and rounded, while the Thinifer trains are much narrower ‘because four Thinifers only took up as much room as one single Fattypuff’.

Who knows if J K Rowling was inspired by the French classic? Anyway, here’s hoping she will bring new readers to this masterpiece.

Among this month’s contributors Leo McKinstry (p14) wrote the trilogy Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster, a biography of Lord Rosebery and a dual biography of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. He was born in Belfast.

Roger Lewis (p16), despite numerous degrees and two doctorates, has seen his work as a writer dry up. He is author of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, later turned into a film starring Geoffrey Rush.

ALAMY

Fattypuffs & Thinifers at 90

Maurois, which came out in 1930, 90 years ago this year.

The gloriously entertaining tale tells of two countries at war: the Kingdom of Fattypuffs, populated by fat people, and the Republic of the Thinifers, inhabited by the skinny. The capitals of each

Melvyn Bragg (p82) has presented The South Bank Show since 1978. He also presents In Our Time on Radio 4. In 1961, he began as a general trainee at the BBC, working with Oldie legend Wilfred De’Ath. Nick Newman (p34), a cartoonist and writer, works for Private Eye and the Sunday Times. With Ian Hislop, he has written Spitting Image, A Bunch of Amateurs and The Wipers Times.

Of all the sights on our re-opening beaches this summer, donkeys will be one of the most welcome.

A small drove of donkeys, with colourful bridles and stripy blankets, ridden by children, will clop along our coast from Weymouth to Barmouth.

Donkey rides have been a seaside scene for over a century. They were originally used in the cockling and fishing industry. If there was no catch, a funny hat was squeezed over their ears and children were charged 2d a ride.

Donkeys are much better behaved on the beach than horses or mules. They’re more gentle, patient and The Oldie July 2020 5

Important stories you may have missed Dog rescued after 24 hours in drainpipe i

Motorist forced parking warden to eat his ticket Daily Telegraph Former Honiton man stole student’s laptop Midweek Herald £15 for published contributions

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sure-footed. They’ll put up with almost anything.

But we’ve moved on from the era of saucy postcards depicting overweight ladies in tiny, ruched swimsuits struggling to keep astride Bobby’s blanket. Now Dolly and Daisy have their rights protected. In Blackpool, they work a maximum of a six-day week with every Friday off – the day holidaymakers would once leave and arrive.

They’re guaranteed an hour-long lunch break for their barley straw.

The Blackpool donkey rides may be a Victorian tradition, but they’ve embraced the 21st century.

They’re the first to accept contactless payments for rides.

‘Stone me,’ as Tony Hancock used to say.

The BBC has launched a £5,500 bursary for comedy writers in honour of Ray Galton (1930-2018) and Alan Simpson (1929-2017), the scriptwriters of Hancock’s Half Hour.

Ray and Alan also wrote Hancock’s first feature film, The Rebel (1961).

Hancock unwisely ended up sacking them.

Tessa Le Bars, who worked with Galton and Simpson for 55 years and still represents their work, says, ‘Tony wanted to break through with an international film. So he went and did The Punch And Judy Man in Bognor.

‘Delia says nothing about lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing’

‘Is there anything less international?”

Galton and Simpson bounced back with Steptoe & Son. Steptoe was one of the first British TV comedies to be exported as a ‘format’ to the USA and other countries.

Tessa Le Bars says, ‘Ray and Alan were pioneers of British situation comedy.

Their influence is still huge, and it’s marvellous they’re being recognised by the BBC with this new bursary.’

The Old Un has been enjoying the Reverend Steve Morris’s daily Celtic prayers on the Oldie website during lockdown.

The Rev tells him that, far from being fluffy treehuggers, our Celtic forebears were rather earthy in their tastes. Among his favourite prayers are one for the

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Dream team: Ray Galton, Tony Hancock and Alan Simpson on the set of The Rebel (1961)

safekeeping of one’s buttocks and one to combat toothache – or ‘the teeth of hell’. The Old Un looks forward to reading his new book, The Journey Home, with 40 days’ worth of Celtic gems.

Two hundred years ago, on 1st July 1820, the most remarkable slim volume in English literature was published.

This little book, containing only 13 poems, gave us some of the most memorable lines ever written.

Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems appeared with very little expected of it. Its author, John Keats, was 25 and profoundly depressed. He was tormented by jealousy, convincing himself that his great love, Fanny Brawne, was in the habit of flirting with his friends.

He had had two haemorrhages and was spitting blood on account of consumption, which seven months later would kill him.

It had already killed his younger brother, Tom. On 12th July, his friend Maria Gisborne reported that

Who would believe the humble telegraph pole would have its own fan club?

The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society, set up

by Martin Evans in the 1990s, celebrates ‘the glorious mundanitude of these simple silent sentinels the world over’.

Made from larch or pine wood and up to 11 yards tall, the telegraph pole is badged with coded pole tags and testing signs. The flashier of the species are crested with cross-arms and ceramic insulators.

Telegraph poles still stalk our land and continue to have a purpose: telephone cables, which replaced telegraph wires, have given way to cable television and network services.

A 119-year-old pole, one of the oldest in the country, has now retired to the Orkney Museum’s storeroom in Kirkwall.

Openreach, the infrastructure arm of BT, owns many of the UK’s poles and trains its engineers on them. It has launched a new service called MiiS, to sublet its poles for mobile-phone use. There’s plenty of life in telegraph poles yet!

The Old Un has been offered the last present on earth he actually wants.

For £1,190, you too can buy a

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Figs and goat’s cheese with balsamic glaze on white bloomer GERT – a ‘real geriatric simulator’, a suit that simulates old age.

The GERT comes with earplugs, a weight vest, awkward gloves, wrist cuffs and goggles that cause blurred

vision and sensitivity to light.

It allows the young to empathise with the old. The Old Un continues his search for a suit that simulates all the pleasures of youth.

CE ES AN IR 20 CH XP 20 ST R E LY LA E JU FF O 0TH 1

he was ‘under sentence of death’. He was advised to go to Italy to try to recover his health.

Five hundred copies of his book were printed, on sale at seven shillings and sixpence each. Not many sold, and even eight years later there were still some to be had.

Reviews were mixed.

Keats’s friends were appreciative and kind, but others were dismissive. His genius was recognised by the poet Shelley who wrote to a friend, ’Where is Keats now? I am anxiously expecting him in Italy where I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. I consider his a most valuable life, & I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician of both his body & his soul, to keep the one warm & to teach the other Greek & Spanish. I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’

In mid-September, Keats and his friend Joseph Severn set off for Italy – from where, of course, he was never to return.

Among the poems were six odes, including those to autumn, melancholy, a Grecian urn and a nightingale.

As Keats wrote in Endymion, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’

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Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Happy 100th Birthday, Ian Carmichael!

My jolly, boozy evening with the comedy great in his Rolls-Royce

I have been celebrating the centenary of one of England’s greatest comic actors, Ian Carmichael – born in Yorkshire on 18th June 1920, died in Yorkshire on 5th February 2010.

He has been my boon companion during lockdown. I caught a couple of his 1950s Boulting Brothers gems on TV (Brothers in Law and I’m All Right, Jack) and then discovered, by chance, in a cardboard box waiting to go to the charity shop when it reopens, a complete set of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he made for the BBC in the 1970s: 20 hours of unadulterated bliss.

His performance as Dorothy L Sayers’s aristocratic sleuth is impeccable.

Now I am frantic to rediscover his 1960s The World of Wooster, in which he played Bertie and Dennis Price was Jeeves.

Given that he was the son of an optician and went to school in Bromsgrove, how he came to corner the upper-crust silly-ass market is a mystery, but he was like that in real life as well as on screen. I worked with him in the 1970s and his every other word was ‘Right-oh’ or ‘Toodle-pip’.

His was only the second Rolls-Royce I had ever travelled in (the first belonged

Thank you, Jeeves and Wooster: Ian Carmichael (left) as Bertie; Dennis Price as Jeeves, The World of Wooster, 1966

to the sleaze baron Paul Raymond of the Raymond Revuebar, but that’s another story) and Ian drove it with a gay abandon that was mighty exhilarating at the time, but nowadays would doubtless (and rightly) have him arrested.

I recall him driving me to an aftershow party late one summer’s night.

Windows down, slightly squiffy, one hand on the wheel, he raced along the highways and byways of Oxfordshire, happily singing his favourite numbers from The Globe Revue of 1952. ‘This is the life, eh what, old bean?’

It most certainly was.

TV seems to have changed a bit since Kenneth Tynan first said ‘f***’ on the box during a late-night chat show back in 1965. In recent weeks, I’ve been having a lot of fun with my friend Maureen Lipman taking part in the Channel 4 series Celebrity Gogglebox. Mary Killen and Giles Wood (of this parish), the regular Gogglebox stars, should have warned us. These days, it’s almost impossible to find a TV programme that doesn’t feature the ‘f’ word – and worse.

On Gogglebox you don’t get to choose the programmes you watch. You take what you’re given, and much of it (if you’re a couple of oldies like Maureen and me) leaves you reeling – or at least feeling a tad out of touch.

In a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary called Ambulance, we met two ladies who were in their early seventies, like us. One of them had been involved in an accident and her friend called the emergency services for help. When they turned up, the friend took a fancy to the young paramedic who helped them into the ambulance. ‘He’s got a nice arse,’ she remarked appreciatively. ‘I bet he’s got a nice cock as well,’ quipped the other.

Is this the way women in their seventies are thinking and talking nowadays? Apparently so.

In 1967, after watching an episode of

Till Death Us Do Part that included 44 uses of the word ‘bloody’, Mary Whitehouse declared, ‘This is the end of civilisation as we know it.’ For better or worse, it turns out she was right.

And speaking of bad language, it’s true that Mrs Whitehouse’s campaign to promote decency in British broadcasting was going to be launched under the banner ‘Clean Up National Television’ until someone took a second look at the poster. You couldn’t make it up.

Inspired by my heroine and role model the actress Olivia de Havilland, 104 on 1st July, I have got myself a tricycle. ‘It may change my life,’ I said to my wife. ‘It may kill you,’ she answered, tartly.

Since Dame Olivia, the last surviving star of Gone with the Wind, became The Oldie’s Oldie of the Year as she marked her own centenary in 2016, we have kept in touch. She kindly invited me and my wife for ‘champagne and canapés’ at her home in Paris (her two Oscars discreetly placed on the sideboard) and sends me the occasional email. The other day, she sent me a snap of her outside her house sitting on a tricycle.

‘Wow!’ I thought, ‘If Errol Flynn’s Maid Marian can ride a trike in her 104th year, I can ride one in my 73rd.’

Supplied by Jorvik Tricycles of York, it’s arrived and it’s a beauty. So far, I’ve managed only to go round and round the lawn in circles, but I haven’t yet fallen off and soon I shall be taking it onto the smaller streets of south-west London. It has a basket for the shopping and I have a helmet for my head.

Who wants to be a masked man risking his life on public transport? I’m heading for the open roads on my sky-blue tricycle. Poop-poop!

During the pandemic, Gyles is performing a different poem every day on Twitter (@GylesB1) and Instagram (@gylesbrandreth) The Oldie July 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

A sex education lesson – from my son I defended J K Rowling until my boy showed me the light matthew norman

‘If it’s OK with you,’ I said to my son, ‘let’s have the J K Rowling discussion now over the phone, and not when we’re together in the car.’

‘Yup, yup,’ he knowingly replied.

‘You’re thinking of the Matt Damon fiasco.’

I was. Every now and again, when one of those socio-sexual-political volcanoes erupts, we debate whatever has people’s knickers in such a frightful Twitter twist.

The Matt Damon conversation was inspired by the actor’s remarking that, while obviously he’d never work with Harvey Weinstein, he would judge every Me Too case on its own demerits.

Specifically, he refused to disown his mate Louis C K over that comedian’s moonlighting as a performance onanist.

My son took a draconian line, and not just about C K practising sex as a soloist in front of women (no great testament, we may concur, to his finishing school on the banks of Lake Lucerne). He was barely less tough on Damon for the lack of ambiguity.

The conversation began on the M3 towards London, started simmering as we hit the M25 and came to the boil on the M4. An hour later, a road sign revealed that we’d travelled 70 miles in the wrong direction and were now on the outskirts of Swindon.

You will appreciate the urge, then, to conduct the Rowling Debate from different counties – my son at his mother’s Dorset cottage, I in the bath (I mention this only for an audience in continual need of erotic stimulation) at my Gothically rancid home in Shepherd’s Bush.

The Rowling furore, in case you missed it, concerned the author’s ridiculing of a headline’s reference to ‘people who menstruate’, rather than to ‘women’.

In a lifetime of perpetual perplexity, nothing – not even the saw ‘Travel broadens the mind’; yeah, so what the 10 The Oldie July 2020

hell happened to Judith Chalmers? – has bemused me like trans politics.

The tweets in which otherwise like-minded folk yell at one another are almost literally all Greek to me. They bring to mind an unseen exam in which Thucydides’s nonsense about some battle swam into one amorphous mass, until I had to copy the entire answer from my friend Paul Brown, outscoring him by seven per cent.

As far as I understand it, however, what mutated the impeccably liberal Harry Potter philanthropist into J KKK Rowling was her refusal to accept that by declaring, ‘I am a woman,’ a person born with testes makes it so.

To those who share her view, gender or sex (there is a distinction, but I can never remember what it is) is a biological fact rather than a personal choice. It can be altered by surgery and/or hormonal treatment, but not by a statement.

They will not be dismissed as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) for standing up for more conventional women placed in danger by men claiming to be female. Nor will they be enslaved to woke dictates.

To my son’s twentysomething generation – a generation immeasurably superior to mine in every imaginable way – this attitude represents a form of persecution against a minority who endure horrendous abuse.

They acknowledge incidents

‘Are we still middle-class?’

concerning self-proclaimed women who, retaining their penises, terrorise and violate women of longer standing in prisons, changing rooms and elsewhere.

But to them, the self-determination of gender, or sex, is a human-rights issue with no more room for argument than the removal of slave-trader statues.

From his lockdown berth near Blandford Forum, my boy went through the familiar stages while I lay in the bath and desperately strove to follow.

He explained why I was mistaken to defend Rowling. I stuck to my guns. He explained again, more slowly, until I muttered that it was very difficult, and that I could certainly see both sides.

Then he explained a third time, now in the style of a mildly exasperated but indulgent dog-trainer trying to teach a trick to an unusually stupid beagle. I told him that I absolutely understood.

I believe I did. For as long as it took to dry myself and conduct the various dental procedures mandated by rampant gingivitis, it made absolute sense.

The next morning, I mentioned to my parents that their grandson had called and comprehensively educated me on this vexing subject. Being a shade bemused themselves about the politics of transitioning, they asked me to do the same for them.

‘Delighted,’ I said. ‘You see, the really important point about this… Well, you see, the central thing here is that… Umm. I’ll ring him tonight and get back to you.’

And, quite suddenly, the penny dropped. It is possible to change gender, or sex, without going under the knife or freebasing oestrogen. I’ve done it myself, and without knowing. I have transitioned into Mam in the Talking Heads monologue, who tells Alan Bennett’s Graham that she understood why racism is wrong when he explained it to her, but now can’t for the life of her remember why.

what was the Banda machine?

When I started teaching in the late 1970s, photocopiers were unheard of in schools – so the only way we could produce worksheets for students was to use the Banda machine.

This device was invented by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld in 1923 and was commonly used in schools, youth clubs, churches and other small organisations. This ‘Teacher’s Friend’ used spirit (a mixture of alcohols) in its process. Health and Safety would have a field day with it today, the odour hitting your nostrils well before you entered the door to the room that housed it. It would be foolhardy to close the windows as the fumes were extraordinarily overpowering and could make you high even before your students had shown their appreciation for your efforts!

And what an effort it was! No simply shutting a cover over a sheet and pressing ‘copy’ or sending something from the net to print. No – this beast involved both creativity and strength in bucketfuls.

First, once you had your inspiration for your worksheet, you created it on a

what is a galliard?

The galliard, from gagliardo, meaning robust, is an Italian courtly dance of 15thcentury origin.

The music is based on six beats in the

double sheet, the second sheet having a thin coat of wax. This was transferred by the pressure of a biro onto the top sheet; the more artistically inclined could swap in other back sheets to create a more colourful effort.

Once this was done, the top sheet was detached from the bottom and fastened to the drum of the Banda machine. Now the fun started! Using a handle on the side, you turned this round, the speed depending on how urgently you needed the finished product. As the drum rotated, the wax was transferred onto paper via the spirit – and out shot a copy of your original, slightly damp from the spirit. After about 20 rotations, the colour would start to fade as your arm started to ache.

You would then dash down to your classroom, cradling your precious reprographics, and distribute them among your students,

who would immediately each pick one up and take a long, long sniff before putting it down and gleefully informing you that you’d made a spelling mistake!

Towards the end of the 1980s, the Banda started to fall out of fashion as photocopiers became more economical to run. So ended the era of this faithful machine – unless there’s still the odd one lurking in a forgotten corner deep inside some echelon of learning…

Christine Wharton

bar. God Save the Queen has the basic galliard rhythm. Typically, the galliard consists of three repeated sections.

The dance consists of five steps over those six beats. There are three grues, when the dancer hops on the ball of his foot, while kicking the other leg forward, then a saut majeur, a leap, bringing him

back to ground with a ‘posture’, one foot in front of the other. It was often paired with another, more stately dance, the pavan.

The earliest surviving English galliard is from 1540, but its period of greatest vitality in this country was roughly 1590-1625. Elizabeth I did much to popularise it. A privy counsellor in 1589 wrote, ‘Six or seven galliards in a morning … is her ordinary exercise.’ By the 1590s, such exercise would have been quite beyond her most senior courtiers, like Lord Burleigh, who was 70 in 1590 (this year is the 500th anniversary of his birth). That area of the Queen’s interests was left to the youthful Earl of Essex.

The greatest composers of the age – John Dowland, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons – wrote galliards, exploring the form’s rich musical possibilities. The six beats of the bar can be divided into double time, as well as the

‘Jenkins, did we get that new 3-D copier yet?’

12 The Oldie July 2020

The Banda model 10

galliard’s usual triple time. This combination is known as a ‘hemiola’.

These English galliards are often set to words; the rhythm conveniently accommodates an iambic pentameter.

The dance became secondary. Probably the most famous English galliard is The Earl of Essex Galliard by Dowland, set to the words ‘Can she excuse my wrongs with virtue’s cloak?’

You can find people trying to dance galliards on YouTube. It looks like camp Morris dancing. With the entire court dancing – a sea of shimmering silk and flashing jewels – it would have looked amazing. But, still, there is something inescapably ridiculous about it.

As a musical form, the galliard continues to flourish. I’ve played them in consorts of viols; they can be transferred to recorders, lutes, harpsichords or combinations of these. They are not easy to get to grips with. Sight-reading something in two-time while others are playing across you in three-time is like

Medieval Morris dancing: the dazzling but inescapably ridiculous galliard

rubbing your head and patting your tummy. What you really need to do is get a feel for the piece’s swing and how your part fits into the overall groove.

Dowland never saw Essex dance with Elizabeth. He was exiled from the English court for decades for being an ‘obstinate’ (and possibly disloyal) papist. His endless letters to Burleigh’s son and successor, Robert Cecil, begging for forgiveness and a job, fell on deaf ears.

My theory is that, despairing, he dedicated his great galliard to Essex to cock a snook at Cecil. Cecil (later the Earl of Salisbury) had been instrumental in getting Essex executed; so Dowland felt a great affinity with Elizabeth’s last favourite. Cecil had ruined them both: the greatest courtier and the greatest composer of the age.

Cecil was a politician of genius, but he was also a five-foot hunchback and would have looked uniquely silly trying to dance a galliard. Only years later, just after Cecil died, was Dowland finally given a job at court. I hope his little joke gave him plenty of laughs. It cost him.

Benedict King

LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS/ALAMY

The decline and fall of Eng Lit In my youth in the 1960s, Eng Lit was a wonderful wheeze.

You studied a number of great writers at A level and then, if you were supremely lucky, went on to wallow in them further at university.

For female students, English Literature was by far the most popular degree subject and it was difficult to be accepted onto a good course. You had to have A-level Latin for a start.

Nowadays, the academic study of our own literary heritage is in sad decline. In 2019, 3,500 fewer students sat English literature at A level than the previous year and, in English universities, applications are down by 30 per cent since 2010. At some American universities, the drop is even steeper, with some reporting a slump of over 40 per cent in applicants since 2005.

Why? One reason is that today’s students don’t see any point in studying a subject that won’t directly lead to a job. If you’re spending £9,000 a year on getting a degree, you might as well learn something that is going to make you money at the end of it, such as engineering or law.

Another factor, say students, is that you might write an essay on a long-dead author that does not please the examiner and for which you will get low marks; whereas, if you take an exam in maths,

your answers are either right or wrong, no question.

It isn’t just youngsters who reckon Eng Lit is a waste of time. Some people of my own vintage are asking whether there is any point in studying writers on a degree course when you can just sit down and read their books anyway. We need scientists, they say, not poncey English graduates.

But there is a world of difference between reading a book at your kitchen

table and embarking on a critical study of it. I am so grateful to have had the chance to study Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene and Elizabethan dramatists; works that would have been too daunting for me to tackle by myself.

And Eng Lit isn’t just about reading books in your spare time. It’s also about getting into the minds and imaginations of geniuses, learning about their world view and, along the way, history, psychology, sociology, religion, attitudes to life and death and human interaction, as well as enjoying the fun and the humour. True, some Anglo-Saxon and medieval works were dull and difficult, but that was all part of it; when rigorous disciplines are forced on you when you’re young, they prepare you for sustained effort in later life.

And don’t forget that brilliant scholars such as J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis plundered those ancient texts to produce the thrilling sagas we love to read today.

I can understand why today’s students want to do something practical to ensure a good salary on graduation. But it will be a major tragedy if nobody studies our great literature of the past.

And, without students or academic departments to delve into them, these works will just disappear. Nobody will read them just for the sake of it.

Liz Hodgkinson The Oldie July 2020 13

Eighty years ago, the Battle of Britain changed the course of history, thanks to the Hurricane and the Spitfire, says Leo McKinstry

The Hurricane, an excellent gun platform.

The Spitfire – grace with aggression

Their finest hour – in their finest planes

A

fter the Second World War, the former German army commander Gerd von Rundstedt was asked in a television interview if Stalingrad had been the turning point in the conflict.

‘On no, it was the Battle of Britain.

That was the first time we realised that we could be beaten and we were beaten and we didn’t like it,’ he replied.

His verdict was sound. The Battle of Britain (10th July-31st October 1940), whose 80th anniversary falls this summer, changed the course of history.

If the Luftwaffe had gained the mastery of the skies over southern England in 1940, Hitler would have been able to enact his plan, code-named Operation Sealion, to mount a seaborne onslaught across the Channel.

More than 2,000 vessels stood ready 14 The Oldie July 2020

in the occupied Channel ports to carry the vast invading army. But, by midSeptember, thanks to the heroism of the RAF, the German dreams of conquest had ended in failure. Fighter Command’s resistance forced the Nazi war machine to look eastwards to the Soviet Union, with ultimately disastrous consequences.

The scale of the challenge that confronted the RAF at the start of the battle was daunting. Not only had Nazi Germany proved invincible in its brutal advance across much of Europe, but its air force was far larger than Britain’s.

By the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe under Goering comprised over 2,600 operational aircraft, including 1,200 bombers, 280 dive bombers and 980 fighters. Among this aerial armada was the single-engined Messerschmitt 109, one of the deadliest fighters in the

world because of its speed at over 350mph and the lethal firepower from its cannons.

Against this colossal instrument of war, RAF Fighter Command had only around 900 operational planes, many of which were obsolescent, such as the Gloster Gladiator biplane. But this imbalance was outweighed by three crucial factors: the quality of the RAF’s two main fighters; the efficiency of its organisation; and the courage of its airmen. With these assets, Fighter Command turned what could have been this country’s darkest hour into our finest.

At the heart of Britain’s defences were the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane. Both were advanced monoplanes that had entered service in the late 1930s and had transformed the capability of the Fighter Command. Both had eight .303 Browning guns in their

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wings, capable of delivering 2,400 rounds, and were powered by the reliable, potent Rolls-Royce Merlin engine with its distinctive throb.

Combining grace with aggression, the Spitfire was the faster of the two, with a top speed that matched that of the Messerschmitt 109. The plane’s manoeuvrability made her a delight to fly, as George Unwin of 19 Squadron recalled: ‘There was no pushing or pulling or kicking. You breathed on it.

She really was the perfect flying machine.’

The genius behind the Spitfire was the chief designer of the Supermarine company, Reginald Mitchell. A former locomotive engineer from Stoke, he built his aeronautical reputation by creating a world-beating series of fast seaplanes in the late 1920s.

Yet, for all his talent, his first monoplane fighter design for the RAF, the Supermarine Type 224, had been poor – ‘a dog’s breakfast’, in the words of one pilot.

Mitchell transformed the design, particularly by installing the Merlin engine and adopting a curved, elliptical wing.

The radical new plane performed superbly on its maiden flight on 5th March 1936. By then, the production of the Spitfire was plagued by difficulties, partly because the plane was so revolutionary; partly because Supermarine was a small company, with little experience of big contracts.

An attempt by the Government to galvanise output by the construction of a huge factory at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, with the aim of turning out 1,000 Spitfires by June 1940, led only to more disappointment owing to weak management and a recalcitrant workforce.

But the Hawker Hurricane compensated for the Spitfire’s early limited numbers. Although 30mph slower than the Spitfire in level flight, it was an excellent gun platform, extremely robust and much easier to build.

The plane was the brainchild of Hawker’s irascible designer Sir Sydney Camm, a carpenter’s son from Berkshire, whose fertile mind was responsible for 52 types during his long career, including the vertical take-off Harrier.

The Hurricane was his most important contribution to British history.

Even when the Spitfire’s manufacturing

‘And now the Last of the Few are down to one: Group Captain Paddy Hemingway’ problems had been overcome by July 1940, thanks to the arrival of dynamic press baron Lord Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the Hurricane still made up the bulk of Fighter Command’s resources. There were 29 Hurricane squadrons compared with 19 Spitfire squadrons. During the battle itself, for every two German planes shot down by Spitfires, the Hurricanes brought down three.

‘It was the aircraft for the right season.

It literally saved the country,’ said the great test pilot Eric Brown.

The effectiveness of these two planes was enhanced by the highly sophisticated control system created by the austere Fighter Command chief Sir Hugh Dowding. By use of the latest radio and wireless technology, information was filtered from radar stations and the Observer Corps through a network of operations rooms, so that fighter squadrons could be targeted swiftly at incoming Luftwaffe raids.

Throughout the battle, the Germans were bewildered at how the RAF always seemed to know their location. ‘I had no idea how the British could evolve and operate so intricate, so scientific and so rapid an organisation,’ recorded the US military attaché Raymond Lee after witnessing the Dowding control system in action.

But technical sophistication would have meant nothing without raw bravery, and the RAF had plenty.

One Hurricane pilot, James Nicholson, won the Victoria Cross for a successful pursuit of a twin-engine Messerschmitt 1100, even when his own

Near-indestructible: New Zealand ace Al Deere (1917-95) in his Spitfire, 1940

plane was hit by cannon fire and engulfed in flames. The near-indestructible New Zealander Al Deere destroyed 17 enemy aircraft from May to August 1940, during which period he was shot down seven times, bailed out three times, collided with a Messerschmitt 109, had a Spitfire of his blown 150 yards by a bomb and had another explode just seconds after he had scrambled clear from its wreckage.

Altogether, 544 Fighter Command airmen died in the battle, while the entire death toll for the RAF, including other Commands, reached 1,542.

And now the Last of the Few are down to one: Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, 100, the only survivor after the death of Terry Clark, a Blenheim air gunner, who died on the eve of the 75th anniversary of VE Day in May, aged 101.

This valour was displayed as the campaign unfolded over three stages.

The first, lasting from 10th July until mid-August, saw the Germans focus their attacks on the south coast and Channel shipping. Then Hermann Goering, the erratic head of the Luftwaffe, switched tactics. From Eagle Day, 13th August, his force concentrated on pulverising Fighter Command in the air and on the ground.

The RAF put up a ferocious struggle but, by early September, German superiority in numbers had made itself felt. For the RAF, men and machines were running short. Between 24th August and 6th September, a quarter of Fighter Command pilots were lost in action, while 295 planes were destroyed. The strain was particularly heavy on the Command’s 11 Group, based in the south-east under Keith Park.

But then the Luftwaffe made a catastrophic error. Thinking that Fighter Command had been knocked out, Goering ordered his force on 7th September to embark on the bombing of London. This was the start of the Blitz, and, though devastating for parts of the capital, the Luftwaffe’s move gave Park and Dowding crucial breathing space in which to regroup.

When the Germans tried to resume the assault on the southern airfields, Fighter Command was waiting. On 15th September, which subsequently became known as Battle of Britain Day, 56 Luftwaffe planes were downed, more than double the total of RAF losses. Two days later, the Führer ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion.

‘Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war,’ Winston Churchill said in his majestic ‘finest hour’ speech on the eve of the Battle of Britain.

The men of Fighter Command turned that prophecy into a reality.

The OldieJuly 2020 15

On the 40th anniversary of the actor’s death, his biographer Roger Lewis admires a sinister genius, who was quite off his head

Peter Sellers, the mad magician P

eter Sellers, who died 40 years ago, was like a tree filled with birds – all those accents and voices, sounds and imitations.

He began his career in the dubbing booth, playing Mexican bandits, Churchill, Humphrey Bogart, parrots – anything extraneous that needed adding anonymously to movie soundtracks. In the fifties, when he first made his name, he was an indispensable character on radio, appearing alongside Ted Ray and doing spots on Workers’ Playtime, making jokes about corsets.

Sellers’s huge facility culminated in The Goon Show, which is still beloved.

With its gunfire, explosions and army jokes, it is the Second World War re-enacted as comedy. Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, his co-stars, were unnerved by Sellers’s almost sinister ability to switch between all his roles – quavering Henry Crun, crusty Denis Bloodnok, squeaky adolescent Bluebottle and the rest – and perhaps one of the reasons he was so good, and remains a household name, is that in being so convincing at turning himself into other people, Sellers also happened to be off his head.

Sellers’s origins were in the gaudy, slightly musty music halls. His (Bradford) father had a ukulele act; his (Portuguese Jewish) mother was a quick-change artiste. He spent his childhood touring round shabby theatres and end-of-the pier concert rooms, as his parents appeared in shows at out-ofseason resorts such as Ilfracombe or Southsea. He remained deeply nostalgic for this magical past. In his work, there is always the exuberance of the magician

16 The Oldie July 2020

and Victorian actor-manager, fond of the make-up box, false noses, limelight and exaggerated, often preposterous effects.

Yet where most of us, having grown up, settle on a single personality, a fixed destiny and a real self that is consistent from day to day, Sellers never did. He was psychologically fluid, dissatisfied, his accent and bodily mannerisms altering, as if he was still doing his impressions act on the stage or before the microphone.

Wives and offspring would find this bewildering and painful.

But it was a wonderful gift for the cinema – and it has always been my contention that Sellers was to the sound era what Chaplin was to silent pictures.

The more I have looked at his output, the more certain I am of this estimation and – though Michael Sheen is a good mimic, Steve Coogan has inherited Sellers’s darker, less tractable traits and Sacha Baron Cohen rivals the audacity – still none touches him. None has quite that core of truth.

Certainly no other actor, in his period, shifted from radio stardom to films in the way Sellers did. Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Tony Hancock’s screen careers were never on a comparable scale. Sellers, as a heavy-set Teddy Boy, is in Alec Guinness’s gang in The Ladykillers, a classic. He flourished in Boulting brothers pictures.

Sellers was to the sound era what Chaplin was to silent pictures

He made crime capers. But then came Lolita and Dr Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick. This was material in a different league – unprovincial, polished and incisively shocking.

The elevation to international stardom, however, would never be replicated today, political correctness being what it is. For The Millionairess, with Sophia Loren, in 1960, Sellers blacked up to play an Indian. It was while making The Millionairess that he also first showed signs of dangerous lunacy, an inability or disinclination to disentangle fantasy from truth.

As, in the film, Loren’s character falls in love with Sellers’s character, the actor fully believed, and was not to be dissuaded from the idea, that the actress wanted to leave her husband Carlo Ponti and be with him in real life. Sellers divorced his wife, abandoned his children, sold the family home, moved into a penthouse flat and decided to parade about as an eligible bachelor.

Well, it was the sixties and, in their exuberance and colour, Sellers’s films do capture something of that bright, irresponsible decade – the continental comedies, with the Henry Mancini brash soundtracks and Blake Edwards’s high spirits. The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark are wonderful, elegant and poised. Sellers’s underplaying is immensely skilful. He has no trouble stealing scenes from David Niven or George Sanders. What’s New Pussycat? and Casino Royale are period masterpieces, as is There’s a Girl in My Soup, with Goldie Hawn.

Critical wisdom would have you believe he then went into something of

GEORGE KONIG/REX/ALBUM/ALAMY

In Dr Strangelove (1964); the Goons in the ’60s

an eclipse. But I have been re-watching films like Soft Beds, Hard Battles, The Magic Christian and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. Yes, the scripts and the narratives are often flat and laboured; but Sellers, especially in his multiple roles, is full of delicate touches and detail.

There is a lightness to his playing, a springiness, that is seldom seen in other comic British actors. He is never coarse.

There’s always more to what he was

doing to explore, I find. He was thoroughly instinctive, too, which is why he couldn’t bear repeated takes and rehearsals. Inspiration either came to him at once or it didn’t – the very opposite of, say, Laurence Olivier, who could duplicate his effects time after time, his techniques very conscious and deliberate.

Maybe, in this sense, and at the finish, Sellers wasn’t an actor, in the usual sense

of the term. He simply became all those different people. His first wife told me that, when he played a Welsh librarian, in Only Two Can Play, based on the Kingsley Amis novel, she had to live with a Welsh librarian for several months. He remained in character at home, in the car, in restaurants.

For this reason, I think, Sellers always found other people hard to cope with. He couldn’t orientate himself – his preferred companions were his gadgets, cameras and cars, which he bought and swapped at whim. He was a devoted home-movie maker, always recording everybody, putting a distance between himself and whatever he looked at down the lens.

Editing the footage later, he could construct what he wanted his history to look like.

As the decades pass, his glorious misbehaviour in his private life fades – the women, the wives. One of his wives died just the other day: Miranda Quarry, who went on to become the Countess of Stockton. She sounded rather trying, the sort of socialite who never did a day’s work in her life and who, after choosing a pair of sunglasses, had to go and have a lie-down.

There was Britt Ekland, of course, who was as beautiful as a blue sky. Sellers went off her when he overheard her talking Swedish, even though she was Swedish. I like the films they made, The Bobo and After the Fox. Then there was Lynne Frederick, an evil little gold-digger, only 29 years his junior. Although they were legally separated at his death as, owing to heart trouble, Sellers couldn’t sustain an erection, Lynne still managed to cop his entire estate, which she got through on cocaine and vodka.

She died in 1994, aged 39. Which is intensely sad – but the greatness of Sellers is the intensity of the melancholy, despite the comicality.

Look at those little shuffling figures in the fifties films, which are somehow damp and bleak. Or The Optimists, Hoffman and Being There, which are ghostly, curiously elusive.

There is something about Sellers always that is like the rain beating against windows; also, an awareness that life will not last very long, like cut flowers. He was only 54 when he died, on 24th July 1980.

The Oldie July 2020 17

The oldie easy riders Country roads are crammed with OAP bikers, says Peter McKay, a ton-up boy for 60 years

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e ride motorcycles for the same reason dogs stick their heads out of car windows: to enjoy the wind on our faces. During a recent warm spell, I noticed many middle-aged and older motorcyclists surfing the balmy Cotswolds breezes.

At a petrol station outside Chipping Norton, half a dozen young bikers – including two women in leathers – sprawled together on the grass verge, enjoying soft drinks and cigarettes while their Japanese ‘crotch rocket’ machines leaned at rest.

Separately, two gents whom I took to be in their 60s or 70s were perched on new-looking Britishbuilt Triumphs nearby. Neither group acknowledged the other.

Movie star George Clooney, 59, now resident in Sonning, Berkshire, is another enthusiast: ‘I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.’

Most bikers tend to be young or middle-aged; some will remain in thrall to motorcycles much longer, returning to two wheels in retirement after their mortgages (or wives) have been paid off.

T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) would likely have continued to ride his 100mph-plus Brough Superior into his dotage if he hadn’t had to swerve to avoid two boys on bicycles in a Dorset lane, killing himself at the age of 46, in 1935.

He enthused about his SS100 bike he called George VII: ‘He ambles at 45 and, when roaring his utmost, surpasses the hundred. A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed, untiring smoothness.’

In his 70s, the theatrical knight Ralph Richardson rode a 750cc BMW twin around London, occasionally with a

Ralph Richardson and Jill Bennett, 1971; Peter McKay, Fleet Street, 1973

parrot on his shoulder (as you do). ‘An old man can do as he pleases,’ he explained.

David Macpherson, the 2nd Baron Strathcarron, remained obsessed with motorcycles after being chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Motorcycling Group. He helped create the basic training system for learner riders, introduced in 1990.

Strathcarron often rode across Europe with his wife Diana on the pillion, sometimes at night. Wasn’t he concerned she might fall asleep? I once asked. ‘No, I always tie a rope around us before we start off in case she nods off,’ he assured me. Gallant Strathcarron died aged 82 in 2006, seven weeks after colliding with a dustbin lorry. His Telegraph obituary said he was ‘an engaging amalgam of Mr Punch, Bertie Wooster and Mr Toad’.

In his 1974 bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – a dense, meaning-of-life essay based on a US road trip he made with his troubled son, Chris, on the pillion – Robert Pirsig says that in cars, ‘Everything we see is just more. On motorcycles, you’re in the scene, not just watching it any more.’

Motorbikes are dangerous; no doubt about it. More so than cars. That’s why

some like them. Hunter S Thompson, the late author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, once borrowed a superfast Ducati superbike from the Italian makers.

Cracking open the throttle, he said, was akin to diving off a high board ‘and then realising the pool was empty’.

My own interest in motorbikes was sparked when I was ten by a straw-haired teenager who’d ride through our Moray village to show off his 1950s Triumph Thunderbird. Sometimes he’d let me twist the throttle to hear its scary roar. After he left, we could hear the T’bird going up and down through the gears when it was in the hills two miles away.

One day, my pals and I found a rusting old Rudge, covered with rubbish, lying in one of the farm buildings. We cleaned it, pumped up its tyres, put in fresh fuel, got a new spark plug and tried to get it going by taking turns on the kick-start.

When that didn’t work, we ran it down a hill in neutral and I jumped on, kicking the bike into gear. That worked finally and I shot up the farm road. But the clutch was bust. Getting back into neutral was difficult. So I shut the throttle, steered it off the road and jumped off before it hit the fence. Our oil-covered gang learned how to operate the gears without the clutch by simultaneously opening and closing the throttle.

When I got to London in the early 1960s, I bought a 750cc Norton Commando. Later I rode to the South of France with my teenage pal Dave on the pillion. We fell off after lunching too well in a restaurant on the Route Napoléon; we skidded on the seafront at St Tropez, sustaining bruised arms, legs and egos.

To mark my 70th birthday, I rode my 800c Honda VFR to St Tropez to join friends for dinner. Leaving London at breakfast time, I got there just as their starter was being served at around 8pm.

I’d have been there on time if I hadn’t taken the wrong autoroute exit on nearing the coast.

The Oldie July 2020 19

Michael Cole

The day Alec Guinness shot the audience A recent photograph of the interior of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in The Oldie, reminded me of my days as an 18-yearold ‘check-taker’ at London’s most beautiful theatre.

Major Peake, cavalryman’s corset pinching his waist and rosewater dampening his curls, looked at me hard.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘You’re tall – so the suit should fit. Start tonight.’

And so, in the autumn of 1961, after grammar school, I became a check-taker at the Theatre Royal.

My job was to stand at the entrance to the Upper Circle, tear tickets in half and direct people to their seats. ‘Through the bar and up the stairs the other side’ was my mantra.

I took orders for interval drinks. In the Dress Circle, at matinées, ladies ordered the Tea Tray: a pot for two, Rich Tea biscuits and two slices of cake, fruit or Madeira – five shillings.

But I didn’t get ‘the Dress’ unless

another check-taker went missing. Major Peake preferred to recruit from the Brigade of Guards. The Scots Guards were at Wellington Barracks. Caledonian voices enlivened the corridor where we struggled into our dinner jackets.

People still wore evening dress in the stalls and the Dress Circle – hence the name. Douglas Bader rocked down the row on his tin legs to find his seat. Vivien Leigh paced the promenade at the back of the Dress during the second act and never returned to hers.

Ross by Terence Rattigan was in the second year of its run. It had opened with Alec Guinness as Aircraftman Ross, the identity T E Lawrence assumed in order to disappear after his Arabian adventures.

Guinness had some business with a revolver in the first act. If anyone arrived late or rustled their chocolate box, he pointed the weapon at them until they sat down or shut up.

Michael Bryant took over from Guinness.

The curtain line closing the first half is ‘Ross, Ross, how did I become you?’

At first, Bryant delivered the line as a howl of rage. Then he decided to whisper it.

Check-takers were paid ten shillings and sixpence per performance – half a guinea – and a whole guinea if they also did the matinée on Wednesday and Saturday: £4 4s 0d a week.

During the day, I worked at Foyles. It was a sweatshop presided over by Christina Foyle, who lived in the penthouse with her poodle. As they swept out every morning, the dog would stop in New Novels to defecate.

After three months, I found a job as a trainee reporter on a weekly. By then, I knew every line of Ross, except the opening scene. I had never seen it because I was always tearing latecomers’ tickets.

Michael Cole was Royal Correspondent for the BBC

Ray Connolly

My ideal home? An old shop A couple more shops closed on our local high street last month.

Even charity shops are closing.

Mothercare, Debenhams and Cath Kidston have gone across the country.

Coronavirus has made the retail collapse much worse.

It isn’t just the virus’s fault. Clicking a mouse at a screen in the warmth of our homes is so much more convenient than traipsing up and down rainy pavements.

But what next? We know what happens when a part of a town is abandoned: the American rustbelt has shown us. It starts with empty shops, which become boarded-up buildings, followed by vandalism and urban decay.

