The Oldie magazine June issue - 388

HAMMER HORROR GLAMOUR GIRL – MADELINE SMITH JOANNA LUMLEY ON ASIAN FLU

June 2020 | £4.75

www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 388

The art of acting English Robert Bathurst on David Niven and other heroes Confessions of a music snob – Alexander Armstrong AN Wilson and Barry Cryer on Charles Dickens How to be a Lady – Antonia Fraser

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Features 13 She’s a Lady!

Lady Antonia Fraser 14 Hammer glamour girl recalls the horror Madeline Smith 17 The best of Dickens Simon Hemelryk 20 My cataract agony Lucy Deedes 22 The awkward art of acting English Robert Bathurst 24 Farewell to the garden of a lifetime Christian Lamb 27 My Hebridean adventure Tamsin Calidas 34 Yorkshire’s Las Vegas Reverend Steve Morris 39 A music snob confesses Alexander Armstrong

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was the Shops Act? Benedict King 12 Modern Life: What are oldie flatmates? Sonia Zhuravylova 30 The Way We Live Now Dafydd Jones

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91 Competition Tessa Castro 36 Town Mouse 98 Ask Virginia Ironside Tom Hodgkinson 37 Country Mouse Giles Wood 53 The Mystery of Charles 40 School Days Dickens, by A N Wilson Sophia Waugh Frances Wilson 40 Golden Nuggets 55 Casting Shadows: Fish and Mark Bryant Fishing in Britain, by Tom 41 Home Front Fort Charles Keen Alice Pitman 55 Sitopia: How Food Can Save 43 Profitable Wonders the World, by Carolyn Steel James Le Fanu Charles Foster 44 Letter from America 57 Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: Philip Delves Broughton The Last Great Battle of 45 Postcards from the Edge the Second World War, by Mary Kenny Saul David Ferdie Rous 46 God Sister Teresa 59 Greenery: Journeys in 46 Memorial Service: Hugh Mellor CBE Springtime, by Tim Dee Lucy Ingrams James Hughes-Onslow 61 Pew, by Catherine Lacey 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Sam Leith Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 51 I Once Met… Lord Beaverbrook 82 My Canterbury Tale Reverend Jonathan Aitken Ferdie Rous 51 Memory Lane 84 Overlooked Britain: Old 63 Media Matters Vicarage, Morwenstow, Stephen Glover Cornwall Lucinda Lambton 64 Words and Stuff 86 Taking a Walk: A Broads Johnny Grimond 64 Rant: Church Commissioners sweep down to the North Sea Patrick Barkham 65 History David Horspool 87 On the Road: Joanna Lumley 89 Crossword Louise Flind 91 Bridge Andrew Robson

Books

Travel

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

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Arts 66 Netflix and Film: The Last Dance and The Assistant Harry Mount 67 Theatre: Bound Nicholas Lezard 67 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Roger Lewis 69 Music Richard Osborne 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 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 80 Getting Dressed: Beatrix Campbell Brigid Keenan 81 Bird of the Month: Nightjar John McEwen

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The Oldie June 2020 3

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’.

What happens when Oscar Wilde collides with an American rock star?

You can find out in the new Folio Society edition of De Profundis – Oscar Wilde’s heart-stopping letter from Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas.

It’s introduced by pop singer Patti Smith, who turns out to be a huge Wilde fan.

Smith visited Wilde’s cell in the now closed Reading Gaol, which campaigners are trying to turn into an arts centre.

‘I noted the cell number, C.3.3, the age of Christ at his crucifixion,’ Smith writes.

‘This missive to you was written on the Rue des Beaux Arts where, wedded to poverty, you breathed your last, in the year 1900.’

Smith has admired Wilde since she was ‘an adoring schoolgirl’. You sense that Oscar, something of a Victorian rock star himself, would have liked the tribute.

film, made in 1968, starring Michael Caine.

Fowles told Granta that he liked Caine when they met on the set: ‘His behaviour between takes, when he is endlessly bothered by autographs and snapshots, is exemplary.’

But Caine’s performance

was another matter. On seeing the rough cut, Fowles described Caine as being ‘excruciatingly bad, totally incredible as an English graduate, however proletarian in origin … he seems to have no notion of how to react, let alone act.’

Fowles, who wrote the

script, did not absolve himself, but thought the director, Guy Green, was largely to blame: ‘I understand now why he wanted all the literary lines cut: he simply doesn’t know how to direct them.’

On learning that Sam Mendes plans to film John Fowles’s Greek island epic, The Magus, the Old Un recalled the author’s jaundiced view of the previous

Among this month’s contributors Lady Antonia Fraser (p13) is the author of Mary, Queen of Scots, The Gunpowder Plot and – coming out next year – The Case of the Married Woman, about Caroline Norton, a 19th-century heroine.

Robert Bathurst (p22) stars in Cold Feet and Toast. He’s just been in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell and The Song of Lunch.

He was in the Cambridge Footlights with Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson.

Tamsin Calidas (p27) is a crofter in the Hebrides. After the BBC, she worked in publishing and advertising. She loves to go wild-swimming in Hebridean waters. Her new book is I Am an Island.

Reverend Steve Morris (p34) is a writer, hospital chaplain and parish priest at St Cuthbert’s, North Wembley. He once ran a brand agency based in London. His latest book is Our Precious Lives.

Taking his regulated exercise in Waterloo Place, London, the Old Un bumped into the Guards Crimean War Memorial.

Its granite plinth carries the statue of Victory and three guardsmen made from the bronze of Russian cannon captured in the Siege of Sevastopol (1854-55).

Up the road in Burlington Arcade is the family-run jeweller Hancocks, which has been making Victoria Cross medals since the end of the Crimean War in 1856. Until recently, it was believed the VCs were cast from the same captured weaponry, although it now transpires the metal originates from Chinese guns and not Russian cannon at all.

Founded in 1849, Hancocks is known for its rings, bracelets and pendants.

Its reputation for fine silverwork first led the The Oldie June 2020 5

Important stories you may have missed Canvas bag stolen from Norfolk garage Eastern Daily Press

Driver caught going wrong way on Tesco roundabout Norwich Evening News Motorbike rider tries to hide from police in Redruth garden Falmouth Packet £15 for published contributions

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Secretary of State for War to commission the company to manufacture Britain’s highest award for valour, and it has continued to be its sole supplier.

When more VCs are required, Hancocks puts in an order for a sliver of the precious metal stored in a high-security vault at the Central Ordnance Depot in Donnington. Once delivered, the bronze is melted, poured into a mould and cast.

Since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert introduced the idea, 1,358 VCs have been awarded; none has yet gone to a woman.

The Old Un, an utter scaredy-cat, won’t be in the running for the 1,359th.

Retired Oxford don John Davie was much taken with The Oldie’s motto, ‘The only way forwards is backwards’. He’s now done the decent thing – translated it into Latin: ‘Tantum retro proceditur.’ If only the Old Un had a coat of arms, he’d slap the Latin motto on it pronto.

Davie was reminded of a letter Verdi wrote to his librettist Boito about their next subject for an opera: ‘Torniamo al antico: sarà un progresso’ (‘Let’s go back to antiquity: it will be a step forward’).

Lockdown is nothing new to prisoners but, still, they’ve had a rough time with coronavirus.

One of the effects is they’re

‘One day, son, all this will be yurts!’

finding it more difficult to get hold of books.

Prison libraries are almost all closed. No non-prison staff are allowed on site; so, in most prisons, there are no library staff on duty. In some prisons, there are book trolleys on the wings and prisoners can take a book when they collect their hot meal of the day.

The charity Give a Book is doing its best to get more books into prisons and to prisoners. If you’d like to help Give a Book, see their website: giveabook.org.uk.

Under lockdown, there has been lots of time for all of us – not just prisoners – for contemplation. The Old Un’s friend Susan Schwarz from New York has compiled a list of some strange things that start emerging in later life:

Feet are further down the legs.

Doctors start practising at the age of 12.

Sofas are deeper.

Names are less memorable.

Keys, glasses and books disappear.

Shoe soles are more slippery.

Driving is more demanding.

Elusive hairs sprout on female lips and chins.

Jar lids are tighter.

Shopping is heavier.

Noses drip.

Being called dear isn’t as complimentary as it once was.

In the May issue, Gyles Brandreth wrote about how John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was rendered in Japanese as The Angry Raisins.

The Old Un was reminded of the garbling of a line from Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, ‘Who watered the wicket at Melbourne?’ (a reference to allegations of cheating during the ’54/’55 Ashes series).

In German, this became ‘Who pissed on the city gates of Melbourne?’

Necessity is the mother of invention. And the lockdown is the mother of rooftop hairdressers, as John Bowling, The Oldie’s Art Editor, discovered this month, staring out of his window in Marylebone, London.

Not going on holiday anywhere interesting?

This year marks the 60th anniversary of that brilliant invention the Etch-a-Sketch, which went on sale in July 1960.

Before Photoshop was a glint in Adobe’s digital eye, Etch-a-Sketch seemed like a miracle.

‘The ease of wiping out every scrap of evidence of terrible scribbles was so satisfying,’ recalls Oldie reader Jacqueline Green. ‘Pity you couldn’t do that with emotional trauma in real life.’

‘Sixty years later, I have a similar situation as my memory seems to implement its own slider, wiping entire events out.’

Jost Haas is Britain’s last glass-eye maker.

Now in his 80s, Haas works from his home on the edge of London. Patients spend hours with him while he crafts and paints their eye in front of them.

Unless he finds someone to whom he can pass on his know-how, patients will have to travel to Europe if they wish to have a glass (rather than plastic) prosthetic. It’s not too late, though – the position of apprentice remains open.

The Old Un’s fave new word is ‘Thomasson’. It’s a strange architectural remain with missing parts and no viable function, like half a staircase leading nowhere.

The word was first used in 1972 by Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa. He came across a staircase that went up and down with no door at the top. Oddly, though, the railing on the staircase had been recently fixed. Akasegawa took to recording kindred curiosities, first in a magazine and then in a 1985 book Thomassons. To qualify as a Thomasson, an object had to be both useless and looked after.

The word owes its origins to Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player sold to Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants.

Thomasson was paid a lot but was often kept on the bench thanks to his poor performance. In other words, he was both ‘useless’ and ‘maintained’. The Old Un has often felt a bit of a Thomasson in these dark virus days.

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Mixed tomatoes, basil, garlic, salt and pepper on toasted olive bread

Apology Some readers have complained about an insert in the last issue which offered ten free lottery lines.

The headline was ‘Our special thank you for being a

loyal reader of The Oldie’.

We did not give permission for our name to be used, and weren’t fully aware of the nature of the advertisement.

We apologise for any misunderstanding.

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Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

An ice cream or a hug?

That’s the easy lockdown question for my grandchildren ‘Free the over-70s!’ I heard my Oldie colleagues cry. ‘Oh no,’ I murmured to myself, ‘leave us be.’ Dare I say it? Some of us have been quite liking lockdown.

Of course, if you live wholly alone in a small flat, it’s been grim, but I am lucky. I have a house and a garden and a wife and a cat. Better than that, I have three children and for the past ten weeks they have been doing all the shopping.

Best of all, I have seven grandchildren and I have the pleasure of chatting to them from the first-floor window without the responsibility of baby-sitting and the anxiety of sleep-overs. We have a supply of Magnum ice creams in the freezer which we throw down to them. Let’s get real here. Who wouldn’t rather have a Magnum than a hug?

Incidentally, when did all this hugging business start? I saw an extraordinary headline in the paper the other day: ‘Author Jeffrey Archer, 80, reveals his agony at not being able to hug his grandchildren due to lockdown.’ Agony?

Agony?? I can remember only one of my grandparents: Colonel Lance Addison, MBE, late of the Indian Army. He was charming and a gentleman, but he would no more have dreamt of hugging me than I would of tickling the Queen to cheer her up. Even as a very little boy, when I met my grandfather, I shook him by the hand and called him Sir. We were no less close because of that.

I suppose I have been missing going to my favourite restaurants a bit, and going to galleries, the cinema and theatres, too.

But I haven’t missed the London Underground or the aeroplanes flying overhead or all those meetings I used to go to. I am realising now that I have measured out my life in meetings, most of which were pointless. And I have had far too many unnecessary haircuts. I have not been to the barber in 12 weeks and I look no worse. (No better, either, I grant you.)

Yes, I know the economic

consequences of all this – for the hairdressers, the restaurants and the rest – is devastating. I am just being selfish here and saying it’s been quite fun being forced to stay at home, read books and watch TV. We have discovered a wonderful series on Netflix called Call My Agent. It’s a drama set in a film agency in Paris, brilliantly cast with a host of star actors playing versions of themselves as the agency’s clients. It’s fast, funny, sexy and sensational, with subtitles – so you can fool yourself that it’s good for your French, too.