Chocolate-box towns, loved by tourists, won’t suffer this neglect. But our less glamorous local high streets could well be abandoned. Many high streets will become strips of betting shops, late-night bars and cheap burger joints.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Our new way of shopping could be a terrific opportunity to rethink our town centres.

Remember what many high-street 20 The Oldie July 2020

buildings were for in the first place.

Outside the city centres, almost every high street in Britain is lined with stout, splendid, Georgian and Victorian buildings, built originally as family homes.

The retail revolution of the past century and a half, when so many have been converted into shops, may have changed their original purpose. But look above the shopfronts – many of the splendid old homes are still there. Some are flats, but many are just storage space – doomed to become increasingly empty.

Every day, we read about the shortage of homes and, on the other hand, threats to the Green Belt from new developments.

At the same time, many once attractive high-street houses stand semi-neglected.

Will urban planners be brave enough to restore and convert shops as fit-forpurpose, modern homes?

The process is already happening around London’s Oxford Street, where residential developments mean the area is reverting to its origins in 1729, when it was a smart place to live.

Not everyone wants to live in the

suburbs. Not everyone drives. Flats in town centres, within walking distance of hospitals, doctors, libraries, newsagents, transport, theatres and town halls suit the elderly, students, nurses, teachers and families of various incomes – who benefit from living close to their work and schools.

The easy – and probably cheaper – answer is to bulldoze the old and build new.

But taking a wrecking ball to history leads only to cultural rubble – areas of towns razed of their character. Bustling town centres can and should be the magnetic local meeting points they always were.

So, let’s take those plate-glass windows out of empty premises and reshape those vacant shops into the homes they used to be.

It will take foresight from central government, local authorities and developers, as well as courage and money – lots of money. But what choice do we have if the alternative is to see our high streets increasingly abandoned?

If we are to preserve our town centres, we have to recreate our past before the buddleia gets hold of it.

Deni Bown became a life model as a broke single mother – and ended up loving it

Naked truth of modelling W

hat on earth made me become a nude model?

It all began with a bank statement. I had exceeded my overdraft limit. This was serious – I was a single parent and, in the early 1980s, absent fathers weren’t obliged to pay maintenance. I already had one part-time job. Now I needed another. I reached for the local paper and turned to Situations Vacant. Among the usual ads for bar staff, shop assistants and so on was ‘Model required for Life Class’.

How embarrassing – but how else could I earn so much for doing what sounded like so little?

My call went through to the art department of our local college of further education. At my interview, I didn’t have to strip. The interviewer was a charming art teacher who, although male, didn’t so much as look me up and down. After a friendly and reassuring chat, the job was mine.

On that first nerve-racking day, I posed for a class of A-level students.

Since then, I’ve tackled a wide variety of poses for men and women of all ages with a great range of artistic skills – even once in front of my nine-year-old son who was

brought along because he had an unscheduled day off school for teacher training. It was awkward, but no one seemed to mind and I needn’t have worried. He spent the entire session drawing dinosaurs, singularly unmoved by the spectacle of his mum starkers in a room full of strangers.

Overcoming an instinctive shyness about being naked is the first challenge in becoming a life model. To be completely naked in front of people who stare at you unremittingly is a challenge. We may flatter ourselves while looking in the mirror. But when you’re holding a pose for 20 minutes at a time, there is no way you can pull in your tummy and stick out your chest, let alone maintain a seductive smile. It’s just you as you really are.

And that can be terrifying. I once heard of a model who began her first pose and couldn’t stop shaking. Another I know fainted on the spot. I got off lightly.

My worst moment was one of sheer embarrassment when some teenagers managed to peer in through a window and started giggling.

The next big challenge is the actual posing. Some poses are far more demanding than others, either Left: Deni Brown, painted by an anonymous student.

Above: The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy by Johan Zoffany, 1772

22 The Oldie July 2020

technically or because they are not in the least bit flattering. Standard poses – sitting, standing or lying motionless with head and limbs in one direction or another – weren’t usually too difficult, though I did once have to sit for 15 hours in the same position for an A-level exam.

That was certainly an ordeal even though, mercifully, it was done over two and a half days and not in one long agonising stretch.

Some poses were more like performances. There were tricky balancing acts, twisting slow-motion sequences and repeated moves such as stepping up and down, lying on the floor and rolling over, and the odd bit of miming, such as drying myself with a towel – though I was of course perfectly dry to start with. The pose most often associated with an artist’s model – the sensuous lounge on plush upholstery – was what I did least often. There was seldom anything to lounge on.

Though my career – if I can call it that – as a life model started at the college, several similar jobs in various locations, including artists’ studios, came my way through word-of-mouth recommendations. People heard that I could keep as still as a statue while

THE PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ALAMY

managing to look more alive and not in absolute agony.

Being a life model in the state education system and the private sector were rather different experiences. Art teachers follow a syllabus that requires specific poses from week to week in the spartan setting of a classroom or assembly hall, with harsh lighting and electric heaters that produced more draught than warmth. Sitting for artists and art groups in their own studios was generally more relaxed and, thank goodness, warmer. They had completely flexible agendas, often rather lovely rooms with garden views, and some creature comforts, such as coffee breaks and lunches – fully clothed, I hasten to add. One artist used to hand me a glass of eau de vie at the end of a morning’s session – the perfect aperitif to revive a near-lifeless model.

What art teachers in colleges of further education lacked in terms of furniture – other than the standard-issue chair or bench – they made up for through imaginative use of makeshift props. This kept me on my toes and brought the best out of students who needed something to kickstart their artistic genius.

One strategy was to focus on the nude form by blurring the details. To that end I have posed behind an opaque screen, been draped in see-through muslin and wriggled into a stockinette tube of the kind used to encase pig carcasses. I once had the bones of a human skeleton, borrowed from the biology lab, surrealistically arranged alongside me in a similar position to my own. Another time, photos of paintings by Mondrian and Bridget Riley were projected on to me, their colours and patterns transforming me into a living work of art.

I was sketched in pencil, crayons, charcoal and chalk, washed in pen and ink and watercolours, rendered in oils and pastels and modelled in clay. Results varied as much as – if not more than – the materials. I have seen images of myself that left much to be desired: head too big/small; breasts not exactly where they should be; round-shouldered; squint-eyed; with a certain lack of proportion in length of legs/arms, size of feet/hands and number of digits.

After a while, my job became routine, like any other. There were occasional highlights, such as being told by a rather good artist that one of his paintings of me was hanging in the Royal Academy. I

went to see the exhibition and was thrilled, especially when I bumped into someone who recognised me behind the anonymity of Seated Nude. I also felt flattered when a picture of me was sold.

I enjoyed the physicality. It takes strength, self-discipline and a certain amount of grace to freeze movement in a way that encourages observation of the body, rather than the person, and doing this well is quite satisfying. And I liked the people, from college students, evening-class attendees and talented – or not-so-talented – hobbyists to accomplished teachers and mentors who helped others master the complex skills of drawing, painting and sculpting the human body.

It boosted my confidence and I took on other part-time positions at the college, which in turn boosted the bank balance – win-win. Last but not least, the enforced motionlessness, without which I was always on the go, gave me thinking time and the courage to change direction.

And so I went out on a limb – ha-ha – and, after applying to Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, became a writer and photographer with an outline for my first book. Wearing nothing gave me everything.

The Oldie July 2020 23

For 20 years at the BBC, Jenny Bardwell sprinkled stardust over dull broadcasts. Now she’s found the old tapes – with their rich, lost voices

Reaching for the stars – in their dressing rooms

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saw Broadcasting House in Langham Place for the first time aged 14. I was hovering outside with a gaggle of girls from Purley, longing for a glimpse of David Cassidy.

My mate Jacqui told me that some of the people working inside that iconic battleship were secretaries, and that turned out to be my way in.

Aged 19, I wrote to the Beeb and then did a speed test on a ‘golfball’ typewriter.

They put me straight to work on their radio ‘secretarial reserve’. Over the next 20 years, wherever I ended up in the BBC, I would try to inject a little theatrical glamour into the programmes (and my life) – on the slenderest of pretexts.

An old shoebox contains cassette copies of radio I was involved with during the 1980s and ’90s. Before they perish on a skip, I wipe down my old ghetto-blaster and insert. Suddenly, the room is alive with rich, tremulous voices.

Me: ‘And what is your favourite meal in the whole world?’ Sir Michael Hordern (with a wicked twinkle in his eye): ‘Oh, I’m very fond of oysters – but you don’t have to cook them [laughter].’

Next, a nasal drawl from across the pond: ‘I never eat kinky food – I would rather die than eat an oyster, a clam, a squid or any of those terrible things.’ Ah yes, Dame Quentin Crisp.

I was a true stage-door Jenny, much happier chatting up the stars in their dressing rooms than ordering stationery back in the office.

Derek Cooper (now there was a

24 The Oldie July 2020

BBC Broadcasting House, London; Jenny in the Milton Keynes studio, 1992

voice – every syllable – redolent of a peaty Talisker from his beloved Skye) was presenting The Food Programme in 1989 and I was the broadcast assistant.

One morning, I overheard him complain about an envelope shortage because ‘Jenny hasn’t done a chit.’ I’d never heard of a chit. When I took him his tea in a polystyrene cup, he would say, ‘You do know how to spoil a poor old soul.’

I was a hungry wannabe producer although, back then, I was more interested in theatre than in food.

‘Sure, I can use a Uher,’ I assured Food Programme producer Vanessa Harrison in 1987, as I hurried down to the National Film Theatre, weighed down by the burdensome reel-to-reel machine to interview Frank, their catering manager, about food in places of entertainment.

Frank said his bar was always ‘drunk dry’ after a showing of Lawrence of Arabia because the audience felt they’d spent so much time traipsing across the desert. ‘I order two extra barmen who will be very busy – it’s a fact of life.’ A Waterloo commuter, tucking into his egg-salad supper at the bar, admitted he’d never actually seen a film there.

Then it was back over the river to interview ‘the fastest barman in London’: Wally, at the Royal Opera House, who proudly told me he’d served 48,000 bottles of champagne in the Long Bar. Opera audiences spent more on sandwiches than balletomanes, because they ‘love smoked salmon and have more money’.

EVERETT/TRINITYMIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY/REX

Clockwise from top left: Michael Hordern, Fay Weldon, Jonathan Miller, Barry Norman and Dirk Bogarde

When the topic of ‘food and the elderly’ was proposed, I didn’t suggest a feature about a lonely pensioner making tough culinary choices on a tight budget.

I visited the Haymarket Theatre where Michael Hordern and Michael Denison were appearing in You Never Can Tell.

I was right, they were very interested in food: Michael H said he’d enjoyed some charcoal-grilled lamb’s liver that very day at the Garrick.

Michael Denison told me, in his beautiful plummy voice, ‘Cucumber has always disagreed with me – and then I played Algy in the 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest whose whole career revolves around cucumber sandwiches.

‘The props department at Pinewood had produced these beautiful, wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches and I said, “It’s no good. You can’t give those to me. You’ll have to give me slices of apple; cucumber is out, as far as I’m concerned.” ’ Living in my Highgate bedsit, frequently on the breadline myself, I needed every bit of glamour I could lay my hands on. The only way I could get promoted to producer was by travelling 60 miles up the M1 to Milton Keynes, where I worked for the next 12 years at the BBC Open University.

A new challenge – how to get my showbiz chums into educational OU programmes. A friend teased me, ‘So, who is it this week – Ken Branagh on quantum mechanics?’

I had delightful meetings with obvious targets such as playwright Willy Russell, who created the OU student Rita in Educating Rita. Lenny Henry and Sheila Hancock were, handily, both OU graduates. Then there were the big fans of the OU, like darling Jonathan Miller, who told us, ‘Philosophy is a very good bullshit-sniffer.’

I had to produce a programme called Open Forum, aimed at potential students, to tempt them with courses, incorporating items about summer schools and course fees.

Rapidly, ‘blurbs’ were smuggled in – brief recommendations from eminent people about a book, play or piece of art that had stirred them. In other words, three minutes of fairy dust to cheer up potentially dry radio about OU credits or the funding council.

A postcard soon arrived for my office wall: ‘Three minutes wouldn’t give me time to clear my throat! Best wishes, Dirk Bogarde.’

These blurbs made wonderful radio and provided me with a perfect excuse to meet my heroes of the day, including the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble, who chose

‘Frequently on the breadline, I needed every bit of glamour I could lay my hands on’

‘someone your listeners will never have heard of – Ariane Mnouchkine’.

He greeted me charmingly in his office at the Barbican in an extraordinary pair of leather trousers which looked as if they belonged to somebody else. The RSC had only recently moved into the Barbican and Adrian was just as lost as anyone.

His parting shot was ‘Don’t ask me where the box office is!’

Barry Norman gave us three minutes on the joys of P G Wodehouse. Professor Charles Handy went into raptures about the beauty of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Enoch Powell spoke of his surprise at the low attendance at A E Housman’s lectures and Fay Weldon told us how pointless it was to clutter up our shelves with half-read books.

It gave me an excellent chance for a little snoop around some gigantic, book-lined rooms. The late John Julius Norwich’s pad in Little Venice won the prize for sheer jaw-dropping square footage.

Time to return to Michael Hordern in his dressing room. ‘Now that I’m living on my own, I don’t eat as well as I should.

I tend to fall for yet another ham sandwich – mind you, it’s very good ham.’ The dear boy probably had a few reviews like that.

Was I abusing my position as a BBC employee by chasing the great and the good to keep my sanity, while toiling away in worthy broadcasting cul-desacs? Yes, I suppose so.

Would I do it again? You bet.

The Oldie July 2020 25

For 60 years, Hunter Davies, 84, has walked – and swum – on wild Hampstead Heath

Hunter on the Heath

On the Heath, with Highgate Hill beyond

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et me take you on my daily walk across Hampstead Heath – a walk I have done for most of the last 60 years, man and boy groom.

I got married to the writer Margaret Forster in 1960, aged 24, and we moved into a flat right in the middle of the Heath, a little, hidden village called the Vale of Health. I was so proud, especially of the phone number HAMpstead 3847.

Very posh. In those days, you could tell from a phone where someone lived.

In 1963, we moved to the other side of the Heath, when we bought a house with a sitting tenant, which was all we could afford. It cost us £5,000. I know – we paid too much. Whenever a new person moves into our streets, I let drop casually how much we paid, just to see them vomit on the pavement.

I have just one road to cross to get to the Heath. It takes me only five minutes and, oh joy, I am at once communing with nature, 800 acres filled with lakes, woods, trees and hills – London’s greatest natural treasure.

OK, it is not exactly the Lake District, where we had a country home for 30 years.

But you can pick your time and route to mean it’s possible to walk for three hours, see hardly anyone and have to cross only one road, convincing yourself you are in the real countryside, despite being only four miles from the centre of London.

This year, I have been able to look on my long daily walk as work – I am doing a book about a year in the life of the Heath.

I was well pissed off when lockdown

‘Our seat’ – for Hunter and the late Margaret Forster’s silver wedding anniversary 26 The Oldie July 2020

Pond life: the Hampstead Ponds feed the Fleet River, as in Fleet Street

came, thinking, ‘Oh God, the book will be all out of date.’ But now I realise it has given me an unexpected narrative: the Heath before and after lockdown.

Just before the lockdown, I was getting near the Men’s Pond, when I suddenly heard panting and someone running behind me. I turned round and saw a bride in full bridal regalia, a young Chinese woman in her early twenties.

About 20 yards behind, panting even more, was a young, handsome, Chinese man of about the same age, wearing smart black trousers and a sparkling white shirt. He was carrying his smart, black suit jacket carefully over his arm.

I asked the bride if she was in a film, as the Heath is such a popular location.

She looked puzzled. They were just on their own. They had come on the bus to the Heath, which someone had told them was a lovely place to have wedding pictures taken.

SPRINGFIELD/ALAMY/HARRY MOUNT

They weren’t getting married till next year. They had just decided to have their wedding photos taken now, as the weather was so nice. I wished them luck with their wedding to be, and said I hoped they were still speaking in a year’s time. They laughed and dashed up Parliament Hill.

I stood for a while beside the Men’s Pond, where I swim most summers. It is even more popular these days, now that wild swimming is all the rage. The water is so green, cloudy, murky and horrible that I’m always surprised by just how many people swim there. I always worry that a giant pike will have a nibble at my willy.

I am also rather scared of the ducks. I swim in a large circle, clockwise round the pond, going from buoy to buoy. I go mad if a duck is already on one of the buoys – so I shout at it angrily. No wonder it’s called wild swimming.

It is, in fact, fresh running water, fed by underground streams flowing into the old Fleet River, now buried beneath London, though remembered in the names of

local streets and a primary school. And my old stamping ground, Fleet Street.

The Ladies’ Pond, three ponds further on, is more attractive and more secluded.

Like the Men’s Pond, it has been a much loved open-air swimming place for nearly a century.

It opened in 1926. The general public were fascinated by the notion of women swimming in the open air. The media loved it, too: it gave them an excuse to use photographs of women in bathing suits. Oooh, Ivy! As early as 1927, Pathé News made Lady All Round the Year Swimmers, a film about a handicap swimming race, featuring women wearing bathing hats and voluminous costumes diving in on a freezing day.

At the entrance to the grounds of Kenwood House, I turn up the sandy path for a few hundred yards, stop in front of a small clump of silver-birch trees and sit down on MY SEAT. I suppose I should call it ‘our seat’. My wife and I put it up in 1985 on our silver-

wedding anniversary. The touching, tasteful little plaque says ‘ To Hunter and Margaret on their Silver Wedding, June 11, 1985’. The site, which we picked specially, has got a visual pun. Silver wedding – and silver-birch trees. Gerrit?

My wife died in February 2016, but I am still alive – or I was, last time I checked. And I am still the only living person with a memorial seat on the Heath. All the others are for the dead.

Kenwood is the greatest treasure of Hampstead Heath – a stunning mansion, built by Robert Adam in the 18th century, with an incredible collection of paintings

by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner, Thomas Lawrence and Romney, plus a Rembrandt self-portrait.

And all this is tucked away in a corner of a public park. Sorry, we regulars never used the word ‘park’. It is always the Heath.

The Pergola is another manmade treasure on the Heath, further on towards Golders Hill Park. You walk along the 900-yard length of this masterpiece, created by the great landscape gardener Thomas Mawson for soap magnate Lord Leverhulme in 1925 just before his death.

On the way home, I go along the ridge towards Parliament Hill , from where you can wave at those poor folks stuck in the City skyscrapers.

I stop on a little hill known as Boudicca’s Mound, where the Iceni Queen is supposedly buried.

Years ago, when I and some other local dads began our own football team, Dartmouth Park United, we played every Sunday on the Heath and our goalposts were kept inside the iron railings on top of Boudicca. Hope she didn’t go wild.

Guess what was inside the mound just a few months ago? Sheep. It was an experiment, which went well, and now they are expected to return in September.

One of my 200 old postcards of Hampstead Heath shows sheep in the 1940s grazing just above the Men’s Pond.

They were for eating, to help feed us during the last war. That would not be approved of now by Hampstead veggie types. Today’s sheep will be for being gazed at, while they graze.

I finish at the Lido, now a listed building, opened in 1938. It has an excellent little café, with home-made food.

So there are four different places to swim on the Heath – the Men’s, Ladies’ and Mixed Ponds, along with the Lido.

No wonder we are so terribly clean. And sometimes a bit wild.

Hunter Davies’s A Year on Hampstead Heath is published next year The Oldie July 2020 27

Radio’s King of Comedy Martin Jarvis has now recorded 195 Just William stories and PG Wodehouse’s funniest books, he tells Valerie Grove

ALAN DAVIDSON/REX

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o sooner had Esther Rantzen said on Radio 4, ‘Make us laugh during lockdown – give us Martin Jarvis reading Just William, give us P G Wodehouse,’ than it was done.

By a stroke of luck, the latest Wodehouse production from the husband-and-wife team of Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres was already in the pipeline. And when the BBC implored them for more Just Williams, Jarvis found five he’d never done before, adapted and recorded them ‘at the speed of light’, even though he was by now stuck in Los Angeles.

That’s how we’ve been getting wall-to-wall Jarvis on Radio 4. There’s the Jarvis-directed Michael Frayn sketches, Mobile Magic. And the two-part Leave It to Psmith, starring Edward Bennett, who was ideal as Wodehouse’s agreeable rogue Psmith (‘The p is silent, as in phthisis, psychic and ptarmigan’). And there was Jarvis himself playing Lord Emsworth, ‘drooping like a damp sock’, as his sister Constance (Patricia Hodge) says. As a bonus, there was a new William story at noon each day – including Jumble, the tale of how William acquired his beloved mongrel companion.

The ageless Jarvis (in fact, he’s 78) has been doing Just William since 1973.

It was his idea and he’s now read 195 of Richmal Crompton’s 335 stories.

After 47 years, he knows exactly how to capture the voice of each character.

How does he do it? In replying, he at first adopts the fluting voice of one of the dotty ladies William meets – deluded spiritualists, poetesses and batty aunts.

‘It is not I who find the voice: their voices find me!’ he trills in batty-aunt mode.

Then, as Jarvis, he says, ‘With all great writers, I look to them to dictate the character. Charles Dickens – what a great director.’ Nobody will forget Jarvis’s oleaginous, writhing, twisting Uriah Heep in David Copperfield on TV. 28 The Oldie July 2020

Just the dream ticket: Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres, his wife and co-star

And he invests each Outlaw with a distinct personality: studious Henry is the boffin; lugubrious Douglas looks on the dark side; jaunty Ginger is Horatio to William’s Hamlet. Then there’s the hated rival Hubert Lane, with his thin rictus of a smile.

Long ago, when I first interviewed Jarvis, I took along my William-mad, William-aged son, Oliver. He told Jarvis he seemed to shape his mouth into a dog’s bottom to speak William’s words, and Jarvis decided he was right. (‘How’s old Dog’s Bottom these days?’ Jarvis asks me.)

Nobody understands William as intimately as Jarvis does. ‘People who see him as a mischievous little scamp are quite wrong. William is driven by a sense of justice and moral rightness. He’d like to be prime minister to sort things out for the “underprivilidged”, who include himself. In fact, William is like Boris: he would really like to be World King – controller and emperor of all he surveys.’

An example of William’s devotion to ‘doin’ good, ritin’ rongs’, Jarvis reminds me, is William and the New Neighbour: a horrible man moves in next door to a dear old lady and poisons the lady’s little dog. ‘Don’t worry,’ William assures her, ‘I’ll see to it.’ He sets up a device in a dark corner of his garden (‘Mother, I’d really

like to try makin’ a garden, like you always want me to’), making the new neighbour’s doorbell ring whenever anyone walks past his gate. Tormented into accusing and assaulting innocent passers-by – the headmaster, the vicar – the horrible neighbour is soon driven to move house again. A William triumph.

Crompton and Wodehouse inhabit the same idyllic England, locked in the same era, with a shared wit and imagining similar characters, often absurd yet somehow always believable. In his south-London boyhood, Jarvis read both; he went to prep school at Wodehouse’s alma mater, Dulwich, before attending the Whitgift School (minor public) in Croydon – just five miles from Bromley High School for Girls, where Richmal Crompton was classics mistress.

Jarvis’s versatility is infinite, as is his productivity: witness his brilliant memoir, Acting Strangely. It took him months to cut Psmith (89,000 words) into a 25,000-word drama – probably longer than Plum took to write it. He’s played Jeeves on Broadway. He’s voiced ads for products from Old Spice to Twix.

In his version of The Trials of Oscar Wilde by Gyles Brandreth, he does every voice from QCs to rent boys. When he plays a creep like the vicar in Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind, he is chilling.

He met his wife when she was Ophelia to his Hamlet, and now they are a cottage industry, acting, producing and directing together, leaving their home in Belgravia for forays to Hollywood to cast stars and record plays for radio: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, with Alfred Molina and Stacy Keach, or a James Bond drama with Toby Stephens as Bond.

Now all projects are on hold. ‘Jared Harris and his wife Allegra are similarly isolated, in the house opposite. We have socially-distanced cocktails, perched on stools, across our parking area. I think Plum Wodehouse would’ve found that pretty rummy, don’t you?’

Clem the gem Clement Attlee became Prime Minister 75 years ago because, under a quiet exterior, he was ruthlessly brilliant, says Francis Beckett

KEYSTONE PRESS/ALAMY

E

veryone knows the Churchill quip about Clement Attlee – ‘A modest little man with plenty to be modest about.’

Almost no one knows Attlee’s typically terse and pronounless description of Churchill’s political style: ‘Trouble with Winston. Nails his trousers to the mast.

Can’t get down.’

Which illustrates a strange paradox.

Attlee – the Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951 whose government created the welfare state – was considered an insignificant little man. ‘An empty taxi drew outside Downing Street and Clem Attlee got out.’ Yet most historians now agree that Attlee and Margaret Thatcher were the two most effective Prime Ministers of the 20th century.

People underestimate him because he talked so little. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to say to the BBC, Mr Attlee?’ asked a television interviewer during the 1950 election campaign. ‘Don’t think so.

No,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘A conversation with Attlee is like throwing biscuits for a dog,’ said one colleague. ‘All you can get out of him is yup, yup, yup.’

Just after he retired, a pretentious BBC interviewer opened a discussion with a long, elaborate, tortured analogy between Marx and Machiavelli. ‘So don’t you think, Lord Attlee, that socialism is really just like Machiavellianism?’

Attlee replied, ‘No.’ But his taciturnity hid absolute self-belief and utter ruthlessness.

A minister, summoned to see him, was horrified to be told that the Prime Minister wanted his resignation, and asked why. ‘Not up to it,’ said Attlee, and that was that.

Who was this minister?

Denis Healey told me it was John Parker, fired from the Dominions Office in 1946. An equally good source names

Richard Stokes, removed as Minister of Works in 1951. Lobby journalist James Margach wrote it of an unnamed Scottish Secretary.

It’s perfectly likely that it happened to all three, for Attlee was ruthless with his ministers. Whoever called him ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ was about as wrong as you could be.

‘Perfect ass,’ he said of his voluble first Chancellor Hugh Dalton. ‘Always had to have a secret to tell someone, to please them.’ When, in 1947, the main items of Dalton’s budget were in an evening newspaper before Dalton gave them to the House of Commons, Attlee said, apparently with genuine puzzlement, ‘He spoke to a journalist? Why would he want to do that?’ He forced Dalton to resign, though no harm had been done and there was no question of corruption.

He had terse and often unkind things to say about many of his colleagues.

Nye Bevan’s marriage to the rather more left-wing Jennie Lee provoked him to say, ‘Nye needed a sedative. He got an irritant.’ Of patrician, pre-war Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, he said, ‘Queer bird, Halifax. All hunting and holy communion.’

And yet he had a genius for getting people who loathed each other to work together. ‘Herbert Morrison [the Deputy PM] is his own worst enemy,’ one Cabinet Minister confided to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and Bevin growled, ‘Not while I’m alive, ’e ain’t.’

Tight-lipped though he was, just occasionally Attlee suddenly became very talkative, though never about politics. At one of his press conferences, which was running into Clement Attlee on his victorious 1945 campaign

the ground after ten minutes because of the Prime Minister’s monosyllabic answers, a journalist who knew him well said, ‘Prime Minister, we’re all stumped. What’s 12 across, two words, seven and six letters?’ And Attlee talked for ten minutes about how he had solved the clue from that morning’s Times crossword.

He enjoyed talking about school cricket matches with anyone who went to his old public school, Haileybury. In fact, he would talk to anyone about cricket, which was a great passion with him.

When his press officer, Francis Williams, wanted to install a telex machine in Downing Street, to see what was running on the news wires, he knew how to overcome Attlee’s objections – he pointed out that the machine would keep the Prime Minister up to date with the latest score from Lord’s.

After it was installed, Attlee looked into his press officer’s room. ‘Francis, my cricket machine – it’s giving out the decisions made in Cabinet this morning.

How can it do that?’ Williams explained that he routinely briefed the lobby. ‘All right. Leave the show to you. Good work.’

How did this terse, understated little man beat the charismatic war hero Winston Churchill, 75 years ago, on 5th July 1945, and win a stunning overall majority of 145 seats? The main reason was widespread determination not to go back to the sufferings of the unemployed in the thirties.

But it helped that Attlee was a known quantity – he had been Churchill’s deputy during the war. He was fond of telling the story about an old lady in his East End constituency who wanted to vote for Mr Churchill, but Mr Churchill’s name was not on the ballot paper.

Fortunately, Mr Attlee’s name was there, and he had been Mr Churchill’s deputy, so she happily voted for him.

Francis Beckett’s Clem Attlee is published by Haus The Oldie July 2020 29

The Way They Lived Then – When Dafydd Jones photographed bright young things 35 years ago,

Above: Boris Johnson at the Christ Church Ball, Oxford, 1985. Below: Hugh Grant, Marina Killery, Lulu Rivett-Carnac, Lord Neidpath and Catherine Guinness – at the Piers Gaveston Ball, the Park Lane Hotel, London, 1983

30 The Oldie July 2020

Oxford and Cambridge Balls in the Eighties his sharp focus captured actors, writers – and future prime ministers

Above left: Nigella Lawson in a sedan chair, Dangerous Sports Club tea party, Gloucestershire, 1981. Above right: David Cameron in Bullingdon tails, Pitt Club Ball, Cambridge, 1987. Below: Jumping over a burning boat, Oriel College, Oxford, 1984

OXFORD: THE LAST HURRAH BY DAFYDD JONES IS PUBLISHED BY ACC ART BOOKS

The Oldie July 2020 31

Cartoonists Ronald Searle and George Sprod were both inspired by hellish Changi Prison – but Sprod is forgotten, says Nick Newman

Searle & Sprod: a tale of two jailmates

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onflict and comedy go hand in hand. War has a habit of producing jokers – the First World War spawned the comic trench masterpiece The Wipers Times, and the Second World War saw the genius of Spike Milligan explode in the foothills of Monte Cassino. Meanwhile in the Far East, the fall of Singapore brought together two soldiers with a passion for cartoons: Searle and Sprod.

Surprisingly, Sprod was not a pseudonym. George Napier Sprod was an Australian, who arrived in Britain in 1949.

He visited the offices of Punch with four drawings, and left with none. Within six years, he was a fixture in the magazine.

Ronald Searle was already a Punch regular and well on the way to international success. But this was not the first time they had contributed to the same publication. They had met in the most gruelling of circumstances, as prisoners of war in Changi Prison, and their shared experiences were to leave a lasting legacy for comic art.

Both artists drew cartoons from their youth. Sprod was published aged 13, in the Adelaide Mail. At 19, he cycled 400 miles to Sydney to try his luck as a cartoonist. He submitted drawings to Smith’s Weekly. When war broke out, he lied about his age to enlist in the Royal Australian Artillery.

Searle first drew for the Cambridge Daily News at 15, and was paid half a guinea (52.5p). Having enlisted, he began submitting cartoons to Lilliput – where Assistant Editor (and future wife) Kaye Webb accepted his drawings of anarchic schoolgirls, based on the daughters of friends who attended a progressive academy – called St Trinnean’s, later reinvented by Searle as St Trinian’s.

34 The Oldie July 2020

Ronald Searle c1951; George Sprod c1942

Following the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was incarcerated in the hellhole of Changi Prison. Built by the British in 1936 to accommodate 600 inmates, it was now crammed with some 10,000 POWs. Among them was Gunner Sprod.

Drawing alleviated the boredom of captivity. At the same time, survival depended on ruthless self-interest – and that meant trading artistic talents.

Sprod wrote and illustrated Narrowminded News, holding ‘editorial conferences’ with his co-editor as they lugged baskets of earth. It featured camp gossip, skits on officers and items about frog-racing. Ten issues were published up to Christmas 1942, by which time Searle and Sprod were working together, providing murals for the Flying Dutchman Snack Bar (sago balls in grated coconut a speciality).

They also contributed to The Chunkel (named after an Asian hoe). It was published by Sergeant Jack Wood (later the Mayor of York) and examples have been preserved online by his family.

The collection provides an insight into the two cartoonists’ contrasting interests and styles. Searle produced a serious piece entitled ‘Art Today’, stating, ‘Great art is that which can arouse in the beholder the same

splendid emotion that urged the artist to creation.’

On the opposite page, Sprod produced a larky article entitled ‘Drooling at the Flying Dutchman’: ‘It has been noticed that gurgling noises, smackings of lips, and other sounds indicative of relish, have been proceeding from the Flying Dutchman. These are the reactions of those unable to restrain their animal passions at the sight of the Searle and Sprod murals.’

In 1943, Sprod was sent to Siam as a night orderly in a hospital camp, producing Nuts and Jolts, a handwritten publication to amuse the patients and, said Sprod, ‘to prevent men from dropping their bundle’.

Searle had also been sent north, to work on the infamous Burma Railway. At Changi, he drew mildly subversive cartoons poking fun at generals, for a magazine called The Survivor. Its aim was to provoke debate, but Army chaplains took exception and had it banned. ‘That is one reason I got sent up to Siam,’ Searle later observed. ‘It upset the extremely conservative mentalities of our own administration.’

When the Japanese wanted groups to

Hand of Sprod: above, prison-camp cartoon, c1944; right, from Punch, 1953

send up north, the English took the opportunity to get rid of ‘troublemakers’.

The horror of the Burma Railway was captured in the fictional film The Bridge on the River Kwai, yet Searle continued to draw, graphically cataloguing the beatings and torture. One attack on his hands put him in hospital. Said Searle, ‘There I lost all my friends.’

He traded pornographic drawings with his guards for paper, and survived beriberi, tropical ulcers and malaria.

Down to six stone and at death’s door, he was transported in 1943 to Sime Road camp near Singapore racecourse, where he was reunited with Sprod.

Loet Velmans, a young Jewish Dutchman who escaped Nazi occupation only to be captured by the Japanese, recalled both men contributing to a Jewish publication. ‘Searle and Sprod were our Tweedledum and Tweedledee,’ he wrote. ‘Both spent the whole day sketching; both were extremely talented; and, of course, both were extremely thin.’

Both men began designing décor for

the Barn Theatre (Hut 16), for Cinderella and the Magic Soya Bean and Rag Bag Revue. For his 24th birthday in 1944, Sprod drew Searle a card with a mournful caricature of Ronald imprisoned by candles on a birthday cake – a far cry from their usual diet. ‘Fried kitten,’ wrote Searle, ‘quite filling, good meal.’

Yet, despite such hardships, they and Jack Ward went on to produce The Exile, the most famous of the camp ‘newspapers’.

Each copy – with a print run of just one – had a readership of 10,000. They produced ten editions within six months.

After liberation, Searle’s involvement with The Exile won the admiration of Lord Mountbatten’s special adviser Tom Driberg, and dinner with Mountbatten.

Sprod, however, had moved on – determined to produce a publication more in tune with his Aussie mates. The result was Smoke-Oh. Years later, Sprod published a collection of his POW cartoons and anecdotes in Bamboo Round My Shoulder: Changi, the Lighter Side.

Post-war, Searle returned to Britain with notebooks full of ideas – many of which were published in Lilliput and Punch – such as ‘Hand up the girl who

Left: Sprod’s Changi memories and Punch cover; Searle’s girls.

Right: Japanese prison officer by Searle, 1945

burnt down the East Wing last night’, originally drawn in prison. He later said that, in its horrific way, his time in Changi was ‘a gift’, because of life models all around him, captive, stricken and dying. His harrowing drawings established him as a master of reportage.

His skills were much in demand: notably, he chronicled the trial of Adolf Eichmann for Life magazine. As the creator of St Trinian’s, illustrator of Molesworth and satirist for Le Monde, his international reputation was assured.

Sprod returned to Australia as a humble gagsmith for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Australian Women’s Weekly. Aged 29, he voyaged to England with his portfolio, linking up again with Searle, whom he followed to Lilliput and the News Chronicle.

Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge became an avid fan. He said of Sprod’s topical cartoons, ‘We don’t want to give our readers a snigger. We’re in for a blankety good belly laugh.’

Sprod provided many. His crude style evolved and became much more Searlelike, in baroque graphic style and tone. A classic cartoon depicted a smart hostess showing her guest to a bed covered with dogs, saying, ‘It’s a little chilly, so I’ve put an extra dog on your bed.’

Muggeridge described Sprod as short, stolid and enigmatic, adding, ‘I cannot imagine anyone not liking his drawings.’

Despite his popularity – the Duke of Edinburgh was a collector – Sprod is now largely forgotten. While Searle will go down in history as the father of black humour, and one of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th century, Sprod’s epitaph might be a line from his book of POW anecdotes: ‘Still and all, you’ve gotta have a laugh, ain’t you, mate?’

The Oldie July 2020 35

Town Mouse

The recipe for interesting children? Boredom tom hodgkinson

The funny thing about school holidays is that I don’t remember my parents featuring much in them.

Of course they were there on the two-week trip to a villa in Corfu, but the rest of the time, when I was a baby mouse in London, where were they? They were working, I think. They are both baby boomers and were far more interested in their careers or their latest enthusiasms than in us. My brother and I were left alone, and that was good. Friends knocked on the door and off we went on our bicycles.

Today, because of the ubiquitous screen, cars and higher levels of anxiety, parents have two options. Let the children be stimulated by computer games, social media and whatever other horrors come to them via their multiple devices and screens. Or take some time out and entertain them yourself. That means full concentration and playing a board game, inventing a quiz or playing football with them. That’s a lot of work.

The best option – when children are left to their own devices, get bored, make up their own games and ramble the streets in gangs, while the parents drink cocktails and doze in the sun – no longer seems to exist. If you want healthy, self-sufficient offspring, D H Lawrence said, ‘Leave the child alone.’ Stop trying to dictate to them. Let them be bored.

That’s the theme of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s new book about school summer holidays between 1930 and 1980, British Summer Time Begins (reviewed on page 53). She captures the deep dullness of the holidays – and how the boredom helped us to develop our minds.

But boredom has been eliminated by the overlords of Silicon Valley. No one has time to be bored, because they are all thrown such a lot of entertaining stuff – with advertising attached. What sort of 36 The Oldie July 2020

effect does this have on the creative mind of the child? It was the spectacularly hands-off parenting style of Lord and Lady Redesdale that led to the flowering of the imagination of young Nancy Mitford. The sisters, when they were not being hunted by their father and his bloodhounds, spent all day making up games and special languages, taking refuge in the Hons’ cupboard and reading.

Funnily enough, the overlords of Silicon Valley themselves do not allow their kids to waste all day on screens.

Take Evan Spiegel. He is America’s

‘If you want healthy, self-sufficient offspring … let them be bored’

youngest billionaire, married to the incredibly beautiful and rich model and organic-skincare-products CEO Miranda Kerr. His business, Snapchat, is used by 186 million people, mainly kids, every day. The couple have a baby and a seven-year-old, Flynn, from Kerr’s previous marriage to actor Orlando Bloom. An interviewer for the Financial Times recently asked Spiegel his policy on screen time. It turns out he had a Mitfordian childhood: his parents didn’t have a TV till he was a teenager.

‘I actually thought that was valuable because I spent a lot of time just building stuff and reading or whatever,’ he said.

As a result, Kerr and Spiegel allow their seven-year-old only one and a half hours of screen time per week, so she can build stuff and read or whatever.

Young Spiegel is spot-on. In my case, acres of time yawned in front of us during the summer hols. We had a babysitter, aged only 16, who would ignore us while she snogged her boyfriends in my parents’ sitting room. She also took us on long rambles through Richmond Park.

I read comics for hours with my friend Simon. First Tintin and Asterix, and later The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. At my grandparents’ house, my brother and I would spend hours creating alien worlds out of plastic counters while my grandfather dozed and my grandmother cleaned.

With all this time on our hands, we kids also started making magazines. The Penguin, the King’s House Times (named after my prep school) and the Sixth-Form Rag were some of our early collaborative projects. I also used to bang a tennis ball against the wall for hours, and as a teenager would gaze at album sleeves while lying on my bed and playing each record again and again. ‘Doing nothing often leads to the best kind of something,’ as that Taoist sage Winnie-the-Pooh wisely notes in the recent Pooh movie.

There was a lot of inactivity. In fact, it used to irritate my mother, on the occasions she witnessed it. ‘That’s what annoyed me about you and your brother,’ she tells me now. ‘The lolling.’

We used to saunter through the streets of Richmond with no purpose. And sauntering is a wonderful activity. It has its roots in medieval pilgrimage. When villagers asked pilgrims where they were headed, the wanderers would reply, ‘À la sainte terre’ – to the holy land. They became known as saunterers.

In other words, boredom is next to godliness.

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler (www.idler.co.uk)

Country Mouse

Mary’s new career – from socialite to prison warder giles wood

Whether you have been cooped up in a tower block or living in the centre of a rural beauty spot, one of the great problems for married lockdowners has been the absence of mental privacy.

Pre-COVID-19, Mary spent at least one third of her week at book launches, gallery openings and assorted London soirées. She insisted that at least one of us should be ‘in the swim’. I was more than happy not to be in the swim and instead to concentrate on experiments in ecological restoration, a new-found interest in growing rare root vegetables and generally mimicking the life of an 18th-century parson naturalist.

Mindful of the diktat of Michael Pollan, ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,’ as I toiled away, I was aware that if anyone was virtue-signalling it was clearly me. My mother always used to assure me that I was more than justified in taking this approach to life: ‘You keep the show on the road while Mary is gallivanting.’

But now Mary has stopped gallivanting and has turned the beam of her attention onto me.

She announced she has been conducting ‘time and motion’ analyses of my outside work: ‘For example, why do I keep hearing that maddening noise of a watering can being repeatedly filled up?

Can’t you use a hose?’

To me, the tinkling sound of water running into galvanised metal is an agreeable one and has always signified progress. I explained that the ecologist far prefers the physical effort of filling and carrying an unwieldy can to any profligate spraying with a high-tech hose.

The fine-rose method of watering is a more sustainable way of preserving finite village water supplies.

But my productivity-driven wife was sceptical. ‘Are you sure it’s not “display working”?’ she asked nastily.

I find that even light irrigation of my rich organic soil causes a flush of earthworms to hurry towards each mini-oasis. Like patrons of a drive-by McDonald’s opening up during lockdown, these are closely followed by the arrival of fast-food-seeking moles. The latter can find scant sustenance in the neighbouring corn prairies, where the only sign of life, apart from the crop itself, is the human being in the 40-foot-boom sprayer.

‘But why are you still in that area?’

Mary’s voice later rang out as she came through the undergrowth towards me.

‘You finished watering hours ago.’

Pre-lockdown, Mary didn’t enter the garden. On the few days when she was at home, she would call from a window.

Now she was getting far too interested in my work – invading my space, as it were.

I said, ‘No gardener welcomes this sort of disturbance when he is communing with Gaia. What you don’t understand, Mary, is that I am existing in a state of sacred time and you insist on pulling me back into the profane.’

‘Sorry, Giles. But I am a busy woman.

What exactly are you doing?’

Once again, I felt over-questioned. But when forced to think about what I was doing, I explained that, through patient observation, I had discovered that the moles’ trademark surface-tunnelling,

which resembles a Lilliputian earthquake, occurs roughly every three hours.

‘It means that, if I can be here at the right time, I can rugby-tackle them and release them humanely.’

‘And how many have you caught so far?’

‘None yet … using this technique.

Although I could try the Indonesian spear-fisherman technique…’

Mary argued that there wasn’t ‘time’ for this approach to gardening.

Then there was the incident of the watering of the road. Seeing my invigilator’s incredulous face looking down at me from an upper window, I explained that, because of the dry weather, the house martins would find it impossible to repair and build their nests without mud. Hence I was watering a pothole in the road to provide a lifeline for the next generation. I told her, ‘To quote E O Wilson, “What is the point of humans prospering if we cannot bring the rest of life with us?”’

Nor has she appreciated my daily ritual of the Treading of the Slow Heaps.

This involves waiting until the slow heaps – garden waste – are dry and brittle and then treading the twigs into the ground to replicate the action of the hooves of prehistoric herbivores such as the aurochs. I need do this only through the one right of way through our land.

I appreciate that many of my outside projects are opaque and difficult for Mary to comprehend. There is an art to creating a wildlife garden and mere neglect will not always do the trick. To Mary, a doctor’s daughter from Northern Ireland, a garden is something with a lawn and rose beds and, essentially, something you should be able to access. And herein lies the misunderstanding, since I consider the garden to be habitat.

But there is good news. Mary happened to ‘throw up’, during an internet search, an article about Slow Gardening, which appeared to her to endorse my modus vivendi. Reading of this movement, ‘rooted in Gestalt’, she learned that Slow Gardeners are to be applauded for their determination to ‘savour’ everything they do on their land, using all their senses. And that ‘participants must be celebrated for the integrity and sensitivity of their slow procedures’. I sense the dawning of a paradigm shift in Mary’s attitude. She has always been highly suggestible.

I had never heard of the Slow Garden movement, but clearly my best chance of continuing with my 18th-century lifestyle is for me to proclaim that I am an adherent.

The Oldie July 2020 37

The widow’s lonely lot If a man loses his wife, women rush round with shepherd’s pie. When Susan Hamlyn was widowed, she was shunned as ‘a spare woman’

TONY SIMPSON

I

met Michael and Louise in the queue for the neurologist.

Michael’s wife, Louise, had a dementia diagnosis similar to that given to Robin, my husband. We stayed in infrequent touch during the several years it took for the dementia to do its worst and kill first Louise and then Robin.

Coincidentally, I met Michael again at the house of a friend, around six months after Robin died.

‘How are you doing?’ I asked, tentatively – there is no right way to put such a question.

‘Oh, wonderful!’ he beamed. He looked a little fatter, ruddier, younger.

‘It’s marvellous.’

‘Is it?’ I asked – somewhat bemused.

Since Robin’s death, my life had been a lonely trudge through probate – countless copies of his death certificate going to the council, land registry, solicitors, the bank, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

In a real sense, Michael and I had each lost our partners many years earlier, owing to their dementia, and I could tell that for Michael, as for me, the actual death had come as a relief.

‘Marvellous,’ Michael repeated. ‘As soon as Louise went into hospital, the women took over.’

‘Women?’ I was even more confused.

‘Oh yes,’ he breezed on. ‘I was out virtually every night, and on the nights I wasn’t, someone always left a meal on the doorstep. In fact,’ he confessed, ‘I got absolutely sick of shepherd’s pie!’

I realised that his friends had taken pity on him once Louise was in hospital – and even more when she died and they saw him, newly, as a responsibility.

Our mutual friend told me, ‘We have huge fun. Michael always comes with us now on our girls’ nights out. He loves it.’

I have shared this story with several widowed women friends and it is clear that my surprise is naïve in the extreme.

‘Oh, the men don’t come near me,’ said my glamorous friend Joanna. ‘It’s as if I go around in a leopard-skin sarong

38 The Oldie July 2020

drawling, “Come up and see me sometime.” The last time I had a few people to dinner, no one even came into the kitchen to offer to help open the wine.’

My experience had been similar. In the long years of Robin’s decline, little help had been offered, other than by two pairs of lovely friends who ensured I had some semblance of a social life.

There was a sense – I was told – that I was a ‘coper’, who would reject offers of support. Which may well be true. But the first time I had people to dinner after Robin’s death, one of the men strode into the sitting room, looked round and then said to me, in obvious consternation, ‘Oh! I thought you’d have a man here to help.’

I gave this remark the shrug I felt it deserved and was then mortified when the cork disappeared into the neck of the wine bottle and I had to hand it over for male hands to sort out while I dished up.

I have got used to good friends asking me for dinner and saying warmly, ‘It’ll just be us.’

I am glad to be invited and wonder whether the male/female balance at dinner tables is really so important. I am accustomed to others saying, ‘Oh, no one does dinner parties any more,’ and wondering where the couples carrying flowers and a bottle are heading on

Saturday evenings. And I reflect ruefully that, perhaps, it’ll only be when a few more of my friends are widowed that my social life will pick up.

Joanna constantly gives jolly and well-attended parties and I assumed, till we talked, that her hospitality is enthusiastically reciprocated.

‘Oh no,’ she told me. ‘The occasional drinks party, perhaps. Or if someone drops out of a theatre trip. But dinner parties are a couples thing.’

Not so for Michael, it seems. If you thought the notion of ‘a spare man’ went out in the 1950s, forget it. He has a key to all his friends’ houses, it would seem – a pal to the chaps and a safe escort and gallant to the women. But a spare woman? Has such a thing ever existed?

That I should be writing this in 2020 surprises me – I feel the spectres of Nancy Mitford, Barbara Pym and Ivy Compton-Burnett raising quizzical eyebrows at me in this age of gender fluidity and vaunted sexual equality.

It’s not that my friends don’t like me.

It’s not that Michael has a rare charm.

And I am a perfectly merry widow, who would be worried if shepherd’s pies appeared on my doorstep. And I don’t think I’m a threat in mixed company – although I am contemplating acquiring that leopard-skin sarong.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Back to school – with no books or toys As I write, we are just preparing for our return to school.

I say ‘return’, but that is wrong in both senses. I have been going in throughout lockdown, and even now most children will not be returning. Only Year 10s – the first year of GCSEs – will be coming back, although school attendance is still not obligatory.

Our primary-school colleagues have paved the way for us, and we are already hearing horrific stories. One mother told me that her reception (four- or five-yearold) child was given a chalked-out square in the playground, outside which she cannot step. There are no books or toys in this child’s classroom. Reading is from a screen, as is writing – pens and pencils are too difficult to keep clean, apparently.

At the other end of the spectrum, a young mother told me that when her son found out schools were open but he was being kept home, he had a meltdown of such misery and despair that she decided to send him in after all.

My own granddaughter is very excited at the prospect of her return, but I am worried that the changes in the school day will disappoint her.

And what about my pupils? My tutor group is in the vanguard of the return, but not all of them will be taking the

GOLDEN NUGGETS The classically debauched American author Charles Bukowski was born a century ago, on 16th August 1920.

He got his big break 40 years ago this summer. That’s when he wrote the script for Barfly, a film about a down-and-out writer who spends his nights drinking and brawling in a seedy LA bar. It took a further 40 The Oldie July 2020

plunge. The parents are worried: if the children don’t go back, will they miss new content? If they do, will they get sick?

The questions from parents are endless and still unanswerable. Will the children wear face masks? How will recess be organised? Will the canteen reopen?

What will they gain by returning, and what will they lose?

I know none of the answers. The senior leadership team are working flat out to organise the near future, but they are also having to consider September: it seems unlikely that even then we will be back to ‘normal’.

In addition to all this, our school is expanding in September but the new building will not be finished in time. So we will have more children and the same amount of space, but children will have to be spread further apart.

Never have I been more grateful that I am a mere foot soldier, carrying out orders and flying the flag for common sense and cheerfulness.

As far as I understand it at the moment, the initial return of the pupils will be for a half-hour meeting with their tutors. I suppose this is to reassure them, but if any of them follow the press they are going to be very muddled. We teachers are either apparently lazily taking full pay

and too cowardly to do our jobs or, as the Daily Mail put it, we’re potential heroes.

‘Let Our Teachers Be Heroes!’ it bellowed, suggesting we’re about to die.

It is interesting, as I make my calls, to discover which parents are gung-ho about sending their children back and which are more suspicious. And what is really depressing is that the children we most need to see back in school are for the most part those who will not be back.

Every September, we see a slight dip in performance from students after the summer holiday – a dip that’s more obvious among those who are unlikely to have read a book or had much conversation with a grown-up in the six weeks away. These are the children who are also going to find it the hardest to catch up now, after what is already a 12-week gap. It is not the work they have missed that will be hard to catch up on. It is the habit of work. It is the getting-up on time, sitting calmly in a class, doing homework and concentrating on five hours of lessons they will struggle with.

As, to be honest, will we. The school now feels busy on a day with 22 students.

I think staff and students will be equally overwhelmed when we are back to full capacity.

I dread it and long for it in equal measure.

Charles Bukowski, barf ly extraordinaire seven years to get on screen, but ended up making Bukowski modestly rich. He once called it one of the easier assignments of his 50-year career. ‘I just copied out my diary.’

If nothing else, Bukowski always delivered the goods. He wrote at a furious pace, often to stay one step ahead of the bailiff, and in a lean, clipped style that combined touches of Hemingway and Chandler.

It has been estimated that, in

the period 1955-1980, he turned out more than 2,500 poems, at least ten collections of short stories and four novels.

I say ‘estimated’ because, in the 1950s and early ’60s, many of his manuscripts, unadorned by anything so sordidly conventional as a stamp, got lost in the post. It was a particular irony because Bukowski sustained himself for much of that time by working at his local post office.

Bukowski died of leukaemia in 1994, aged 73 .

He was survived by his widow, an adult daughter and his debts. He chose the inscription for his tombstone, which combines a touch of nonchalance with his determination not to abandon the struggle.

‘DON’T TRY,’ the epitaph reads, immediately above the image of a boxer.

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

The silent-film star who came to tea Even for someone who barely leaves the house if she can help it, the last two months before lockdown have taken on the heady nostalgic quality of 1920s Weimar Berlin.

In January, Mr Home Front and I had a slap-up lunch in Soho, before going to the Curzon to see The Lighthouse, a film about two lighthousekeepers – one young, the other old – who go mad during a storm. ‘Steptoe and Son with seagulls,’ mumbled Mr HF before falling asleep 15 minutes in.

In February, Betty and I went to Champneys in Hampshire (my excellent Christmas present from Mr HF … a distinct improvement on the anti-wrinkle creams of previous years). I had a great time, waddling about in a white gown and flip-flops like Little Britain’s Bubbles DeVere; eating and drinking to excess.

An exceedingly uncomfortable massage, which at the time made me privately cross, virtually cured years of persistent lower-back pain.

At the spa, Betty and I, alongside a hen party from Croydon, shrieked with abandon under the invigorating showers.

Three different settings: Tropical Rainforest, Caribbean Storm and Cold Mist. ‘Did they have Oldham on a Tuesday?’ asked Mr HF. Then there was an outing to the BFI with my friend Annabel. We saw a 1916 silent western, The Good Bad Man, with excellent live piano accompaniment. Our late arrival meant we missed the introductory talk about the film’s actors.

So when the wholesome young ingénue appeared, flashing her eyes at rakish cowboy Douglas Fairbanks Snr (who looked old enough to be her grandfather), I had a jolt of recognition.

‘That’s Bessie Love!’ I hissed in Annabel’s ear. ‘I met her in the 1970s!’

I was 15 when my mother asked one day if I would like to go with her to visit an elderly film-star friend of hers.

‘Eh? Who? Crikey, yes!’ I enthused.

We took a train from Surbiton to Clapham Junction and walked to her sheltered apartment in one of the large Victorian houses overlooking the common.

Bessie Love, then in her late 70s, was a still pretty, birdlike woman, with the same elegant legs that had danced their way through The Broadway Melody of 1929 and a string of other films.

In a plainly furnished living room – I had imagined plush, pre-war Hollywood décor – we sat and drank strong black Nescafé. On her walls, pasted any old how, were cuttings about old films torn from magazines. ‘Like a schoolboy’s wall!’ remarked the Aged P afterwards.

Bessie was very gracious, answering my gauche questions, peppering her anecdotes with infectious laughter. Had she known Gary Cooper? (My crush at the time.) ‘Oh indeed, yes! He once said to me, “I wonder if people will still be watching these films many, many years from now.” ’ She spoke of her friend Mary Astor, then living in a care home in Los Angeles: ‘She hates it there! Just hates it.’

Sometime after, Bessie was invited back to ours. The prospect of having a Hollywood film star in our Surbiton house felt strangely surreal, like peering

‘It was like peering out of the window and seeing Fred Astaire pruning the roses’

out of the window and seeing Fred Astaire pruning the roses.

A proprietorial female companion drove her over. Whenever I stood up to offer Bessie an egg-mayonnaise sandwich or a slice of cake, the companion would swish me away with her hand: ‘You’re standing in Miss Love’s light!’

‘Who was the companion?’ I asked my mother as we stood waving them off on the doorstep.

‘An ageing groupie.’

The following year, Bessie Love effectively dropped my mother after she’d criticised Jimmy Carter in her Christmas card. ‘He is a good and worthy President!’ said an indignant Bessie.

We never saw her again – except for a brief cameo appearance in the film Reds.

She died in 1986.

At the height of lockdown, the care home suggested the Aged P and I Skype each other. Why not? It would make a change from frustrating, half-heard phone calls. It would also give me the chance to ask how she and Bessie Love had come to meet. And, if hearing was still tricky, she could read my lips.

Me: ‘The care home have arranged for us to Skype each other next Tuesday.

We’ll be able to see each other for the first time in weeks!’

Aged P: (Groan) Me: ‘Don’t you want to do it, then?’

Aged P: ‘Not particularly. I know what you look like.’

It went ahead anyway. Just before, I ran a comb through my Shirley Williams lockdown hair and even applied lipstick (the Aged P thinks I’m dying if I don’t). I wondered if she would finally rise to the challenge of Skype, like Norma Desmond ready for her close-up. But it wasn’t to be.

The Aged P wore the pained expression of an ISIS hostage.

‘I don’t think my mother’s enjoying this very much!’ I eventually called.

A face-masked carer homed into view.

‘No, she’s not, is she.’

So it was back to phone calls: ‘Do you remember the day Bessie Love came to Surbiton?’

‘Of course!’

‘How did you two come to meet?’

‘What?’

‘How did…?’

‘Hello?’

‘HOW DID–’ ‘Alice?’

The Oldie July 2020 41

Profitable Wonders

What’s the point of the cactus?

RICHARD WON/ALAMY

james le fanu

‘It seemeth a strange herb,’ wrote the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes in his Joyful News out of the New World (1568) of his first encounter with a cactus. ’One of its thorns pricked me. They are as sharp as needles and did hurt.’

Strange, certainly, and, in their serried ranks at the garden centre, unappealing – bulbous, warty and bristling, like a legion of warlike goblins. Or so they had always seemed until, last year, I visited the Huntington Desert Garden in southern California.

Henry Huntington founded the Pacific Electric Railway in 1901. Based initially in downtown Los Angeles, it grew within a few years into a mass-transit system of electrically operated street cars, linking the sprawling metropolis from north (Pasadena) to south (Long Beach), west (Beverly Hills) to east (Rialto). His foresight in buying large tracts of real estate alongside the routes of his streetcars made him the largest single landowner in California.

He was fantastically rich and, with his estimated fortune of 50 billion dollars, built an art gallery to house his collection of prints and paintings (Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya and Gainsborough) and a library to display his first editions of Shakespeare, the Gutenberg Bible, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and eight copies of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, two annotated by the author.

And he created the most extraordinary garden in the world, spread over ten acres of gently sloping, west-facing hillside below his palatial mansion in Pasadena. Here, ably assisted by his foreman, German landscape gardener William Hertrich and dozens of labourers, he planted more than 5,000 species of trees and plants culled from the deserts of five continents.

The visual effect on a hot bright morning in early summer was surreal and stupendous. It was as if you had been

Barrel cacti, Huntington Desert Garden

transported to an alien planet where the usual rules of form and structure no longer applied: spindly grey green columns of euphorbia shooting 40 feet straight up into the sky; vast rosettes of stout, spiky-leaved agave sprouting from the arid soil; clumps of dragon trees, their battered trunks encrusted with red sap.

Most impressive of all, unsurpassed in their variety of shape and size, are the cacti, armed to the teeth with their dangerously sharp, needle-like, hooked and barbed spines. In May and June, their intensely hued blossoms outshine those of any other plant, visible for miles to their potential pollinators, bees, bats and hummingbirds.

Their popular names convey something of that exuberant profusion of shape and colour: the ‘silver torch’, handsome and erect, cloaked in snow-white bristles; the ‘hedgehog’,

‘Their intensely hued blossoms are visible for miles to bees, bats and hummingbirds’

low-growing and inconspicuous, almost obscured by a mass of brilliant pink flowers; the ‘bishop’s mitre’, flat and star-shaped like a biretta with a showy blue pompom at its centre; the ‘pincushion’, covered with spiralling rows of nipple-like nodules; the large, spherical ‘golden barrel’, with its dazzling, symmetrical, bright yellow spines; and, bizarre in the extreme, the ‘creeping devil’, whose prickly, python-shaped stems worm their way across the ground.

The fabulous aesthetic impact of this symphony of exotic forms and colours is inseparable from the physiological miracle they represent. Each part is adapted to maximise their chances of survival in the arid desert heat. Put simply, this accounts for three of the cacti’s most distinctive features. First, they have dispensed with leaves – conserving all the moisture that in temperate plants is transpired through the minuscule stomata (or mouths) on their undersurface. Next, the internal structure of the stem is modified to store both water and carbon dioxide, whose combination, in the process of photosynthesis, forms the tissues from which all plants are made.

As for that armature of spines, while usefully defending the succulent cactus from thirsty desert-foragers, they also capture and condense the fog rolling in from the Pacific as the hot desert air is cooled by the ocean. This was discovered quite recently by researchers at the Natural History Museum, who used time-lapse photography to demonstrate droplets of water moving rapidly down the spines’ narrow grooves before being absorbed directly into the stem. Some 5,000 miles away, on the Namibian coast, the desert beetle Stenocara gracilipes similarly refreshes itself, gathering on its outstretched wings fog droplets that roll down its back into its mouth.

The wonders of nature never cease.

The Oldie July 2020 43

Letter from America

Murders most foul

George Floyd’s death came 60 years after To Kill a Mockingbird edward kosner The cable news has been running for hours each day on our big TV. It’s hard to look away. America has been in the midst of an unprecedented double crisis – giant protest demonstrations and ugly looting triggered by the police murder of a black man in Minneapolis, overshadowing for a time the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The anguish and chaos remind many of 1968, when the country was convulsed by resistance to the Vietnam War, the assassinations of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, the shooting of the racist demagogue George Wallace and the tumultuous Democratic convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s cops ran riot themselves.

History chimes in magical ways. The furore over the killing of George Floyd comes just weeks before the 60th anniversary of the publication, on 11th July 1960, of America’s most celebrated novel about racial injustice.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of white lawyer Atticus Finch’s failed effort to save the innocent Tom Robinson, a black father of four, from conviction by a Dixie jury of the rape of a white woman. It has sold more than 40 million copies, has been made into a memorable 1960s movie and a 2018 hit Broadway play, and is required reading for nearly every American high-schooler.

Stories like George Floyd’s are painfully familiar to me. My first newspaper job, at age 20, was on the old liberal New York Post. The tabloid was a lonely sentinel in the 1950s, covering lynchings and other racial crimes in the deep South.

The Post had one of the few black reporters on any metropolitan daily – Ted Poston, who regularly risked his life to cover big race stories in Mississippi and Alabama.

The week I joined Newsweek in the early ’60s, the cover story was Dr King’s March on 44 The Oldie July 2020

Washington. A few years later, I was part of the team who produced an acclaimed special report outlining a programme for ‘Negro’ advancement in America.

I was walking peacefully with colleagues, all wearing press passes, outside that infamous 1968 convention when a Chicago cop slammed his nightstick onto the skull of the only black reporter among us.

It’s facile to conclude that over the past half-century in the story of race in America only the names and details have changed. Change has been profound, even if it sometimes feels glacial.

Growing up in Manhattan, I had but one African-American classmate (he wound up an important doctor) until high school. On my student paper at the City College of New York, everyone was white. The Post had Poston, and Newsweek had only one black writer or senior editor in my years there.

It was national news in 1966 when Edward Brooke became the first AfricanAmerican US Senator since Reconstruction, and again a year later when Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland. In the midst of today’s crisis, some of the most eloquent voices are the mayors of Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, DC – all black women.

In America now, many of the highestpaid athletes and pop and movie stars are African-American, and Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest women of any colour.

Even so, most black citizens – as well as Hispanics and Asian-Americans – live in segregated neighbourhoods, even though housing discrimination has long Brock Peters and Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird

been outlawed. Much of Harlem, where my college had its concrete campus, has been gentrified by the long economic boom, as have other minority neighbourhoods around the country.

More than anything, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, after the assassination of John F Kennedy, began the great transformation of our politics that in time led to Barack Obama in the White House.

Still, a deeply resistant strain of racism persists in America. It is not new. Acts of police violence against blacks and routine racist incidents on the streets happened all the time in post-war America. Most were witnessed by a handful of people, and only a fraction were reported in the papers. Now they are captured by mobile-phone cameras and police body cams and broadcast to the world on cable news, Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

My colleague Peter Goldman wrote most of Newsweek’s brilliant coverage of the civil-rights movement. ‘We’ve made fitful progress since the marches and riots of the 60s,’ he told me the other day, ‘but the video record of Floyd’s death reminds me that one thing hasn’t changed: the recurring use of deadly police force against unarmed African-American men.’

The protest marches prompted by Floyd’s death have been disfigured to a degree by the arson and looting rampages of hoodlums with their own motives.

But the huge, diverse and sustained demonstrations that have filled our great cities are incontestable proof that racism is being overrun in America – too slowly, but surely. As I finish this piece, activist Rev Al Sharpton has just electrified Floyd’s televised memorial service, crying, ‘Get your knee off our necks!’

That’s why I and so many others can’t look away.

Edward Kosner was the editor of Newsweek, New York magazine, Esquire and the New York Daily News

Postcards from the Edge

Smoky beauty of the old Gitanes gypsy

Mary Kenny’s sneaking admiration for David Hockney’s filthy habit

TOBY MORISON

Though I quit smoking many years ago, I can’t help giving a small cheer for David Hockney, who not only stubbornly continues to smoke, but regards the cigarette habit almost as a civil right in a free society. He even maintains, perhaps implausibly, that smoking prevents COVID-19 and has helped his health, since he’s in fine fettle at the age of 83.

Mr Hockney is understandably dismayed, on aesthetic grounds alone, that the French have altered the romantic Gypsy figure on the front of a packet of Gitanes to an image of an afflicted old crone. Pictures of famous smokers such as Jean-Paul Sartre have also been airbrushed to remove the ciggie.

Smoking certainly can cause ill-health but it isn’t always to blame for everything.

When I developed a pulmonary condition – diagnosed as bronchiectasis – in 2011, it was automatically seen as a punishment for my previous fag habit. A subsequent diagnosis indicated that it was more likely to have been caused by lung damage as a child, when I had a serious pneumonia.

If I ever again cross the Channel to Normandy – where Hockney dwells – I may smoke just one Gitane in his honour.

Imperial or metric? The cultural war between the two has never been resolved, Brexit or no Brexit. But during the spring, we were so insistently subjected to the two-metre distancing rule that we all became more familiar with metric measurement.

With younger people, metres had won the measuring war anyway. Still, it’s noticeable that imperial and metric can mix and match in this country. The metric system may be used for official announcements, but heights and weights are still colloquially given in imperial.

When Boris Johnson was ill, we were told he was 17½ stone, and five foot nine inches tall.

At birth, a baby’s weight is given in

kilograms, as are adults’ weights in medical tests. But popular culture still tells us that the singer Adele lost over seven stone, rather than 44.452 kilos.

British dieters are attached to measuring their losses in stones.

Weather reporters officially announce temperatures in Celsius, but the popular press still describes a summer heatwave as being ‘in the 90s’. A Fahrenheit reading sounds more dramatic, even though both measures are usually given in the text.

The world – even America, in some fields now – has been progressively going metric, but I quite like the British muddle of retaining elements of the imperial. It has so much more resonance in habits of speech and tradition. ‘Going for a pint’ is handier than ‘going for 0.568261 litres’. The departed are more poetically buried ‘six feet under’ than ‘1.8288 metres down’. It’s nice that the racing fraternity still uses its ancient furlongs (of which we learned that eight constitute a mile). And The Oldie still sticks to good old imperial.

In the world of precision engineering, exactitude is vital, but in the human sphere an element of fluidity is endearing. Feet and inches were based on the human body, and even the French still use the same word for ‘inch’ as for ‘thumb’ – une pouce. ‘No’ can still be expressed as ‘not an inch’.

A cultural map of Europe has been published on social media, detailing the most famous person associated with each country.

Some are predictable – Shakespeare for Britain, Van Gogh for the Netherlands, Vlad the Impaler for Romania and Sibelius for Finland.

Austria gets Freud and Hitler, Spain Picasso, France Napoleon and Rousseau, and Ireland has Oscar Wilde (not St Patrick). Germany gets Immanuel Kant, Sweden Carl Linnaeus, the botanist, and Belgium gets – Charlemagne. Who knew the Holy Roman Emperor was a Belgian?

Good pub-quiz question!

Dublin is bidding farewell to one of its oldest cafés, Bewley’s in Grafton Street – closing because the rent is too high and the revenues are insufficient. Bewley’s Oriental Cafés, founded in 1840, were cheap and Bohemian, offering a heavenly aroma of roasting coffee for students and writers from James Joyce to Maeve Binchy. In 1928, the Grafton Street Bewley’s installed six stunning stainedglass windows, painted by artist Harry Clarke, portraying multicoloured birds, butterflies and sea creatures.

The Bewleys were a Quaker family who produced both philanthropists and eccentrics. The evangelising mission of the Society of Friends was to replace the intoxicating tavern with the sober coffee house.

Everyone, local or visiting, had a Bewley’s story. My elder brother was taken there as a little boy by our 50-ish father. My brother began whingeing about his ice-cream sundae, which occasioned a stern admonishment from the neatly liveried Dublin waitress.

‘Aren’t you the bold boy, cryin’ about the nice ice cream your grandfather bought you?’ Pa was amused, but it rather illuminates the old precept that it can be tactless to presume upon the details of a kinship.

The Oldie July 2020 45

sister teresa

Cultivate your own Garden of Eden Whether we are conscious of it or not, and whether we like it or not, we are all spiritual beings.

Those of us who obviously practise our faith, especially in our old age, are approached by people who say how they envy us the certainty of our belief. What they may not realise is that it is possible to be beset by doubts and that hard work is involved. They say they are vaguely aware of the existence of God, that Jesus was a very good man, but they don’t know what, if anything, to do about it.

The ways to God are infinitely varied.

It is an absolute certainty that there is one for each of us. For some, it will be through the poverty and unhappiness we see around us; for others, our own lack of fulfilment, the goodness of others, the arts or, just possibly, gardens.

To be a gardener is, naturally speaking, to be a contemplative. And surely all gardeners must ask from time to time, ‘Where do all these astonishing things come from?’ They are to be found at the

Il faut cultiver notre jardin: Sister Teresa’s own embroidery

very beginning of the Bible: ‘Vegetation, seed-bearing plants and fruit trees bearing fruit with their seed inside’ (Genesis 1:12). They come into being on the third day. I am not a fundamentalist and am well aware of the processes of evolution, but it is reassuring to find that, in this poetic creation myth, plants appear the minute the earth is ready for them.

Gardeners know that gardens are hard work; they are places of growth, just like faith. They are subject to setbacks, disappointments and sometimes disasters. But if gardeners really mean

business, mere calamity is not going to put them off for long. The same is true of our spiritual lives. There are efforts to be made; and even when we lapse we can always begin again. My novice mistress used to tell me that letting something fall off the tray was unimportant, but that it was vital not to drop the tray.

Those who are beginning to want a greater understanding of Christian practice will need to read, think and talk things through. At some point, they are going to have to make a leap of faith and acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is at work, very specifically, in them. It is the Holy Spirit who is trying to get through, over and over again, via strange and often tiny impulses. Like plants, these impulses need to be nurtured.

Application is crucial.

My father, a very good gardener, used to say that planting seedlings should be done with all the attention, gentleness and love that are needed in putting a baby to bed.

Memorial Service

ANL/SHUTTERSTOCK

James Ramsden (1923-2020) This column breaks new ground with the virtual funeral in Harrogate of James Ramsden. The last British Secretary of State for War, he succeeded John Profumo after the revelations about Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler in 1963. He is the first former Cabinet Minister whose life has been celebrated with an online service.

A select group attended Harrogate Crematorium, with many more watching screens at home. Prayers and psalms were read aloud; it was all over in 20 minutes.

Ramsden was working for the family brewery in Halifax when he became MP for Harrogate in 1954, serving until 1974.

He joined the Cabinet at the precocious age of 39, but the War Ministry was soon dropped following the Profumo scandal.

He went to the MoD in 1964, until the Tories were defeated in that October’s election.

46 The Oldie July 2020

He was never a grouse-shooting Tory but was very keen on hunting, preferring it to being in Whitehall. He became joint master of the Bedale Hunt in 1959, but resigned on becoming a minister. In 1962, he formed the West of Yore, to hunt when Parliament did not sit.

From 1988, he chaired the Hackfall Trust, restoring 18th-century dingles in woodland between Ripon and Masham, created by William Aislabie. He made a new weathervane for Mickley Church and, in latter years, spent much of his time reprogramming computers.

‘Thank you for joining us, the very few of us, on this extraordinary moment in

our lives when we come to commit our father’s body to be cremated and to pray for his soul. In the 20 minutes allowed, we will gather together the strands of his life and give thanks to God for them,’ said Ramsden’s son Tom. ‘Central to Father’s life was his strong belief in God. It founded his love of family and place, his instinct for what is right, his charitable work and his love of the countryside. He felt hunting was good for the body and soul. He approached his passions for beekeeping, woodwork, forestry, fishing and fly-tying with single-minded intensity, knew that they were healing and helped to calm his active mind.’

Some of Ramsden’s wood carvings were on display during the service.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

Trump’s miracle cure is no such thing – probably Is hydroxychloroquine – the drug Donald Trump’s been taking – of use in the prevention or treatment of COVID-19?

One might have thought, or hoped, that seemingly simple questions such as this would find a swift and definitive answer. After all, there have been millions of cases worldwide, hydroxychloroquine is a widely available drug and there have been untold numbers of dedicated researchers into precisely these questions.

And yet, six months into the epidemic, there is still uncertainty. This is partly because there has been no co-ordination of efforts and partly because the questions are much more complex than might at first sight appear.

Hydroxychloroquine has been shown in the laboratory to be bad for the virus; moreover, the drug is used in autoimmune conditions such as lupus. The fulminating immune reaction to the virus is what is most dangerous. So it seems to stand to reason that hydroxychloroquine, alone or in conjunction with antibiotics, might be of value in the treatment of the disease.

A paper in the Lancet, however, appeared to show that the drug was not only of no value, but positively harmful.

The authors analysed the results of 96,000 cases from around the world, comparing those who were treated with the drug and those who weren’t, controlling for a large number of factors such as BMI (body mass index). This is important because it has emerged indisputably that the obese are more likely to die from COVID-19 than the lean.

The BMI is calculated as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by his or her height in metres squared. The paper, purportedly demonstrating the inefficacy of the drug, implied that the BMI was known in all 96,000 cases and therefore could be adequately controlled for. But the chances that 96,000 patients with COVID-19 had their BMI calculated are nil.

In other words, the authors must have, at best, extrapolated from the data they had to produce data they hadn’t, which is scientifically illegitimate. The authors, unable to justify their data, were forced to retract their paper.

None of this means that the drug

actually is effective; it means only that we still can’t be sure.

But even if it were ineffective as treatment, it might still be effective as prophylaxis. A paper in the New England Journal of Medicine tried to answer this question. Just over 800 people who had had contact with proven COVID-19 patients were assigned to receive either placebo or hydroxychloroquine as prophylaxis against developing the disease themselves. Neither their doctors nor they themselves knew which they received.

In brief, the results showed that hydroxychloroquine had no statistically significant protective effect against COVID-19, and more people suffered side-effects than those receiving placebo (though the side-effects were not serious).

However, the trial was severely limited in its implications, even if reproducible. It was too small to detect any serious side-effects of the drug that occurred in fewer that one in 150 cases.

But a fatal side-effect that occurred in, say, one in 300 cases would be very significant in a drug given to billions of people, especially if the efficacy of the drug were slight or minimal.

Moreover, the results applied only to people similar in all characteristics to those enrolled on the trial and given the same dosages of the drug. As a guide to doctors, it was almost useless.

This illustrates a problem of pharmacological or pharmaceutical research, namely the infinitude in number of possible hypotheses. It can always be argued that the reason a drug did not work is because it was given in the wrong dosage, by the wrong route and at the wrong time. An Italian study once showed that anti-hypertensives work better when taken at night.

All one can say at present is that there is no satisfactory evidence that hydroxychloroquine is of value in either the treatment or the prophylaxis of COVID-19.

Uncertainty remains, therefore. In the words of the song of Flanders and Swann, it all makes work for the working man to do.

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Vera Lynn’s Burmese days SIR: Leafing through the May issue of The Oldie over my breakfast coffee, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I examined the picture of Vera Lynn with ‘the boys’ in Burma. Snuggled next to her in the army Jeep, looking slightly smug, as well he might, was the unmistakable face of my father – this was a moment that none of us three sons had ever heard him mention. He said so little about his time in the army. He served in India in the 1930s, was in the BEF in France, and was among those rescued from Dunkirk. He was then posted to India and thence to Burma. He must have experienced immense hardships that he shielded us from. Looking at the picture on VE Day made it all the more poignant as we raised a glass to him. At least we now know he had one moment of light relief in Burma. I shall treasure the image.

Tim Ellis, Cambridge

Vera Lynn with Dad (middle), 1944

Peter Sellers regrets...

SIR: With reference to the Old Un’s Notes (June issue), Peter Sellers is alleged to have once said, ‘If I could live my life all over again, I would do everything exactly the same – except I wouldn’t go and see The Magus.’

Yours, Simon Broad, Sawston, Cambridgeshire

board on Sundays; but they probably didn’t sing ‘Oh hear us when we call to thee’. The second verb (in this verse from Eternal Father, Strong to Save) is actually ‘cry’; but while the Beagle’s adventures were in the 1830s, Mr Whiting (born 1825) didn’t write his hymn until 1860, when he had grown up.

So the sailors and scientists probably sang something else; perhaps even Begone, Unbelief by the old former seafarer John Newton (1779): By prayer let me wrestle, And He will perform; With Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm.

Sincerely, Christopher Idle, London SE24

48 The Oldie July 2020

SIR: In her entertaining account of HMS Beagle (May issue), Sara Wheeler tells of Charles Darwin’s epic five-year voyage around the world. ‘When he returned,’ she writes, ‘he published On the Origin of Species, a book that rocked Victorian England and changed natural science for ever.’

Actually Darwin returned in 1836, and three years later published his Journal and Remarks, now known as The Voyage of the Beagle.

It was not until 1859, 23 years after his return, that he finally published On the Origin of Species. Why he delayed for so long is another story…

Yours sincerely, Edward Mirzoeff, London SW13

Nice Mr Scrooge

Darwin’s favourite hymn SIR: Thank you for Sara Wheeler’s fascinating account of Darwin and the Beagle (May issue).

Small point: I’m glad that under Captain FitzRoy they sang hymns on

Evolutionary delay

‘I just met their leader. Quick – let’s get out of here!’

SIR: Barry Cryer says (June issue) his most treasured Dickens moment occurs in A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge finds he’s been utterly transformed by the visits from the ghosts. I’ve always suspected that people would have soon found the reformed Scrooge to be quite insufferable and would have been asking themselves: was the unreformed Scrooge all bad?

A fresh light was cast on this question in the TV drama Dickensian, broadcast by the BBC a few years ago. The action takes place on a street inhabited by various Dickens characters, including the unreformed Scrooge. It was interesting to note that in this version Scrooge comes over as a perfectly reasonable individual. True, he is mean and hard-nosed, but he isn’t dishonest or malicious. He just lends people money and expects them to pay him back according to the agreed terms.

And when Dickens has the feckless father of the future Lady Dedlock (Bleak House) sent to the debtors’ prison, I was rooting for him all the way.

Philip Sheail, Hertford, Hertfordshire

Lockdown cocktails SIR: I enjoyed Philip Delves Broughton’s Letter from America about cocktails (June issue).

I was introduced to cocktails by American friends and now my husband and I start our weekend at 6pm on a Friday with one. Part of the pleasure is the anticipation and discussion through the day of what we think we might want that evening: a Manhattan (which bourbon?), a Martini (with lemon or olive?) or a Cosmopolitan? During lockdown, we started shopping at small shops we could walk to; however, this all changed when we realised we were down to our last two cocktail cherries!

We were not worried about running out of flour or pasta, but this dire situation meant our first supermarket trip was to our local Waitrose where, happily, we were able to buy two jars.

Yours faithfully, Jane Smith, Poole, Dorset

‘Are you sure we’re not coming up to a waterfall?’

Coward’s inspiration SIR: James Le Fanu is probably much too young to remember London Pride, a saxifrage which grew alongside the rosebay willowherb and inspired Noël Coward to write the patriotic song of that name.

Best wishes, John Woodgate, Rayleigh, Essex

Jeff bin in a tank top? Never SIR: The key to the photograph of the Colony Room Club (Old Un’s Notes, May issue) accuses Jeff Bernard of wearing a tank top. It’s perfectly clear that the garment is a V-necked sleeveless pullover.

Jeff would not have been seen dead in a tank top, a garment favoured by grinning morons on kiddies’ telly. For reasons I am unable to fathom, Jeff was never invited to present such programmes.

Jonathan Meades, Marseille Jeff Bernard (foreground), sleeveless and legless

Eyes and the needle SIR: I felt a pang of survivor angst wash over me when I read Lucy Deedes’s article (June issue).

I had sight-correcting laser surgery about 17 years ago and it was the most awful experience. I think the worst thing was the eye clamp. I actually wimped out and asked for it please to stop: I couldn’t take any more.

The surgeon said soothingly he was over halfway and couldn’t stop at that point. Finally the whole awful process was over. I had only one eye treated, which was just as well as I couldn’t have gone ahead with number two!

Sincerely, Penelope Pulley, Bosham, West Sussex

Fact 2: Batley was never a mining town but was one of the centres of the Heavy Woollen District, covered in mills, not mines. Since the closure of the mills, many have been converted for bed manufacturing.

I thoroughly enjoy The Oldie but, when it is glaringly obvious that a contributor has not checked his facts, let alone visited the area concerned, and this person is a Reverend, I get angry. Batley, ‘my town’, may not be the Las Vegas that the Corrigans wanted it to be, but neither is it a run-down, second-rate town. Like most towns and cities, it’s like the ‘curate’s egg’.

Robert Dudley, Batley, West Yorkshire

Batting for Batley SIR: I was interested to read the piece by Reverend Steve Morris on Las Vegas, West Yorkshire (June issue), but I wish that he would get his facts correct.

Fact 1: bulldozers were never introduced to demolish the building.

After the Variety Club closed down, it was resurrected as The Frontier in the early 1980s and closed in July 2016. After a major refit, the building reopened as JD Gyms on 16th June 2017. Although currently closed because of COVID-19, it was a thriving gym and I am sure will be again once we get back to the ‘new normal’.

‘Yes, it is a very stressful time of year’

Ghostly murderers SIR: In Memory Lane (June issue), Kirsteen Stewart writes of her father Duncan Stewart’s death. The murder in 1949 was planned at a house, Journey’s End, in Sibu, Sarawak, where my husband and I lived from 1964 to 1967. The night before, locals reported hearing knives being sharpened.

Following the murder and hangings, the house and ghosts were sold off cheaply to the Methodist Church. We never saw the ghosts. A country short of history and heroes cannot be too fussy but that can be of no comfort to Duncan Stewart’s daughter.

Pat Johnson, Glenridding, Cumbria

Norman’s cheap shot SIR: Matthew Norman clearly has not visited a golf course between Surrey and Scotland. Most golf clubs in England are modestly priced, welcome racial minorities and are keen to recruit women. As for the diamond-patterned knitwear and caddies, they are rarely spotted. Oldies are abundant and tolerated everywhere.

John Harris, Northamptonshire More letters on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie July 2020 49

I Once Met

Keith Waterhouse I first met Keith Waterhouse in the Groucho Club in the late 1990s. There he sat with the usual glass of champagne, his canopy of silver hair hitting the shoulders of a crumpled jacket (he was no dandy).

When I was introduced to him, he glanced up briefly, the larger of his gooseberry eyes quite unblinking, and then looked away. I was rather mortified, but was assured that he was always this frosty with newcomers. He first had to ascertain that you were not a bore (the very worst crime) and then you’d be fine.

I must somehow have passed the test because, very soon after, we became good chums.

Keith and I would often meet at Gerry’s Club, a subterranean sanctuary in Dean Street – after a long lunch, this was the place to be, along with a colourful crew of resting actors, hacks and drifters whom Keith always rather loved. He had a strict work ethic, though. In the morning he would concentrate on his twice-weekly Daily Mail column, a novel or a play, which made him feel he had earned the right to slope off to Soho for the rest of the day (and a fair proportion of the night).