One of the old film favourites we caught again the other night was the 1960 version of The Trials of Oscar Wilde starring Robert Morley as Wilde and Ralph Richardson as Sir Edward Carson, the lawyer whose devastating crossexamination of Wilde brought about his downfall 125 years ago, in the early summer of 1895. When I was a young theatre producer, I put on a stage version of the Wilde trials and had lunch with Sir Ralph to talk about the possibility of his reprising his role. He wasn’t interested.

He wasn’t much interested in me, either. We lunched at Rules restaurant in Covent Garden where, I seem to remember, across the dining room, Sir Ralph recognised a fellow diner. ‘Hello,

there,’ he called out to him. ‘Stanley Jackson – is that you?’ The man turned towards Sir Ralph. ‘Oh, Stanley,’ the great actor went on, ‘how you’ve changed!

Where’s that lovely head of hair you used to have? You’ve gone all bald. And you used to have such a jolly face. It’s all long and lugubrious now. You’ve changed, Stanley, you’ve changed!’ At this point the man intervened to protest, ‘I’m not Stanley Jackson.’ ‘Oh,’ cried Sir Ralph.

‘Changed your name as well, have you?’

At the end of the lunch, I told Sir Ralph I was going on to meet his agent to discuss my proposition further. ‘Oh, my agent, eh?’ he said. ‘Give him ten per cent of my love, won’t you?’

The one downside of lockdown has been weight gain. I have put on nearly a stone. I have allowed it to happen only because I know how to get it off again.

I have a diet that never fails and I can share it with you in a useful way. Since all this began I have been posting a poem a day on Twitter and Instagram. Each of the poems lasts around 20 seconds, the time required for that really thorough hand wash. This is my poem that both lasts 20 seconds and tells you how can lose two pounds a week.

To lose two pounds a week, To regain a figure slim and sleek, The rules are simple, if not nice: No bread, potato and no rice, And, when it comes to pasta, basta!

Carbs are out, and booze is too.

It’s tough, but do it and the news is you, While inwardly resentful, bitter, Outwardly are lither, fitter, Trimmer, slimmer – nippy, zippy!

Yippee!

‘You’ve been lying on that thing ever since you invented it’

You can find Gyles performing his poems on his website www.gylesbrandreth.net or on YouTube: /www.youtube.com/ gylesbrandreth The Oldie June 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

What is the Prime Minister driving at?

When he opened golf courses, he left me feeling distinctly under par matthew norman

It is a pitiable sign of this writer’s shallowness and spite that almost nothing has enraged him lately like the lifting of the coronafatwa on golf.

In truth, that ‘almost’ covers a plethora of such exemptions as the Prime Minister’s bunking off Cobra meetings and shaking hands in infected hospitals. Furthermore, in its paltry defence, the reopening of England’s golf courses shone out as a beacon of clarity within Boris Johnson’s pea-souper of befuddlement.

Had he visited equal precision on this as on the vexed question of returning to work, the official advice would have been as follows. ‘You may play golf. You mustn’t play golf. I can’t be clearer about this. We strongly encourage you to play golf, which you absolutely mustn’t. If you do, as you certainly should, you must use a putter off the tee, and a shoulder-held, ground-to-air missile launcher on the greens. So do enjoy your golf. And remember that in no circumstances are you permitted to play golf.’

Yet about golf, if nothing else, the government has indeed been very clear.

It may once again be played. Before we continue, it should be made no less very clear that there is zero discernible danger, COVID-wise, in playing golf.

It’s hard to imagine a less risky activity than one enjoyed in a huge expanse of the open air by people standing many metres apart. Synchronised paragliding might be one. Attending the annual convention of the Alan Sugar Fan Club (albeit one assumes that this event, traditionally held in a disused phone box, qualifies as a solo activity) could be another.

Still, given the regrettable lack of combat between its participants, golf is about as safe a pastime as there could be.

So why did its return cause such a piercing stab of anger? It’s hardly as if I despise the game itself. Quite the reverse: 10 The Oldie June 2020

on honeymoon in rural Massachusetts, I checked us out of a charming Shaker inn and into a motel room that boasted – along with a spectacularly stained duvet and the aroma of an abattoir – cable TV. During the electrifying climax to the 1991 Ryder Cup, I sent my bride across an eight-lane highway to fetch Big Macs and bourbon. Why she later left me I will never comprehend. But on that occasion, she returned in time to see Bernhard Langer miss that heart-stopping fivefooter that would have retained the trophy for Europe.

The paradox is that a love of professional golf goes hand in Lexusowner’s string-backed driving glove with the loathing of leisurely golf in England.

Indeed, under my projected lifetime dictatorship, Edict No 4 (after 1: giving up Trident; 2: gifting the UN Security Council seat to India; and 3: shuttering the arms industry) will be the state reclamation of three-quarters of nonpublic English golf courses.

The amount of space they occupy – something over two per cent of Surrey and various other counties – is a scandal.

Hundreds of thousands of houses framed by idyllic scenery will be built on that land. Under this neo-Reformation, the remaining quarter will be subject to aggressive social engineering.

Membership fees will be means tested,

‘Keep them coming’

with those on benefits charged nothing, and those earning less than the national average subsidised by the more monied.

Where waiting lists exist, applications by members of ethnic minorities and all women will be prioritised.

Golf in England will thus be democratised. It will be a game of and for the people, as it has always been in its birthplace across the border. Scotland will be exempted from these measures, by the way, with the exception of any clubs owned by Donald J Trump or his descendants. These will be transformed into holiday homes for the urban deprived.

Surviving English golf clubs, meanwhile, will have to adopt various rule changes. There isn’t the space today to outline them all, but this will give the flavour.

Any golfer who confuses diamondpatterned knitwear with socially acceptable clothing will receive a two-stroke penalty on each hole until the garment is discarded and incinerated in the nearest bunker. To this end, caddies will be mandated to remove the pitching wedge from the bag and replace it with a military-grade flame-thrower. Any club that flouts the new regulations to the slightest degree will thenceforth double up as an alligator farm.

Frankly, it is a long shot – longer, at least, than the duffers could manage with a Big Bertha off the tee – that these changes will be effected before the rest of the lockdown is lifted.

But, if by some miracle they were, I believe it would be a charming diversion for the single parent, trapped on the 19th floor of a high-rise with a livid toddler, to switch on the telly and find dear old Peter Alliss commenting on a veterans’ pro-celebrity golf tournament in which Nick Faldo and Joe Pasquale are being chased down the 15th fairway by a peckish reptile.

what was the Shops Act? Thanks to the virus, the Government is planning to allow supermarkets to stay open longer on Sundays to make it easier to buy essentials.