He was the author of a slim and delightful volume entitled The Theory and Practice of Lunch, in which he extolled the wonders of that glorious institution. The joke was that he never actually ate anything. He adored the ritual of meeting friends at restaurants, whereupon he would move his food around on the plate. The only meal I ever saw him eat and truly enjoy was egg and chips, which we often had with (more) champagne at Kettner’s in the small hours.

He once said to me, ‘I never drink when I am working. However, I quite often work when I am drinking.’ At first this sounds no more than a neat piece of nonsense – but writers will see the truth in it.

If you were really lucky, you would be treated to the egg trick. On top of a pint glass of water Keith would place a tin lid, this surmounted by the hull of a matchbox.

A fresh egg was balanced above – whereupon

Keith would strike the lid with his shoe.

The lid and matchbox would go flying, and the egg would plop into the glass.

Unless it didn’t work, of course – when the yolk was on you. Watching Peter O’Toole in a revival of his wonderful play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Keith said to me with reverence, ‘Behold – a masterclass.’ I had to assume he was talking of the actor and not the playwright, though it was hard to be sure.

I was a founder member of his brainwave the Useless Information Society, the idea being that about 20 of us would occasionally meet for dinner, and each would spout information that was brief, true and utterly useless: harder than it sounds. ‘This society,’ he said, ‘will be a male institution, for it is felt that women have no use for useless information.’ The dear man died in 2009 at the age of 80. His friends still miss him – and Soho was suddenly dimmer.

Joseph Connolly Let’s do liquid lunch: Keith Waterhouse

BOB GEARY

The joy of losing to Harold Wilson

Fifty years ago, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson called a general election, on 18th June 1970. Labour had a 12 per cent lead in the opinion polls – but Edward Heath’s Conservatives won, with a swing of 4.7 per cent. For me, as a losing Tory candidate, it was still a great night to remember – especially as my opponent was Harold Wilson, in the Huyton constituency on Merseyside.

The sun was shining on election day – the day my wife was due to have our first child.

His arrival was late – so my

wife joined me in a local pub when the first results started coming through, showing a swing to the Conservatives.

We went on to the count in the local Territorial Army hall in a joyous mood. By then, millions were watching our proceedings on TV, to see their first view of Harold Wilson walk into the hall like a presidential candidate, soon to be stripped of his robes.

Wilson walked in slowly, looking red-eyed and dazed. I went over and, without conversation, we shook hands. Mrs Wilson kindly asked after my wife. As soon as the results were announced, I again shook Wilson by the hand and congratulated him on his victory. It appeared I had

received 24,509 votes to Wilson’s 45,583 votes.

The returning officer said there was a small discrepancy in the recording of the votes. I accepted this, seeing no need for a recount, and Wilson gave a nod, looking shattered. The returning officer announced my poll – greeted by a huge roar from my supporters – and then the other results, when Wilson got cheers (and one or two boos).

Wilson made a low-key acceptance speech, saying his first majority had been only 800 and noting that he had increased his majority again. I gave my thanks.

Wilson graciously told me I had done well and the Tory Party should now find me a safe seat. We were asked to

go outside and repeat our vote of thanks; we were again cheered and booed. Wilson told everyone to be quiet when I was speaking. He said he hoped no one would now throw an egg at him and what a clean fight it had been.

I had never thought that as a defeated candidate I could feel so elated. It was the end of my political career, but what a happy way to end it: I went back home to help my wife with the imminent birth of an 11-pound son.

By John Entwistle, Grangeover-Sands, Cumbria, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie July 2020 51

Books Paradise lost TANYA GOLD British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980

By Ysenda Maxtone Graham

GARY WING

Little, Brown £18.99 This book has enough stories for a hundred novels.

It is a history of the school holidays from 1930 to 1980. Deprived of televisions and computers, the child could ‘vanish deeply into whatever it is: to lose track of time passing: to sit at the piano, or read through a whole adult library, or work out the guitar chords, or write a first novel on lined paper, or build something, or dam something, or play with a bat and ball, for days and weeks on end, so that time itself becomes the vast landscape he or she lives in’.

The effect of this emptiness was often magical: one woman related how, as a child, she befriended a tree. She was ‘willing inanimate objects to life’.

Maxtone Graham’s account is evocative because the author recorded the memories of only those she spoke to personally. An early chapter is so redolent of suburban boredom that, reading of a puddle of sunlight falling onto a carpet in Tunbridge Wells, I fell asleep in my chair. But I did grow up in Surrey.

The scope is astonishing: 50 years of holidays, for children from all classes, across the whole country. We get a young Dennis Skinner, buckling under his paper round, telling the newsagent that the tide had turned at Stalingrad.

A girl hop-picking for the summer in Kent is thrown in the river by Ron and Reggie Kray, who blame each other. A boy at the River Clyde walks into a towing office to be told, ‘Tomorrow we’re taking an American aircraft carrier down

the river. You can come, too. You might have to get the bus home.’ That would not happen now.

There are paradoxes, too: middle-class children were not often allowed to play outdoors and endured ‘punitive trips to the Shell Museum in Glandford [in Norfolk]’. Aristocratic and working-class children had more freedom: aristocrats because they had land, and the working class because they had nothing. ‘The fewer possessions worth stealing, the more the doors were open; so it was the poorest who were the freest. Towns and villages were porous, with children passing in and out of the boundaries.’

Adults did not tyrannise their children with their continual presence. We see a two-year-old girl sent out to buy sugar.

Mothers emerge as active, and soothing; fathers as controlling, with large amounts of PTSD after the war.

They spent their leisure hours practising packing the car, to see how many tinned cans they could fit in, because even if they

went to France they would not eat food they bought there; or they would photograph traffic jams. There are many stories of sympathy between child and grandparent: ‘because their houses weren’t our own, they combined the solace of the known with the unforgettableness of the strange’.

So here, in its scope, is a history of British children and what they did, and didn’t do. Although the darkness is there at the edges – flashers, lewd uncles, the woman beating an evacuee from neck to knee and cruelty from other children – it is unbearably touching, probably because it is tales of children; their vulnerability, their talents, their dreams. It recalls a shabbier, parochial England: cars always broke down; no one spent money, even the rich; road signs were removed during the war, and so everyone got lost. If you wanted to have a barbecue on the roof in Eaton Square, you would just punch a hole in the ceiling.

I thought of my own childhood,

The Oldie July 2020 53

of poking the River Mole with a stick, and holidays in Treyarnon Bay near Padstow, and jumping the waves with my father and climbing up cliffs as my mother lay in the sun. I benefited from the benign neglect that in the 1970s was still, just, fashionable. Today, my husband has to concentrate – to deny television, sugar and trash culture, almost hourly – to give our son anything like the same freedom and innocence.

At the end of the book, Maxtone Graham says she can’t see children spilling out of holes in hedges anywhere, as they once did. ‘I worry,’ said one interviewee, ‘that children in unhappy homes nowadays can’t get out.’ My most delighted childhood hours were spent roaming and alone, away from my parents’ shared misery – and so, at that, I wept.

Ideal English homes LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Edwardians and Their Houses: The New Life of Old England

By Timothy Brittain-Catlin Lund Humphries £45 The architect and historian Timothy Brittain-Catlin begins his erudite and entertaining book on Edwardian architecture with a quotation from E M Forster’s novel The Longest Journey (1907).

The hero, Rickie, who is studying philosophy, gazes on ‘a morsel of Jacobean brickwork, ruddy and beautiful amidst the machine-squared stones of the modern cathedral apse’. This poignant little reminder of pre-industrial craftsmanship produces a rush of patriotism. ‘ “Thank God I’m English,” said Rickie suddenly.’

In the England of Forster’s fiction, these little morsels of the rural past are under attack from encroaching suburbs, ribbon developments and row after row of hideous, bricky boxes spreading ever outwards over the green. The rook-racked, ivy-clad, un-planned jumbledness of Forster’s Howard’s End is a morsel squeezed between the deep and particular pleasures of the past and the soulless efficiency of industrial capitalism.

But Brittain-Catlin points out that the great building boom of the Edwardian age, though its style has become synonymous with commuter belts, suburbia, jokes about Stockbrokers’ Tudor and (especially) golf courses, had at its best a radical vision of land reform, better housing for the poor, and buildings that celebrated the best

‘Give us a few days and we’ll call to tell you we’ve given the job to someone else’

elements of the craftsmanship of the past but with top-notch additional bathrooms and central heating. Indoor bathrooms were almost universal in all new homes built after 1900.

Edwardian houses come in all sorts but the one aspect that defines them is an often eccentric homage to a romanticised national past: pitched roofs, pantiles, mullions, beams perhaps or Queen Anne gables. The great Edwardian architects, including Voysey, Lutyens, Shaw and Clough Williams-Ellis, aimed to suggest in their designs a comfortingly familiar and mellow past for a society undergoing social change and urbanisation at a dislocating rate.

They were keen on upcycling agricultural buildings that had been made redundant into attractive homes: oast houses, for example, or coach houses which were converted to garages.

Edwardian architects were the original barn-converters.

Cottages were key, but so were castles.

Kingsgate Castle, built (over a Georgian folly) for the liberal politician and scientist Sir John Lubbock on a clifftop on the Isle of Thanet, can, says Brittain-Catlin, tell us ‘almost everything that is special about Edwardian architecture: science; politics; archaeology; style; history; castle; fantasy; magic; golf; a contented people in the land of England: it is all there’.

Edwin Lutyens took the 16th-century fortification on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, and incorporated it into a magical new building that corresponds in appearance exactly to what we might expect of a medieval castle, at the same time as being a comfortable Edwardian home with a baronial interior.

Brittain-Catlin is very interesting on how these influential images of preindustrial Merrie England were also conveyed through the hugely popular children’s-book illustrations of Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott, with their cosily detailed depictions of cottages ornés with

barley-sugar chimneys, thatches and diamond-pane windows. Unsurprisingly, the development of Edwardian architecture (the book begins with Pugin) coincides with the development of folk-song collecting and the encouragement of maypole- and clogdancing for schoolchildren. Also crucial to the story is the rise of the garden city, where social housing was modelled on the old-fashioned working village – but without the hierarchical grip of the old aristocratic estates.

The magazine Country Life, established in 1897, caught the mood of the moment. It was founded by Edward Hudson, the owner not only of Lindisfarne but of several other Lutyens houses. Country Life was the house journal of Edwardian progressive ideas about the architecture of the future as well as nostalgia for the past; of celebrating ancient workmanship in new ways.

A Country Life kind of house had an exterior that reflected (or suggested) weathered centuries of architectural mood and change and an interior that was clean, pale and uncluttered in the aesthetic manner. Brittain-Catlin writes, ‘Country Life’s brilliance lay in the way in which it both published charming old buildings of all kinds that had an historical air about them and at the same time pioneered economic, rational building and rational planning.’

There are some glorious illustrations in this book: there doesn’t seem to be any Edwardian architectural corner into which Brittain-Catlin hasn’t ventured with his camera. Some of his examples, beautifully designed and made, are now hidden in the kind of suburban development that E M Forster so deplored.

This is a book full of surprises and a reminder that behind a familiar landscape there was a grander vision of housing fit for everyone.

The magnetic north WILL COHU Walking the Great North Line

By Robert Twigger Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 Robert Twigger has turned his hand successfully to most forms of writing.

Everything he writes is filled with the restlessness of a mind in search of meaning, or perhaps a landscape in which the many shapes of his consciousness fit.

No such place exists, and so he invents it. Walking the Great North Line is ostensibly the description of a The Oldie July 2020 55

400-mile tramp across England, from Christchurch in Dorset to Lindisfarne, along a line running 1 degree 50 west that links ancient sites, from Old Sarum to Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor. On one level, the book hovers in the Celtic shadows. In keeping with Twigger’s taste for awful puns, you could say it is a woad trip. But it is also a funny critique of fashionable nature writing.

Twigger exhibits a stubborn personal – even national – character that pursues a speculative, passionate form of nativist exceptionalism in the face of law, comfort and reason.

The author’s mind bounces along in pleasant companionship with Wittgenstein (writing about Frazer’s Golden Bough) and Carlos Castaneda.

‘The Line was an alignment of ancient sites,’ he writes. ‘Alignment is a key aspect of shamanism.’

Practically speaking, the book introduces many ancient sites that are little known, because of access issues.

Twigger has no special regard for fences or opening times, and lurks apprehensively overnight in monuments or brews up in church porches. History does not interest him much and he’s not lyrical about place. Quite a lot of his England is shrouded in rain and mist.

The author’s writing is the antithesis of the carefully poised authorship of Robert Macfarlane and his followers, for whom each step is a bog of antique meaning into which the author sinks, while declaiming the sacred etymology of that which devours them.

Twigger prefers the liberated subjectivity of Geoff Dyer. He is likely to be found in a real bog, cursing the stubborn streak that made him walk where good sense knew he would drown, because the line goes across that field and one must be true to the line. Even though the line doesn’t exist, it is at least one’s own line.

He is no shaman. A cyclist competing for the path reduces him to ‘unmitigated rage’. He owns up to insulting cows with ‘uninhibited pleasure’. His nights are disturbed not by banshees, but by stabs of middle-aged jealousy because the manufacturer of his too-small sleeping bag chose to sponsor Ben Fogle (‘who I naturally hated even though I know nothing about him’.)

But he likes people – those he walks with and meets, or who lived a long time ago, such as the 18th-century farm labourer Stephen Duck, whose wife (née Sarah Big) changed her name to Sarah Big Duck.

He walks in his fancy with long-dead Twiggers. They include a great-grandfather

Cooking under fire EDWARD BEHRENS How to Cook a Wolf

By M F K Fisher Daunt Books £9.99

‘Do you know who I was?’

who was murdered and thrown into a Birmingham canal while working as a detective for the Transport Police and ‘mad uncle Harry’, a garage owner who ended up in the Lubyanka for his support of the White Russians. There are shits and blisters, booze and blues, and he is remarkably candid about others’ personal struggles, as if he presumes they are as happy to share their insufficiencies as he is.

His account seems the truer for its personal leakiness. Perhaps he should have gone further; been stranger. It could have been a poem rather than a book.

Twigger (a former winner of the Newdigate Prize) has the instincts, but maintains that he somewhere lost finesse with words. I suppose even this book is not about the language and description, but about the experience.

With obstinate persistence, Twigger imposes his line across England. Along footpath and across private estate, over walls and barbed wire, across Birmingham and on to the Peak District he trudges, blazing his eccentric path into the landscape.

It is not a journey of certainty, or reward; it is haunted by depression and he is, touchingly, in constant dread of being told off (though he is shouted at just once for trespass and the only assault he suffers is when he walks into a road sign and cuts his head open).

By etching his personal line, he gives us his unique picture of the extraordinary, compressed and changing nature of England. He reminds us that travel is not about following a literary script. We should park our preconceptions and walk our own line.

The past few months have seen a number of comparisons to the suffering and deprivation of the world wars.

Some have been more felicitous than others. Perhaps the most sensible is Daunt’s characteristically shrewd republishing of M F K Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, which first appeared in the United States in 1942.

For a certain sort of American (and, indeed, European), the presence of Fisher looms large over food. The usual comparison is to say she is the American Elizabeth David, but that is not quite right. Elizabeth David set about introducing the English to a whole new, European world of food. In teaching them how to cook, she engendered a new pleasure in eating. Fisher is more interested in a sensibility of food. As anyone who cares about taste should be, she is also attentive to style; her prose is as pleasurable as her food.

The wolf of the title is the hunger that war shortages produced. How to Cook a Wolf is a guide to thrifty cooking and, at times, survival. Though this is not something that much bothers food writers these days, it’s not a bad thing to be reminded of. Indeed, one of the best recent books on food, The Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, addresses this subject head on. It is a knowing homage to How to Cook a Wolf and a way to ‘clear a path through’ complications. One of the points of food is that knowing about scarcity can make the plentiful more delightful.

Fisher approaches her subject with a bracing practicality: ‘No recipe in the world is independent of the tides, the moon, the physical and emotional temperatures surrounding its performance.’ There’s something reassuring about knowing that, if it all goes wrong, it might not be your fault.

It is in this practical vein that Fisher approaches all aspects of a meal when you have no money and can’t get hold of most ingredients. She takes in everything from boiling water, the cooking of eggs – ‘probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg’ – to the carving of meat and the preparation of vegetables. She even includes the essential subject of self-care. (Her recipe for soap, however, might not be the one you immediately turn to.)

The Oldie July 2020 57

For someone with such an authoritative tone, she is curiously open to other interpretations. On the subject of how to fry eggs, a simple enough subject, she writes, ‘The best way to find a trustworthy method, I think, is to ask almost anyone but me. Or look in a cookbook. Or experiment.’

A truly great cookery writer will make you want to cook something because of the words on a page alone. Elizabeth David does just that. Her instruction for a salad dressing to contain ‘no more than a suspicion of vinegar’ makes one want to know where those suspicions might lead.

Fisher does not do this, certainly not in recounting how the wolf’s ‘pungent breath seeped through the keyhole’.

Her recipe for soufflé sounds, frankly, revolting. ‘In a soufflé, add one cup of puffed cereal to the three separated eggs, and you will have food for four people.’

To this line she adds, in a subsequent edition of How to Cook a Wolf, ‘…at least three of whom, I feel impelled to add, you dislike intensely and hope never to see again.’ It is this wit and respect for taste that make Fisher a great food writer.

One of the joys of this edition of the book (1951) is in seeing Fisher’s commentary on her own earlier work.

When she writes at the end of a chapter, ‘For one of the few times in the past thirty-odd years, I am pleased with something I have written. I think this is a good chapter,’ it is hard not to share in her pleasure.

If you are looking for an American authority on French food of the early20th century, there is no doubt that that other US expat Alice B Toklas is a more reliable guide. But if you want to see the product of that imagination at its most relaxed, precise and unfussy, then snuggle up with this big bad wolf.

Danish treasure islands CHARLES FOSTER The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year

By Tim Ecott

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Short Books £14.99 The Faroe Islands owe little to anyone or anything other than the sea. They lie about 200 miles north-west of Scotland and politically are an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Seventy years ago, Eric Linklater observed that the Faroese appeared to have ‘escaped the vulgarity and inertia of civilisation’. They have been corrupted since (helped by Europe’s fastest internet speeds and woefully complete mobile phone coverage), but much less than the

Vincent van Gogh’s Sprig of Almond Blossom in a Glass with a Book, oil on canvas, 1888. From Vincent’s Books by Mareilla Guzzoni, Thames & Hudson, £25

rest of us. Partly that’s a function of the size of the population: the size is itself a function of geography.

The population of the whole archipelago is just over 50,000, which, with the Faroes’ population density, is a self-policing size. It would be hard for snobs or bullies to thrive, but the ethos militates against them arising at all.

The country is a paradoxical entity, impossible according to the canons of conventional anthropology: a huntergatherer state. If you live in the capital, Tórshavn, you could get all your food from a supermarket, but you’d be despised. You’d have lost your soul, your neighbours would say. They’d mean that you’d lost your connection with the land and the sea, your sense of complete dependency and vulnerability, and your corresponding self-reliance.

Most of the workforce is still involved in fishing, while shepherding and sea-bird catching remain important. Almost every house has a meat-drying shed (the maggots need to be scraped off every day in the summer). If you’re invited for dinner in a Faroese house, you’re likely to have roasted Manx shearwater with dumplings made of cod roe and the fat from around a sheep’s rectum. If you stay overnight, you might get guillemot eggs for breakfast, along with cornflakes flown in from Copenhagen.

Tim Ecott has wandered musingly through this land, watching storms swoop in from Iceland, listening to violin lessons on Skype in a remote farmhouse, following the fate of a raven family, helping with sheep-gathering and hare-hunting, joining expeditions to collect fulmar eggs and gannet The Oldie July 2020 59

chicks from the high cliffs, and netting newly fledged fulmars from the sea.

The Land of Maybe is Ecott’s crystalline, powerful, moving and highly readable account of his love affair with the Faroes. (The Faroese word for ‘maybe’ is the best-used word in the islands: it’s usually a reference to the weather, but is also a nod to the supreme fact of acknowledged contingency.) The affair is an uneasy one. Ecott doesn’t want to get too close to his beloved for fear of seeing something that will make him hate her.

What he’s worried about is killing.

The Faroese don’t kill wildlife casually, but they do it unsentimentally. He killed a gannet chick himself. ‘Afterwards I am unsettled,’ he writes. ‘On one level it seems a minor thing, but holding the warm, elegant creature in my hand had plunged me into a confrontation with hunting and death that was new and disconcerting.’

His real worry is about the grindadráp – the notorious round-up and slaughter of pilot whales. ‘One day soon, you will kill a whale,’ a Faroese friend tells him, and he lives in dread of the prophecy’s being fulfilled. He’s 90 miles away when he gets the phone message. The whales have arrived. He feels compelled to go, but ‘half-hopes’ the road will be blocked.

His concerns are not ecological (pilot whales are not endangered) but (on one level) humanitarian. He’s read too much about the whales’ cognition and family lives. But mainly he’s worried about himself. I can’t blame him. He doesn’t want to lose his remaining innocence – for if that went, what might come in its place? ‘I know that if I took part in killing a pilot whale, I would be allowing the possibility of death, of nothingness and nihilism into my heart – there would be nothing sacred left in the world, and the eight-year-old boy who cried when he killed a toad would be gone for ever.’

Would it really be a loss of innocence?

If the Faroese have more of a pristine, Edenic culture than ours, he might gain innocence by sticking a lance into a whale’s head. Perhaps the Faroese, chatting companionably at the beach as the blood fills the bay, are the unfallen ones. Perhaps our urban fastidiousness is a sign that we’re dangerously far from the wild world of which we are a part.

Ecott’s fine book is, at root, a timely meditation on the clash between modernity and premodernity and between settler and nomad. It’s an interrogation of the role of compassion in our moral lives and an examination of the crucial question of what sort of creatures we are.

OLDIE NOVELS OF THE MONTH

Girls with attitude PAUL BAILEY Four novels by Irmgard Keun: Gilgi, One of Us (translated by Geoff Wilkes); The Artificial Silk Girl (translated by Kathie von Ankum); Child of All Nations (translated by Michael Hofmann); After Midnight (translated by Anthea Bell) Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99 each Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905 and raised in Cologne, where her father worked in the petrol industry. After school, she tried, and failed, to pursue a career in the theatre. She was in her twenties when she discovered that she had a natural talent for writing.

Her first novel, Gilgi, One of Us, was published in 1931 to instant acclaim and made into a film in 1932, when her second book, The Artificial Silk Girl, appeared.

In the meantime, she married the much older Johannes Tralow, an early convert to the Nazi party, whose likeness would later grace a ten-pfennig postage stamp.

Then, in 1933, with the rise of Hitler, the two novels that had brought her success were banned. She was considered frivolous and disrespectful of German family values. Her independent, free-spirited young girl characters were judged to be a travesty of womanhood. Gilgi (short for Gisela) and Doris, wearing artificial silk, were a disgrace to the Fatherland.

Yet she continued to write throughout that ‘low, dishonest decade’, as Auden described the 1930s. Her divorce from Tralow was traumatising. In 1936 she went into exile, living for two hectic, nomadic years with the great Joseph Roth, who was sick and dying. Her books were now being published abroad, in Holland chiefly.

Two of them are still unavailable in English, but the other two from that period, After Midnight (1937) and Child of All Nations (1938), now complete a beguiling quartet. Gilgi and Doris are joined by Susanne, known as Sanna, and Kully, an unusually sharp-eyed nineyear-old. They make you laugh and they make you think. Even while they are informing everyone that they have no knowledge of politics, they display a keen awareness of individual human behaviour – that of men, in particular.

In her translator’s note to the US edition of The Artificial Silk Girl, Kathie von Ankum calls the first-person narrator, Doris, a predecessor of Bridget Jones and the other bestselling ‘material girls’ of recent fiction. There’s a certain

truth in that, though I’m not entirely sure that the likes of Helen Fielding and her copycat inferiors could ever be as shrewd or perceptive as Keun manages to be in the face of oncoming tyranny.

In the opening pages of After Midnight, for instance, the irreverent and resourceful Sanna is annoyed with Hitler and his motorcade for disrupting the quiet streets of Frankfurt when all she wants is to drink her beer and enjoy the sunshine.

In that same novel, a disillusioned former journalist named Heini cadges drinks off rich and poor alike, and then chastises his benefactors for supporting, even with silence, an ideology of racial purity as absurd as it is terrifying. They listen to him when they are not advising him to watch what he’s saying.

Sanna is Heini’s recording angel, as she is for everyone she encounters. She doesn’t miss a trick, in more than one sense. Her love for the unambitious, kind-hearted Franz – in thrall to his overpowering, Hitler-worshipping Aunt Adelheid – is the true indication of Sanna’s essential seriousness of purpose.

Each one of these four extraordinary novels, now rescued for posterity, contains scenes and characters that refuse to be forgotten. The thoughtful, diligent Gilgi, who is learning three languages and taking on extra jobs to keep herself independent, allows herself to be infatuated with an older man who, for all his charm, is amoral. She is brought to her senses by a series of unexpected events that end in the bleakest possible manner.

The resourceful Doris, who would have got Harvey Weinstein’s number within minutes of meeting him, spends happy weeks in the unlikely company of Ernst, an intellectual businessman who talks longingly of the wife who has left him. The good-time girl, irritated by Ernst at the outset, decides to care for him domestically, exhibiting skills for cooking and housework the other men she has met would be startled to know she had. This sequence in The Artificial Silk Girl is exquisitely subtle and funny.

Irmgard Keun’s last novel, The Man with the Kind Heart, set in bomb-scarred Cologne, where she lived throughout the war under the name Charlotte Tralow after the death of Irmgard Keun had been reported in an English newspaper, will be published by Penguin in December. The translator is Michael Hofmann. Keun lived for another 32 years after its appearance in 1950, raising her daughter and writing occasional articles and sketches.

When her books were reissued in the 1970s, she did nothing to promote them.

Perhaps she realised they were good enough to do without her assistance.

The Oldie July 2020 61

Media Matters

The New York Times v Donald Trump

A great paper has lost the plot in its fight with the bigoted President stephen glover Not all Oldie readers may be familiar with the New York Times. It is highminded, self-important, mildly leftist, viscerally anti-Trump (the feeling is mutual) and widely attributed with a scrupulous attention to detail.

The paper has also weathered the decline of print better than any other title in the world. With over four million digital subscribers to add to weekday print sales of around 400,000, it churns out huge profits and boasts a newsroom of 1,700 journalists, which is more than ever.

Since 2012, the New York Times’s chief executive has been our own Mark Thompson, formerly Director-General of the BBC. His pay last year was around five million pounds, which he may have deserved.

On the whole, it’s hard not to admire the paper. That said, its pomposity and sanctimony can be wearisome. Its latest idiocy was to sack (officially, he resigned) opinion-page editor James Bennet. His crime was to have published a provocative piece by Senator Tom Cotton, a Trump supporter, calling for the deployment of the military during the civil disturbances that followed the killing of George Floyd.

One of Mr Bennet’s deputies was reassigned to the newsroom.

Senator Cotton’s piece admittedly contained some inaccuracies. Mr Bennet was blamed for not picking them up because he hadn’t bothered to read it, which does sound a bit casual. But spotting factual errors is the responsibility of legions of editors, who are expected to check every statement in an article. The New York Times is proud of its painstaking ‘fact-checking’.

If the piece had been about a less controversial subject, Mr Bennet would not have been expected to fall on his sword as a result of the odd mistake, and the paper would not have thought it necessary to apologise. The real offence was to publish a piece by a Trump

cheerleader whose views are anathema to many New York Times journalists.

Dozens of them expressed their shock at publication. One objection, which to me sounds rather thin, was that sending the army onto the streets would put black journalists and people of colour in danger. Whether Cotton was right or wrong, surely the point is that his article represents what a prominent member of the United States Senate thinks.

Publisher A G Sulzberger initially defended the decision to publish on the basis that the paper was committed to representing ‘views from across the spectrum’. But the subsequent disowning of Mr Bennet and a public recantation suggest that carrying articles with which it disagrees is not the paper’s priority.

The New York Times, which was once intellectually eclectic, has become increasingly partisan, though it is true that it harbours the odd conservative columnist such as Bret Stephens – who is nonetheless strongly anti-Trump.

You may say our newspapers are no different, and I suppose that’s true. It’s hard to think of any robust right-wing writers in the Guardian, or ferociously left-wing ones in the Daily Mail, for which I write a column. The Times is the only British title that makes any attempt to cover the waterfront politically. It has mildly leftish columnists such as David Aaronovitch and Philip Collins, and right-of-centre counterweights in Daniel Finkelstein (not actually very far to the right) and Melanie Phillips (much further).

The New York Times is still worth

‘Once intellectually eclectic, the paper has become increasingly partisan’

chiding, because it used not to be ideological. It prided itself on being heterogeneous – even if it hasn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. In recent years, though, the paper has become narrower in its outlook, and the advent of the abusive Donald Trump has made it more pugnacious and intolerant. The two parties are locked in unedifying combat.

In a strange way, the once reserved ‘Gray Lady’ is beginning to resemble the blinkered bigot it so despises.

Television reporters invited to ask questions before their print brethren at the daily Number Ten COVID-19 press conferences have not entirely covered themselves with glory. Some of them deliver prolix mini-lectures rather than ask forensic questions.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the infamous press conference in the Downing Street rose garden, when Dominic Cummings gave his unconvincing account of his movements between London, Durham and Barnard Castle. When the television magnificoes stepped forward to interrogate the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, they were all so busy ventilating with indignation that they failed to ask the killer question.

My wife, sitting beside me on the sofa in front of the television, knew what it was.

So, no doubt, did other people up and down the land. The question they should have asked is whether Mr Cummings’s wife, Mary Wakefield, can drive.

And if she can, why didn’t she just drive her husband and child back to London without the lockdown-busting 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle (supposedly undertaken to test Mr Cummings’s eyesight)? The answer was that she can drive – but no one put the question, and Mr Cummings survived.

Motto: don’t preach. Ask. The Oldie July 2020 63

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The truth about the X factor

TOM PLANT

Lock down and chuck out. If that has been your motto recently, or possibly an order you have received, you might consider tidying up the alphabet as well as your sock drawer. Start, perhaps, with one of those things that aren’t strictly necessary and you don’t often use: the letter x, for example.

Of all the letters in the alphabet, only j, q and z are used less frequently than x.

We might not miss it much if were gone.

After all, some languages, even some using the Latin script, do fine without it.

X occurs in a few Italian names, such as Craxi, and crops up in borrowed words such as xenofobia and extraterrèstre, but on the whole Italian gives it the bird.

English could do the same. In most words spelt with an x, you could use ks instead. It would take a bit of time getting used to coksing and boksing, ekspressing yourself in heksameters, or getting ekscited about spotting a galaksy of wakswings. It certainly wouldn’t go down well with some people if they had to sign their letters Aleksandra – rather Russian – or, worse, Maks. And ks doesn’t always work as a substitute: would you want to go on a luksury holiday? Xerxes would become Zerkses.

Other names would have to be reconsidered. Generation X might have to become Generation Middle, between the Boomers and the Millennials. The Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox might have to adopt more

Long-winded books Like many people, I have been reading more than usual recently and one thing has struck me: why are so many books, especially biographies, much too long?

This applies mostly to non-fiction. You expect 64 The Oldie July 2020

conventional spelling. And Elon Musk, who runs Space X, might want to think again about naming his son X Æ A-Xii. Despite the problems, though, expelling x from the alphabet would be doable. But would it be wise? X is paradoxical: though relatively little used in words, it is often used as a symbol, more often perhaps than any other letter.

X gives us The X Factor, The X-Files and ten in Roman numerals. The illiterate use it for their signatures. ‘My uncle out in Texas/ Can’t even write his name/ He signs his cheques with xs/ But they cash ’em just the same.’

X also follows signatures as a symbol of innocent love, sometimes childish, sometimes romantic. ‘A lotta kisses on the bottom, / I’ll be glad I got ’em.’

Strangely, it is as well the symbol of lustful, forbidden love: X is for sex.

The mysterious like it too. For anyone seeking obscurity, whether bashful

Dickens and Trollope to take a leisurely route and, in the modern era, Hilary Mantel’s massive historical novels are so engrossing that you almost wish they were longer. But with non-fiction, when after an hour of reading you notice that you have made little impression on the 600 or so pages, it can be a little disheartening, to say the least – however interesting the subject.

Do we really need to know the family tree and background of every single person the distinguished writer/artist/ politician met at Cambridge or the minutiae of the weird rituals at his public school?

These details may interest the

would-be Valentine, frightened whistleblower or ruthless extortionist, X provides the mask of anonymity. It is, in fact, the foremost symbol for the unknown, especially the unknown variable. In this role, x is spattered across every book of algebra ever written.

Lately, another role for X has been in the news, its part in our genetic make-up. When it comes to resisting COVID-19, it turns out, men are the weaker sex because they have only one X chromosome, whereas women have two. One X chromosome has about 10,000 genes, many of which help build the immune system. The Y chromosome carried by men has about 60, and most of those are kept busy with sex.

So x is much more useful than first sight would suggest. The same goes for my sock drawer, I think. You never know when things will come in handy. No decluttering for me.

professional historian, but for most people they just slow up the narrative and can encourage the reader to skip large chunks, thereby perhaps missing some vital and relevant information.

When, some time ago, my wife wrote a biography of one

SMALL DELIGHTS Digging out your compost heap and finding a hand tool you lost two years ago.

JOHN FEELEY, WEST KIRBY, WIRRAL Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

of her ancestors, the publishers suggested that she trim it by a quarter. This was not easy to accept, given the large amount of research that had gone into the book and the time it had taken to write. Nevertheless, she followed their advice and the result was a much better book with a more concise and readable narrative.

Editors and publishers need to take a firmer stand with prolix and self-indulgent authors, however distinguished they might be. Readers would be very grateful – as well as saving a fortune in library fines.

GEOFFREY HEATH

History

Bursting the South Sea Bubble myth

The 1720 crash harmed dukes – but it wasn’t on the COVID-19 scale david horspool Dire economic news, like any other dire news, often comes with historical comparisons.

So it was that my radio cheered me up with the prediction of the worst economic slump since the South Sea Bubble, which, conveniently, popped exactly 300 years ago. In the press, Jayne Dowle wrote, ‘The South Sea Bubble was so catastrophic because it encompassed the entire nation. Everyone from housemaids to shopkeepers to MPs and the aristocracy was encouraged to buy shares in a failed enterprise to raise millions to fight a war against France.’ This, apparently, makes it an ‘opportune’ comparison.

I’m not so sure. Though most of us have heard of the South Sea Bubble, and understand that overheated financial speculation rarely ends well, we couldn’t say much more about it than that. That description above is largely wrong (for a start, in 1720 Britain wasn’t at war with France: they were allies). We’re on safer ground with another journalist, Lindy McDowell, who wrote, ‘We do not need to concern ourselves with precise details here, other than to say it was a bubble, it centred on a South Sea Company and it was bad.’

The South Sea Company looked fishy from the start, if you expected it to do what it had notionally been set up to do – trade in South America. The Spanish and Portuguese were already there, and weren’t about to surrender their rights lightly. Actually, that wasn’t what the Company was really for. It was set up at the instigation of Robert Harley, Queen Anne’s Lord High Treasurer, as a way of managing the national debt. From 1719, it began offering its own equity in exchange for government securities.

The Company got a guaranteed annual payment from the Exchequer equivalent to six per cent of the stock it took over.

As the creation of the ruling Tories, the Company was subject to attack from

the rival Whigs, who tried to mobilise their earlier creation, the Bank of England, to outbid the opposition.

But the Company’s offer was bigger, and the price of their stock rose by 700 per cent during the first six months of 1720, before rapidly plummeting, as the truth about its shaky foundations and the shady dealings behind the scheme began to emerge.

There were certainly spectacular losses, such as the Duke of Portland’s, with a claim of £135,000 made against him. But others did rather well, including the Duke of Marlborough, whose wife, Sarah, got him to sell up in time to make a profit of £100,000 (about £11.5 million in today’s money).

Recriminations in Parliament followed the collapse of the stock (though not the disappearance of the Company, which did secure trade in South America – in slaves – and lasted until 1854).

Robert Walpole, a Whig, was able to take advantage of the blame laid on corrupt Tories to assume control of the government. Lessons were (briefly) learned, and prosperity returned.

The South Sea Scheme (it wasn’t called a bubble until more than 50 years later, in the Encyclopædia Britannica) certainly made an impact. What is less clear is how wide an economic shock it caused. Far from being a scheme open to

Hogarth’s merry-go-round: victims of the South Sea Bubble crash, London

all, it was jealously guarded and, even after a public issue of stock, the total number of investors has been estimated at 30,000, or 0.5 per cent of the population.

Those headlines today about economic contraction don’t seem to be based on the findings of economic historians. One of them, Julian Hoppit, having surveyed the impact on agriculture (the biggest sector), trade, number of bankruptcies and foreign exchange, concluded, ‘There are good reasons to doubt that the Bubble generally disrupted the British economy in the 18 months after it burst.’

So, if it mainly affected the toffs, and made little economic difference in the long term, why does the South Sea Bubble still float into our contemporary discussions? Well, we like tales of hubris and folly, preferring to forget that the hubris and folly were widely warned of at the time, by the likes of the journalist and Spectator founder Richard Steele, who told his readers throughout 1720 that the scheme was a ‘bulky Phantom’, which he compared to investing at the gaming table.

The cautionary tale of the Bubble was also kept alive by some of the most memorable creative minds of the age, from Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe to William Hogarth and Alexander Pope. Pope warned of ‘Lucre’s Sordid Charms’, and revelled in the exposure of the corrupt.

Finally, there’s that name, which doesn’t belong to the contemporary story of the scheme at all. The Encyclopædia Britannica was a Scottish publication in origin, and ‘The Scottish economy was showing distinct signs of over-heating in 1771 [when the Bubble was first referred to], and suffered a major collapse in credit in the following year,’ wrote Julian Hoppit.

So whenever people talk about the great historical Bubble, they’re really thinking more about their own times.

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Arts FILM AND NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (AMAZON PRIME) JEFFREY EPSTEIN: FILTHY RICH (NETFLIX) Is Woody Allen trapped in the 1950s?

A Rainy Day in New York is set in modern Manhattan, but all the references in this quite engaging comingof-age drama are to Allen’s own youth 65 years ago.

The opening music is Bing Crosby’s I Got Lucky in the Rain; the opening titles are in black and white, in an old-fashioned font. The two preppy leads, Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet, are ostensibly undergraduates today – but their fictional upstate university, Yardley, is a classical campus, straight out of 1950.

She wears a bobby soxer’s outfit; he’s permanently in a tweed jacket. The scenes are in the best of old New York (all a stone’s throw from Allen’s own house, incidentally): the zoo in Central Park; the time capsules of Manhattan’s smartest hotels. Chalamet’s character quotes Cole Porter, uses a cigarette-holder and is even called Gatsby, for God’s sake.

You might say all this escapism is there in order to, well, escape Allen’s disastrous personal life: the divorce from Mia Farrow, the marriage to his adopted daughter and the allegations of sexual abuse of another daughter.

But in a triumph of chutzpah – or narcissism – the film is full of brazen references to yawning age gaps between elderly film directors and nymphet leads.

The spine of the film is the doomed love affair between Ashleigh (Fanning, brilliant as the gauche ingénue) and Gatsby (Chalamet, convincing as the paranoid intellectual, like a much better-looking, young Allen). Gatsby is 66 The Oldie July 2020

torn between Ashleigh and Chan (Selena Gomez), another young beauty.

On their trip to New York, Ashleigh is due to interview Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), a much older film director keen to seduce her – yes, you’re supposed to think of that other disgraced film director Roman Polanski.

Once Ashleigh has met Pollard, she is swept into a world of yet more older men who want to seduce her. There’s Ted Davidoff, Pollard’s colleague, played by Jude Law with a good New York accent and a paranoid intellectual manner – like a better-looking, middle-aged Allen.

Then there’s the impossibly handsome Francisco Vega (Diego Luna), who successfully seduces Ashleigh. When Ashleigh runs off with him, the jilted Gatsby even says, ‘What is it about older guys and younger women?’ Come on, Woody – I know you’re angry but you could be a little more subtle.

Written and directed by Allen, 84, the film is littered with his trademark quips.

They’re now more mournful and less

Yawning age gap: Selena Gomez and Woody Allen, A Rainy Day in New York

frenetic. But they still depend on the main Allen joke – a kind of intellectual bathos, contrasting highbrow showingoff with self-deprecating pay-offs.

So Ashleigh gushes to Pollard about her heroes – Van Gogh, Rothko and Virginia Woolf – before suddenly realising they all killed themselves. She turns from intellectual and keen to impress to mortified and embarrassed –a classic Allen mood shift.

The wisecracks are pretty good but not wise enough. Ashleigh says of someone they’re the ‘greatest thing to come along since the morning-after pill’ – OK, but not as sharp as 1960s Allen.

The gags are laid over a fairly thin plot: a series of outlandish incidents, coincidences and sudden revelations set off mini-stories which are very quickly resolved. Some of them are pretty cheesy, not least the moment when Ashleigh is nearly discovered in flagrante and has to hide in the pouring rain on a fire escape.

It’s light, frothy, pretty enjoyable stuff, but you can see why Allen had to fight for two years to get this 2018 film on screen.

If there are moral questions over a writer-director’s behaviour, his films have to be very good to go on being made.

To be fair to Allen, he's still been convicted of nothing, whereas Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted serial paedophile. His crimes are treated seriously and without sensation in the gripping Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.

Epstein conducted what one commentator describes memorably as a ‘molestation pyramid scheme’. Once he’d got a girl (usually from a poor and/or broken background) into his clutches, he trapped her with his money, made her dependent on him and then got her to lure more girls into his gilded net.

The eyewitness allegations of Prince Andrew consorting with Virginia Roberts, one of those poor girls, are not edifying.

THEATRE

GARY SMITH

NICH0LAS LEZARD SHAKESPEARE FOR EVERY DAY YouTube Ever fancied seeing Helena Bonham Carter’s garden? Well, now you can.

You can also see her and Dominic West, reading out bits of Shakespeare for us, loosely themed around the passage of a year, as per Allie Esiri’s anthology Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year.

Ms Esiri herself opens the proceedings, and it becomes clear from the outset, with her soothing manner, that this is going to be an easy ride. I’ve seen audiences just before curtain-up at Shakespeare performances: it’s not exactly like being in the landing craft on D-Day, but there is certainly a prickle of apprehension there; they know they’re in for the long haul. This, though, an hour-long meander through the Famous Bits (and some not-so-famous bits), is going to be a walk in the park – or, in this case, the garden.

Watching actors do Shakespeare is generally win-win. They either ham it up so much it’s hilarious, or get it right, ie help you understand what’s going on while keeping the music alive. But they tread a fine line between their respect for the text and their respect for themselves, and they know that every other actor who has ever put on a pair of tights is looking over their shoulder. Especially when they do the Famous Bits. Dominic West is so relaxed about the business that he actually performs ‘To be or not to be’ while leaning against a tree.

The thing is, they’re not exactly performing. They’re reading the passages out. You don’t notice this at first, with Dominic West in close-up. Then you see his eyes looking downwards every so often, and think to yourself, ‘Hang on.’

By the end of the film (directed, under strict social-distancing protocols, by Benjamin Caron) they’re walking around holding clipboards, as if they’re doing a read-through before a rehearsal.

At first, I thought this was a bit of a cop-out. When West does ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, you’d think he might have memorised possibly the secondmost famous speech in the language, but in the end I didn’t mind at all: it gave the proceedings a relaxed, informal air.

There was only one moment of intrusion, in Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech: you hear him turning a page at the word ‘fardels’. What is a fardel, anyway?

Normally, when you see someone giving the ‘Tomorrow’ speech, you can tell they’ve been in the wars, not just

A midsummer night's screening: Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West

because by that stage Macbeth is in a bit of a fix, but also because the actor playing him has done, up to that point, all the hard work that acting involves. Neither West’s nor Bonham Carter’s performances here will make your hair stand up like the fretful porpentine’s; but there’s a time and a place for that, and these days, and HBC’s enormous garden, are not the time and place for that. It is all very gently done.

Esiri is a mildly politically correct guide. I have no problem with this at all, but I did wonder whether mentioning Holocaust Remembrance Day in the context of Shylock was utterly tactful; unavoidable, I suppose. There’s a bit from King John about immigrants (‘What would you think, to be thus used?’), which Shakespeare might not even have written; but it’s a good bit, and I’m glad I heard it. There’s an extract from The Rape of Lucrece, which, as you know, isn’t even a play; Esiri proposes the theory that it was written while the theatres were shut because of the plague.

Fair enough; and it’s nice to go off the beaten track.

One interesting side effect of watching stage actors in close-up like this is that you start noticing their mannerisms, normally obscured by distance or the tall person sitting in front of you.

Dominic West has a kind of smiley ennui about him, as if everything is vaguely tiring, but he’s going to make it as pleasant as he can for you. If he were a doctor, he’d have, you think, a very good bedside manner; just as Esiri acts like

your kindly, glamorous mum bringing you a mug of warm Ribena when you’re off school with a tummy-ache.

In pandemic times, this is just what we want.

As for Helena Bonham Carter, the thing about her (why didn’t I notice this when she was in The Crown?) is that she does an enormous amount of her acting with her eyebrows. Once I started noticing her eyebrows, I couldn’t look anywhere else, or indeed concentrate on much else without an effort of will.

My favourite is when she expresses thought, or perplexity: her eyebrows go up in the middle, like two caterpillars gearing up for a fight. However, given the sylvan setting – my, she really does have a big garden, unless it has been very skilfully filmed – this seems somewhat appropriate.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE Nick Wallis’s series, The Great Post Office Trial, prompted a protracted feeling of rage.

Told in ten 15-minute lunchtime slots on Radio 4, the story of the Post Office’s corporate indifference to the suffering of loyal and hardworking sub-postmasters, falsely accused of ‘theft and false accounting’, was not new. It was well covered in Private Eye last year.

Still, Wallis spent ten years hearing their moving and tearful testimonies, which made gripping listening. These people had built up loyal The Oldie July 2020 67

communities in villages and suburbs, and then found themselves financially ruined, having to repay impossible sums or go to jail. The culprit was an IT system called Horizon, which ‘ate’ money. The Post Office remained in denial.

The series culminated in the High Court trial where, at last, the good Judge Peter Fraser exposed the miscarriages of justice. Excellent.

Among many things, I hope we can keep in the ‘new normal’ is the repeats on Radios 3 and 4. It has always seemed profligate to squander drama, opera, recitals and concerts in one-off broadcasts, and not to capitalise on the archive. But for the next few months we shall continue to be awash with cultural experiences, thanks to ‘Culture in Quarantine’, the BBC’s decision to record stuff without audiences.

I actually heard a preview of one Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert while lazing in the back garden, as my neighbour Anna Tilbrook was rehearsing (with windows open) her piano accompaniment, with the soprano Lucy Crowe singing Schumann. Bliss. Then I heard it as recorded at the Wigmore. The 20 concerts, all available for a month, make a merciful escape from The World at One, with its bleak reminders that the stricken global economy will cost the world ‘nine trillion dollars’.

Your Desert Island Discs, featuring frontline workers’ choices, was the audio equivalent of Vogue magazine covers featuring front-line workers. Laudable, though not all the musical reminiscences were memorable. But Professor Jason Warren, neurology consultant, had heard a delicate, haunting Grieg piece ‘at the witching hour’ on his night shift in hospital. He said, ‘It was like a call from a window on a world beyond COVID.’ On Saturday Live, Dame Marina Warner’s inheritance tracks (Si, mi chiamano Mimi, from La bohème, sung

by Renata Tebaldi, and Beethoven’s Sonata No 3 in A major, played by Alfred Brendel on piano and his son Adrian on cello) were explained in her crystalline tones: ‘What I love about chamber music is the way the musicians speak to one another – a model of how society or any group can work together.’

And by the way, said the Rev Richard Coles, Marina is the lady writer in the song Lady Writer – (‘Lady writer on the TV/Talk about the Virgin Mary’). I checked and it was true: in 1979, everyone gave her the Dire Straits record after she’d appeared on a Melvyn Bragg programme talking about her Virgin Mary book. ‘It quite eclipsed the other thing I was famous for – appearing 68 The Oldie July 2020

on Double Your Money as a teenager.’

Crossing the Line proved a timely Book of the Week: the dispiriting memoirs of John Sutherland, former Metropolitan Police inspector, broadcast in the days after police were attacked and injured in the George Floyd demo, and just when an easing of the lockdown on pubs was proposed. One could only share the exasperation of the inspector, who declared that pubs are ‘ASBO generators, violence generators, crime generators, all-round-harm generators’.

There hasn’t been much to laugh at – except perhaps the characters in Ambridge suddenly giving us stream-ofconsciousness soliloquies (not a popular move). So a week that contained five new Just Williams and a two-part P G Wodehouse, thanks to Martin Jarvis, was wonderfully cheering. I rang Jarvis, locked down in Los Angeles, and you can read what he said on page 28.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS What a lot of tosh has been upended over us lately. Are we expected not to notice?

I watched the surrogacy drama series The Nest (BBC1), into which was flung a murdered drug addict, stabbed aunties, corrupt newspaper editors, bent social workers and him off Line of Duty Martin Compston, with a Glaswegian accent.

David Hayman snapped and snarled, but he’s Glaswegian anyway. Shirley Henderson was a mad old mother with a crutch and a limp, the only thing lacking being a parrot on her shoulder.

Mirren Mack, as the girl whose womb was to be hired, flipped back and forth between manipulative innocence and broken-bottle violence. Sophie Rundle was lovely to look at, especially when she emerged wet from the phosphorescent loch. She was one of those well-off mums-to-be who adore decorating the

Fears of a clown: Tony Slattery (seated) with partner, Mark Hutchinson

nursery and buying heaps of teddies and clothes, but who’d be hopeless with the demands of an actual baby.

The star, however, was the glasswalled house with its views of water and glen. The plot twist was that the Ukrainian hospital had mixed up the embryos in the lab – so the actual genetic parentage of the resultant child was as mystifying as that of Our Lord.

Even more daft was Hollywood. Set in the Forties, it was anachronistic blather, depicting the film-making colony as so crudely racist, homophobic and antiSemitic that it was incapable of making decent pictures. Quite how Cary Grant, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang or Humphrey Bogart happened was never explained; also overlooked were Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Instead we had the least-convincing lookalikes imaginable, absolutely terrible renditions of Vivien Leigh, Noël Coward and George Cukor.

Somebody who was meant to be Cole Porter was in a caravan with his trousers round his ankles.

The whole conception was very finger-wagging – Hollywood a sham, a hell, built on lies and deceptions. Acting was seen as a kind of pimping, which was meant to explain the rise of Rock Hudson. Well, maybe the studios were shameful places, in urgent need of enlightenment, but on its own terms Los Angeles was as exciting as Shakespeare’s London. What was hypercritical was this expensive series, where in the sex scenes women kept their clothes on. The actual enemy of art is self-righteousness, where everyone is compelled by decree to be nice and kind and non-predatory and equal. Under the sententious surface, of course, people will be as cruel and competitive as ever.

Ibiza, in White Lines, with its sex, drugs and vodka, looked like my kind of place, and I wanted to rush there immediately, until I remembered I am old and fat and disgusting and within hours would be disconsolate.

Nevertheless, I loved the look of the villas with their fountains and pots of geraniums. I also rather fell for Laura Haddock, her face alive and beautiful from every angle and distance. She played someone who was trying to solve her brother’s murder case from 20 years earlier, and one minute she was demure and at a loss, the next she was shooting bodyguards with a harpoon and driving a car very fast through police roadblocks. It made neither psychological nor narrative sense.

Also in the sunshine were warring factions of the Balearic mafia, Laurence Fox as a greasy guru, orgies, kidnap, dead

Ed McLachlan

‘I'm starting to get a little worried about the company my Colin's been keeping lately’

bodies in a camper van, and a priest given hand relief by an old lady in an alcove. Daniel Mays, whose cocaine stash was hidden in a plastic banana, lost his wife to a local sleazeball, had his leg broken and saw his pet dog drown – though he brought it back to life by giving it a panic-stricken pummel.

Tom Harries, in lengthy flashback scenes as the late brother, Axel, was messianic and mad. A blond angel of death, he was meant to demonstrate the emptiness of all the hedonism, the egotism of a free spirit. His impulse was only to destroy, stirring things up, getting his pals deliberately hooked on heroin and making bonfires of everyone’s money. No wonder he ended up demised.

What shocked me about the candid documentary What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? (BBC2) was the way these elfin Channel 4 stars and university wits from the Eighties are now hefty, haggard and losing shape. Time has, so to speak, been digging deep trenches in their

beauty’s brow. Slattery, white-haired, virtually unrecognisable, shambles about with depression and drink, hoping to find a psychiatrist who can patch him up.

His house looks even more horrible than my own here in the Hastings slum district. Stephen Fry made a very brief appearance, and the contrast between a multimillionaire National Treasure and this broken figure who hasn’t worked in years was simply cruel. Slattery, I mean, not me. Though me as well.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE OPERA ON CD: OLD TREASURES AND LONG-HIDDEN GEMS Streamed music-making may fill a private need in peculiar times, but the visual media are no friend to music.

Opera, that most visceral of performing arts, is best experienced live or on CD, where – as we used to say of radio – the pictures are so much better.

In a year bereft of summer festivals, there’s been an unusually fine array of opera releases – not hand-me-down DVDs of theatre telecasts but bespoke sound recordings, handsomely supplied with texts and translations, learned essays and well-researched iconographies.

Two of the finest, in terms of their scholarship, the excellence of the music-making and the elegance of the limited-edition hardback books into which the CDs are unobtrusively inserted, come from the Venice-based Palazzetto Bru Zane.

This is a story in itself. After restoring the 17th-century Zane palace as a gift to the city of Venice, Nicole Bru, head of a family-run French pharmaceutical company, put her formidable financial expertise to the service of high-end music and culture. With arts budgets being slashed across Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, and a new wave of race-to-the-bottom populism taking hold, it was a timely gesture.

The foundation’s musical speciality is operatic rarities from the French 19th century. This would appear to rule out Gounod’s perennially popular Faust, until you realise that here, for the first time on record, is Faust in the sharper, wittier, more down-to-earth form in which Gounod originally wrote it in 1859.

Rarer still is Bru Zane’s revival of Offenbach’s elegant and engaging three-act opéra bouffe Maître Péronilla, a late-flowering bloom with a Spanish setting and a Viennese lilt, which, unaccountably, has until this year never been recorded. Did Offenbach miss a trick by naming the opera after his lawyer-turned-chocolatier Maître Péronilla?

At one point, the delectable 19-yearold Manoëla is married (civilly) to an elderly dolt and (ecclesiastically) to an ardent young music teacher. Might not the title The Wife of Two Husbands have helped propel the opera towards the popularity it deserves?

There are no nubile 19-year-olds in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur; only blind Emmeline, over whom Arthur locks horns with a Saxon warlord. The text of this patriotic ‘semi-opera’ is by John Dryden, his ‘last piece of service’ to Charles II, whose death in 1685 caused a six-year delay to the work’s completion.

Dryden loved Purcell’s music and thought it destined for immortality. Yet, after Purcell’s death at the age of 36, the manuscript parts were scattered to the four winds, which is why it’s taken conductor Paul McCreesh the best part of 25 years to reassemble the piece.

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off the page, provided you have a theatre-savvy cast skilled in the free and rapid handling of recitative.

The new three-CD Erato set has it all: a near-definitive Agrippina in Joyce DiDonato, a superb Poppea and a well-contrasted trio of virtuoso counter-tenors. The young Russian prodigy Maxim Emelyanychev directs the Venetian period-instrument band Il Pomo d’Oro from a variety of keyboards with a style and pizzazz Handel himself might have wondered at.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON Joyce DiDonato: the quintessential Agrippina in Handel's black comedy

McCreesh’s superb two-disc Winged Lion recording with his Gabrieli Consort & Players also comes in a small hardback book, nicely illustrated with black-andwhite photographs of those landscapes and trades – wool, grain, fish – that by Stuart times had made Britannia rich.

I enjoyed the photo of the Barley Mow on the village green at Tilford in Surrey.

It fits well with Purcell’s shepherds’ dance, Your hay it is mow’d, the kind of rustic roistering Percy Grainger and the ale-swilling Peter Warlock would later love to replicate. ‘Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth,’ as T S Eliot has it in his Four Quartets.

It’s astonishing to think that Handel’s Agrippina, the rip-roaring black comedy written for Venice in 1709, was created so soon after the Purcell. The opera provides us with a powerful line-up of celebrity deviants from first-century Rome, including Agrippina’s son, the teenage Nero, a young Poppea, as politic as she is randy, the Emperor Claudius, nursing a mid-life crisis, and Agrippina herself, one of the ancient world’s most manipulative tiger mothers.

We meet these people elsewhere, in Tacitus and Suetonius, Monteverdi and Robert Graves. Graves’s treatment of Agrippina’s story at the end of Claudius the God seems perfunctory when set beside the Netflix-style historical lash-up that the Venetian diplomat, impresario, and sharp-witted man of letters Cardinal Grimani provided for the 24-year-old Handel.

As anyone who saw Barrie Kosky’s 2019 Covent Garden staging knows, Agrippina is a thrill-a-minute show, the music sensuous and vibrant by turns. It’s a long opera but the numbers are short, with linking scenes that positively leap 70 The Oldie July 2020

AMAZON VS THE BEEB When I heard that the BBC was introducing a rival to Amazon’s voiceassisted speaker range, I groaned loudly.

‘I’m sorry,’ came an apology in polite executive-secretary tones from the corner of the room. ‘I’m having trouble understanding you today.’

‘Shut up, Alexa!’ I yelled. ‘Alexa, STOP!’ Instead of shouting ‘Tell me a joke’ or ‘What’s the weather?’ at a female voice assistant (a son’s godmother is called Alexa, which makes it all the stranger and ruder), we will have to ‘wake’ Auntie’s new speaker by saying, ‘OK, Beeb.’

A bit uncouth, but then Beeb is a northern bloke – a decision taken to avoid charges of sexism and to assuage the pandemic of Londoners who might superspread their influence/viral load into the regions. Beeb will play anything – anything, that is, from the iPlayer and BBC Sounds app.

Does anyone welcome this? I can already get the BBC on my Alexa. The one in London is on the blink. Despite

this tech fail, I ordered an Alexa Dot (£35 from Amazon) for Somerset. I could say, basically, one thing – ‘Alexa, play BBC Radio 4!’ – and spare myself the fiddle of getting my iPhone to connect with the wireless Bose speaker. The speaker resolutely refuses to pair with its twin so that we can play the same thing in two rooms, even though the man in John Lewis swore they would pair up and this is why I shelled out for them.

During the dreaded setting-up process of the new Alexa Dot, I had to talk into my mobile phone, to establish voice recognition – and lo! The gizmo actually seemed to work.

A few hours later, my children in London WhatsApped. Everything I was saying on Exmoor was playing through the Alexa speaker in our London kitchen, which had come back to life and had managed to pair with its country cousin as if by magic.

‘Mum, we can hear you shouting at Ziggy,’ my children reported. They mimicked me. ‘ZIGGY! Stop barking!’

We are told that the tech giants Apple, Google and Amazon are ‘teaming up’ in an effort to make smart home tech ‘easier to use’. Surely, that’s an admission that smart home tech is too complicated and makes dummies of us all. Every time we want to play a DVD, we have to ring one of our three children and ask them to walk us through it.

Sometimes, when Ivo is doing something quietly, like making traps for the crawfish in the Exe, or constructing birdfeeders, the new Dot – which ignores our orders most of the time – will blast into life unbidden and play gangsta rap at top volume.

Will Beeb be welcomed by dutiful licence-payers across the land? I think Alexa knows the answer to that one!

Clockwise from top left: Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage, Bonington’s La Ferté, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Van Dyke’s Van der Geest portrait, Rubens’s View of Het Steen in the Early Morning , the little room of Claudes and Turners, the Rokeby Venus, The Fighting Temeraire, Uccello’s Battle of San Romano

NATIONAL GALLERY TREASURES HUON MALLALIEU BRITAIN'S TOP TEN Where do you begin a bespoke tour of the National Gallery? Where to end is an easier question to answer: lunch in a Covent Garden favourite such as The Oystermen in Henrietta Street.

But where should one start in a building so packed with joys? As with any great gallery, it is important not to overdo it, or beauty-blindness and museumlimp will drain the pleasure. No more than about ten paintings, then – and a coffee break – should do it.

With choices running from goldground to Impressionism by way of the Renaissance, much depends on one’s companions’ tastes. If possible, one tries to weave some sort of narrative thread.

My ten candidates, for the moment, are Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage, Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rubens’s View of Het

Steen in the Early Morning, Van Dyke’s Van der Geest portrait, Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, the little room of Claudes and Turners (counting as two), Bonington’s La Ferté and Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

These choices change frequently and, in any case, three would have to be dropped, since, to answer my own question, I always like to begin with the Wilton Diptych, pay a visit to Francisque Millet’s Mountain Landscape with Lightning and end at Lake Keitele by the Finn Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931).

It is easy to forget how small the diptych is – each panel 12in by 9in – and yet how packed with detail, some still undeciphered, and perhaps now undecipherable. I would like to know more about Richard II’s sumptuous red cloak, a superb example of Opus Anglicanum, embroidered in gold with his emblematic harts. It has been plausibly suggested that the diptych was a collaboration between a French artist

for the figures and one of Richard’s English court painters for the heraldry. At least one of the court painters is known to have designed robes; so perhaps the collaboration went further.

Francisque Millet (1642-1679) was a Flemish painter who worked in France in a Claudean manner. When using the Gallery as a short cut, I always pause at his Mountain Landscape with Lightning, another enigmatic work and one I find oddly moving, perhaps because he gives us a near-vertiginous bird’s-eye view. The subject may be Biblical – perhaps the destruction of Sodom or the flight of Ahab – but that hardly matters. We feel the wind, hear the heavens growl and know an almighty thunderclap is imminent.

Gallen-Kallela’s name may not spring to many visitors’ lips, but his Lake Keitele battles with the Temeraire at the top of the Gallery shop’s postcard-sales list. This is another painting to listen to as well as look at; it is full of breeze and birdsong.

The Oldie July 2020 71

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER MONET TALKS It could be as simple as turning a barrowload of damp, earthy, woodsy, worm-filled compost.

Or the growth of a small cutting in its cradle of moist soil, telling you ‘I’ve made roots!’ More likely, it’s the smell of a rose triggering fragments of vivid memories that have lain idle for decades in the brain’s deep retreats. Perhaps it’s the enduring existence of a beloved plant given many years ago by a dear friend or a total stranger.

Whatever, the pure joy and, more potently, the rewards of gardening are impossible to calculate, but guaranteed to surprise, stimulate, inspire and adore.

As the Chinese proverb has it, ‘Life begins the day you start a garden.’ All this was confirmed in a new scientific study in Landscape and Urban Planning magazine, confirming that gardening is good for your mental and physical health.

Claude Monet considered his garden at Giverny his ‘most beautiful masterpiece’, and that’s saying something – although he might shudder at its present incarnation where, when I last saw it, a supposed need to satisfy a seemingly endless trudge of (mostly) foreign visitors had draped its few hallowed acres in inappropriate garb.

That last visit of mine to Monet’s garden was in September 2013, on a warm evening after the gates had been locked and most people were heading back to Paris in a fleet of air-conditioned charabancs. Earlier that day, I ate lunch at the very table in Giverny’s Hôtel Baudy restaurant, where the Impressionists were known to gather.

I was a guest of Claire Joyes, who lives in the village and, more importantly, is the widow of Jean-Marie Toulgouat, Monet’s first wife’s great-grandson, who

died as recently as 2006, establishing Claire as the comet’s tail, so to speak, of that hugely influential artistic movement.

After lunch, we sat in Claire’s orchard garden, sipping deeply from glasses of single malt whisky, waiting for the Monet pilgrims to dissipate, clutching their souvenirs and phrase books, just a few streets away. Claire held her own key to this Eden and, as the sun began to dip behind the poplars along the Ru (a tributary of the Seine which Monet dammed for his much-painted water lilies), we made our way slowly along the paths and around the pond, benign ghosts paying our own private homage.

I also hold dear memories of an earlier visit made years before, in the mid1970s, when I trod the same paths on a bought ticket for a few francs. There were no crowds then, and Monet’s favourite nasturtiums lay untroubled over the gravel as if one of his canvases had sprung into life – or one of the many early-1900s black-and-white photographs of the garden had magically filled with colour.

Gardening is not the boring slog non-gardeners insist it is. It’s about the wondrous enjoyment of plants – their structure, flowers, fruits and foliage.

Claude Monet in his Giverny garden, 1905

Above all, it’s about people and places and filling our mental store cupboards with glorious incidents when time comes to harvest the past.

My day with Claire Joyes in Giverny was a privilege enabled by a shared love of gardens and gardening. So too were the several hours I spent one summer’s evening 30 years ago, interviewing Prince Charles at Highgrove, listening to a man whose passion for gardening was, and remains, matched only by his delight in the whole natural world.

But gardening’s high points are not about hobnobbing with the great and the good: like music, galleries, museums, the wide outdoors and the boundless night sky, gardens are for us all – and if you don’t have one of your own, you’ll know people who do. Enjoy theirs for, as some wise, unknown sage has made clear, ‘gardening adds years to your life and life to your years’.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD TOMATOES Having written almost 60 articles on the kitchen garden, I find it hard to believe that I have yet to mention tomatoes, especially as they are one of my favourite vegetables/fruit to grow and eat. In this country the tomato was no one’s favourite until at least the 18th century.

As a solanaceous plant, related to deadly nightshade, it was considered poisonous when brought back from Peru by the conquistadors. It was left to the Spaniards and Italians; and because the first tomatoes seen in Europe were yellow, in Italy it was called pomodoro (golden apple).

Tomatoes nowadays come in various colours and sizes. For the past three years I have grown a so-called black variety, though the ripe fruit’s colour may be half-red, half-black or a dark brownish green. Black Krim produces large The Oldie July 2020 73

fruit but, in my experience, not many, while Indigo Beauty, which I am growing again this year, is more prolific and deliciously sweet.

As red vine tomatoes are so readily available to buy, I also grow two yellow varieties – Moonglow and that wonderful cherry tomato Sungold – which are said to be kinder than red to arthritissufferers. A home-grown tomato’s taste is undoubtedly far superior to that of a bought one, and some insist that the best flavour can be achieved only if the tomatoes are grown outdoors.

Large varieties generally ripen better in a greenhouse, in grow bags or large pots.

Whether in or out, the plants will need to be grown up supporting canes or strings; pinch out the side shoots immediately above a leaf. When you have four or five trusses to a plant, the top of the main stem should be taken out to concentrate the plant’s energies on fruiting.

Tomatoes grown outside can be planted out now (early June) in a sunny, sheltered spot, but if we have a wet summer beware of blight. Those fruit that have not ripened by mid-September can be picked and placed in a drawer with a banana skin to help them change colour. Or they can be made into green tomato chutney.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD DINE ON YOUR FLOWER-BED If you thought herbaceous border plants were purely decorative, think again. So says Mat Coward in Eat Your Front Garden, a sturdy little pocketbook from Prospect Books (£12.99).

The author has done the spadework, so the rest of us don’t have to. Fuchsia berries, he explains, can be eaten raw when ripe but are best prepared as jam.

Dahlia tubers are all edible, ‘though not all are pleasant’. Daylily buds are much used by cooks in China, who know them as ‘golden needles’. Oca, Oxalis tuberosa, a member of the Bermuda buttercup family, is grown as a root crop in New Zealand and is increasing in allotments in the UK: it looks and cooks like a red-skinned potato and has a deliciously nutty, buttery flavour.

In early summer, edible wild greenery is a little over the hill for salads but good for cooking. Traditional foragers – Provençaux, Italians, Greeks – cook their wild gatherings.

Among the more unusual suggestions are the slender leaves of Silene vulgaris, bladder campion, which taste of tarragon, sweetish and a little bitter. As are the leaves of several members of the bellflower family – also known as rampion, rapunzel, 74 The Oldie July 2020

500g good-quality fatty bacon, diced 2 medium onions, diced 3-4 tbsp bourbon or whisky 250ml cider vinegar 250g soft brown sugar 4 tbsp whole-grain mustard

harebell or bats-in-the-belfry (really); and those of the red-stalked orach, Atriplex hortensis, a tall, decorative, easy-going member of the spinach family, often found in municipal plantings.

Of the daisy family, Chrysanthemum coronaria – recently renamed Glebionis but commonly called the crown daisy – is also known as chop-suey greens. No prizes for guessing they’re good in a stir- fry. Wild greens, particularly when mature, taste bitter. The exception is mallow, Malva sylvestris, whose leaves have a gentle, spinach-like flavour and, when cooked, lose their characteristic furriness and develop that curious gluey texture common to all members of the family, including okra.

The author, gardening correspondent on the Daily Star and scriptwriter on QI, is something of a renaissance man.

Tasting notes rather than recipes are offered; the horticultural information is revelatory.

Appalachian kil’t greens with bacon jam This is poor-folks cooking, as is appropriate to foraged foodstuffs. The leaves soften and collapse – are kil’t – when they meet the hot, salty, liquorlaced dressing. Wouldn’t you? Serves 2-3 1kg mixed wild greens and shot lettuce, picked over and de-stalked 2-3 generous tbsp bacon jam (see below) Salt and freshly ground black pepper Heat a large frying pan, add the bacon jam and wait till it melts. Add the greens, turn up the heat and toss until the leaves are wilted – a few minutes. Possible accompaniments are sliced raw onion and hard-boiled eggs.

Appalachian bacon jam A good amount of fat is required. Speck or pancetta works best, or you could add a spoonful of goose fat. The preparation is of German-settler origin. Moonshine comes with the territory. Makes about 500g

Cook the diced bacon in a heavy frying pan over medium heat, stirring, until the fat runs and crisps a little. Add the diced onion, reduce the heat and cook until the onion softens. Add the liquor and bubble up. Add the vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, bubble up, reduce the heat and then simmer until thickened, about 10 minutes. Pot up and refrigerate till needed. Good as a warm relish with cold meat or a baked potato.

THE RESTAURANT CRISIS JAMES PEMBROKE The Oldie Editor is the UK’s most fervent COVID warrior.

Half-man, half-bike, he still cycles into the office every morning, oblivious of the fact that he’s the only one there. Worried that he might go the way of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese Second World War soldier who refused to surrender until 1974, I now pay him a weekly visit to keep him in the loop about the Outside World.

Other than our shared cravings for even the dullest book launch, we also suffer from a profound anxiety about the absence and future of restaurants. This is especially acute for him (recently honoured in the Pot Noodle Hall of Fame) but also for me, given that I have undergone lockdown with a broken dishwasher and two children who have perfected the art of smearing even more grease onto dirty plates. They now rejoice in the knowledge they will be for ever stood down from all sink duties.

The Government will inevitably have us believe that the plight of London’s restaurant scene, the most vibrant and eclectic in Europe, is down to COVID. It isn’t. Its biggest problem was already rent.

Polpo, a Soho restaurant of 60 covers, pays £20,000 a month in rent and rates before it turns the lights on. We punters tend to think, on the basis of menu prices, that restaurateurs must be making a killing, but at Polpo they need to turn over their tables two or three times, at both the lunch and the dinner sittings, to be viable. In common with almost every restaurant, pub and bar in central London, the premises have a rateable value in excess of the £51,000 level that would entitle them to a tax holiday, so they are at the mercy of their landlord.

Whereas some landlords such as Fuller’s have cancelled the rent for its 215 pubs, 90 per cent of landlords are

expecting full rent throughout the lockdown. Jonathan Downey, the owner of Milk & Honey in Poland Street, Soho, is just such a victim, despite having paid £3.9 million in rent over the last 19 years.

The Job Retention Scheme effectively ends in August, and doesn’t take into account tips (the tronc). So staff are really getting only 60 per cent of their earnings, with which to pay their own rent. Little wonder that many have headed back to their countries of origin, where the restaurants are reopening. Jeremy King, the colossus of the Wolseley and Zédel, believes that 30 per cent of restaurants will close, and that half of the hospitality industry’s two-million-strong workforce will lose their jobs in September.

‘Casual dining was already dying because millennials like to order food in, but with the two-metre distancing rule – the WHO suggests only one metre – it will die out,’ Richard Beatty, the owner of Polpo, told me. Like other restaurateurs, he and his talented wife, the chef Florence Knight, are already putting all their energies into a new delivery service.

The idea of fritto misto delivered to your door is very appealing, but the peoplewatching in our kitchen is limited; the buzz is care of the washing machine.

During the 1973 oil crisis, the Government bailed out the leading property developers, saving them from liquidation. Apparently, British Land just scraped onto the bottom of the list. Given that so much commercial property is owned by foreign investors, why can’t Rishi Sunak now do the same for tenants?

Not that any such rent freeze would benefit The Oldie, owing to the Editor’s insistence on reporting for duty every day and opening the office windows, indicating that the place is working as normal.

DRINK BILL KNOTT A BLOODY GREAT BLOODY MARY Various earnest surveys have appeared over the last few months concerning our national drinking habits during lockdown: are we drinking more, starting earlier in the day and hitting the spirits more?

I will admit to one indulgence which, I suppose, ticks all three of those boxes: an occasional Bloody Mary with a late breakfast. It both hits the spot and takes the edge off, if you know what I mean.

Pinning down the origins of cocktails is a ticklish business, but the most convincing candidate for creator of the Bloody Mary is Fernand Petiot, a French bartender at Paris’s New York Bar in 1921.

Petiot moved to New York a few years later: by 1934, he had become the head

bartender at the King Cole Room in the St Regis Hotel, where he laid claim to inventing the first ‘modern’ Bloody Mary: he tricked out his original cocktail – just vodka and tomato juice – with Worcestershire sauce, salt, cayenne, black pepper and lemon juice. Shaken with ice, strained and served.

This recipe, I think, still makes a perfect Bloody Mary. I have attended dozens of Bloody Mary contests over the years, at which wannabe mixologists whisk up countless outré twists on the classic, invariably throwing the whole balance of the drink out of kilter: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as our American cousins say.

Use fresh tomato juice from the supermarket fridge and put a bottle of vodka in the freezer. For two people, pour a generous slug of vodka (75ml) into a cocktail shaker; add 300ml of tomato juice, a grind of black pepper, a large pinch of salt, the juice of half a lemon and about twice as much Lea & Perrins and Tabasco as you think sensible. Fill the shaker with ice, shake, and strain into chilled glasses.

No garnish is necessary, and certainly not celery sticks, which always seem to poke me malevolently in the nostrils. You can, however, make your own celery salt very easily: dry out the leaves from a bunch of celery in a slow oven or on a sunny windowsill, and then blitz them with a handful of rock salt. Use instead of plain salt in the drink, or – if you’re feeling fancy – encrust the rims of your glasses with it, after dipping the rims in beaten egg white.

I permit myself a couple of variations: a splash of sherry (dry or medium dry) conjures up a certain Spanish frisson, like slurping gazpacho in the sun with a chilled manzanilla and some salted almonds for company, while a dash of the liquor from a jar of sliced jalapeños lends a sour, spicy Mexican edge. Bloody Marias they should probably be called.

You can, of course, leave out the vodka altogether – the result is a much better drink than a G&T without the gin, or a whisky and ginger without the Scotch – in which case it is called a Virgin Mary.

Not in Australia, though, where – in typically pithy Aussie fashion – the alcohol-free Bloody Mary is known as a Bloody Shame.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines: a white from the southwest of Sicily; a comme il faut rosé from Provence; and a spicy red from the southern Rhône.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Catarratto, Palazzo del Mare, IGT Sicily 2019, offer price £7.99, case price £95.88 Crisp, dry and clean white with plenty of this indigenous Sicilian variety’s notes of tropical fruit and almonds.

Cap au Large Rosé, Côtes de Provence 2019, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00 Sunshine in a rather smart bottle: the palest of pinks, and dangerously easy to drink.

Le Sabounet, Domaine Roger Sabon, Vin de France NV, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Entry-level red from a famous Châteauneufdu-Pape producer: silk-smooth fruit with a peppery edge.

Mixed case price £113.92 – a saving of £22.95 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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‘Our apologies. This is our oldest wine!’

The Oldie July 2020 75

SPORT JIM WHITE FOOTBALL’S GREAT COMEBACK By the time you read this, I will be in the midst of an all-consuming binge.

My eyes will be goggled, my liver atrophied and my sofa-bound backside swollen to the size of an Amazon delivery truck. All the benefits of exercise accrued in lockdown will have dissipated as I sit statically staring at my television screen for hours on end. Yes, football is back.

And, given the structure its processes have assumed because of the pandemic, there will be little opportunity to escape its return. Football is going to be everywhere.

Because it will all be staged ‘behind closed doors’, without a live audience in attendance, each and every game will be televised, to allow the fans to keep pace.

On Saturday and Sunday, from midday to the late-evening news, it will be possible to watch ten hours a day of live Premier League matches, mostly free to air without any need for costly subscription.

And that is without even mentioning the Premier League matches that will be staged every weeknight, the remaining FA Cup ties and the left-over European fixtures crammed into whatever moments of the schedules remain unfilled.

Talk about overkill. This is not so much a return to normality; more the fulfilment of a football obsessive’s darkest fantasy.

It makes you wonder what is going to happen to family life in the footballcrammed days until 1st August. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be served at the sofa.

Intravenous connection to the alcohol supplies in the fridge will be required.

Shares in pizza-delivery operations will experience a vertiginous uplift. People who don’t like football are going to see all the benefits they enjoyed during its lockdown hiatus disappear in one extended action replay. There is nothing subtle or half-hearted about the scale of its comeback. Football will be everywhere.

And what will be the consequences for the game of the bizarre new manner of its delivery? Will this massive collective overdose change the way we engage with our national sport? If less is more, what happens when we are pinned to our sofas by a gathering wave of the stuff pounding us into submission?

For a start, it will not be the same. In the absence of the live game, television schedules have been furred up with reruns of former matches. Endless replays of erstwhile glory (or, in the case of England internationals, glorious failure) have brought us countless images of celebrating fans. There will be none of that.

It will doubtless take the players time 76 The Oldie July 2020

to respond to the new circumstances, their urgency reduced without the noisy insistence of their supporters. Caginess will be the order of the day. Excitement and attack will be at a premium.

Chances are, much of the new normal will be doused in ennui; for many, this will provide an unexpected cure for insomnia.

The noise emanating from many a sitting room won’t be the roar of expectation; it will be the steady rhythm of the snore.

Will even we hopelessly addicted fanatics finally decide that actually it is true – there is a bit too much footie around?

Probably not. Most of us will forget the dull bits and simply relish the fact that being hit round the head with a footballing sledgehammer is still way better than the nothing we have endured these past few months. As the return of horse-racing to our screens demonstrated, how we need the glorious injection of the unexpected into our lives.

Now we can forget the minor incursions of pandemic, Trump and Brexit into our consciousness and concentrate once again on what really matters.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD

BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT If 50 is not a qualifying age for an oldie, we should award honorary oldie status to deserving cases who reach their halfcenturies. I propose the Range Rover, born in 1970.

With 1.19 million produced, it’s part of our cultural landscape, regularly seen on housing estates, on great estates or in Downing Street. I once glimpsed the Queen driving herself in one near Balmoral, headscarf and all. Yet, in 1967, when the ‘100-inch Station Wagon’ project was signed off, it was a unique concept. Although not the first fourwheel-drive SUV – the Americans had Jeep, Ford and International Harvester versions – it was the first to offer in pretty well equal measures luxury-saloon comfort, performance-car road-holding, estate-car capacity and serious off-road capability. And it looked so good that the Louvre exhibited one.

It was brought from concept to production in under three years by a small team headed by engineer Spen (Spencer) King, creator of (among much

Majestic: 1970 Range Rover Classic

else) the P6 Rover, otherwise known as the Rover 2000. While thrashing one of those over fields near Solihull, he was struck that fitting the new project with the P6’s long-travel coil springs, instead of the traditional Land Rover leaf springs, would transform the off-road ride while greatly improving on-road handling.

When they needed a body to test prototypes, the engineers knocked one up, spending, said King, ‘about 0.1%’ of their time on it. When Rover stylist David Bache came to draw the production version, all he did was tweak what the engineers had done. The natural engine for it was the re-engineered 3.5 V8, recently bought from Buick. Although the Range Rover rapidly achieved social status, it was designed as a working vehicle: early ones had interiors you could clean with a hose.

Development was slow under failing Leyland, Rover’s new owners. It took 11 years to produce a four-door version, 12 to introduce an automatic gearbox, 15 to get round to fuel injection and 16 to offer a diesel. The original shape, now called the Classic, was succeeded in 1994 by the bigger and fatter P38A, under BMW ownership.

It was next bought by Ford, who in 2002 introduced the even bigger L322, itself succeeded in 2012 under Tata ownership by the current – bigger still – L405.

The Range Rover has with age gained not only weight, but also electronic complexity. Early ones will do everything the later will, but the later do it more powerfully, in greater comfort and with less driver effort. Which means, of course, there’s more to go wrong, and when it does it’s more expensive. If you’re looking for one, forget the very early Classics – too collectable; prices stratospheric. You can get a reasonable post-1985 Classic for £6,000-£10,000 (avoiding air suspension), while the cheapest is the 1994-2002 P38A – provided previous owners sorted out the notorious electronic gremlins. A good buy would be a 2002-2012 Fordproduced diesel V8 – the first more-thanmerely-adequate diesel the Range Rover was blessed with – for about £10,000. If you want a current model and don’t mind high miles, think £20,000-£25,000.

My own history with Range Rovers is that of a thrice-jilted lover. One was stolen, one was driven over a mine in Angola (not by me) and the other developed a porous engine block, probably because I converted it to gas.

But still I yearn. Nothing else drives quite like them. From earliest to latest, they make you feel King of the Road.

Spen King and his men got it right first time.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

A plague on the printing cowboys Never waste a crisis, the saying goes – and COVID-19 has offered plenty of opportunities for the guileful to take advantage.

I suppose I am naïve, but I had not expected to see such behaviour in the world of publishing. Nonetheless, I did.

One of the better services made possible by our digital revolution are ‘print on demand’ companies; they will print you a single copy of a book – or hundreds – whenever you want. The author uploads the text, layout and format to the printer’s website. When an order appears, the printing machine whirrs and clicks and produces the book,

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Battle your wits against a machine www.actionquiz.com Hundreds of trivia quizzes where you can play against computer opponents; warning: it’s addictive.

Dive right in and explore the reef www.attenboroughsreef.com Fantastic interactive tour of the Great Barrier Reef with David Attenborough.

Just how a travel website should be.

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

nicely bound in the size and manner decreed by the buyer, with all the pictures and pages in the right order.

There are many such printers, including the mighty Amazon itself. And that is where the trouble started for me.

Several people had recommended that I read Daniel Defoe’s historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year. It is set during the bubonic-plague outbreak in 1665 and offers a glimpse of how society coped with an epidemic back then.

Obviously, it is out of copyright so anyone can publish it. I went to the Amazon site, found a cheap (£4.99) edition and ordered it.

It was unreadable. This is not Defoe’s fault – I mean that the production was dreadful.

When I looked more closely, I realised that it had been ‘published’ in late March after the lockdown began; that is, uploaded by some chancer to Amazon’s own printing service, in anticipation of a spike in demand. When I ordered it, Amazon both printed and posted it.

Amazon did nothing wrong, but the material it was given to reproduce was hopeless. There were misprints, no page numbers, the margins were too narrow, paragraphs were jammed together, tables of numbers were misaligned and more.

I gave up after a few pages page and went to the website of a proper bookshop (Waterstones); they offered me a choice of several sensible versions. I ordered the Penguin Classics edition, which of course comes with an excellent introduction,

appropriate typeface and proper editing and is a pleasure to read.

My beef is not with Amazon, who refunded my money without a murmur and didn’t even want me to return the book. My complaint is with whoever set up the deal, one of the group Amazon refers to as its ‘seller partners’. Most people don’t realise that over half of what is sold on Amazon is sold not by Amazon itself but by others using it as a shop front. Amazon provides the means by which we find a supplier and pay them.

Quite often, Amazon also arranges the packing and delivery – and, in my case, even the manufacturing – of the product.

All this is made clear if you look carefully, but you do have to look.

One of the oldest rules is that a good guide to the quality of what you are buying is the reputation of whoever is selling it. That’s why John Lewis does so well. This rule is just as true when you’re buying online, but when you buy through Amazon it is easy to forget that it probably isn’t really Amazon you are dealing with.