This would be a relaxation of the Sunday Trading Act, which came into force in England and Wales in 1994.

There had never been Sunday-trading restrictions in Scotland, although shops there tended to follow similar practices to shops in England. Northern Ireland had similar rules to England and Wales.

Before 1994, England and Wales were governed by the 1950 Shops Act. Generally, this prohibited shops from opening – but with many, bewildering exceptions. You could buy fruit and vegetables, but not if they were canned.

You could buy razor blades for medicinal reasons (eg removing corns) but not to shave. You could buy fish and chips from a restaurant, but not from a chippy.

It was daft. Even the courts couldn’t understand it. In the early 1980s, the Auld Committee, set up to investigate the situation, recommended complete liberalisation. A Sunday Trading Bill was introduced to that effect in 1986. It was defeated, with 72 Tory MPs voting against it – the only time an entire

what are oldie f latmates?

Could flatmates really be making a comeback – oldie flatmates, in particular? As we all live longer, and pensions don’t stretch as far, renting out a spare room or two could well become the new normal.

Feelings of apprehension about letting a stranger into your home are to be expected, says Suzanne Noble, who has set up Silver Sharers, which aims to bring older landlords and renters together.

London-based Noble stumbled on the idea when she was helping her partner, Bob, find a suitable room to rent. ‘That’s 12 The Oldie June 2020

government bill was defeated during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

The 1994 bill was a compromise.

You could buy anything, but shops over 280 square metres could trade for only six hours between 10am and 6pm.

No one could be forced to work. In reality, it was a historic defeat for the Sabbatarians. Since the early-eighth century, when King Ide of Wessex introduced rules on Sunday observance, puritans and partypoopers have been trying to make Sunday ‘special’ or, as many consider, ‘dull’. In 1994, they were finally defeated. For the purposes of consumption and entertainment, Sundays are now like any other day.

This lockdown (before the Government’s proposed extension of Sunday trading) makes me long for those halcyon pre-1994 Sundays.

When I was growing up in Oxford in the 1980s, Sundays weren’t boring. They were just inactive. It was pleasant to go out and simply enjoy the city and its reduced pace for one day a week. Hardly anyone was about. People wandered to church and bought the papers; a few tramps

staggered about; the odd gaggle of teenagers loafed around. It was like the lockdown, but with no social distancing and no restrictions on meeting people.

Families went for leisurely walks in the parks after lunch. You could go to the cinema, and to the pubs when they opened. The slower pace was a collective discipline. ‘No one’s preventing you from doing nothing’ isn’t good enough. The experience depended on no one else doing much.

I don’t want a religious Sunday. I want an idle Sunday for hedonistic reasons. The lockdown is boring, but we have been reminded of how blissful it can be to have an occasional break from the frenetic activity of the modern world and the remorseless orgy of consumerism that often feels like a substitute for religious observance.

We should restrict trading to Sunday mornings – between 6am and noon.

Retail maniacs, could, like the devout of old, get up early to do their thing. The rest of us could enjoy those old idle afternoons. Sunday need not be offered up to God, but most of us could, like the good Lord on the seventh day, use a rest from the world we have created.

Benedict King

when I realised the challenges of trying to find him a shared home that matched his budget, with people who shared his interests and were of a similar age,’ she explains.

Noble herself lucked out with her lodger – Ameet, who’s 52 – but, she says, finding a good match when you’re older can be tricky if you’re not seeking to share a home with a handful of young strangers. ‘I’d just fallen into my situation, but I realised that if you were to go about this more deliberately, it could be really hard and really demoralising,’ she says.

To her, having a lodger of a similar age makes perfect sense – it brings her both companionship and a regular income.

Noble and Ameet often share meals

together, have mutual interests and, when she just wants to have a chat, he’s often available. Setting clear boundaries was key to their successful co-habitation.

Her situation is not so unusual.

According to the latest statistics, one in

‘If I appear overqualified, I can tone down the exaggerations’

five over-50s now rents. Forecasts suggest that a third of over-60s will be forced into the rental market by 2040 as rising divorce rates and high property prices take their toll.

‘The pension gap, especially for women, is a factor. Then you have the loneliness epidemic to contend with,’ says Noble. ‘I started talking to others who had experienced the frustration of trying to find or fill spare rooms. I decided to take the plunge and set up Silver Sharers to find a simple solution to a complex problem.

‘At the moment, we’re just in London – it’s a big enough city and has the greatest need,’ she says, but she doesn’t rule out expanding the company.

In the UK there are some six million over-50s who have two or more spare bedrooms – and the number of potential long-term lodgers of a similar age increases daily.

It’s still early days for Noble’s company, but her weekly newsletter, in which she advertises new properties all over the capital, has already

attracted some 700 prospective landlords and renters.

Recently, the Older Women’s CoHousing group banded together to create its own community in a new purpose-built block of 25 flats in High Barnet, north London. Designed with ageing in mind, the flats have a shared kitchen and garden and are managed by the women themselves.

The development is based on a model from the Netherlands, where shared living is common, and on research that shows older people remain more active, healthier and less lonely when they live near one another. Whether this, or simply connecting with suitable landlords, allows oldies to remain in their communities for longer, a form of co-living could be the answer to many looming problems.

Just don’t forget when it’s your turn to buy the loo roll.

Sonia Zhuravlyova

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

She’s a Lady!

I first became a Lady in 1961.

By which I do not mean that I underwent some gender-transferral process at the time. A recent questionnaire on some official matter took me by surprise by beginning, ‘Are you still the gender you were born into?’ I was tempted to reply that I didn’t remember my birth that clearly…

In any case, the answer is yes: I was born female. And I became a Lady when my father succeeded my childless uncle to the Earldom of Longford in 1961.

I was 30. Now an Earl’s daughter, I had the right to be styled Lady plus Christian name.

That was it: no more was involved. I still had the common rank of commoner.

I certainly had no right to enter the House of Lords, as chatty taxi drivers have sometimes suggested. It was a courtesy title, so called, and thenceforth courteous people did – and do – address me as Lady Antonia.

There was no necessity to take it: of my three sisters, two did and one didn’t.

It’s not my professional name as a writer.

When I wrote Mary Queen of Scots in 1969, I was careful not to use it on book jackets in case it prejudiced Marxist reviewers against me. (I still don’t.)

There was and is, however, a necessity not to address me as Lady Fraser. That would imply the style came from my husband, the MP Sir Hugh Fraser. Similarly, my courtesy title was

Not plain Mrs Pinter: marrying Harold Pinter, Kensington Register Office, 1980

not affected by my husband’s own style.

When Harold Pinter and I got married in Kensington Register Office in 1980, the press attended outside. As we left, a tabloid gossip-writer cried, ‘How does it feel to be plain Mrs Pinter?’

‘She’s not,’ snapped Harold. No Pinter pause on this occasion.

The next day, the Daily Mirror thoughtfully explained the rules of the British peerage, before adding a gallant postscript: ‘Besides, Lady Antonia is not plain.’

It is obvious from all this that I warmly welcomed being a Lady. And I still do. It’s beautiful (unlike Dame, which has elements of pantomime about it). It also, for what it’s worth, gives no indication as to whether I am married or not – like the mingy, unpronounceable Ms, but much more agreeable. Come to think of it, why isn’t Lady used by everybody who wants to, in place of Ms? So much prettier.

There is no law against it.

Lady Antonia Fraser The Oldie June 2020 13

When ailing Hammer Films needed a boost 50 years ago, budding actress Madeline Smith discovered nudity was a must

Hammer glamour girl recalls the horror!

H

alf a century ago, I took my first foray into Hammer Films.

My acting career was in its infancy when I went to meet formidable casting director Aida Young. I was up for the tiny part of Dolly, the waif prostitute in their latest horror offering, Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970). She considered me to be sufficiently vulnerable, and a couple of days later I was riding on actor Geoffrey Keen’s back.

I wore a Victorian-style white lace boiler suit, and I weighed scarcely more than seven stone. He was on his haunches on the floor, with me atop his rump.

According to fellow actor John Carson, also in the brothel, Geoffrey complained bitterly about my dead weight.

A naked female danced sinuously between us while her pet Python wrapped itself lovingly between her thighs. Tinny music played from a loudspeaker somewhere off set.

It was all quite a long way from Hammer’s origins in 1934, when it was set up by William Hinds, a comedian and businessman. Unromantically named after his home in Hammersmith, Hammer Films produced classics such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959), all starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

By the time I turned up on set, in 1969, I was so shy – a 20-year-old virgin, fairly fresh from convent school – that I spoke to nobody. What a waste! Hammer was known for employing the best character actors in the business. It would have been a delight to chat away to them.

Until then, Hammer films had been shot mostly by the Thames at Bray Studios. In the late 1960s, they moved to

14 The Oldie June 2020

Elstree. I soon got used to early-morning calls, waiting for reeking minicabs at dawn to take me the long route up the North Circular Road. I was never allocated a car or a driver on any film: the Hammer budget would never have stretched to transport for small fry like me.

By 1970, Hammer was feeling the pinch. Film audiences had plummeted.

Hammer’s X-rating meant the films were shown after normal hours and to an already shrunken public. In the early 1970s, fans clustered around their 12-inch television sets to catch a screening. It is only now, with DVDs and instant availability, that these films have acquired iconic status.

Hammer was in big trouble – and so it decided to sell through sex rather than quality. Boss James Carreras sold his soul to a ragamuffin company called American International Pictures. His father, Enrique Carreras, a Spaniard who had gone into partnership with William Hinds, would be turning in his grave. It was all very sad.

My first Hammer role: with Ralph Bates in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

For my poor embryonic career, this unholy marriage between these two companies was a disaster. Nudity was going to be on the menu, and I was the last to know.

Two heavies arrived at Elstree, briefcases bristling with pornography.

Michael Styles was the one with the secret penchant for filth: if he had had his way, Hammer would have descended much further into the abyss.

They made a three-picture deal. I was thrilled to be offered a major part in their first offering, The Vampire Lovers (1970).

I counted the lines and was overjoyed to see that I was second lead to Ingrid Pitt. I was to succumb to the lavish enticements of her slavering vampire. My foe was a comely East European and sexually experienced actress, prone to taking her clothes off at any and every opportunity. In real life, though, I still clung lamely onto my virginity. I didn’t know any other way. Yes, I was that dim!

The Vampire Lovers had been sensitively adapted from the Gothic novella Carmilla, written in 1872 by Sheridan Le Fanu.

The simple plot involved a vampire with lesbian leanings but not averse to the odd tankard of male blood. Hammer was interested solely in breasts, and as many of them as could be squeezed into this 90-minute film.

One fat producer rang me over the holiday to ask about my measurements.

He was concerned they may not meet the requirements of the part. I rushed to my local Hornby & Clarke dairy and gorged on yoghurts and milk. Job done!

On set, this same chap sported a shiny red salami slung around his waist, thinking it a real hoot. I failed to get the joke. One morning, he invited me to

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remove my bodice, to act alongside the nude vampire who at the time was in her tin bath. He reassured me it would be for the Japanese version only, and nobody would see it. This did not turn out to be the case.

The sets and costumes were glorious, if flimsy. Problems arose when the paper moon kept blowing about in the breeze.

Props had to harness it with string.

Peter Cushing, playing a benign uncle, gave a most touching, heart-rending performance, even within the confines of a small role. His clothes were sumptuous rich velvets, the lighting was sublime and, apart from the wretched nudity, I consider The Vampire Lovers to be a classic. Sadly I never got to act opposite Christopher Lee. Then I was in another Peter Cushing film, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). That movie was created rather cynically to compete with the recent craze for blood and gore. In that respect, it did not disappoint!

There was no nudity. There was a cheap claustrophobic set to represent the lunatic asylum of a surgeon, Baron Victor Frankenstein, played by Cushing.

It was the old Frankenstein story, with Dave Prowse (later Darth Vader) as the monster. He wore the crudest rubber suit, and dealt gamely and uncomplainingly with it. He was unfazed by the sheep-body parts hurled at him for

Above: Madeline Smith, Shane Briant, Peter Cushing, Charles Lloyd-Pack in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

the finale. I found these scenes gratuitous and unnecessary. For years, they were cut from the film. People had left cinemas in disgust when the film started to resemble an abattoir. One weekend, the dreadful brains, eyes and offal were not refrigerated. On the enclosed set the resulting smell was unbearable.

Peter Cushing himself looked like a cadaver. He didn’t eat or drink and throughout our filming was mourning his recently deceased wife. He was a pitiful sight. The scenes were redeemed by the wonderful character actors who played the inmates of the asylum, bumped off one by one as Frankenstein endeavours to find the best brain for his creation.