That was the case with my book; a shoddy attempt to cash in on COVID-19, using the respectable mantle of Amazon to inspire confidence.

So always remember: Amazon is as much a marketplace as a shop, with all kinds of people setting up stalls under its roof. Amazon is strict and sellers must toe the line or they are thrown out, but there is always the risk that you will come up against a dodgy one before they are discovered; caveat emptor.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Beware of easy money Many people are financially better off through COVID-19 because there is no opportunity to spend money in restaurants, cinemas, art galleries and the other places we usually enjoy.

But you might be one of those who is worse off and struggling, or you want to help relatives who have lost their jobs, and this could tip you towards looking at new ways of raising money.

Two schemes enable the over-55s to 78 The Oldie July 2020

release substantial sums. One is taking money out of your pension fund and the other is equity release, also called a lifetime mortgage, which lets you cash in some of the value built up in your home.

Both should be treated with extreme caution because neither is a risk-free path to riches and either could turn out to be an expensive mistake. Taking money out of your pension or your home can also affect your entitlement to welfare benefits.

Unless you have a pension where your employer takes the investment risk (a defined benefit pension), the value of your pension pot will have shrunk a lot this year because share prices have tumbled. Taking out a lump sum now will further reduce the amount of money you have left for your retirement income and could leave you with less than you need.

It also reduces the amount you can put back into your pension in future without

paying tax on the contribution, from £40,000 a year to just £4,000.

The attraction of equity release is that you repay the mortgage – capital and interest – only when you die or move.

The downside is that you pay compound interest, which means interest is regularly added to the loan, so you are paying interest on the interest as well as the capital.

This substantially increases your debt to the point that, within 15 to 20 years, it could take the entire selling price of your home to pay it off. Many providers now guarantee that you will not have to repay more than your house is worth – a no negative-equity guarantee – so you do not have to use money from the rest of your estate to meet the debt.

The rate of interest charged on lifetime mortgages is higher than the rate on ordinary home loans, which can be less than 2 per cent. Last year, strong competition in the equity-release market forced the rates down to record lows but, since COVID-19, they have crept up again to between 2.5 per cent and 6 per cent. On top of that, you can pay for mortgage and legal advice, arrangement and valuation fees, and early repayment penalties.

‘It’s still a mystery why they get drawn to the beach’

Agreeing any mortgage during the lockdown is difficult not least because no one is certain how far house prices might fall. To keep the market ticking over, the Equity Release Council is temporarily allowing legal advisers to discuss products with potential customers in recorded telephone or video

conversations, backed up with written advice. Previously it was the rule, given the age and vulnerability of some customers, that meetings had to take place face to face.

For such a finely balanced decision, it is essential to take professional advice before you commit yourself.

The Oldie July 2020 79

The kittiwake

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Adam Nicolson, in The Seabird’s Cry, describes the arrival of a kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) to see him safely home to the Shiant Isles. He owns the islands, which lie in the notoriously rough Minch, the channel between mainland Scotland and the Outer Hebrides.

He was labouring to keep his boat afloat when ‘this bird, a companion, even a form of consolation, floated above me.

I felt then that I had never before been in the presence of such a sprung and beautiful thing, dawn grey, black eyes, black tips to the wings, the body held there as if on wires above me, afloat, dancing, its whole being like a singer’s held note, not flickering or rag-like, nor blown about like a tern, but elastic, vibrant, investigative, delicate, the suggestion of a goddess momentarily present above me.’ He speculates that aithuia, the sea bird that landed on Odysseus’s wave-swept raft in the Odyssey, was a kittiwake.

If any gull deserves to be called a ‘sea gull’, it is the kittiwake, which comes ashore only to breed. The UK’s 205,000 population arrives in force from March, breeds from mid-May to late July on coastal cliffs, predominantly in Scotland and Ireland, and disperses from August.

The most famous colony in the world is not on a cliff but on the façade of the BALTIC, formerly a grain warehouse and now a centre for contemporary art, on the Gateshead quayside of the River Tyne.

This bucks a declining trend.

Kittiwakes are among the species most dependent on sand eels, thousands of tons of which are turned into animal feed and fertiliser. In Scotland, it was one of 12 seabird species to have declined by 50 per cent between 1986 and 2015. This is despite a 7,700-square-mile closed area for fishing, established by law in 2000, extending from north-east Scotland to Northumberland.

Unlike other urbanised gulls, the kittiwake does not scavenge but can

make round trips of 100 miles for fish; so Tyneside birds have clearly benefited from this exclusion zone.

Walking west from Newcastle’s Central Station last July, I saw nesting kittiwakes grow in number as the river approached. The length of the arched High Bridge was studded with them, with others on supports or in crannies, down the hill to the Tyne Bridge colony.

Businesses have complained of the birds’ mess and noise. Spikes and netting were still visible, but whereas in 2015 15 birds died ‘horribly’ in nets, in 2019 just one suffered that fate. Gateshead and

Newcastle now take pride in their kittiwakes, with the result that the population has risen from 872 pairs in 2015 to 1,353 in 2019.

As for the BALTIC colony, temporarily displaced during the building’s conversion, it provides the quayside’s kittiwake climax. Visitors can stand outside, within feet of the birds, at one end of the principal nesting ledge, which underlines the lettering proclaiming the old warehouse title. Here spectators have intimate access to the most inland and urban colony of a marine bird anywhere – truly one of the world’s wonders.

The Oldie July 2020 81

Travel On top of the world As a boy, Melvyn Bragg biked up and down the fells. At 30, he bought a cottage there. Now 80, he is still bewitched by the Lake District

I

was brought up in North Cumbria on the Solway Plain between the fells and the sea.

Skiddaw, the northernmost big fell, was, most days, clearly in view 12 miles to the south, the guardian of the Lakes, that other country. It was Skiddaw we had in mind when, in the choir, we chanted, ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.’

My first trip into the Lakes was a choir outing to Keswick, a couple of miles south of Skiddaw. We went on one of the boats that, then as now, motored around Derwentwater, which Wordsworth called the ‘jewel of the Lakes’, stopping half a dozen times to load and offload passengers. We rowed in the awkward rowing boats for hire.

Most of all, I just looked around. It must have been a fine day because I recall so much: the remains of the Celtic fort at the southern tip of the lake, the little bays, the magical island which sank below the surface and came up again – of its own free will, it seemed – and the bigger island once inhabited by St Cuthbert, whose prayer was to die on the same day as Bede.

More memorable than all the details was the sweep of landscape and the peace: the roll of fells in all directions, woods, cliffs, a sense of ever-dissolving

82 The Oldie July 2020

and reassembling landscapes as the boat moved around the lake, and the beautiful intricacies of this unique location – at times densely packed and then expansive; now crowded, now solitudinous.

Coleridge first observed that, as you walk up any fell, the prospect changes every two dozen yards. Daniel Defoe, visiting the area, describes its horrors, its fearsomeness; Turner was to transform that into magnificent landscapes; Wordsworth found a language for it that helped drive a revolution.

For some of us, at school with bikes, it became in our adolescence a soaring, swooping masterpiece of nature which we were allowed, tempted, encouraged to occupy. As we – three or four of us – became more adventurous, we would take more sandwiches and go further.

An early expedition was the first time we went to Buttermere, for years a secret lake, and still, on the many good days, a lonely huddle of houses, a few farms and two pubs, one of which became nationally famous as the birthplace and workplace of the landlord’s daughter, Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere.

We’d leave our bikes behind the pub, go into the Bridge for a quick and cautious bottle of beer and then tramp along the western shore of the lake, and

take the path through the little-used Scarth Gap Pass to look down on Ennerdale. We were alone on the top of the world, looking down into a long valley now reverting to deciduous forestry.

Below was the Black Sail Youth Hostel, the most remote in the Lakes. We looked down on Pillar Rock, where so many of the early English mountain climbers earned their spurs. We could see Scafell, one of the three greatest heights in England; Red Pike; and, out and over to the west, the sea, the incoming storms.

Biking back, we experienced the luxuriance of aching limbs; home was in sight and downhill most of the way.

Just as in that valley Buttermere all but merges into Crummock, so Crummock does into Loweswater. I have a particular affection for Loweswater.

During and just after the war, my mother used to take me to the village of Lamplugh, where my father’s sister lived with her husband and two children.

Somehow my mother and I also fitted into the tiny cottage.

Later, in my twenties, I would walk around the place on the High Fell Road and, not far away, discovered Mosser, a hamlet distinguished by a tiny Quaker meeting house. I could circle the sides of Loweswater on bridle paths and come

STEWART SMITH/ALAMY

Melvyn Bragg’s point of view: Buttermere and Crummock Water from High Stile

down to the water by a different route each time.

When I was looking for a place in the Lakes, in 1970, I went to the village of Dockray above Ullswater. The property was priced in five figures and out of my league. Eventually I found a cottage in the Northern Fells in a hill-farming hamlet.

I have been there ever since, but going to Dockray gave me the chance to walk up Aira Force, one of the most spectacular of the waterfalls. You had to keep your wits about you. The steppingstones could be slippy and the surges and jets from the fall could easily distract you.

Although on a minor scale, it felt like a real ascent! That you were splattered and soaked added to the feeling.

And at the top – a wonderful pub. The sight of the majestic Ullswater below, with the pleasure boat churning along the 16 miles, could dream the day away.

Memories of the boy Wordsworth’s fears and nightmares after he stole a boat one evening add to Ullswater’s attraction.

Julian Cooper, whose mountain paintings define for me the modern Lake District, has made several studies of

Greenhead Ghyll, which is just outside Grasmere, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived for some time. I went up there at Julian’s suggestion. You get at it from just under Dunmail Raise (once a Scottish-boundary marker).

The reason I was so keen to go was that Wordsworth, born 250 years ago, set his plainest and most moving narrative poem, Michael, up there. Michael is an elderly shepherd; he and his wife have a son who at a certain age leaves Cumberland for London where he goes to ruin. His heartbroken father was building a new sheepfold when the son left, and now keeps returning to it with less and less heart to complete it. On some days, he ‘never lifted up a single stone’.

Julian told me there were still remains of that sheepfold on the fellside. I think I found it – but one fold shelter with a collapsed wall can be much like another.

Still, I made the journey and undoubtedly felt melancholy for the good old man.

And that, if you are interested in such things, is another part of the unique quality of the place.

There are significant Celtic remains, Roman remains … and then the Norsemen came, finding valleys and fells which reminded them of home but were warmer! They brought their language,

not yet erased, and their customs, some still extant, and for a thousand years guarded the place against all comers.

The walls alone – so many miles of dry-stone walls, climbing the steepest fells, diving into the valley – follow the Norse ownership, netting the district as if Neptune had risen from the Solway and done the job himself.

My cottage in a hamlet of nine dwellings is on the north side of the most northerly fell. One side faces across the Solway to Scotland, where Criffel and other hills are in some way a mirror to the Cumbrian Fells.

When you walk up the fell at evening, you see one of the many sights that have stirred the hearts of millions since Wordsworth’s day. To the east – on a fine evening – I can see the Pennines, the glimmering spine of England. Looking ahead takes you into the core of the place: peaks, level fells, half-seen fells and, with luck, a late aura of light, giving the place an Arthurian splendour. To the west you gaze across more fells, to the sea and on sunsets too red perhaps, even for Turner. Colour streams in and lands on Skiddaw, on the heather, bronzed by the late light like a shield, a glittering bronze, displaying all that’s best in nature.

Do not disturb.

The Oldie July 2020 83

Overlooked Britain

Home, sweet Gothic home

LUCINDA LAMBTON

lucinda lambton Ever since moving into the Old Rectory at Hedgerley 40 years ago, I’ve kissed its walls every day During these troubling times, there can surely be no more suitable building for me to write about than my house for 40 years, the Old Rectory at Hedgerley in Buckinghamshire. I have daily kissed its walls with love for the place.

The rectory was built in 1846, replacing the parsonage of 1740. I have always assumed the architect Benjamin Ferrey was responsible for our Old Rectory, though I cannot prove it.

He was a contemporary and a friend of the great architect Augustus Welby Pugin, whose father he had lived with and worked for. Also a church architect supremo, Ferrey was responsible for the pleasingly flint-covered St Mary’s Church in Hedgerley. This stands a mere half-mile away from the Old Rectory, while only a mile to the other side stands the great neo-Tudor pile of Bulstrode, also designed by Ferrey.

Bulstrode was the site of the house belonging to villainous Judge Jeffreys, where he lived during his Bloody Assizes, condemning 800 people into slavery and 320 to death. Particularly vicious was his decree that one Alice Lisle be burnt alive for sheltering a supporter of Monmouth.

Surely, then, our house must be a luscious, Ferrey-filled sandwich. Spicing up the rectory yet further was the Rev Edward Baylis, who had his initials E B and the date 1846 writ large in burnt bricks above the diaper brickwork embedded into the whole house. On taking over the parish, he bought the ‘advowson’, the right to appoint the vicar, which he did straight away – by appointing himself!

He then set about building his rectory, having to borrow £500 of the total cost of £1,000 from the Queen Anne’s Bounty fund set up for indigent vicars. There were obviously degrees of indigence: a long row of his domestic servants were buried in the churchyard. He created his Victorian Gothic rectory with certain aspirations to grandeur: the hall is some 30 feet long and nine feet wide.

Pugin wrote that ‘Gothic is more holy the nearer it reaches heaven’ – and so it is: when you’re surrounded by the style, 84 The Oldie July 2020

your spirits do most certainly soar. We have ourselves enhanced the rectory no end with four eight-feet-high paintings of angels and with great gold papier-maché stars that were stolen – by me, I fear – from a due-to-be-demolished Edwardian circus in Liverpool, where the smell of animals still hung heavy in the air.

Adding to the atmosphere at Hedgerley are golden stars on a blue ceiling above a Gothic memorial to departed dogs, inscribed with the words ‘Joyfully barking in the Heavenly Chorus’. Arches leap round over ram’s heads above a painted motto, ‘He who sows Thistles shall reap Prickles’, honouring two mongrels. Their pawprints are embedded, Hollywoodstyle, into the floor.

Thistle and his mother, Clover, are painted on either side of a dachshund coat of arms, quartered with pawprints, rabbits and bones. A rampant dachshund, and another in armour, rule over everything!

Staring forth are the somewhat

incongruous death masks of Goethe and Schiller; while Cromwell’s, warts and all, is scrunched into a dark corner. Most gloriously Gothic of all is the conservatory, with spires, pinnacles and a floor of particularly exciting encaustic tiles I first saw in the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Encaustic tiles of terracotta inlaid before firing with a different-coloured (in this case, cream) clay were created by the Cistercians in the 12th century. The process was lost with the Dissolution of the Monasteries but then revived – encouraged by Pugin and others – by Herbert Minton in 1843. Soon they were coating the floors of most Victorian churches as well as innumerable other buildings. With the onset of plain tiles in the 20th century, their popularity faded.

But in 1974, when the Smithsonian wanted to restore and replace theirs in Washington, they discovered that their original makers were Mintons, now H R Johnson, of Stoke-upon-Trent, who

Left: the Gothic conservatory.

Above: Mark Twain’s life mask.

Right: the Old Rectory, built in 1846

stirringly applied themselves to relearning the craft again from scratch.

I saw those revivals in Washington and how I cheered those pathfinders.

HURRAH! Here was an English medieval industry, which had been revived and then died in the 19th century, now given a full-whack rebirth in late-20th- and 21st-century America. In our conservatory, Pugin’s tiles, designed for the Foreign Office, streak off in one direction, while those for his Palace of Westminster go off in another. Taking particular pride of place, to acknowledge their American saviours, are the tiles made for the 1876 reconstruction of the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia.

I see this house as a giant cabinet of curiosities, with rooms jam-packed with objects, ‘whatever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced’

– Francis Bacon’s words in 1594, when, in the age of discovery, you strove to encapsulate the whole world in your collection, as is my aim in this house.

In the drawing room, there is a wooden stick, half painted red, with which I am sent spinning off to Louisiana, where one like it is used in New Iberia to test the ripeness of peppers for Tabasco sauce.

And then there’s the picture of one of my favourite buildings in the world: Lucy, the Margate Elephant, in New Jersey in 1881, whose trunk was a pioneer trash disposal unit! T S Eliot knocked the nail bang on the head when he wrote, ‘Even the humblest material artefact which is the product and the symbol of a particular civilisation is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes.’

To be surrounded by this multitude of

objects is to feel cosily entwined with the roots I have planted throughout my life.

That very ‘shuffle of things’ was an essential and most beguiling part of the cabinet’s charm, where, say, a stuffed dodo might be next to a bracelet fashioned out of the thighs of Indian flies.

How I relish being able, at one glance, to submerge myself into the place whence a certain object came. When seeing my copy of Mark Twain’s life mask – bought in his house in Connecticut – I am infused with a sense of excitement for the place and a delight in remembering my discovery that the great man’s mother was a Lambton – most especially as I had, 30 years earlier, unknowing of this, called my son Huckleberry!

With each and every room, there is an exhilarating caper down memory lane.

The Oldie July2020 85

Taking a Walk

Bardsey, my pleasure island

GARY WING

patrick barkham

We walk to perform daily tasks and we walk also to escape. And there is no better act of escapism than a stroll round a small island.

The most perfect small island I have ever encountered is a rock off the western tip of Llŷn Peninsula: Bardsey. Its Welsh name, Ynys Enlli, ‘the isle of the currents’, poetically describes its predicament, cut off from the mainland by a dazzling, treacherous swirl of blue-green water that in winter can render it inaccessible for two weeks at a time.

When conditions are good, however, Colin Evans, the Bardsey boatman, can zip you across in his little yellow boat and you can circumnavigate the island.

Bardsey has all small island bases covered: a red-and-white-striped lighthouse, tiny inlets where seals groan, small fields, few trees, no cars and a population of about five permanent residents and a few more holidaymakers who can stay in scenic Victorian farmhouses, surrounded by stone walls to repel the wind.

But it has another more amorphous quality. It is Wales’s holy island, the equivalent of Iona in Scotland and Lindisfarne in England. It has been a place of pilgrimage ever since Celtic Christian monks prayed there, and an enterprising Welsh 12th-century bishop, Urban of Llandaff, marketed it as ‘the island of 20,000 saints’. In the Middle Ages, it became the place to be buried.

The devout believed it would guarantee swift passage to the next life.

Christine Evans, Colin’s mum and a fine poet, believes Bardsey’s spiritual credentials are an accident of geography.

Bardsey turns its back on the mainland, with its eastern side being a hill of 550ft rising from the Irish Sea. Its habitable land faces west, across the Irish Sea. So life here is a perpetual contemplation of an empty western horizon. In older times, we believed we departed this life in a westerly direction. Every evening here at sunset, a path of golden light on the water shows you the way.

86 The Oldie July 2020

I began my walk when the sun was still obscured behind Bardsey’s ‘mountain’, Mynydd Enlli. It looked quite a climb; I ascended through heather and gorse on the island’s northern flank for a lungbursting 15 minutes to reach the top. The views were worthy of a big mountain – east over to the mainland of North Wales, with hazy blue mountains beyond and frothing, cobalt sea below. There was no sign of any other human; instead I enjoyed the company of flying ants, silver Y moths and a pair of choughs, those wonderfully acrobatic ‘sea crows’.

The descent was gentler on the southern flank, and I then took the track to the lighthouse at the island’s southwestern tip, the tail of this tadpoleshaped island. Sheep loafed between the broken stone walls that once divided small fields. The flat, green ‘west end’ felt like another world altogether.

On my walk back up the island to my accommodation close to the church, I called in at the old ‘pig kitchen’ of Carreg Fawr farmhouse. Here, a nun called Sister Helen Mary created a cell to pray in when she moved from Oxfordshire to

commit to a solitary life on Bardsey in 1969. She lived there pretty much as a modern-day hermit for the next 15 years.

Visiting monks, nuns and vicars still hold services in the simple, whitewashed room where she worshipped. Its silence was broken only by the hum of bees at the fuchsia and the chitter of swallows dipping over the cobbled yard.

Surrounded by so much sea and a surfeit of air that delivered both unceasing wind and a strange stillness, I found that space and time began to do unnerving things. The measurements of conventional life, of clocks and kilometres, warped and flexed. Had I been walking for hours or minutes? Miles or yards? It ceased to matter – which is one great reason to escape to walk on a small island.

This route is simple: follow the edge of the land in a rough circle! Day trips to Bardsey with Colin Evans (www. bardseyboattrips.com) (check weather conditions the day before); self-catering holidays via the Bardsey Island Trust (www.bardsey.org)

On the Road

Hand luggage? My Stradivarius Nicola Benedetti tells Louise Flind why she loves her native Ayrshire, how coronavirus closed concert halls – and how heavy violins are

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My violin.

Something you really miss?

I miss being able to cook and I miss doing my own laundry – but bear in mind that I am always away from home. So, for me, the things that people perhaps don’t like about being at home are the things I actually love.

Favourite destination?

Places are all about the people for me.

I’ve been to some of the most beautiful places in the world but if I’m not settled with who I’m with, I don’t care where I am. So I would say, for that reason, West Kilbride, in Ayrshire, and New York.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

Mu parents and my sister and I went to the same place every year in the South of France, a little village.

What have the effects of coronavirus been on your professional life?

I was on tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the final concert was in Aberdeen on Saturday 14th March. As we were playing, it was becoming very clear that this would be the last concert we all did for a while and halls were starting to close.

What was it like for you playing abroad when you were very young? Did you travel alone?

I started travelling when I was 15 and, from the beginning, did a lot on my own.

I wanted to have that independence and also I knew it was going to be my future. I wanted to test out if that was something I could cope with.

How many violins do you travel with?

How do you keep them safe?

Just one – I have a Stradivarius that’s on loan to me. It’s in a case – I carry it on my back. On a plane, it goes in the overhead bin.

Favourite places in Scotland?

Whenever I’m in Scotland, I’m working, really. I very fond of the countryside of Ayrshire – both my parents grew up there, so that has a special resonance.

Edinburgh is a magical place.

Who are your favourite composers?

Beethoven and Shostakovich, to play and to listen to.

Why have Italy, Germany, Austria, France produced so many more great composers than Britain?

I think countries all over the world have strengths and weaknesses. A dedication to musical sophistication has maybe been led by German-speaking territory. But I wouldn’t say that France has produced so many more great composers than the UK – the UK has a lot of great composers.

What are your favourite concert halls in Britain to play?

Like places, concert halls become about the performers. I love the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, but my assessment is always totally dependent on how I felt the concert went.

What are your favourite concert halls in Europe to play?

The Vienna Musikverein and the Berlin Philharmonie. And I particularly like the Paris Philharmonie – there’s a uniquely close and family-type feeling in there.

Do you like working away from home?

I don’t like or dislike it. It’s something I’ve done so consistently from such a young age that it’s like asking me, ‘Do you like eating three meals a day?’

Do you go on holiday?

I’m not a big holiday person: basically, time off is not playing but being with those I love – that’s a holiday for me. I don’t need to be on a beach.

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away?

No. I’m very bad with routine. If I have any kind of routine, something in me has to break it after a couple of days.

That goes with practice routines – I hate that kind of monotony of things and I just can’t do it.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I guess the first time I had sea urchin in Japanese cuisine.

What’s your favourite international food?

Pasta, definitely.

Best and worst experiences in restaurants when abroad?

There’s one restaurant in New York that I love because I know the people who run it and it’s a very family-type environment – simple but good quality.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

Yes. If I were to write a list of my friends, they would be from every part of the world.

Do you have a go at the local language?

Whenever I do, it’s terrible – I’m horrendous with languages.

Biggest headache?

I’m very weak. I don’t have a lot of muscle anywhere – so the worst thing for me is the physical toll of having to lug around a violin, handbag, usually two suitcases…

Do you like coming home?

If I don’t arrive home to heating that’s not working and a leak in my ceiling, then I’m quite happy coming home.

Nicola Benedetti’s new album, Elgar Violin Concerto, is out now The Oldie July 2020 87

Genius crossword 389 el sereno All clues are normal. Any book title may need to be researched.

Across 1 Growth that’s found in ox’s cheek? (7) 5 Wolves, perhaps needing a long time for such a deal (7) 9 Settle on tubers, twisted at the end (5) 10 Respecting call about adjustment of grade (9) 11 and 13. Book’s hard tone about accommodating bankrupt (3,6,4) 12 Outstanding front of office annexe (5) 13 see 11 15 Gives out about 150 bars (8) 18 Counts topless spectacles across South America (8) 19 Bear short on energy (4) 22 Edict that may see Britain as European (5) 24 Birds and fish found in horoscope? (9) 26 Fabric consisting of a mixture of linen and coir (9) 27 and 28. Magi set it off for shifting book (1,4,2,5) 28 see 28.

29 Rear and middle section of lump should be bone (7)

Down 1 Man of the church needs to correct missing account (6) 2 Most of ladies will accept openings must be beneficial (9) 3 Time may be invested in genuine revolutionary in due course (5) 4 Unusual perk at sea for such fliers (9) 5 Heathen may be parking once more without one (5) 6 Load put on student in snub for religion? (5,4) 7 Set bail, having single defence at law (5) 8 Clash with recruit (6) 14 Wrote quickly, seeing love embraced by confounded females (6,3) 16 Instrument needed by ten as played in musical (9) 17 Stress comes after my previous wife gets part of the house (9) 20 Sister company admitting one ambassador from Rome (6) 21 Spain encounters rising regard (6) 23 A faction inspiring wonder (5) 24 Parodies king in poses (5) 25 Source of loan facility for rent (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 21st July 2020. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 389 Across 1 Healthy in mind (4) 3 Domicile (4) 6 Rowing blade (3) 9 Electrical connector (9,4) 10 Appetiser (8) 12 Ogle (4) 13 Seed; idiot (3) 15 Buttonhole (6) 18 Pastoral (6) 19 Flatfish (3) 21 Indolent (4) 22 Likely (8) 25 Unacceptable (6,3,4) 26 Crimson (3) 27 Gold-plated (4) 28 Typeface (4)

Genius 387 solution Down 1 Carbolic slime (anag) (6,7) 2 Part of a lasso (5) 4 Source (6) 5 Jug (4) 6 Is it Leo (anag) (7) 7 Reconciliation (13) 8 Observed (7) 11 Pelt (3) 14 Tall glass (7) 16 Transmitted (7) 17 Knock sharply (3) 20 Savage (6) 23 Well done!! (5) 24 Cosy (4)

Thales of Miletus is an anagram of the extra words in 6 Hits, 8 Female, 17 Louts.

Winner: Rhodri Young, Carmarthen Runners-up: Clare Pinchin, Richmond, North Yorshire; Fred Peeling, Soham, Cambridgeshire

Moron 387 solution Across: 1 Poor, 3 Keep, 9 Highs, (Porky pies) 10 Nostalgia, 11 Lay-by, 12 Soap opera, 15 Enlist, 17 Expose, 19 Incognito, 21 Stamp, 23 Profusion, 24 Lucre, 25 Rite, 26 Send. Down: 1 Punishes, 2 Obstacle, 4 Eagles, 5 Phalanx, 6 Ugly, 7 Espy, 8 Halo, 13 Homicide, 14 Renowned, 16 Skipper, 18 Accost, 20 Glum, 21 Sale, 22 Arch.

The Oldie July 2020 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO Our featured four-spade game comes from a Simultaneous Pairs event. Declarer made a careless play at trick three but found a Houdiniesque recovery.

Dealer South East-West Vulnerable

West ♠ 10 9 3 ♥ K J 10 5 4 3 ♦♣A 7 4 3

North ♠ Q75 ♥A762 ♦ A 10 7 6 5 ♣9

East

♠ K8 ♥9

♦K93 South ♠ AJ642 ♥Q8 ♦QJ842 ♣Q

♣K J 10 8 6 5 2

The Bidding South West North East 1 ♠ pass (1) 2 ♦ 3 ♣ 3♦ 4 ♣ (2) 4 ♠ pass pass pass (1) Despite the adverse vulnerability, I’d have chanced a 2 ♥ overcall.

(2) Anyone for 5♣? That diamond void is massive. 5♣ is one down at worst and will make if South leads a spade, or if North fails to switch to a spade when in with ♥A. West cashed ♣ A and switched to ♠ 9, which ran round to declarer’s ♠ J. Cashing ♠ A is the indicated play at this point and, with ♠ K fortuitously dropping, declarer would lose only the two red kings and so make his contract. However, when declarer preferred (erroneously – too great a risk of a ruff) to play ♦2 at trick three, West was able to ruff with ♠ 3. West exited safely with ♠ 10, and declarer appeared to have thrown away his chance of making the contract. Not so – can you see how he managed to avoid losing to ♥K? Declarer won ♠ A drawing East’s ♠ K, crossed to ♦A and paused to reconstruct East’s shape. Known to have started with two spades and three diamonds, and likely to have seven clubs for his vulnerable overcall at the Three-level, he had room for only one heart. Declarer cashed dummy’s ♥A – key play – and was unconcerned East’s singleton was not ♥K. He played a third diamond to East’s ♦K and East, whose singleton heart exit card had been extracted, had to return a club. Declarer discarded his ♥Q and ruffed with dummy’s last spade. What a great recovery.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 255, you were invited to write a poem called Sweeping.

Thanks to everyone who managed to overcome the postal hiatus. William Wood got off to an exhilarating start with ‘Take a lurcher to an empty beach.’ Dorothy Pope in red wellies swept down the drygoods aisle in Waitrose. Max Ross shone technically with an acrostic spelling out ‘sweeping change’. Fay Dickinson recalled why, aged six, visiting Father Christmas, she railed against sweeping gender stereotypes. Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to Neill Roberts.

Four o’clock: time for one last sweep.

Down the slope, back across the field, Straining for one distinctive bleep, The detector coaxing land to yield Something more than a rusty tin, Bent horseshoe, better lost than found.

Something to justify dust-baked skin, Refilled holes in the dry-baked ground.

The headphones give a sudden squeak.

A second sweep confirms a find.

Bag down, spade poised, no need to speak.

Dig down, lift up: life, please be kind.

When the dirt is wiped away, I’ve A coin, complete with words and face: ‘Carolus … 1665…’

That year. Scrub my hands. Just in case.

Neill Roberts In dark and mist our light swept to and fro.

‘A pedalo! An orange pedalo!

She’s dead for sure. She’s drowned or dead of cold,’ My dad said, as the oily wavelets rolled And slapped our boat. He said, ‘It serves her right, Her stupid parents, too. Slow. Sweep the light.

A fool’s game, this. Give up? No, we’ll persist.

That orange will show better through the mist.’

Well, we found her: cold, exhausted, half-awake.

‘Poor lass,’ my dad said, as he bent to take Her pulse: ‘It’s strong. She’s come to little harm, Thank God!’ he said. ‘Now we must get her warm.

Towels, blankets, tea with brandy in it.

I’ll call in to her poor folks in just a minute.’

I’d seen your grandpa suddenly old and grey, Now suddenly young, two ages in one day.

Peter Hollindale She sweeps aside the dressing room’s starred door And, silk gown sweeping the bouquetstacked floor, Sweeps up her hair, sweeps on the base panstick, Then sweeps mascara, rouge and greasepaint thick.

Sweeping forth, a sweeping glance she flings On backstage sycophants, sweeps to the wings, Sweeping her palms over her costumed hips, And sweeps on stage, lines sweeping from her lips.

Her gaze sweeps gods and circle, box and stall.

She sweeps a curtsy, sweeps a kiss to all.

She sweeps away congratulations, and Dismisses compliments with sweep of hand.

Reaching the dressing room, she sweeps within And sweeps cold cream into her ageswept skin.

Clogged cleansing pads into the bin she sweeps, Then, in the mirror, brashly lit, she weeps.

Jane Bower Cinderella, sadly sweeping, Always work and never play, Seldom smiling, often weeping, Dreams her prince will come someday.

Stepmother and ugly sisters Rule with fear the orphaned girl, Faces like enormous blisters, Eyes that threaten, lips that curl.

Seemingly her life is tragic, But, dear reader, she will meet Her Prince Charming, thanks to magic, And he’ll sweep her off her feet.

That’s the way the tale has travelled, Though in truth the prince was gay.

Cinderella’s hopes unravelled.

All her dreams were swept away.

Basil Ransome-Davies COMPETITION No 257 I was recently surprised to encounter a flowering tulip tree in London. So a poem, please, called The Surprising Tree.

Maximum 16 lines. Still no entries by post, I’m afraid; please send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 257’, by 23rd July.

The Oldie July 2020 91

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Take back control

I’m in a muddle. My daughter, who normally rings me only once a month, if that, and visits perhaps once every three months, has been very angry, during the lockdown, at the idea that I haven’t been washing my hands – insisting I don’t walk in the park, let anyone into the house or do my own shopping. As a fit, self-sufficient 75-yearold with no underlying health conditions, I have been disobeying her. I am quite capable of making my own decisions and don’t like to be treated like an infant.

I also feel, ‘If I die, I die’ – I’m past my sell-by date anyway. But I’m even now feeling angry. Why this sudden interest in me – as if she wants me to become a dependent misery – while she shows no more than scant interest in engaging with me when life is back to normal?

Moira G by email This is such a common problem.

I feel that the answer lies in your relationship. Perhaps your daughter hasn’t been in touch frequently because she’s always felt controlled by you. This may just be her own perception, rather than the reality. That explains her minimal interest in you normally. The lockdown has given her a chance to get her own back and control you – and perhaps to vent unspoken anger in the guise of care, a more acceptable way of unleashing it. It may also be an example of younger people’s terror of death or loss generally. It sounds as if there is a lot of underlying hostility between you, as well as the love, and this might be a moment to have it out with her so that she has a chance to express her real annoyance with you rather than having to express it through this so-called ‘care’.

A

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

98 The Oldie July 2020

Keep taking the pills

Don’t love thy neighbour

Q

Q

A

A

My doctor, after years of prescribing me a certain antidepressant, has refused to continue to give me the medication I now need. He says I’ve been on it long enough.

I have come off very, very slowly but the problem is that I am getting more and more depressed. And I still haven’t got down to even half my normal dose. I am thinking of going on the internet and buying them there – it seems to be possible. But everyone says that would be madness because pills obtained via the internet can be very dangerous. What do you think?

John Barker, Northants I can’t recommend buying pills on the net, although as someone for whom depression is also a close companion I might myself be very tempted – but only as a last resort. First, I would suggest you return to your doctor and have another try to get your dose increased. If he completely refuses, try to find another doctor at the practice and beg them. Use every trick in the book.

Burst into tears. If you feel suicidal, certainly tell them. If the answer’s still ‘no’ – and, who knows, they might change their minds – then, if you can afford it, I’d suggest finding a private psychiatrist and see if you can persuade them. Your doctor will almost certainly want you to try some new concoction, but my advice would be to resist, unless he can convince you that the dangers of continuing outweigh the cost of your living a life of despair. You found a pill that works – one that he put you on in the first place. It is cruel to remove it unless the evidence of damage or risk is absolutely overwhelming.

ISSN 0965-2507.

Printed in England by Walstead Group Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £42.50; Europe/Eire £48; USA/Canada £49; Rest of World £58.

During the lockdown, my neighbour has taken to cooking me a hot meal three times a week and bringing it round. I am deeply touched by her concern and, for the first few weeks, I found her dinners really welcome – even though they were very starchy and full of fat. Now, however, months later, while I would rather go out to buy my own food, she still continues. If I eat her meals, I put on weight. If I don’t, I have to throw them away which, as a war baby, I find anathema. How can I get her to stop, without appearing ungrateful?

Name and address supplied You could say that you’ve developed type 2 diabetes and your doctor has put you on a strict diet. Or you could say that you’re now feeling well enough to cook for yourself – and pass her on to some other poor soul who would really appreciate her contributions. Or you could fudge it and just say once a week is great but suddenly, for some reason, your appetite has dwindled and you can never eat more than a quarter of her delicious dinners.

Perhaps it would embarrass her if you insisted on paying for the ingredients and her time: it’s no fun giving unless the act has no monetary reward. Risky, I know, but worth a try! If you’re lucky, she might opt to direct her ‘good works’ elsewhere. If you’re not lucky, you are, I fear, screwed.

And you’re down to brutal honesty.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk – I will answer every email that comes in; and let me know if you would like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

Michael Barber suggests some lockdown reading Lucy Lethbridge on Elizabeth von Arnim Nigel Molesworth in wartime Biography & Memoir History French Resistance Grief Fashion Sex Contagion Fiction Summer 2020 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Confining moments Review of Books Issue 52 Summer 2020 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain by Tom Fort Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World by Carolyn Steel Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of the Second World War by Saul David Greenery: Journeys in Springtime

by Tim Dee Pew by Catherine Lacey The Ratline: Loves, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War by Eileen Alexander

One of the most frequent questions I was asked during lockdown was: what are you reading? (At least it was better than another: how are you feeling?) Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, a collection of short stories by DH Lawrence, Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing were among my favourites.

Unsurprisingly, with bookshops closed, online book sales have gone up hugely – Waterstones reported a 400 per cent rise at the end of March, with a ‘significant uplift’ for classic titles such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. We all seem to be spending a lot more time reading since lockdown began.

According to a survey by Nielsen Book at the beginning of May, the UK as a whole has nearly doubled the amount of time it spends reading books – from around three and a half hours per week to six. Readers were turning to crime, thrillers and popular fiction, with little interest in dystopian stories. Gardening and DIY, food and drink, puzzle and quiz books were also popular. And Normal People by Sally Rooney, first published a couple of years ago, has been back in the fiction bestseller list, thanks to the BBC adaptation. Also near the top of the list has been Peter May’s Lockdown, written some 15 years ago. The thriller combines the story of a devastating pandemic with a murder mystery. Not for the faint hearted…

In his feature on page 25, Michael Barber suggests some lockdown reading.

Thankfully, restrictions have now been eased – for the moment. Whatever the present situation, his recommendations are still pertinent, with, he reckons, laughter a key ingredient for these times – his personal preference being Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up. So take a look inside this supplement where you’ll find masses of ideas for summer reading – whether you are self-isolating, locked down or ‘free’.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

18 FASHION 19 SEX

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones

20 MISCELLANEOUS

Prisoners of History: What Monuments to the Second World War Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves by Keith Lowe

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, James Pembroke, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Melissa Arancio, Kami Jogee For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

16 PAPERBACKS

21 RESISTANCE

9 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

23 GRIEF 24 CONTAGION 14 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS Lucy Lethbridge on Elizabeth von Arnim

16 PLAGUE POETRY

25 LOCKDOWN READING

Michael Barber’s suggestions

26 FICTION 30 EXTRACT

Molesworth in wartime The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 3

History they were invited to establish a large new military hospital in central London.’

In the Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson praised ‘a riveting story’ and in the Evening Standard, Philippa Stockley was bowled over: ‘Rarely is a book so important, so timely. Vividly and meticulously written, Endell Street is a masterpiece to stretcher straight into a major film studio. What material!’

This is, said Maxtone Graham, ‘the best book I’ve read about the First World War since Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth’.

A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING

Mardie Hodgson and special constable at the Endell Street hospital gates

ENDELL STREET

THE TRAILBLAZING WOMEN WHO RAN WORLD WAR ONE’S MOST REMARKABLE MILITARY HOSPITAL

WENDY MOORE

Medical journalist and historian Wendy Moore’s book couldn’t have been published at a better time to hail the astonishing careers of two pioneering women surgeons, former suffragettes who in the First World War set up and ran military hospitals in Paris and London. As Ysenda Maxtone Graham put it in the Times: ‘Louisa Garrett Anderson (born in 1877) was the chief surgeon, and Flora Murray (born 1869) the chief physician. What a couple! And they were a couple. They lived together in a small flat in a wing of the hospital with two spoilt Scottish terriers. They were extraordinary, visionary, unflagging, superb as doctors, and terrifying.’

Ann Kennedy Smith in the Guardian set the scene: ‘The outbreak of war in August 1914 gave them the opportunity to take a different sort of radical action.

Together they organised the Women’s Hospital Corps and set up a hospital in a luxury Paris hotel. There, amid the chandeliers and marble, they operated on wounds caused by shell fire, used primitive X-rays to locate bullets and shrapnel, and treated gas gangrene and trench foot. The taboo on female doctors treating men vanished overnight. In early 1915 4 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

JUDITH FLANDERS Picador, 352pp, £16.99

As Joe Moran in the Guardian put it, ‘one of the many fascinations’ of Judith Flanders’s new book ‘is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is’. According to Dennis Duncan in the Spectator, we tend to take for granted that alphabetical order is the most effective form of cataloguing – yet ‘the medieval mind, trained to categorise, to look for God’s pattern in the world, was suspicious of its arbitrariness. The Romans, meanwhile, ran their vast and officious empire with little need of it.

And at Harvard and Yale, graduating students were listed in order of their family’s social status until the late 1800s.’

In the Sunday Times, Dan Jones enjoyed a ‘delightfully quirky’ book which has put alphabetic order in its place among many systems ‘each providing a tantalising glimpse into the minds that dreamt them up’.

Praising ‘a charming repository of idiosyncrasy, a love letter to literacy that rightly delights in alphabetisation’s exceptions as well as its rules’, Chris Allnutt in the Financial Times hailed the democratising effect of alphabetic order which ‘enabled classifications that eschewed class, value or divine hierarchies’.

And Moran noted that the book may soon come to be an elegy to a lost form: ‘Who bothers with an A–Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search

TALES FROM THE COLONY ROOM

SOHO’S LOST BOHEMIA

DARREN COFFIELD Unbound, 427pp, £25, ebook £25

The painter Darren Coffield discovered the Colony Room in Soho in the 1980s when he was an art student. He has compiled an oral history of the club, founded by Muriel Belcher in 1948, by its members and hangers-on. In the Mail, Roger Alton thought it ‘riveting’ and ‘an elegy to a vanished world: not necessarily the best of times for everyone, but a world where people talked to each other, not just their mobile phones’.

Roland White in the Sunday Times also felt as though he were there, listing all the Colony’s celebrated habitués: ‘Members or guests over the decades included Noël Coward, EM Forster, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, John Hurt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ian Fleming and Ian Dury. Tracey Emin, Daniel Craig and Kate Moss were among the people who occasionally did unpaid stints behind the bar.’ In an interview with the Camden New Journal, Coffield described how he’d spent five years tracing the artwork from the Colony’s walls – including works by Francis Bacon given in lieu of payment for drinks. Only Roger Lewis, in the Times, was glad to have

Muriel Belcher entertained the Krays

NEAL SLAVIN

ANDERSON FAMILY

Atlantic, 376pp, £17.99

THE CURIOUS HISTORY OF ALPHABETICAL ORDER

engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed “invisible through its eight centuries of active duty”, in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance.’