Vincent Price was my real top man when I appeared with him – not in a Hammer movie but in an independent film called Theatre of Blood (1973).

Vincent was a real charmer, playing the actor who takes brutal revenge on the theatre critics who have savaged his performances.

When the old guard died, Hammer became very watered down. After some success with ghastly comedies for a time, they were no longer able to compete in a changed world. Today, a brave CEO of Hammer Films, Simon Oates, is steering his own course. Recent Hammer films include The Woman in Black (2012) and The Quiet Ones (2014).

The Lodge is out this year. The actor Mark Gatiss has paid fine tribute to Hammer Films, giving the classic horror films a darn good dusting – and they come up shiny and vivid.

But, still, the Hammer of old that I knew is dead and buried. On with the new!

The Oldie June 2020 15

The great novelist died 150 years ago, on 9th June 1870, aged 58.

Four writers tell Simon Hemelryk their favourite Dickens moment

The best of times...

GRANGER/ALAMY

Simon Callow

Actor, author of Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World and creator of the one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens It made my young, would-be actor heart beat much faster when I first read the section in Nicholas Nickleby where Nicholas and his friend Smike join Vincent Crummle’s touring company. The pair meet him in a Portsmouth inn, having come to the town to look for work as sailors.

But Crummle, this improbable figure with

a huge rumbling voice, convinces them they should take to the stage instead.

‘There’s genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye,’ he tells Nicholas. ‘You’ll do as well as if you had thought of nothing else but the lamps, from your birth downwards.’

Dickens’s subsequent description of life in Crummle’s touring company is an enchanting introduction to the theatre.

There are fabulous characters: the child phenomenon, who’s actually about 20, and Folair, who’s unmistakably a

bitchy queen – not unknown in acting.

There’s a real sense of the magic, absurdity and tawdry glamour of the profession. And the the thrill of putting on a show, exciting people and then moving on to the next place.

When I was a child with chickenpox, scratching all over, my grandmother gave me my first Dickens, Pickwick Papers. I never scratched again.

Dickens’s youthful, carnivalesque world of grotesques was wonderful to discover as a young person.

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The story introduces the idea that David’s world is full of different types of people, all with different motives and often with not quite enough money. It also shows he’s got a very good grasp of detail – important for becoming a writer.

I got into Dickens properly when I was doing English at UCL. I hadn’t read any of his books apart from Oliver Twist. But I ended up doing my dissertation on him.

He had a big effect at such a seminal age. Familiarity with his characters was so enriching. And the amount of writing, walking and other things he did… He was unstoppable.

At the moment, I’m writing a crime novel and you have to throw out lots of ideas and details to bring it to life, hoping you can weave them all to a satisfying conclusion later. Dickens’s work – something like the caul story – gives me the nerve to try it.

The theatrical emotion of Vincent Crummles, an 1838 engraving by H K Browne (known as Phiz) for Nicholas Nickleby

Jeffrey Archer I’ve tried over my career to create or portray characters like his who belong to the realm of the imagination, rather than being slavishly photographic. Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, for instance. Or Oliver Haddo/Aleister Crowley in Chemical Wedding (2008).

The human race, which has so disgraced itself, has thrown up a few admirable figures to give us all courage.

Dickens was one of the most admirable of them all.

Barry Cryer

Comedian and writer The Dickens moment I treasure most is in A Christmas Carol when we realise Scrooge has been utterly transformed by the visits from the ghosts. He finally realises where he’s been going wrong and that he has the chance of a much better life.

He starts to smile and laugh. ‘I’m as light as a feather,’ he says. ‘I’m as happy as an angel. I’m as merry as a schoolboy.

I’m as giddy as a drunken man.’

Alistair Sim’s portrayal of this moment in Scrooge (1951) is particularly wonderful. His face just lights up in a way you haven’t seen remotely in the movie, until then. Then he leans out of the window and asks a boy to buy the prize turkey. ‘I’ll send it Bob Cratchit’s,’ he chuckles to himself. ‘He shan’t know who sends it.’

Dickens wasn’t a conscious influence on my work, but sometimes the great writers have more of an impact on you than you realise. When writing sitcoms, I’ve realised it’s not necessarily the witty, sharp lines that make characters funny.

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It’s making sure they speak and react in a way that’s completely true to their nature. Dickens was a master of that.

Graham Chapman and I created a part for Ronnie Corbett, in the comedy series No – That’s Me Over Here!, who was an amalgamation of several Dickens-type characters. Something would go badly wrong at work and he’d go home and tell his wife a totally different version of events.

Dickens’s work hasn’t dated, which is quite amazing when you think about it.

But that’s because he writes about human nature so well.

Lynne Truss

Author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves The start of David Copperfield has a long description by the hero of how he was born with a caul, which eventually became the property of an old lady. The superstition ran that owning one would prevent you from drowning. It is a completely unnecessary piece of prose – we never hear about the woman again.

But it’s a brilliant pen portrait and, for me, exemplifies the joy of writing. You can tell Dickens is loving it, thinking ‘Yeah, I can really do this.’

There’s lots of great detail about how the caul was initially advertised in a newspaper ‘at the low price of fifteen guineas’. And how, eventually, the old lady wins it in a raffle and dies ‘triumphantly in bed, at 92’. David adds, ‘I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge.’

Novelist If you’re going to have an anti-hero in a novel, he has to do something very, very special for the reader suddenly to say, ‘Wait a moment. There’s more to this guy than we thought.’ That’s exactly what Dickens manages in A Tale of Two Cities with the death of Sydney Carton.

On the face of it, he’s a drunken, brawling, second-rate lawyer. Then his love for Lucie leads him to take the place of her husband and his doppelganger, Charles Darnay, in a French prison.

Darnay has been sentenced to death for the misdeeds of his aristocratic relatives.

But it is Carton who is taken from prison to the guillotine on the back of a cart, the crown jeering as he goes.

‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done,’ he thinks as he is about to meet his end. There can’t be a more dramatic event in many novels.

But then, in terms of drama Dickens was the giant of his era. He really makes you turn the page. That’s a God-given gift. I’m a storyteller, too, and, of course, I’m influenced by the greats.

His genius is also that you remember his characters. Pickwick and Pip are figures we all know and love. We don’t love Scrooge so much, but we certainly know him. These are people who have lived in readers’ minds for 150 years.

I read A Tale of Two Cities when I was a child – it was one of my mother’s favourite books. Dickens has lots of youthful heroes, such as Pip and Oliver Twist. People who succeed. But I loved his anti-heroes, like Carton, too. We all see ourselves as anti-heroes, don’t we?

We all think we’ll come good and do something brave in the end.

Eyes and the needle After cancer surgery, Lucy Deedes thought she was tough as old boots – and then she faced the agony of a cataract op

RIMOM/ALAMY

I

’ve been in and out of hospital pretty regularly over the last few years.

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2013. So there was surgery, chemo, radiotherapy and the rest. Most of it was far easier to cope with than I expected and, strangely perhaps, it’s been a wholly positive experience. Some people fear hospitals, but I find them a safe place.

So, in spite of an unforgettable operation two years earlier for a detached retina, I breezed fearlessly into hospital for the cataract surgery that inevitably follows eye trauma. I’m as tough as old boots, I thought, and this one won’t hurt at all. Everyone has it! It’s over in a flash!

What can possibly go wrong?

Cataract surgery is quick and effective and the most commonly performed operation in the UK. Some 30 per cent of people of 65 years and over have cataracts in one or both eyes, and in England alone 330,000 operations are performed each year: 95 per cent of those will be on those over the age of 40.

There are inevitably long waiting lists.

I waited for about a year but, on the day, the operation took only 20 minutes and I was in and out of hospital in just over three hours.

At 63, I was much the youngest patient on the morning list, which featured one man and six other women, one in a wheelchair.

The surgeon saw us in turn, explained to me that he would take out the cloudy lens and replace it with an artificial one under local anaesthetic, and marked the eye with a biro mark on my forehead.

Every 15 minutes or so, a nurse gave me eyedrops to dilate the eye, followed by anaesthetic drops just before I went into theatre.

I didn’t smell a rat even when one elderly lady asked, ‘Is this your first time?’ in a solicitous voice, and another confided that it was her second time and that she had learnt some poetry – 20 The Oldie June 2020

Cataracts affect some 30% of over-65s

Wordsworth, Frost – to recite to herself to help her get through it.

In the theatre, my eye with its hugely dilated pupil was clamped open. The eye didn’t much care for this, what with the merciless overhead lights. A sterile cloth was put over my face and an eyehole cut out. Then the irrigation started and the unhappy eyeball was sluiced with water.

The word ‘waterboarding’ popped into my head. If the Spanish Inquisition had asked me where my grandmother was hiding, I would have cried, ‘She’s upstairs in the airing cupboard.’

A nurse held my left hand and told me to squeeze if I needed, but obviously you don’t want to make a fuss. So instead I plucked holes in my jeans with the other hand and my toes did a ragged Mexican wave. In my head, I was lying on the deck of HMS Victory with a piece of leather clamped between my teeth. The theatre staff asked me to try and keep still.

There was no pain from the cutting and tugging; just a bit of pressure and

‘The word “water-boarding” popped into my head’

plenty more hosing down. Occasionally I remembered to breathe. When I thought we must be nearly done, the surgeon said, ‘You’re doing very well – we’re halfway now,’ and what was left of my courage wilted and died. I heard a bleeper start up – one single long note – and assumed my heart must have stopped.

Then there came a sublime moment when the mask and the eye clamps came off. I half expected them to say, ‘You have a beautiful baby boy.’

Back to the waiting room, reeling, for a cup of tea and some after-care instructions. Luckily my daughter had paracetamol in the car and I have loads of hospital-strength painkillers at home.

So I hit the co-codamol and spent the rest of the day rolled up in a ball on the sofa thinking about poor King Harold and his eye.

The next day, it was a different world.

I was still in mild shock, but the pain was gone and my sight was restored, after two years of fog, to a wonderful level of sharp though still fractured 3D images, like stained-glass windows. My house appeared to be lit entirely by halogen bulbs.

It was a miracle for which I am hugely grateful, and yet I do have questions about the brutality of that procedure. Maybe I am a massive coward, or have been spoilt by the sensitivity – tenderness, even – that I have found everywhere in oncology, but how do thousands of elderly eye patients cope with the trauma, even with William Wordsworth’s help?

Do they just manage because for them there is no choice?

Costs, resources… I get it, of course, but couldn’t a mild sedative be offered, as it is with a colonoscopy or gastroscopy?

Acquaintances who scoff at my spinelessness admit, on further questioning, that they went privately and paid for treats such as anaesthesia.

I can’t help thinking that if punchy, professional 30-somethings regularly required cataract surgery, things might change.

The awkward art of acting English

Diffidence, restraint, over-politeness... Robert Bathurst, the modern master of playing Englishmen, salutes the craft of his heroes

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his is a very broad commission – to discuss the acting of Englishness.

Rather than ring up the Editor and ask him to narrow the definition a bit, I’ll make a guess that what we’re tackling here is the unfashionable end of the market: the portrayal of middle- and upper-class, white, male characters whose emotional range is limited to restraint, embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, fear of intimacy, self-deprecation, hypocrisy, modesty, courtesy, deception, fair play, sarcasm, understatement, fence-sitting, fuss-avoiding, over-politeness, conformism and a searching for the happy medium in all things.

It’s a rich seam, full of subtlety. The

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actor of Englishness must get all of the above into the line ‘I do beg your pardon.’

The finest exponents of this style of acting, historically, often were from very different backgrounds from the characters they played. Part of an actor’s impetus to Toff It Up A Bit in their off-stage persona came from within the profession itself.

Henry Irving lobbied vigorously for his knighthood, awarded in 1895. In accepting the honour, he said that it had elevated the acting profession’s respectability, giving long-overdue recognition of its place in society and at last actors could be accepted at Court, when for centuries they’d had the social status of vagrants and criminals.

Aside from the vainglory Irving may have enjoyed, he did have a point –

though it is questionable why anyone thinks an actor should be given a gong.

The profession, especially today, gets recognition enough and a K doesn’t make you a better actor. Most honour citations for actors should read ‘For services to their career’.

Despite Irving’s ennoblement, the acting profession remained insecure. In the 1930s, an actor in a play in London could be reprimanded by the management and threatened with suspension if seen walking in the West End without gloves and a hat; this criminal slovenliness let down the reputation of their profession.

This meant that actors of the 1930s and later generations had a strict imperative, financial and for professional advancement, to play the game. George

PHOTO 12/AF ARCHIVE/LANDMARK MEDIA/ALAMY

Bernard Shaw railed at the curse of ‘society-struck actors’, aping the upper classes in their off-stage lives.