History missed the party. ‘According to Coffield, “the only unforgivable sin in the club was to be boring”, but, as always in books about Soho and its denizens, while assertions are made about the pervasive wit and conversational brilliance, actual evidence of dazzling talk is nonexistent. There is nothing left but ugly recollections of snarling and swearing, everyone plastered and “getting angry” like “a pack of mongrel bitches in a slum alley”.’

THE ADDRESS BOOK

WHAT OUR STREET ADDRESSES REVEAL ABOUT IDENTITY, RACE, WEALTH AND POWER

DEIDRE MASK

WELLCOME TRUST

Profile, 332pp, £16.99

American journalist Deirdre Mask wonders what our street names say about us, our times and our history.

In a somewhat confusing paragraph, Sarah Vowell in the New York Times, praised her range. ‘Structurally, narrative nonfiction tends to work either like a freight train (progressing in a straight line from Point A to Point B) or like a horseback rider (jumping fences to gallop across fields of unwieldy facts); count Mask among the horsy set. The Address Book is her first book, and she is already a master at shoehorning in fascinating yet barely germane detours just for kicks.’

PD Smith, in the Guardian, noted that ‘most households in the world don’t have street addresses’ and enjoyed Mask’s forays through West Virginia where ‘people navigate in creative ways. Directions are delivered in paragraphs.’ Frances Wilson in the Telegraph also enjoyed the diversions ‘between potted histories of cholera, the French Revolution and Japanese script’, observing that ‘while street names can celebrate and instil collective memory they are also a form of propaganda. Propaganda relies on simple messages and “what message”, Mask asks, “is more simple than a street-name?”’

In the Sunday Times, Andrew Holgate had his eyes opened: ‘Read Mask’s fascinating deep dive into the world of Mill Lane and Martin Luther King Street and you will realise how important these geographical markers are, how pregnant with

meaning, and what a difference they make to everything from the proper functioning of society to questions of wealth, poverty and democracy.’

DIFFICULT WOMEN

A HISTORY OF FEMINISM IN 11 FIGHTS

HELEN LEWIS Cape, 368pp, £16.99

Difficult women can change the world. Helen Lewis’s book is divided into 11 chapters with mostly oneword titles – ‘Divorce’ ‘Work’, ‘Safety’, ‘Play’, ‘Sex’ – with each concentrating on the contribution of one particular character to the history of feminism. Players include well-known figures – Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes, women’s rights activist

and Erin Pizzey, for instance – and forgotten ones such as Jayaben Desai, who led the 1976 Grunwick strike in north-west London of largely South Asian women against the inhumane work practices of the photo-processing factory in which they worked. Lewis’s argument is that worthwhile fights were fought by women who might then attach themselves to causes or lead lives which we find impossible to admire.

The point is neither to airbrush the biographies of these women, nor junk them as subjects for study.

Joan Smith in the Literary Review noticed the effects of social media in the footnotes which read like ‘the knowingly clever one-liners people post on Twitter’. She also credited the author’s experience of being trashed online for opinions expressed as a journalist for her sensitivity to the ‘barbs aimed at well-known women in the past’. Nell Frizzell in the Telegraph enjoyed ‘Lewis’s short, sharp political

observations’. As an example: ‘Every feminist action provokes an equal, opposite reaction.’ Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard promised that you didn’t have to be on side with Lewis to enjoy her arguments: ‘I disagree with her about abortion. But it’s written in a feistily accessible style ... so it’s easy to engage with the actual substance.’

DRESDEN

THE FIRE AND THE DARKNESS

SINCLAIR MCKAY Viking, 400pp, £20

‘The first 70 pages of Sinclair McKay’s narrative offer a lyrical vision of Dresden, both light and shade, on the morning of 13th February 1945, before more than 1,000 British and American aircraft opened their bomb doors over the city,’ wrote Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. ‘The author, who achieved bestsellerdom with his earlier account of Bletchley Park’s codebreakers, has here written a much more troubled and troubling book, about one of the most controversial events of the Second World War... There is rage in his ink, as he describes the destruction of the 18th-century Catholic cathedral, whose crypts contained the remains of Saxon kings and princes: “This was not a factory producing optical equipment, or spare parts for planes or tanks. This was a holy place that had held onto its own unique life even through the coming of Hitler.

The effect of its destruction – upon those left to see it – would be that of simple despair and fury as opposed to crushed morale.”’

In his review for the Financial Times, Richard Overy declared that the book ‘has little to add to the standard account by Frederick Taylor, published 16 years ago and strangely absent from McKay’s endnotes’. But he acknowledged that ‘if the central narrative of the raid is already well known, the recollections mobilised by McKay give the experience of the bombing a vividness and poignancy that other accounts have lacked’. The Dresden atrocity is ‘a difficult subject to sell to a British readership, but a necessary one’, wrote Saul David in the Daily Telegraph. ‘McKay’s canny approach is to concentrate on the human story of the civilians and servicemen involved on both sides.’ Nonetheless The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 5

History David thought McKay ‘too generous’ in his speculative judgement that Bomber Command’s ‘city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless, but ever more desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop’. For David, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris was ‘convinced that area bombing helped to shorten the war – ignoring all evidence to the contrary – and, unlike Churchill, he never regretted Dresden’.

THE RESTAURANT

A HISTORY OF EATING OUT

WILLIAM SITWELL Simon & Schuster, 268pp, £20, ebook £9.99

Ysenda Maxton Graham, in the Times, enjoyed this ‘warm-hearted romp through the history of eating out, from the food stalls of Pompeii, via the “sharing dishes” of the Ottoman Empire, to the first mention of a tablecloth in medieval London, to the out-of-work domestic cooks (whose employers had been guillotined) who opened the first restaurants in revolutionary Paris, to the clubbing Victorians and their 10-foot-high puddings, to dismal postwar British hotels, to Charles Forte’s Festival of Britain cafeteria, to the Roux brothers’ dainty French portions at Le Gavroche, to Heston Blumenthal’s snail porridge at the Fat Duck, to 35 tiny courses at El Bulli in Barcelona, to the restoration of sausage and mash as an acceptable menu item at Kensington Place.’

Annie Gray, in the Spectator, was less convinced by ‘this gastronomic whoosh through the centuries. This is unashamedly popular history, but it’s a book of unequal halves. The early chapters are uneven, the narrative alternating between purple prose (Vesuvius’s first rumbling likened to

Paris Restaurant, 1906, by Albert Weisgerber 6 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

“the gods grumbling, perhaps like humans did when offered a bad hand at the gambling table”) and snarky asides.’

Richard Vines at Bloomberg admitted ‘the reader doesn’t get bored because Sitwell really doesn’t care to cover all the bases, preferring curious and interesting tales and tasty titbits to dull analysis’. He devotes the last few pages to a serious look at restaurant veganism and raw meat substitutes ‘which require 100 times less land and 5.5 times less water than conventional meat’ – quite a volte-face atonement for joking about ‘killing vegans one by one’ which cost him his job at Waitrose Food Illustrated 18 months ago.

THE BEAUTY AND THE TERROR

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

CATHERINE FLETCHER Bodley Head, 432pp, £25

The 16th century in Italy was one of constant, brutal warfare – the backdrop to the Renaissance – and Fletcher’s premise is that this should change our view of it. As Michael Prodger wrote in the Times, ‘As her impressive and lucid “alternative history” makes clear, for its citizens, the period 1494–1571 was less a time of high art than high danger.’

‘This is a powerful book,’ wrote Charles Nicholl in the Guardian, ‘but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory ... she intends to highlight “the brutal realities behind Renaissance works of art”’, yet, as Ian Garrick Mason decided in the Spectator, she ‘doesn’t sail very far from the ports built by her predecessors’. It’s ‘an ambitious, multifocal book’, Mary Wellesley wrote in the Sunday Times, with a large cast of characters. She has ‘added a wealth of information that will be new to most of us,’ Noel Malcolm noted in the Telegraph.

Baptismal records in Florence indicate that the husband of Mona Lisa was a slave-dealer – a ‘backstory’, the author believes, that puts a new and very negative perspective ‘on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile’. The Guardian refuted this: ‘to call [him] a “slave-trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite

than a genuine argument.’

‘But if the book is more oldfashioned than the author seems to believe ... it has all the old-fashioned virtues: it is richly well-informed and well-written, containing material of real interest on every page,’ Malcolm concluded. ‘That sort of history book is good enough for me. Better, dare I say, than the alternative.’

MR ATKINSON’S RUM CONTRACT

THE STORY OF A TANGLED INHERITANCE

RICHARD ATKINSON Fourth Estate, 496pp, £20

When Richard Atkinson understood that he and his wife could not have children, he turned to the past, to discovering his ancestors. A cache of family letters opened a Pandora’s box.

Bridget Atkinson’s book of recipes conveyed a familiarity with exotic ingredients – cinnamon, ginger, curry powder – leading Atkinson to Jamaica, and, inevitably, to the slave trade. It led to Richard Atkinson, the famous rum-contractor, conveyor of millions of gallons of the stuff to British troops during the American Revolutionary War.

The tale is ‘full of drama, surprises, twists and turns’ Matthew Parker in the Literary Review found this tale ‘enthralling ... full of drama, surprises, twists and turns. There are wars, sudden bankruptcies, doomed love affairs, tragic early deaths and bitter family feuds, all involving a cast of Atkinsons brilliantly brought to life thanks to nearly a decade of painstaking research.’

Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph was less effusive: ‘The dizzying wealth of detail may test the reader’s patience – a labour of love for Atkinson, laborious going for us.’

Yet ‘his evidence-sifting tenacity is impressive and the way he combines thumbnail nuggets with grand narratives shows how his story benefits from being written from the ground up’.

‘Personal agonies make great reading,’ opined Gerard DeGroot in

History the Times. Atkinson ‘is at his best when he candidly confesses the joys and apprehensions of ancestral research... there’s just not enough of that’. Clive Aslet concluded in the Spectator: ‘Family history can become an obsession and often a bore. But in this case it has produced gold. Love, adventure, skulduggery, moral outrage – what a story.’

RIVERS OF POWER

HOW A NATURAL FORCE RAISED KINGDOMS, DESTROYED CIVILIZATIONS AND SHAPES OUR WORLD

LAURENCE C SMITH Allen Lane, 356pp, £20

Few of these narratives lead anywhere, and sometimes you detect an almost tragic sense of desperation.’

A self-confessed ‘fluviophile’, David Aaronovitch in the Times found the book ‘instructive and entertaining on the subject of riparian disasters, natural and man-made’. Smith is ‘a decent and enthusiastic writer, whose prose is clear and who explains scientific concepts well’, but Aaronovitch regretted that the author ‘felt it necessary to throw in quite a lot of extraneous history in what I felt was an unnecessary attempt to prove the importance of rivers. I could quite easily have managed a little more on the geography of rivers and how they vary.’

SONS OF THE WAVES

THE COMMON SEAMAN IN THE HEROIC AGE OF SAIL

STEPHEN TAYLOR Yale University Press, 416pp, £20

LAWRENCE BOGLE

The Thames: underappreciated

American geography professor Laurence C Smith believes that ‘rivers hold a grandly underappreciated importance to human civilisation as we know it. Our reliance on them – for natural capital, access, territory, wellbeing and power – has sustained us for millennia and grips us still.’ Dominic Sandbrook in his Sunday Times review thought Smith ‘does a good job of reminding us how important rivers were in the birth of civilisation’ and ‘argues persuasively that the real problems come when, by commanding the high ground from where a river flows, one country controls another’s source of water’.

However, ‘like so many geographers who decide to write books explaining all human history, he ranges so widely and superficially that he ends up saying nothing very much about everything. One moment we are reading about the Nilometers used by the ancient Egyptians to measure river levels, the next we are on to the rise of Chinese communism.

As a result, entire sections read like extracts from a child’s encyclopaedia...

The men of the Royal or Merchant Navy – commonly referred to as Jack Tar because of his habit of covering his jacket with tar to keep out the elements – were a distinct and noticeable type on dry land. Stephen Taylor’s purpose, wrote Ian GarrickMason in the Spectator, was ‘to convey what such men were like, and what they experienced’. The trade ‘set its practitioners apart from their ground-based countrymen: in how they dressed, walked, spoke and behaved, British sailors were as distinct as Catholic priests’. The author ‘uses memoirs, diaries and letters to let seamen and officers speak, as far as possible, for themselves. Usually plain, though sometimes literary and poetic, their words conjure visions for us.’

Drunkenness, actively encouraged with generous daily rations, accounted for the largest number of floggings. During the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, disease and accidents accounted for 84,440 out of 103,660 deaths of naval personnel, while combat accounted for a mere 1,483.

‘In this absorbing and original book, Taylor seeks to reveal Jack Tar as an individual,’ wrote Ben Wilson in the Times. ‘The sailor that emerges in Sons of the Waves is spirited, assertive, articulate and independent.

He is much like the Jack of folklore, familiar from the novels of Patrick

O’Brian and others... The unpredictability of what lay beyond the horizon, he argues, shaped the sailor’s character, including his traits of insouciance, impulsiveness and improvidence. The strains placed on the human condition gave sailors a code of tolerance and obedience that made coexistence possible.’

THE SECOND WORLD WARS

HOW THE FIRST GLOBAL CONFLICT WAS FOUGHT AND WON

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Basic, 652pp, £18.99

This is military history written by an arch-strategist, in which brute industrial strength is the key element.

‘One of Hanson’s running themes is that the Allied victors mainly killed German and Japanese soldiers, while the Axis focused more on killing civilians,’ explained Thomas E Ricks, who reviewed it for the New York Times. ‘Over all, in its accounting of the global carnage, this book amounts to an ode in praise of deterrence and against appeasement and isolationism.’ Ricks ‘found it lively and provocative, full of the kind of novel perceptions that can make a familiar subject interesting again. It wouldn’t make a good introduction to World War II, but it may win readers already familiar with the conflict’s events.’

Hanson, wrote Gerard DeGroot in the Times, is ‘a brutally pragmatic historian who cuts through myth and hype. Stripped of emotion, his war is reduced to simple equation: “Victory ... was a morality tale of production besting killing: those who made more stuff beat those who killed more people.”’ Hanson ‘provides some fresh insights on an excessively popular subject where originality is difficult. He eschews narrative, concentrating instead on a systematic deconstruction of the war that examines in intricate detail the six big combatant nations — Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and Italy.’ But the exercise left DeGroot cold. Hanson ‘counts ships sunk, but never considers the lives shattered. Emotions never impede rational analysis. Presented in this starkly reductive fashion, war becomes too easy to contemplate.

Military history used to be written this way. It should no longer.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 7

Biography and Memoir

Machiavelli by Santi di Tito, 1584–6

MACHIAVELLI

HIS LIFE AND TIMES

ALEXANDER LEE Picador, 762pp, £30

A BITE OF THE APPLE

A LIFE WITH BOOKS, WRITERS AND VIRAGO

LENNIE GOODINGS OUP, 320pp, £16.99

Lennie Goodings is chair of Virago Press, having first joined what was then a tiny feminist publishing house ‘to do the publicity’ in the early 1980s. Her book is part memoir, part history of Virago, part practical guide to publishing, part affectionate portraits of writers she has worked with, part a defence of the continuing need for Virago to exist at all – ‘Does any other successful publisher get asked constantly if they are still necessary?’ the author asks, with wistful good humour.

Mark Bostridge in the Spectator was struck by Goodings’s ‘impressive idealism ... about the ways in which the published word can change society and help readers to become the people they want to be’. In the Guardian Bidisha missed the malice ‘that makes a literary memoir truly great – the touch of poison that seasons the recipe’. But the book snapped ‘into wit and colour’ when Goodings wrote about her work as an editor. Frances Wilson in Prospect honed in on Goodings’s account of the white male vicar who published a series of stories about British Asian girls under a false name in 1987 – the episode ‘proved prescient for current debates about fiction and identity

politics’. Wilson noted Goodings’s argument that ‘the new hurdle is getting books by women to be read by men’ and suggested that ‘Virago continues to mirror the evolving feminist movement, and like that movement it has achieved a great deal and almost nothing at all.’ She gave the last word to Goodings: ‘Why are men tone deaf?’

OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE SCENES OF A FAMILY AND A PLANET IN CRISIS

SVANTE AND GRETA THUNBERG, MALENA AND BEATA ERNMAN, Allen Lane, 288pp, £16.99

Greta Thunberg is named as one of four authors of this book, together with her mother and father and younger sister, but it is her mother’s voice which dominates. Most of the 108 scenes into which the book is divided predate the school strikes which have made Greta Thunberg into a Joan of Arc for our times. They describe Greta’s descent into breakdown aged 11 – she refused to eat and stopped talking to strangers – and how she recovered when she discovered an urgent mission to make the world ‘listen to the science’ on climate change. Along the way we learn of Greta’s mother’s childhood eating disorder, and how she was saved by music and became a starry opera singer, and of the special needs of Greta’s dancing sister. The book doesn’t ask, but readers might, whether some of the strength of Greta Thunberg’s protest was honed

Greta Thunberg: Joan of Arc of our times The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 9

ANDERS HELLBERG

Most persons’ knowledge of Machiavelli is confined to a reading of The Prince, his manual for rulers.

But Alexander Lee’s new biography, wrote John Guy in the Literary Review, ‘seeks to position Machiavelli securely in the culture, society and politics of his time and to consider the full range of his writings, rather than concentrating narrowly on Il principe... What we get is what it says on the tin: an utterly absorbing month-by-month, often day-by-day account of Machiavelli’s life and career, contextualised through a near-epic history of Florence’s involvement in the Italian Wars, from the city’s expulsion of the Medici in 1494 to the sack of Rome in 1527.’

According to John Gray in the New Statesman, Lee tells us that although Machiavelli married for life ‘that did not stop him patronising courtesans and rent boys, or engaging in a late-life love affair that for a time consumed him’, and although ‘he died an avowed Christian... a deathbed dream provoked a laughing last word in which he confessed that he would be happier in the company of those who were consigned to Hell’. But the author also ‘presents a novel interpretation of his subject’s thinking. Machiavelli, Lee argues persuasively, was a radical conservative who aimed to show his fellow-citizens how to reclaim self-government from a corrupt oligarchy.’ He believed that Christian

values were incompatible with good republican government and his message ‘challenges liberal humanism as much as monotheism’, Gray argued, because in our modern world ‘liberal humanist values are Christian values in secular clothing’.

Christopher Hart, in his review for the Sunday Times, alighted on some choice biographical details: that Machiavelli was sexually abused by a high-minded tutor, that he fathered seven children, and that he once had enthusiastic sex with a prostitute whose head was covered with a towel and regretted taking a peek under the towel after the act. ‘Lee’s is a long, dense account of a fascinating man and a complex period, and for devotees only,’ Hart concluded.

‘Nevertheless, it will surely be the definitive book on Machiavelli for some years, and provides tough yet nourishing food for thought.’

Biography and Memoir in a struggle for airtime at home.

Rosamund Urwin in the Times pre-empted critics who might want to accuse Greta of ‘Meghan Markle and a private-jet style hypocrisy’ by pointing out that profits from the book are going to environmental charities. David Mitchell in the Guardian made much of the fact that Greta Thunberg has been diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. He described her as ‘a default autism advocate as well as a climate activist’ and endorsed her own description of her Asperger’s as a ‘superpower’. Jane Shilling in the Evening Standard was less moved, describing the book as an ‘uneasy account of painful family dynamics, awkwardly (and, it is hard not to feel, somewhat expediently) hitched to ... environmental issues’.

A BIT OF A STRETCH

THE DIARIES OF A PRISONER

CHRIS ATKINS Atlantic, 336pp, £16.99

‘If you thought you knew how bad British prisons are, you haven’t read this book,’ Blake Morrison wrote in the Guardian. ‘Drugs, riots, suicides, squalor, overcrowding, understaffing, dangerous criminals let out early, minor offenders kept in too long or wrongly banged up in the first place; that’s only a fraction of the story.’

The acclaimed documentary film-maker Atkins was an unlikely candidate for a five-year prison sentence, but was in there for tax fraud. ‘The shock-horror of being a middle-class man in prison is well evoked,’ Libby Purves noted in the Times.

Olivia Lichtenstein in the Daily Mail found it ‘a highly readable and thought-provoking account ....

Alongside the picaresque tale of our hero navigating prison life runs the darker story of the ineptitude of the

Prison grinds down the human soul 10 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

penal system: a rotting, archaic machine held hostage to staff shortages, impenetrable bureaucracy and unforgivable ineptitude.’

‘Chris Atkins’s powerful memoir of his time in HMP Wandsworth is a dispassionate record of the grinding down of the human soul, deliberate hopelessness, insane and moribund bureaucracy, the whims of bullying guards,’ Roger Lewis concurred in the Telegraph.

Yet, as Lichtenstein attested, ‘The book teems with larger than life characters’ and contains ‘many lively and alarming anecdotes’. Alexander Larman in the Critic agreed the ‘anecdotes are hilarious ... there is a wealth of gallows humour amongst his fellow inmates.’

Will Heaven in the Spectator applauded ‘a razor-sharp and darkly funny memoir that should be mandatory reading for justice ministers, ministry officials, Her Majesty’s inspectors, and anyone at all interested in the anarchy that is the UK prison system’.

Princes in the Tower? Tallis declares that ‘The suggestion that Margaret was in any way involved ... is frankly ludicrous.’

‘Tallis is a zealous destroyer of myths,’ Gareth Russell agreed in the Times, although he thought it ‘hopeful and unlikely’ that that particular conspiracy theory would be put to bed. However, he noted that ‘Margaret’s subsequent intrigues with the princes’ widowed mother, Elizabeth Woodville, are thrillingly told...Tallis deploys an extraordinary eye for detail in telling this story. She explains throughout her use of the sources, while maintaining an elegant prose,’ Russell concluded.

‘Through this superb revisionist biography, Margaret Beaufort emerges as a fascinating and often surprisingly sympathetic matriarch.’

UNSPEAKABLE

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

JOHN BERCOW W&N, 438pp, £20

UNCROWNED QUEEN THE FATEFUL LIFE OF MARGARET BEAUFORT, TUDOR MATRIARCH

NICOLA TALLIS Michael O’Mara, 362pp, £20

When her son Henry Tudor became King in 1485, Margaret Beaufort took the ‘momentous and unprecedented step’ of having herself declared by parliament to be a ‘femme sole’, giving her full control of her property independent of her husband. ‘She was now able to step out from the “supporting role” of wife and mother and take control of both her life and her identity,’ Katherine J Lewis wrote in the TLS. Tallis is one of the rising stars of a new generation of historians and her ‘analysis of Margaret forms part of an important and growing area of scholarship on the significant involvement of women in 15thcentury politics’, Lewis continued.

‘Margaret emerges from this compelling study as admirable and relatable, accommodating astutely to the volatile political climate and emerging from it as “a woman of extraordinary determination and self-possession”.’

But what of the suspicion that Margaret arranged the murder of the

John Bercow: auto-hagiographer

Reviewers reading former Speaker John Bercow’s autobiography mostly found that the memoir was appositely titled. Quentin Letts, writing in the Times, said that when he finished it, he felt ‘physically dirty.

When reading it on trains, I hid the cover from shame. But it does have a value. As an example of autohagiography, of extended hypocrisy, of unwitting and damaging selfrevelation it is both unspeakable and unbeatable.’ Stephen Bush writing in the New Statesman was scarcely more measured; the book lacks ‘reflection – and an unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to take others with him on his intellectual journey’ making for ‘an unsatisfying memoir of his time in office’.

Biography and Memoir Allison Pearson, in the Telegraph, found that a ‘seething, unappeasable anger runs through this autobiography’. It is written by a ‘preposterous little man’. While Patrick Kidd, writing for Politicshome, felt that the problem for Bercow was that ‘his own leaders failed to recognise his greatness’.

Bercow is coruscating about his political colleagues, and reminded Kidd of the fictional broadcaster Alan Partridge, who also wrote a selfserving autobiography in which every anecdote ended with the phrase ‘needless to say, I had the last laugh’.

Andrew Rawnsley, in the Guardian, perceived two motives: ‘this is memoir as both therapy and revenge. Vengeance on all those who have crossed him during a contentious career. Therapy by trumpeting to the world that “Crater Face” [as a youth he suffered from acne] defied those bullying classmates by rising to occupy parliament’s high chair for a decade.’

child to sex, and describes the ‘pure liquid heaven’ of the hormones coursing through her, which she likens to heroin. O’Keefe described it as ‘a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation’. Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times praised it as ‘quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read’ while Julia Bueno in the Times Literary Supplement noted that this was a ‘far from a Cuskian account of the darker emotions our children can pull us towards… The vocation of motherhood clearly wins out for her.’

EILEEN

THE MAKING OF GEORGE ORWELL

SYLVIA TOPP Unbound, 495pp, £25

MY WILD AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS A MOTHER’S STORY

point of view and shows that Orwell persistently failed to do so’.

Rachel Cooke in the Guardian complained that Topp neither makes the case for Eileen’s importance to Orwell, nor renders her interesting in her own right. But Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail found it a compelling portrait of a marriage, and felt after reading that she had been ‘living in a damp, cold, mouseinfested cottage’ with sore fingers from typing up the husband’s manuscripts ‘while he coughs all over me, a perpetual drip on the end of his nose, his infected TB breath imbuing the place with a sickly-sweet odour... there’s so much illness in this book that you feel the very pages are contagious.’

INDIAN SUN

CLOVER STROUD

THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF RAVI SHANKAR

Doubleday, 256pp, £16.99

Clover Stroud’s first memoir, The Wild Other, described years of adventuring after her idyllic childhood ended when she was 16 after her mother suffered a horrific riding accident. It was short-listed for the Wainwright prize for naturewriting. The second is set in the Oxfordshire countryside and describes the first year in the life of her fifth child, and some difficulties with her eldest son, now 16. Alice O’Keefe in the Guardian hailed it as another sort of nature-writing – ‘but this is nature as experienced from the inside. [Stroud]... excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes.’

Stroud writes of how motherhood forces her to pretend ‘to be the person I really am not: patient, hygienic, gentle, interested in other people’s children, good at craft, moderate, rarely anxious’ and contrasts this to her sexual self ‘when I can forget all that and be something different, unembarrassed and lustful’. But while ‘sex is the opposite of motherhood’ she compares her labour pains for the birth of her fifth

The book was ‘a revelation, because it sees things from Eileen’s point of view’

OLIVER CRASKE Faber, 672pp, £20

Eileen: stayed with Orwell despite affairs

Eileen O’Shaughnessy was 30 when she married Orwell in 1936, and embarked on a life of domestic slavery in a remote cottage in Hertfordshire. When Orwell went to Spain the next year, she followed him; both had affairs but they stayed together. When he started work on Animal Farm Eileen typed the manuscript, and covered the back of each page with suggestions. John Carey in the Sunday Times was persuaded by Topp’s suggestion that the novel was ‘almost a joint production’. But in 1945, before the novel was published and just after adopting a son, Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic. Orwell had always been the sick one, but she was sicker.

To Carey the book was ‘a revelation, because it sees things from Eileen’s

As Ammar Kalia pointed out in the Guardian, this epic ‘first authorised biography is the product of 25 years’ research and interviews’. And ‘what a life he lived’, said the Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury: ‘Shankar was brought up in straitened circumstances by his mother and only introduced to his father aged eight. By then he had suffered [repeated] rape at the hands of a man he described as “an uncle”.’

In the Times Richard Morrison wrote, ‘You learn about the six years he spent as a young man living like a monk in the house of his guru. He practised 12 hours a day until he was infused with the 72 parent scales of Indian classical music and 250 ragas.

As he explained to George Harrison, there are no shortcuts to greatness on the sitar.

‘His private life also became a quest – that involved sexual relationships with hundreds of women... In three months in 1978, while still in a close relationship with The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 11

Biography and Memoir

Ravi Shankar in his late twenties

‘It was as if the sitar became the torso of a beautiful woman’ Kamala in India, he seduced Sukanya (who lived in London) then impregnated his American tour manager, Sue Jones, in Los Angeles.’

Pendlebury noted Shankar’s twin passions of sex and the sitar: ‘Deeply moved while playing, he wrote to a friend: “It was as if the sitar became the torso of a beautiful woman and I was making love to it – tenderly – ardently and wildly!”’

Even though he became its darling, ‘Shankar disliked many aspects of the hippy scene,’ said Pendlebury. He ‘played at Woodstock, but found it “impossible to connect to the vast crowd”. The audience, sitting stoned in mud “reminded me of water buffaloes in India”.’

APROPOS OF NOTHING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

WOODY ALLEN

‘As one might expect from a writer with his comic pedigree,’ wrote Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, ‘Allen’s style is gossipy and spry when dealing with his childhood and rise to fame...

Self-deprecation is Allen’s default setting and his bleak humour can be winning... Elsewhere, however, egotism tramples wit.’ In her

Woody Allen: bleak humour

to have been ‘taken unawares by the full brunt’ of his ex-partner Mia Farrow’s assault when she discovered his relationship with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi and subsequently accused him in 1992 of sexually abusing another adopted daughter, Dylan, he ‘paints himself as the naif that in fact he may very well be, but it does not absolve him of obliviousness and a curious lack of self-reflection’.

BROKEN GREEK

A STORY OF CHIP SHOPS AND POP SONGS

PETE PAPHIDES Quercus, 585pp, £20

This childhood memoir ‘opens with Paphides as the son of Greek-Cypriot immigrants whose dream of a better life has them frying fish six days a

Pete Paphides with his elder brother: in love with pop music

week in a Birmingham suburb’, explained Jackie Annesley in the Sunday Times. ‘Life was spent in two very different cultural spaces,’ said the Guardian’s John Harris. ‘This seems to have contributed to… his decision to stop talking to anyone apart from his mother, father and brother – what a child psychologist would call selective mutism. “A Trip switch had activated itself in my head and it was best for me not to talk.”’

‘Paphides,’ explained Annesley, ‘is riddled with insecurities and phobias, including only speaking to his family between the ages of four and seven, and embraces British pop culture to educate himself “when parents have no parenting left in them”.’

‘His silence is finally broken in 1977,’ said Alan Johnson in the New Statesman. ‘By then young Pete is so in love with pop music that he’d lift his parents’ telephone receiver most days… listening to British Telecom’s Dial-a-Disc service. Pop music for him, is “a place where the big issues were addressed”. Waterloo by Abba was a history lesson; Roxanne by the Police taught him about prostitution... ‘“All the music I liked was performed by people who might feasibly step in and take care of me if something happened to my parents,” [Paphides] writes. Lynsey de Paul, Kiki Dee and Sting were contenders,’ Annesley noted.

‘The options available when it all gets too much include two polar opposites,’ Harris concluded. ‘One is the silence Paphides adopted when he was three. The other is the glorious noise that eased him back into the world.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 13

PETE PAPHIDES

SHANKAR FAMILY

Arcade, 400pp, £25, ebook £15.49

Observer review, Rachel Cooke found the book to be ‘a mixed bag. If he can write (obviously, he can), and if he is, at points, surprisingly honest (eye-poppingly so, on occasion), then he can also be a bore and a selfdeceiver... I regard it as both disgraceful and alarming that Hachette, his original publisher, gutlessly dropped his book following a walkout by some of its staff – and that though I was sometimes repulsed by it myself, I was also fascinated, even entertained.’

Allen biographer David Evanier, in a review for the online magazine Quillette, called it a ‘calm, blithe, and objective memoir’ and noted that ‘Allen emerges, at wild odds with his comedic persona, as a very tough, independent artist, a passionate lover of women, avowing his innocence of the one and only charge ever levelled against him in 84 years.’ In claiming

Forgotten authors LUCY LETHBRIDGE believes Elizabeth von Arnim’s best novels were written after her more famous German garden series Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Elizabeth von Arnim’s first book, has rarely been out of print since it was published in 1898.

An autobiographical novel in the form of a diary by a young Englishwoman married to a stuffy Prussian aristocrat, it’s not hard to see the appeal: the book is about the healing power of garden-making but also, because that can get a bit samey, throws in some wincingly rude but astute portraits of human beings. Fed up with her city flat and the stifling formalities of social life in Berlin, Elizabeth has decamped to her husband’s vast estate, where the schloss has been empty since the departure of the nuns who were its last inhabitants. With a mixture of trial, error, whimsy and migrant labour, she creates a garden in the English style: a messy, anarchic profusion of planting in curvy borders. It is an act of revolt against all the straight, rigorously weeded, lines she finds in German gardens and more generally in German bourgeois life and morals – and the book moves between rhapsodic descriptions of creative garden disorder and biting sketches of the locals with their narrow lives, buttoned sofas, puddings, ugly children and retrograde views of women.

Elizabeth’s chafing at her husband’s eye-rollingly awful views on women is the novel’s scratching post. Her tiresomely arch friend Irais is imported to argue with Henning while Elizabeth, having trailed her coat, slips out to look at the garden.

Henning was 15 years older than her and does sound a terrible bore: it’s a mystery (an interesting one) how they ever got together. In the novel he is referred to as the Man of Wrath and is forever wondering why she doesn’t give the garden a good tidy-up or retiring magnanimously to his study when an argument looms.

We learn much about his firmly held views on wifely duties and that a husband is perfectly justified in knocking a woman about if she shows signs of ‘aspirations’. His wife’s aspirations, however, proved resilient, and following the success of her first book, Elizabeth went on to publish more novels on the theme of witty, effervescent Elizabeth, her 14 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

Statue of Elizabeth in Buk, Poland

garden, her foolish husband and strange, obdurate Germanness.

Elizabeth von Arnim was born May Beauchamp in Australia in 1866 and the family settled in London three years later. She was clever and musical and, at 23, her father took her on an extended tour of the Continent during which she met the German Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. He was instantly smitten, pursued her vigorously and married her the moment she’d completed a threemonth intensive German course.

They went to live in a comfortable flat in Berlin and, by the time she wrote her first novel, she’d had three of their five children and had created her garden at the Von Arnim estate at Nassenheide (now in Poland, the house bombed into ruins by the British).

In her widowhood, Elizabeth lived in Switzerland, where reports of her celebrated wit, entertainment value and love affairs were legion

Henning died in 1912, three years after the publication of Caravaners, Elizabeth’s irresistibly comic portrait of a German baron and his wife on a caravanning holiday in Sussex with English friends. Seen through the bewildered eyes of the pompous and stupid Man of Wrath (he gets the diary this time) the behaviour of the English is incomprehensible and against nature. The men help with the washing up! Though unimpeachably top-drawer they hold socialist views! The women argue back! When he hears the group whispering about a wife who cannot leave because she so pities her husband’s ‘loneliness’, he doesn’t for a moment think they can be talking about him.

In her widowhood, Elizabeth lived in Switzerland; reports of her celebrated wit, entertainment value and love affairs were legion. It is also interestingly mysterious, therefore, that for her second husband, she chose the alcoholic, convicted bigamist Earl Russell. He was a horror, depicted by Elizabeth in grippingly seductive detail as the empty, narcissistic husband of a child bride in Vera (1921). Von Arnim’s best novels, I think, appear in this period. The mannered fan-batting of the German garden series is replaced by a deeper generosity to the complexity of human behaviour – and to vulnerability. After a painful affair with a man 30 years younger, she wrote the agonising Love – about middle-aged Catherine’s marriage to a boy in his early twenties. But even here the Man of Wrath looms in the form of Catherine’s sanctimonious and self-indulgent vicar son-in-law.

Her final novel, Mr Skeffington, appeared in 1940, a year before her death. It was later made into a film starring Bette Davis. It is a portrait of an ageing beauty, once the toast of London, who finds herself compelled to seek out her old lovers, one by one, only to arrive in the end at the dull, long-forgotten husband on whose money she depends. Mr Skeffington doesn’t seem remotely like a Man of Wrath but even though he appears only at the end of the novel, their reunion is drawn with both tenderness and forgiveness for both parties.

Plague Poetry A Litany in Time of Plague (extract) Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys; Death proves them all but toys; None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Thomas Nashe 1593 The Pestilence This pushy and unwelcome visitor creates a fever Of excitement like a fox appearing in a chicken run, Or when a recognised seducer smirks their way Into a teenage party; pulses and expectations race.

The old identify a time that they dislike; The springtime flowers prematurely fade, The opera goes on too long and trips to India And Italy, promising warmth, indulgence and escape From time’s slow march, must be delayed.

Our only champions – actively unglamorous Scientists in suits, and wooden ministers and mayors With earnest clipboard frowns and stilted diction.

The club we’ve joined advises we expect a lengthy stay With shrinking funds, distress and possible extinction.

So far it’s been a phoney war whose real cruelties Have been inflicted somewhere else; and so, like soldiers Marching to the front, we’re talking sense and balancing The odds. Do we succeed in packaging the swift irrelevance Of beauty, wit, possessions, past success, courage And even love? Or does the fox untie our brains Before he does the business? Is it remotely sane To buy those crates of bogroll, beans and soup?

Seventy years back our fear of nuclear war could just Be soothed by tinned sardines and powdered milk, Secreted in the roof; much later found and binned By mocking children and bemused executors.

A nervous whine greets each defensive stratagem, Pointing its quivering finger at the obvious Mistakes and all the horrors sure to follow.

Kipling would sigh at manliness so hollow.

The town is greatly changed, the streets perversely quiet Except where ‘supermarket’ stores, last month so firmly Calm and deeply stocked, must gasp for breath While from their doors, with all the vigour of a plague Of angry ants, their wild-eyed shoppers drag huge Bulging bags away. The little shops now look as if Their former confidence will soon be turned to dust And spread across their bare abandoned counters.

A 16th-century plague could only kill and leave; This modern plague may just be cheated Of your life – and take your livelihood instead.

A brightly coloured blanket of apparent cash Descends to shield our shivering community And we are asked to trust that such a contrast to the usual Miserly restraint is just a sign of strength. We hesitate To guess what we will find when finally the blanket floats away And we can see what little has survived to face the day.

But when our visitor departs his grand destructive Triumph will be compromised by pleasures which He accidentally sired. For children, school at home Restores to them the proper custody of their education.

Plenty of ‘art’, insane dislike of screens abandoned, And teachers grateful – finally – for their pupils’ generous Participation. Outside the birds and bees observe That garden productivity is being usefully improved; The sheep record that footpath walkers have a strange Good humour and, from a certain distance, smile incessantly At lambs and other humans, as if in sudden love With every living thing. Are they unwell? Or is the lack Of traffic in the sky above making them all so debonair?

We’ll never understand; last night they stood outside Their homes and clapped and clapped the chilly evening air.

Jim Peers, Fenny Compton, April 2020 I wrote this when the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to take hold and as a result of then coming across the Nashe poem, which reflects the British experience of plague at the end of the 16th century. That experience was of course more frightening and lethal than ours but nevertheless comparable, despite the enormous changes in society.

Paperbacks

16 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

brutal and backward conditions.’

Harry Sidebottom in the Telegraph, thought the novel ‘genuinely thrilling’.

And David Sexton in the Evening Standard called it ‘a truly surprising future-history thriller. Fabulous, really.’

Two young girls go missing in an isolated town in rural Russia – this is the theme of Julia Phillips’s debut novel Disappearing Earth (Scribner, 272pp, £8.99). ‘Each of the novel’s 13 chapters is told from the perspective

of a character,’ explained Laura Miller in the New Yorker... It doesn’t ‘much concern itself with the search for the girls’, she continued. ‘Instead, with each new character’s perspective, it builds a portrait of a place.’ Sarah Moss in the Guardian had some reservations, but thought Phillips could certainly write: ‘characters, dialogue, pacing, the fine balancing of what is shown and what goes unsaid are all done with aplomb.’

LAWRENCE BOGLE

Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep (Arrow, 432pp, £8.99) is a ‘work of speculative fiction set in Britain 800 years into the future, after a “systemic collapse of technical civilisation” known as the Apocalypse’, explained Alex Preston in the Guardian. ‘Into the void of the “Dark Age” steps a rejuvenated and dogmatic church, whose authoritarian rule and obsessive suppression of heretical “scientism” ensure that people live in

Fashion CLOTHES…

AND OTHER THINGS THAT MATTER

ALEXANDRA SHULMAN Cassell, 352pp, £16.99

— a photo shoot with the Duchess of Cambridge, dinner with Richard Gere, a portrait session with Michelle Obama — she is resolutely closemouthed.’ More openness might have resulted in not only ‘a nice, intelligent, well-researched collection of essays, but also a riveting read’.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MALCOLM MCLAREN THE BIOGRAPHY

PAUL GORMAN Constable, 848pp, £30, ebook £12.99 Alexandra Shulman: quiet observer

LINDA BROWNLEE

Neither an autobiography, nor a fashion manual, this is a memoir and social history narrated through the prism of fashion. Alexandra Shulman was editor of British Vogue for 25 years, and here she recalls the highlights and lowlights of her time by sifting through the contents of her wardrobe.

There is nothing clichéd about this fashion editor: ‘Yes, she may have had white high heels custom-made for her by Manolo Blahnik and handfuls of free Chanel jackets, but even while being a linchpin in the industry she remained fashion’s quiet observer… So many in fashion affect nonchalance, Shulman just has bags of it,’ said Kate Finnigan in the Daily Mail.

For Gwendolyn Smith, writing in inews, it was ‘an enjoyably blunt, witty read from a woman who knows that clothes are not the only thing that matter – but who understands that they teach us a lot about pretty much everything else that does’.

One of the conceits of the book is how we associate moments in our lives with whatever we were wearing at the time. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian enjoyed this relatability in Shulman. Clothes are not only about fashion, but ‘the buying of clothes involves complex emotions as well as, sometimes, a certain spirited ridiculousness’. Still, she was critical of Shulman’s sense of discretion.

After all, the author has spent time with some of fashion’s greatest icons, yet there is no propensity to tell-all.

Lauren Indvik in the FT agreed.

‘There are no insights as to how she climbed the career ladder, or navigated the choppy political waters of Condé Nast. When it comes to the famous people who pepper her book 18 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

‘I blame the granny,’ began Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Daily Mail.

‘Malcolm McLaren, widely considered to be the creator of punk, grew up in a dysfunctional, sweary 1950s household in north London, looked after by his maternal grandmother, Rose.’ Indeed, the granny loomed large in all the book’s reviews, in particular her stricture that ‘to be bad is good, because to be good is simply boring’. For Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times, ‘This excellent biography is testament to how fiercely he internalised Rose’s advice — there’s little that’s boring here.’ Fiona Sturges in the Guardian agreed, writing that ‘As Paul Gorman’s mammoth biography illustrates, McLaren was never boring — though he could be a dreadful pain in the arse.’

Nevertheless, could a 900-page tome be justified? Paul Tierney in the i thought so, describing the book as a ‘mesmerising journey’, while for Sturges it was ‘Neither hagiography nor hatchet job… curious, rigorous and, despite its eye-watering length, rarely dull.’ Crucial to the McLaren story is Sex, the clothes shop he and Vivienne Westwood founded in the King’s Road. ‘A transgressive haven of rubber, leather and bondagewear,

Malcolm McLaren: founder of Sex

it became the Sex Pistols’ birthplace,’ wrote Segal, while Sturges added the tantalising snippet that ‘newsreader Reginald Bosanquet was allegedly a client’. Segal relates that McLaren died in 2010 from ‘mesothelioma, the cancer commonly caused by asbestos exposure’. According to Gorman, this was probably, and fittingly, a result of holes he smashed in the ceiling of Sex 30 years earlier — ‘the act of destruction that finally caught up with him’.

DRESSED FOR WAR

THE STORY OF VOGUE EDITOR AUDREY WITHERS, FROM THE BLITZ TO THE SWINGING SIXTIES

JULIE SUMMERS Simon & Schuster, 416pp, £20

Audrey Withers, who edited Vogue for 20 years from 1940, unflaggingly keeping the magazine going during the bombs and rations of wartime, was a bluestocking rather than a fashion-plate. As Ysenda Maxtone Graham put it in the Times: ‘Toothy, brainy and unflagging (and not quite pretty enough to go on the cover of this book – she’s relegated to the endpapers), Withers had been a keen lacrosse player at her girls’ boarding school and carried her games-pitch cheerfulness and sense of schoolgirl honour into her adult life.’

Lucy Davies in the Daily Telegraph noted how Withers took the helm at Vogue during the Blitz and the staff had to escape to the cellar during bombing raids two or three times a day. ‘One learns, vividly, in Julie Summers’s magnificent new biography, how Withers took all this in her stride, keeping a small attaché case to hand, into which she could stuff anything vital for the next issue – proofs, copy, photographs, sandwiches (she was notoriously frugal) and a gas mask. “We look as if we are going on a peculiar picnic,” Withers wrote in a Vogue editorial, designed to show anxious readers how they, too, might find the courage to go on.’ In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones was full of admiration: ‘I’d have liked more gossip and I’d have loved more photos, but this meticulously detailed, fascinating book should be read by every young woman starting out so they might realise hard work, not connections, will get you anywhere.’

Sex

The male’s fear of women’s passion...

A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX KATE LISTER Unbound, 456pp, £25

Kate Lister, who curates a website and social media accounts catchily named ‘Whores of Yore’, makes her book-publishing debut with this quirky omnium-gatherum of all that is saucy and strange in human history. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams reported that the book ‘contains, as the title promises, many delightful curiosities. There are people, for instance, who get aroused by the sun.

“Actirasty”, it’s called, which sounds like a probiotic yoghurt drink but would of course be life-changing if you lived in Málaga,’ not to mention medieval sex-spells, questionable monkey-gland therapies, virginity tests, bicycle fetishes and much else besides: ‘Dildos, the clitoris, depilatory creams are all explored in her rambunctious style.’

For all its fruitiness, Roger Lewis wrote in the Mail, ‘Lister’s book is more about denial and suppression than fulfilment and adventure […]

The chief, disturbing, lesson of A Curious History of Sex is the male’s fear of women’s passion and independent erotic existence, a “moral leprosy” that had to be crushed […] the descriptions of the treatment of women are very angry-making.’

Nevertheless, he found it tremendous fun: ‘Had Victoria Wood decided to write a scholarly book about sex, it would be like this. Lister has a saucy wit and I loved the deployment of ingenious euphemisms: baby-cave, lady

baubles, sugared almond. I laughed out loud.’

The New York Times’s Dwight Garner was charmed, or semicharmed, too. Although he warned that the author was ‘an Englishwoman’ he pronounced her ‘a strong writer’: ‘Lister is aware that her book, dark passages aside, is a romp rather than an especially serious or comprehensive work of history or criticism. She has the double entendres to prove it: “This is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless.”

‘This is a book of varying merit. At moments, when Lister is piling one fact atop another, A Curious History of Sex has a Wikipedia-page vibe. But she manages to pull out of these midair stalls. She’s mostly quite good company on the page.’

STRANGE ANTICS

A HISTORY OF SEDUCTION

CLEMENT KNOX William Collins, 416pp, £25

Clement Knox takes on quite the subject in this ‘dense and capacious’ history of seduction, said Helen McCarthy in the Guardian, arguing that ‘the origins of our current sexual discontents can be located some 300 years ago in Enlightenment-era debates over human nature.

“Whether we are moved more by reason or by the passions, whether we are rational agents or creatures vulnerable to error, deceit and suasion” is the question he sees as foundational to any understanding of sexuality now.’

Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times, though, found that argument was hard to follow amid the distracting historical detail: ‘It is the argument that distinguishes Strange Antics, and this tends to get lost inside the life stories of the figures in the tent. There is much to praise here, but the book would have been improved by reducing the word load, focusing the plot line and tightening the guy-ropes throughout.’ Houman Barekat in the Spectator concurred: ‘The stories told here have been told many times before; Knox’s achievement, in arranging them into a single narrative, is more curatorial than authorial.’

Though Simon Ings, writing in the

Times, agreed that the book resembled a ‘greatest hits’ parade of sexual moments from history, he said: ‘Just as the game begins to pall, Knox delivers a blistering finale, drawing together themes of sexual politics, economics, law and the ordinary human desire for love and companionship into a vision of our present condition.’

THE OX

THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROCK STARS

PAUL REES Constable, 352pp, £20

There was a mixed reception for this book – produced by a former Q editor, and with help from the subject’s family, and leaning heavily on an unfinished memoir by the late bass guitar player for The Who. John Entwistle died at 57 in Las Vegas after a night of sex, drink and cocaine, and was just the type of rock star that his demise suggests.

Writing in the Observer, Jude Rogers noted that the rock memoir – once the province of selfcongratulatory anecdotes about sexual misbehaviour and chemical excess – has been transformed in recent years by the likes of Viv Albertine and Chrissie Hynde: ‘Next to them, this biography feels desperately passé, from its subheading onwards.’

The book, like its subject, has early promise: Entwhistle’s sensitive writing about his childhood is quoted, and the reader gets a (patchy) sense of just how ‘thrilling The Who’s music, and Entwistle’s urgent, virtuosic bass-playing, could be’. But ‘The Who’s music then takes a backseat as Entwistle’s other “greatest rock star” attributes take over, namely being oafish, buying crazy things for his mansion and enjoying the company of women who aren’t his wife.’ […] ‘If Entwistle was the last of the great rock stars,’ she concluded, ‘then good riddance. Let’s hope music memoirs of this nature go the same way.’ Jonah Raskin in the New York Journal of Books, was friendlier, but warned: ‘Like so many other biographies of famous musicians, The Ox offers a cautionary tale about a man who began songs and couldn’t finish them, much as he started his autobiography and never got to the end.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 19

Miscellaneous Montaigne and Monet. I quite enjoyed, however, its almost fierce unfashionableness.’

Landscape gardener Marian Boswall was full of praise in Gardens Illustrated: ‘a book so wise and comfortable that it merits a place alongside Christopher Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden by the side of every bed’. Stuart-Smith’s writing, wrote Boswall, ‘has the simple grace of someone who really knows her subject and how best to explain it’.

THE WELL-GARDENED MIND

SMALL MEN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY

It is only a year since Paris’s great cathedral of Notre-Dame went up in flames. Agnès Poirier has produced what Jon Henley in the Observer called ‘a slim, vivid and engrossing history both of that night and of the edifice she calls “always far more than just a cathedral … The face of civilisation, and the soul of a nation”.’

Constable, 352pp, £20

Collins, 352pp, £20

John Carey in the Sunday Times enjoyed the book’s genre-defying energy. ‘It is part anthropology, part psychotherapy and part autobiography, plus much invigorating advice about how to stay healthy.’ It’s not an easy read, warned Carey, ‘and hops from subject to subject, unaccountably.’ But Treneman enjoyed the surprises. ‘At times the sheer scope of references seems a bit surreal with Jack in the Beanstalk joining Immanuel Kant, the green guerrilla movement,

Oneworld, 219pp, £16.99

ED WEST

SUE STUART-SMITH

The Stuart-Smiths have created a bit of magic in their Barn Garden in Hertfordshire

AGNES POIRIER

THE DECLINE, FALL AND UNLIKELY RETURN OF CONSERVATISM

REDISCOVERING NATURE IN THE MODERN WORLD

Sue Stuart-Smith’s book couldn’t have been published at a better time.

As Ann Treneman in the Times remarked: ‘There is a reason that the entire country now seems to be buying up seeds to plant, and Stuart-Smith would see this desire to create green life in a plagued world as entirely rational.’ The author’s qualifications are perfect: ‘she is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who is also a knowledgeable gardener.

Her husband is the celebrated garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith and together, over the past 30 years, they have created a bit of magic in their Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.’

NOTRE-DAME

THE SOUL OF FRANCE

First there was Brexit. Then a huge Tory majority in the last election. So what’s not to like if you’re a conservative? Rather a lot, according to conservative columnist Ed West.

Thanks to liberal dominance of the ‘commanding heights’ of culture, the Devil now has all the best tunes. No wonder most educated people under 40 dance to them.

The son of maverick Tory journalist Richard West, Ed West seems to have inherited what Niall Gooch, in the Catholic Herald, called his father’s ‘idiosyncratic blend of attitudes and beliefs’. This meant, said Gooch, that ‘West’s undoubtedly robust conservatism is nevertheless suffused with generosity and wit.

Small Men is not only full of selfdeprecating asides, but is laugh out loud funny.’ The Critic’s Christopher Snowdon agreed, describing it as ‘an often hilarious memoir of a born conservative watching the world go wrong’. But, added Snowdon, ‘This is a serious book. Behind the dry wit and self-mocking he has something important to say.’

In the Sunday Times Matthew Goodwin said West had written ‘an insightful, poignant and at times hilarious book’ that exposed the dilemma conservatives faced. They might win elections – for now. But in the long run they had less and less to offer. Where, asked Goodwin, were conservative thinkers like the late Sir Roger Scruton? Until he had some cogent successors, ‘conservatives will be on the back foot no matter how many elections they win’.

20 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

Notre-Dame in flames

In the Financial Times, Victor Mallet praised the ‘nail-biting’ first chapter in which Poirier recounts the events of that night through interviews with many who were there, including ‘the 50 men from the Grimp, a special unit for dangerous operations. It was they who were sent to control the inferno at the top of the north tower, where the fire was threatening to topple the whole structure.’ A great scream of ‘Non’ went up from the crowd as the 750-tonne spire crashed through the medieval stone vaulting of the nave.

Richard Morrison in the Times was gripped by Poirier’s unfolding account. ‘We follow Marie-Hélène Didier, the heritage curator in charge of France’s religious art, as she dashes into the smoke-filled nave at the height of the fire to carry priceless paintings and artefacts to safety. With her is Laurent Prades, Notre-Dame’s general manager, who charges across Paris on a bike because he is the only

A great scream of ‘Non’ went up from the crowd

Miscellaneous

French Resistance

man with the code to the bulletproofglass safe at the far end of the cathedral that contains the Catholic world’s most treasured relic: the artefact believed by the faithful to be Christ’s crown of thorns.’

peritonitis so convincingly to escape deportation to a labour camp that his appendix was removed. Somehow he escaped again and joined the maquis.

In the Times, Caroline Moorehead called Rosenberg ‘a natural raconteur with a pleasing conversational style’.

Noting that after the war he settled in America, where he enjoyed a long and successful career as an academic, she concluded, ‘Few members of the resistance and still fewer young Jews have such happy tales ... What shines through his engaging book is his evident desire to be helpful and responsible and his acute consciousness of how extraordinarily lucky he was.’

THE BETTER HALF

ON THE GENETIC SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN

SHARON MOALEM Allen Lane, 288pp, £20

With fatalities from Covid-19 among men so much higher than among women, this is a timely book – a fact not lost on Guardian reviewer Gina Rippon. Women have an inbuilt genetic superiority, meaning they live longer, have better immune systems, survive cancer better and even see the world in a vastly greater number of colours than men. The reason, it appears, is their extra X chromosome: far better to have a spare X than just one and a ‘tiny Y’, she explained, adding that the problem is that the Y has thus far had ‘much more attention’. ‘Statistics going back as far as 1662 show women living longer than men,’ Rippon discovered; and medicine ‘needs to stop ignoring the secrets of women’s biological successes and find ways of harnessing them to improve the survival chances of the whole human race’.

Stuart Ritchie in the Evening Standard was irritated by the whole weaker-stronger-sex thesis.

‘Does one sex really have to “win” over the other?’ he asked.

Moalem, he admitted, ‘presents enough evidence to convince any reasonable reader that the XX vs. XY theory is worth pursuing. But he makes that evidence sound a great deal more solid than it really is.’

Neither Rippon nor Ritchie were enamoured of the chapter on autism and the male vs. female brain, and both pointed to the fact that too little attention is paid to women’s predilection to diseases such as MS and lupus, which derive precisely from their auto-immune superiority.

Ultimately, Rippon was pleased with the book whereas Ritchie clearly wasn’t. Could the reason be as simple as X vs. Y?

Justus Rosenberg, right, Marseilles

THE ART OF RESISTANCE MY FOUR YEARS IN THE FRENCH UNDERGROUND

JUSTUS ROSENBERG William Collins, 288pp, £20

‘As I write this memoir, I am almost one hundred years old – ninety-eight to be exact.’ So begins Professor Justus Rosenberg’s account of his astonishing exploits in Occupied France, which has all the attributes of a good thriller: atmosphere, intrigue, suspense, mayhem and even sex – commencing with his seduction at the age of 16 by a glamorous friend of his mother. ‘I was very lovable in those days,’ he told the New York Times.

Rosenberg’s odyssey began in 1937, when his parents sent him to Paris to escape the Nazi pogroms that had begun in Danzig, where they lived. Exploring the grands boulevards with ‘salutary aimlessness’, he fancied himself a flâneur, but still found time to develop his gift for languages, which, together with his nerve, would serve him so well in the clandestine life he later led. What he calls ‘an amazing confluence of circumstances’ began when he fetched up in Marseilles and went to work as a courier for Varian Fry, an American journalist who dedicated himself to rescuing artists and intellectuals from the Nazis.

Rosenberg not only mixed with avant-gardistes like André Breton, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, but also helped some of them cross the Pyrenees to safety. Later captured in a Vichy round-up, he feigned

A SCHOOLMASTER’S WAR

HARRY RÉE, BRITISH AGENT IN THE FRENCH RESISTANCE

ED. BY JONATHAN RÉE Yale University Press, 192pp, £14.99

Harry Rée, DSO, OBE, was one of the heroes of ‘the shadow war’, that implacable conflict in which no quarter was given by either side. A Bolshie ex-public schoolboy who despised ‘turncoat, fire-eating ex-appeasers’, he volunteered for SOE because it would rescue him from ‘the fifth-form atmosphere of the officers’ mess’. It was a wise move, because according to the official history of SOE, he became one of their very best agents.

Like so many men and women who had ‘a good war’, Rée, who died in 1991, rarely spoke of it. But he did leave a variety of written pieces, including letters he received from France after Liberation, that his son, the philosopher Jonathan Rée, has deftly assembled into a riveting miscellany. A high point is Rée’s account of his brutal, hand-to-hand battle with an armed German officer, whom he overcame despite being shot twice. But, said Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times, Rée’s ‘matterof-fact’ style underlines ‘just how ordinary life in the SOE often was…. and just how brave the people sheltering him were’.

In the New Statesman, William Boyd also paid tribute to the ‘secret army of “passive supporters”’ that allowed Rée and his comrades to function at all. Rée, he said, was determined that their bravery should not be overlooked.

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 21

Grief THIS TOO SHALL PASS

STORIES OF CHANGE, CRISIS AND HOPEFUL BEGINNINGS

JULIA SAMUEL Penguin Life, 336pp, £14.99

‘Life changes – these changes often hurt’

LAWRENCE BOGLE

No one who reviewed this book had a bad word to say about it, and everyone was full of admiration for its author, the seasoned psychotherapist Julia Samuel, whose previous book on bereavement, Grief Works, had won similar widespread praise. This follow-up, wrote Kate Saunders in the Times, ‘looks at the smaller, but no less important changes that so many of us will face whether we like it or not — divorce, redundancy, sexual confusion or plain old disappointment’. Georgia Beaufort told us in the Telegraph that ‘Samuel draws on her own patients’ stories, dividing them into themes: family relationships, love, work, health and identity – and reflecting at the end of each chapter on the issues raised.’

‘The case studies here are presented so well that they often read like good fiction,’ said Saunders.

These range from the seemingly trite (a rich Indian woman furious that her younger daughter refuses to have a showy, expensive wedding) to, in Mia Levitin’s words in the Guardian, ‘the most heart-wrenching case of Ben, a widowed father of two who has just started to adjust to his bereavement when he receives a life-threatening cancer diagnosis’.

Samuel, she goes on, does not consider therapy a cure-all: she concedes that what Ben needs in this instance is ‘not counselling but a turn of luck’. ‘There are all kinds of lessons to be learnt from this wise, kindly book,’ wrote Saunders, a sentiment clearly shared by Beaufort, when she concluded that ‘It would be hard for

anyone reading it not to find a person or scenario that did not resonate in some way.’ It is Samuel’s presence throughout, she went on, ‘that makes This Too Shall Pass more effective and readable than the multitude of popular self-help bibles’.

Samuel’s advice, Levitin deduced, is that ‘the key to resilience is the quality of our relationships: family and friends can buoy us in turbulent times’.’ If there is a message in this book, wrote Saunders, it is ‘that life changes and these changes often hurt. Samuel is not peddling any magic solutions, but she has a basic faith in human decency, and her optimism shines through every sentence.’

NO VISIBLE BRUISES

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CAN KILL US

RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER Scribe, 320pp, £9.99

American journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has uncompromising truths to tell about domestic violence, challenging assumptions that it is ‘the fate of the unlucky few … [involving] a woman hard-wired to be hurt [and] a man hard-wired to hurt.’ In the Times, Rosamund Urwin praised a ‘powerful book – part reportage, part polemic.’

In the New York Times, Parul Sehgal laid out the harsh statistics.

‘Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.’ And in the Guardian, Amy Bloom pointed out that in the US, 50 women a month are shot dead by their partner. The World Health Organisation has called it ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions’.

Bloom praised Snyder’s ‘forensic eye’ and ‘clear, smooth and accessible style (never folksy but never academic and so matter-of-fact you can feel the writer holding herself in check so as not overwhelm us with painful details)’. Using case studies, Snyder tells us that ‘the most dangerous place for an American woman to be – the most dangerous place on Earth – is in her own home’.

‘Domestic violence is like no other crime,’ wrote Snyder in the Atlantic.

‘It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you.’

THE STATE OF DISBELIEF JULIET ROSENFELD Short Books, 192pp, £12.99

Why don’t we talk about death was the question posed by the psychoanalyst Juliet Rosenfeld after her husband of seven months died of lung cancer. She wrote this book, she tells us, to celebrate her love for him but also to explore how to talk about bereavement. Juliet was 46 when she met Andrew, her second husband, and he was only 52. A rich and successful property developer, he was unaccustomed to giving in, even as his cancer proved to be inoperable.

In an interview with Rosenfeld in the Times, Louise France observed: ‘What is striking – and perhaps made Juliet’s subsequent grief all the more messy and incomprehensible – was Andrew’s refusal to admit what might happen. She allowed herself to cry just once in front of him over those 13

They felt insulated from mortality...

months. “He found my getting upset unbearable. The power of his denial was so strong. Somehow I really capitulated with that. I was complicit with him.”’

In the Daily Mail, Helen Brown noted that the Rosenfelds ‘feel, to some degree, insulated from the mortality afflicting the rest of us. Him by his wealth and optimism, her by what she assumed was a deeper understanding of the human heart.

She is laudably frank about her failure to “manage” her grief as she had anticipated.’ Brown concluded: ‘I hope she doesn’t adhere to Andrew’s instructions that she remain single forever.’ But Beth Guilding in the TLS wasn’t sure that the book quite worked: ‘The descriptions of Andrew, the power of their love, how handsome, orderly, logical and private he was, become saccharine.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 23

Contagion Publishers have been nimble in producing books about the Covid-19 pandemic or about pandemics in general. Some had already been scheduled, while others had not been conceived before lockdown began.

‘Now, with perfect timing, a good guide has arrived to pull together scientific knowledge about the way things spread and how to block (or encourage) their transmission,’ wrote Clive Cookson in his Financial Times review of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski (Wellcome Collection, 352pp, £16.99).

It ‘prepares the ground comprehensively for readers to make sense of what is happening today, by distilling the wisdom gathered by studying previous epidemics over more than a century’. Guardian reviewer Laura Spinney, herself the author of an earlier book about the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, focused on the book’s hero, Ronald Ross, ‘the British doctor who in the late 19th century discovered that mosquitoes spread malaria and was rewarded with the 1902 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine... Ross wasn’t the first to describe an epidemic mathematically, but he was the first to do so armed with a thorough understanding of the biological and social processes that shape it, and this made all the difference.’ The book examines ‘the things that are common to all pandemics – from the ice bucket challenge to bitcoin to infectious diseases – rather than those that are peculiar to each one’ and ‘one of the most interesting and topical parts of the book is about the mathematical modelling of fake news’.

As Meera Senthilingam states in her ‘compelling overview’ Outbreaks and Epidemics: Battling Infection from Measles to Coronavirus (Icon, 176pp, £8.99), ‘every outbreak... has a unique source’, wrote Adrian Woolfson in the Spectator. What is more, ‘old enemies can come back. As global warming takes effect, the exposure of human and animal corpses previously locked into the Siberian permafrost raises the possibility of the resurgence of deadly diseases such as anthrax and smallpox’.

According to New York Times reviewer Carl Zimmer, some of the scenes in The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic,

Hysteria and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum (C Hurst, 392pp, £20) ‘were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head’.

Honigsbaum analyses nine stories of past pandemics, including the 1930 parrot fever outbreak and the 2014-15 West Africa Ebola outbreak.

‘Whether familiar or forgotten, parrot fever or Ebola, he finds striking similarities among them.

And those similarities ought to make us worried about the next outbreak.

If history is any guide, things may not

Yellow fever or dengue mosquito

24 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

go well.’ Zimmer was doubtful whether we should call the last 100 years ‘The Pandemic Century’, however. ‘What made this past century unusual was not pandemics per se, but our expectations about beating them.’

The Italian novelist Paolo Giordano, who has a PhD in theoretical physics, began writing How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness and Community in Times of Global Crises (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 80pp, £2.99) on 29th February and finished it on 4th March. It is ‘part analysis, part journal, perhaps the first from the new world we all share’, wrote

‘What made this past century unusual was not pandemics per se, but our expectations about beating them’

David Sexton in the Evening Standard. ‘It is modest, lucid, calm, informed, directly helpful in trying to think about where we are now.’

In Together: Loneliness, Health and What Happens When We Find Connection (Wellcome Collection, 352pp, £20), the former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy ‘provides a compassionate and thought-provoking exposition of the loneliness pandemic that runs “like a dark thread”, disguised as a host of other pathologies such as addiction, obesity, violence, anxiety and depression’, wrote Adrian Woolfson in the Spectator. ‘The fractured structures of modern societies are fertile breeding grounds for this unforgiving malady.’ Although much of the research in the book is not new, wrote Christina Patterson in the Times, Murthy ‘marshals it with great eloquence and clarity, and illustrates it with stories and interviews that bring it alive. What shines through most of all is the humanity... as we all struggle to find new ways to connect, we are starting to see what we also see in this inspirational book: the radical, transformative, creative power of compassion and hope.’

To what extent is a monetary value placed on a human life? That is the central question posed in Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life by Howard Steven Friedman (University of California Press, 204pp, £23). ‘The answers that society gives are often unfair and irrational,’ wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond in his endorsement for the book. ‘But our justice system, environmental regulations, product safety, life insurance, health care, and abortion decisions demand answers.

This gripping book is essential reading on a topic that you’d like to avoid but can’t.’

Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management, wrote Economics in the Age of Covid-19 (MIT Press, Kindle edition, 132pp, c.£7.81) and had it peer-reviewed in less than a month.

It is 40,000 words long and most of the citations are from March and April 2020. The first four chapters look at the economics of shutdown and especially the risks of not shutting down; the later chapters look at possible solutions. The author will update the book continually until its hardback publication in November.

Lockdown Reading MICHAEL BARBER suggests some books to enjoy in these strange times

LAWRENCE BOGLE

In 1940, with the enemy at our gates, British readers turned to Anthony Trollope, ignored since his death 60 years before. The machinations of Lady Glencora and Mrs Proudie, the profligacy of Burgo Partridge, the chicanery of Augustus Melmotte – these proved soothing antidotes to total war. Today it is Albert Camus, also 60 years dead, who unexpectedly commands our attention. Originally intended as an allegory for the German occupation of France, his novel The Plague, about a deadly contagion that shuts down the Algerian port of Oran, seems to have struck a chord.

The Plague is not a long book.

Nor, with its graphic descriptions of bubonic plague, could you describe it as soothing. So where should you go for balm? Surveys suggest that while young people immerse themselves in the parallel worlds depicted by writers like Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, oldies prefer semi-autobiographical sequences like Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, enthused over by the Duchess of Cornwall, or Anthony Powell’s Music of Time, which the American critic Edmund Wilson said he would ‘read in bed late at night in summer’. Did it ever give him nightmares, I wonder?

Because Powell’s urbanity is deceptive: horrible things happen to many of his characters, confirming his belief that ‘the world is never a very nice place’. I suspect that Proust, to whom Powell is often, erroneously, compared, shared this view. Proust is an author whom many people vow to read once they have time on their hands. If they do, they will not only encounter a surfeit of subordinate clauses, but also the sorrows of love, the tortures of jealousy and, appropriately, the tyranny of time.

But do we all have time on our hands right now? Might ‘the pram in the hall’, that traditional impediment to writing, also impede reading? So too the absence of cleaners and gardeners. No wonder some of us, oppressed by intensive parenting or unaccustomed chores, seek solace in ‘the land of lost content’. Enid Blyton, persona non grata for many years, is

back in fashion. The launch of a television adaptation of her Malory Towers series, about a girls’ boarding school, prompted ‘sack-loads of mail’ from fans of the books. Not to be outdone, prizewinning novelist Jonathan Coe recommended Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series, ‘a safe space, when the worst deprivation you can expect is detention’. (But isn’t detention what we’re all in now?)

Another prizewinner, Hilary Mantel, put her money on Ivy Compton-Burnett, describing Dame Ivy’s bleak domestic conflicts as ‘Downton for the intelligent’. Rather more money, I’m sure, has gone on The Mirror & the Light, the triumphant conclusion to Dame Hilary’s epic Tudor trilogy. We know that Thomas Cromwell is doomed, but as one reviewer noted, ‘Mantel creates suspense and apprehension where none should exist.’ A word of warning. At over 900 pages this book is not for the limp-wristed.

It may seem perverse, when social distancing has become the new norm, to recommend a series about someone you’d least like to be stuck in a lift with. I refer to Jackson Lamb,

‘Mantel creates suspense where none should exist’

the gross, flatulent, rebarbative monster who runs Slough House, the knacker’s yard to which ‘slow horses’ – MI5’s damaged goods – are consigned. ‘I don’t think of you as a team,’ says Lamb to his minions. ‘I think of you as collateral damage.’ Mick Herron, from whose fundament Jackson Lamb emerged, has won golden opinions and numerous awards.

In the absence of a vaccine, his black humour cauterises our toxic predicament.

So perhaps laughter is the best medicine, as witness the number of readers who say humourists like PG Wodehouse and EF Benson are a tonic. Myself, I prefer humour with an edge, like the jests Elizabethans made about the pox. Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, a short, serio-comic novel about a bunch of oldies precariously co-existing in a country cottage, is a fine example of this. The last time I read it I laughed so much my wife tried to smother me (we were in bed at the time).

If, as I did, you came of age during the Sixties, then one rite of passage you may have undergone was reading John Fowles’s bestselling bildungsroman, The Magus, which provided, it was said, an experience ‘beyond the literary’ – in my case, a vicarious ego trip. How flattering to have so much time and energy expended in order to make you a better person. No wonder Fowles himself, in a foreword to the revised edition published in 1977, described it as ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’.

Fowles also described the film it inspired, starring Michael Caine, as ‘a disaster’, adding that if you want your book reproduced, ‘Go to television and ask for an eight-hour serial.’ Too late for him – he died in 2005 – but not for us, Sam Mendes has stepped up to the plate. Goodness knows when his version will reach the screen, but now might be a good moment to try to recapture the spell the book cast.

Finally, from the pages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which I really will try and finish this time, a palliative reflection: ‘Hope, the best comfort for our imperfect condition.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 25

Fiction

Bigamy can ‘extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives’

SILVER SPARROW TAYARI JONES Oneworld, 340pp, £16.99

Tayari Jones secured the 2019 Women’s Prize for fiction, and her novel was endorsed by the Obamas and by Oprah. No pressure for her new novel, Silver Sparrow, then.

Sara Collins, writing in the Guardian, had no difficulty commending this book: it is ‘as moving, intimate and

‘This novel speaks of one of literature’s most intriguing extended families’

26 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

A THOUSAND MOONS SEBASTIAN BARRY Faber, 251pp, £18.99

Barry’s novel takes up the story of his award-winning Days Without End, and, according to Ian Critchley in the Literary Review, ‘shares some of its faults’. Nevertheless he found it ‘a compelling portrait of life in 19thcentury America’, with its central character, Winona, a ‘wonderful creation’. Winona is the Native American adopted daughter of Thomas McNulty and his fellow Civil War soldier and lover John Cole, the heroes of the first book. This sequel takes up the story when Winona is 17.

Erica Wagner in the FT described her and her two fathers as ‘a new kind

HAMNET MAGGIE O’FARRELL Tinder, 384pp, £20

In her latest novel, Maggie O’Farrell enters the domestic life in Stratford of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway and her children, and takes its title from his son Hamnet who died of bubonic plague at the age of 11. It is, said Stephanie Merritt in the Observer, ‘a work of profound understanding’. Merritt was among several reviewers to point out that the title is misleading as ‘its central character and beating heart is the boy’s mother, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes’.

O’Farrell’s Agnes is a witchy figure who gathers herbs for medicine and tames falcons. In the Financial

Maggie O’Farrell: great understanding

MURDO MACLEOD

wise as An American Marriage on the topics of marriage, family and womanhood, and deserves similar acclaim’. As the book explores the unsteady terrain of coming of age, Collins admired Jones’s ‘shrewd observations’.

Two African American half sisters strike up an uneven friendship. Dana is the secret, illegitimate daughter who knows that she is related to Chaurisse, while Chaurisse, the official daughter who calls their father ‘Daddy’, is unaware of the dynamic between them. The novel examines the multitudinous effects of bigamy — how it can extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives.

Francesca Carington, writing in the Telegraph, found the novel moving: ‘Bigamy is what gives the novel its dramatic impetus, but it’s

the double coming-of-age story that gives it heart.’

For Anita Shreve in the Washington Post, the reader’s compassion is manoeuvred from character to character: ‘Blame the bigamist, who turns out to be a pretty good guy; blame the too tolerant wife, whose bitterness seeps into Dana’s silver skin; then blame the bigamist again for getting Laverne pregnant when she was just 14.’ For her, this novel speaks of one of literature’s most intriguing extended families.

One consequence of ‘this beautiful tribute to children’, remarked Claire Kohda Hazelton in the Spectator, is that at last the unacknowledged child has a designated name. In an interview at the end of the book the author describes emails she has received from readers. One begins: ‘I guess I am a Silver Sparrow. I just never had a name for it.’

of family forged in a new kind of nation’: the violence of the past behind them, they live in Paris, Tennessee in a ‘world of homesteads and pickled pears and peace’. Then Winona and one of their farmworkers are brutally attacked and she sets out on a journey of revenge in boys’ britches and a gun and knife in her belt. Her subsequent adventures, wrote Alex Preston in the Guardian, take her ‘on a journey that is horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure’. Usefully, he also told us that although it’s a sequel, the novel stands alone, ‘wasting no time with backstory as it launches into its typically rollicking tale’. Wagner concluded that this is a ‘less satisfying novel than its predecessor’ albeit ‘subtle, troubling and full of silences and pain’. ‘Barry,’ she wrote, ‘knows that it is too much to look for redemption in a story like Winona’s, but in his telling he shows that love offers at least a spark of hope.’

Fiction Times, Rebecca Abrams was moved by the attention to emotional detail: ‘The description of Agnes laying out her son’s body for burial and seeing everywhere the proof of his aliveness is an astonishing piece of writing, a poised and profoundly moving portrait of the indelible imprint of love and loss.’ Joanna Briscoe, in the Guardian, was also affected by ‘a breathtakingly moving study of grief … O’Farrell’s portrait of maternal and sibling bereavement is so accurately expressed it’s almost too painful to read.’

Other reviewers found O’Farrell’s prose a challenge. For Claire Allfree in the Evening Standard, the scenesetting was ‘a little bit too leisurely’ and she read it with ‘faint impatience’.

In the Times, Johanna Thomas-Corr thought it ‘fey and humourless. A novel that ultimately feels precious and worthy.’ And John Self in the Irish Times regretted O’Farrell’s tendency to use three adjectives where one will do: ‘the problem with piling on the descriptions is that it doesn’t deepen the reader’s understanding, it dilutes it.’

HERE WE ARE GRAHAM SWIFT Scribner, 195pp, £14.99

Graham Swift’s latest novel is set in the 1950s, among performers in an end-of-pier seaside magic show. It is, as Simon Baker in the Literary Review reflected, ‘a pleasurable, low-gear excursion into the recent, yet strangely ancient past’.

Barney Norris in the Guardian condensed the plot: ‘Evie White, widow of the actor Jack Robbins, goes out for lunch on the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

Then she returns home, walks into the garden where Jack’s ashes were scattered, and suddenly sees all the cobwebs glittering in the dew around her, before heading back inside and upstairs to sleep. What she remembers in the course of this slight day, though, is a story that spans half a century, an account of the great vanishing act of life, which is as light and brilliant as the cobwebs in the garden.’

Reviewers for the most part enjoyed the un-showiness. As Lindsay Duguid put it in the TLS: ‘Swift’s style, following his characters, is casual and colloquial, as he

smoothly propels the action. As well as being an old-fashioned story told in an old-fashioned style, Here We Are has an emotional reticence, a reluctance to stir the reader’s feelings too far beyond the rueful tears of a survivor.’ It wasn’t quite enough for the Spectator’s John Self: ‘It’s comforting and cosy ... but it does make the effort of reading it feel mildly inconsequential. It’s a bit sad, a bit funny, a bit interesting — but only a bit.’

the Guardian Sofka Zinovieff, whose novel Putney covers some of the same ground, praised the novel’s intelligence.

WEATHER JENNY OFFILL Granta, 224pp, £12.99

MY DARK VANESSA KATE ELIZABETH RUSSELL 4th Estate, 384pp, £12.99

This first novel about a relationship between a 15-year-old pupil and her 42-year-old English teacher at an elite boarding school in Maine 20 years ago was published with great fanfare after selling for a seven-figure sum.

Stephen King hailed it as ‘dynamite’ while one of Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers argued – unsuccessfully – that a female juror at his trial should be removed because she had been spotted reading a novel which had already been hailed as a key text of the

The novel is a ‘complex examination of harm and power’ Me Too movement. The story is told

by Vanessa Wye and moves between her messy unhappy life aged 32 and the beginning and then the middle of her affair with Jacob Strane, the teacher who sidestepped exposure by arranging for Vanessa to be expelled from the school. Despite this betrayal the adult Vanessa clings to a version of the affair which prevents her from joining forces with other victims of Strane.

In the New York Times Katie Roiphe described Vanessa as ‘a classic unreliable narrator’ and the novel as a ‘complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power’. Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Sunday Times, was less impressed.

She disliked the combination of ‘slushy erotica (“I’m soft belly vulnerable”) with the knowing commentary of a writer with one eye on the commercial zeitgeist’. But in

Environmental catastrophe

The critics loved this short novel narrated by a librarian in New York who takes a second job answering the emails received by her old mentor whose podcast about environmental catastrophe attracts loopy responses from right and left. The narrator quotes from the questions, and gives brief wry glimpses of her life as a wife, mother, sister, daughter increasingly anxious about the future of the planet.

Trump becomes president and an Iranian friend tells her, ‘Your people have finally fallen into history...The rest of us are already here.’ Sarah Ditum in the Literary Review suggested that Offill’s fragmentary style ‘hints at the don’t-look-now horror characterising many people’s attitude to climate crisis’.

Lucy Scholes in the Telegraph praised the novel as ‘an uncannily realistic portrait of what it’s like to be alive right now’. Kate Clanchy in the Guardian admired the smoothness of the characters and backstories which emerge from Offill’s ‘stream of honed observations. She is not solipsistic: she has too many people to care for.’ Weather made Clanchy grind her teeth at night, in the manner of the librarian narrator. She hailed the book as ‘a brilliant exemplar for the autofictional method... Offill pulls us in close in order to make us worry about things outside us; mirrors the self to show us what we are selfishly ignoring.’

The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020 27

Books & Publishing

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Books & Publishing

Extract Molesworth in wartime Nigel Molesworth, the curse of St Custard’s, returns – in wartime. The anarchic prep school boy appeared in four classic books by Geoffrey Willans, illustrated by Ronald Searle, between 1953 and 1958. But Molesworth was born in the pages of Punch, where he appeared in Willans’s column (without Searle’s illustrations), between August 1939 and December 1942. The pieces have never been published in full until now, the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain

My Diary of the War

Contains: Time-Tables of War days and a.R.p. Huns, boshes. Nazis dirty roters and tuoghs

Sept 3, 1939 War declared. 3 tuoghs arrive from Bermingham who are put in Spare room thay are awful. They pute out there tongues at me so when mum not looking I scrap them. Chiz.

Ern say his father is a robber (swank) Arch runs about with no trousis he is not going to be a gentleman and at cricket they all slosh and touogh each other up.

Sept 16, 1939 Uncle come in uniform weedy private.

Now I say you will haf to kill as many germans as the last war and as that was 5000 you will be hard pute to it.

Uncle tell how he captured ten germans on the Som but Ern creep up and let off toy pistle with cap and uncle jump like anything three feet actually.

Sept 24, 1939 Back to school weedy school. Peason and me rage in the jim and he say stinker (Mr Cutler) and Sergent Buble also gone to join up which is enough to pute the germans off. mr Trimp (headmaster) still here but new master is awful as he deaf and face like a monky. Schwarz, german boy say war is just british propergander and hitler win india paris and magninot line. Deaf master agree with him but i do not think he hear.

Fotherington-tomas has brought back fairy cycle weedy. Mr trimp say poland not really beaten.

Nov 16, 1940 Molesworth 2 now zoom by he sa he short range bomber and haf shot down skool pig in flames and scored direct hits on valuable objectives on deaf masters trousis. Soon deaf master zoom by to and howls appear. Find molesworth 2 very grave he sa he haf been shot down and he mourning himself. He is bats.

Nov 25, 1940 No bombers toda chiz as I had counted on them and done no prep. Term draws on leafs fall, foopbal matches, rags and toughery. Gran send telegram to sa on no account are we to go to Canada as it is not allowed.

Nov 26, 1940 10000000 seconds to Xmas and boo to Germans.

Jan 30, 1941 Tonite we do not haf a bad air rade and wizard bomb drop near skool pig. Mr trimp tells us long story about Great war and lekture us that Britain fight for peace and goodwill towards men. He then set down on draring pin which happened to be there and give me 6 chiz. See deaf master squeeze new misteress hand. I think he suspeck as he sa he will let me off conduc mark. Chiz parot appear from boot box where I haf hidden him and mr Trimp confiscate him. Do not think parot like it as he sa rude word ten times. Bomb drop and restore peace.

Sept 12, 1941 – On holiday from school Mum announce NEWS St Cypranes

Sept 25, 1939 7760400 secs to end of term.

30 The Oldie Review of Books Summer 2020

Chiz parot appear from boot box where I haf hidden him and mr Trimp confiscate him. Do not think parot like it as he sa rude word ten times

[the original name of St Custard’s] haf been BOMBED cheers cheers cheers we faint with joy. Mr trimp mrs trimp and skool pig all safe but luftvaff haf established scendency in the air over mrs trimps pink hat and given it severe hamering hemhem. molesworth 2 sa how about another ten weeks at the seaside mater.

July 17, 1942 – Molesworth’s school is evacuated to a girls’ school in the country, St Ethelburga’s molesworth 2 zoom by with trowel. He swank he is digging for defeat and all small girls are impressed.

July 21, 1942 Pop’s embarkation agane cancelled and he is to sit in barn near bognor and give all solders fatigues chiz. No real sign of end of term hols bombs or more rasberries.

Nov 15, 1942 Grate day as mr pankhurst who was master at st cypranes come back as flight leiutenant (r.a.f.) all boys sa gosh look and ask feeble questions viz. how many haf you shot down sir? mr pankhurst sa about 10 but chiz as molesworth 2 shout sez you and zoom away he is feeble and think he finest pilot in the world becos he shoot down chikens, rooks and skool dog ect. jenkins sa Hope you will come back after war sir but mr pankhurst sa no jolly fear and dig matron in ribs.

New master sa 10 very impressive total for officer in stores branch. Can he be jealous?

Nov 22, 1942 Give molesworth 2 BOOK to read as he haf large bag of sweets. He sa not bad but he prefer all about love also eat all sweets. What is the use? Thro book at molesworth 2 hit deaf master and zoom away to skool pig.

The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth

by Geoffrey Willans are published by Robert J Kirkpatrick (£10)