The litany of actors who come to mind as being the epitome of Englishness are a colourful parade of, mostly, Burlington Berties whose ambition was spurred on by distressed gentility, real or threatened.

Lawrence Olivier was the son of a peripatetic vicar; the sublime Leslie Howard was from a Hungarian Jewish and Prussian immigrant family. Robert Donat, Rex Harrison and Charles Laughton, likewise, had backgrounds far removed from the Kensington and Mayfair lives they portrayed on film.

This lies at the heart of what it takes to do the job and how good they were at it.

How much of the actor is on show?

How much is real? The answer is: none of it – not consciously. This goes against the perception that actors are just playing themselves, something encouraged by PR agents and, often, actors, to make them sound more interesting, as though they and the character they play are one and the same. How many more ghastly profiles do we have to wade through where an actor talks about their process and how they felt performing the part?

Noël Coward was dead against this artistic embodiment – what he called ‘the modern trend, [in which] you have to be in the mood, and feel it’. He said, ‘You cannot afford to feel it when you are playing eight performances a week and you’re going to give the public their money’s worth.’

It’s this robust showmanship as described by Coward, a pragmatic, technical toughness, that belies the sometimes loose, languid diffidence on which some actors successfully traded.

David Niven, George Sanders, John Le Mesurier, Patrick Macnee, Robert Morley and David Tomlinson; you wouldn’t want to cross them by saying that they didn’t care and were just playing themselves.

They knew exactly what they were doing and what value they could give to a line of dialogue.

Some actors knew where they stood in the market and resisted all offers to veer away from it. Kenneth More was courted

by Peter Hall to play in a Shakespeare production. He refused; he felt that the audience didn’t want to see him stray from the sort of part they were familiar with him doing. It was also a canny way of maintaining his profile as a star, settling on an image and polishing it for ever.

Another scrapper who oozed upperclass, English suavity, and stuck at it for his whole career, was Finchley-born

Opposite: Patrick Macnee, The Avengers (1960s). Above, from top: David Niven (c1951); John Le Mesurier, Dad’s Army (1968); David Tomlinson, Mary Poppins (1964); Terry-Thomas, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968)

Terry-Thomas. He was a type, always, but a type in a pickle. He combined beautifully and in an extreme fashion the playing of a high-status character with a low-status predicament. Cartoon-like in its execution, maybe, but always with its own truth.

My favourite exchange is in the film Too Many Crooks,where he’s kidnapped, tied to a chair and blindfolded by George Cole, who is blowing cheap cigar smoke over him and pretending he is an international criminal. Terry-Thomas elides his three-part response into one swift sentence: ‘International criminal?

What’s that you’re smoking, a Congo rat?

Who’s your accountant?’

Another enjoyable, wily performer, who, when choosing roles, stuck to his guns and always pointed them in the same direction, was Wilfred Hyde-White.

He knew exactly what he was doing while seeming to make no effort. He is quoted in Moray Watson’s memoir as saying, ‘I went to the RADA, and learned two things. One is: I can’t act. The other is: it doesn’t matter.’

All these actors, along with many others including Alec Guinness, Trevor Howard and Jack Hawkins, shared one underrated quality: you could hear what they said. It is a taboo in some circles now to say that an actor is inaudible; I’ve worked with directors who are too scared to say so or too cloth-eared to notice. I once filmed some dialogue with an actor who was standing about four feet from me but the only way I knew it was my cue was that his lips stopped moving. Consonants are not elitist: discuss. See also, for great, audible actors, Michael Hordern, Peter Cushing and Denholm Elliott.

My acting heroes described here are all dead. There are many others alive today who play Englishness with deftness and subtlety, underscoring what they do with weight and surprise. It seems to be a diktat of modern drama that no such characters are to have any redeeming human qualities. But there are ways to subvert that and it’s always possible to sneak some interest into the part when the guards aren’t looking.

Englishness, as defined here, might be coded, sly and dishonest, but those qualities make for stories both richly comic and understatedly desperate. That is why it will not go away, whatever the high priests of the arts decree. It may die with the final generation to enjoy irony, cruelty, euphemism and disguise of emotion.

Good riddance to Englishness, those high priests will cry – but there’s some great fun to be had along the way.

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here is something about big, wide, busy rivers that makes one long to live beside them.

During the Second World War, I had the luck to work down near East Tilbury, where Henry VIII built blockhouses on both banks.

At Coalhouse Fort, one of these blockhouses, I worked as a 20-year-old Leading Wren – a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. I’d given up a place at Oxford in 1939 to become a Wren.

After a year of this, I again found myself beside the Thames, doing the officers’ training course, living under the white Palladian colonnades and domes of Greenwich Palace, arriving by ferry at the pier frequented by kings, queens, Drake, Raleigh and Pepys.

I met my husband, Lt John Lamb DSC, in Belfast when his ship, HMS Oribi, was sent there for repairs. I was a Plotting Officer there for the Battle of the Atlantic. We married in 1943. That was the year HMS Oribi famously rammed a U-boat.

Then, in 1944, I worked in Whitehall on the maps of the D-Day landings. We dealt with individual pieces of the enormous jigsaw. None of us knew or discussed what the others were doing.

My brief was to delineate everything that could be seen on every compass bearing from each landing position visible from the bridge of an approaching landing craft. Big-scale Ordnance Survey maps were spread out on the wall, showing railways, roads, churches, castles and every possible feature visible to an incoming invader and from every angle.

When D-Day happened, on 6th June 1944, I heard the announcement on the radio at 6am. I was thrilled to know that, at last, we’d managed to carry out the plans, envisaged for so long by so many brilliant brains. We were there! It was the beginning of our campaign to help get back France for the French.

Seventy years later, when I was dining with a lucky friend whose London flat overlooked the Thames, the thought suddenly occurred to me, ‘Why don’t I leave Cornwall and move up to London?’

My second thought was, ‘How can I possibly live without my garden?’

It had taken me 50 years to decorate a rather undistinguished patch in Cornwall with a much-loved collection of plants.

We came to Cornwall when the Royal Navy was cut in half, as frequently happens. A harbourmaster was required at the tiny port of Par. My husband was offered the job. We were well-used to travelling the world with our three children. Cornwall seemed no different from Malta or Singapore as a next stop.

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Christian Lamb helped plan D-Day. Now, as she turns 100, she leaves a beloved garden

Farewell to the garden of a lifetime It wasn’t until the children had flown the nest and stopped littering the garden with old bangers and bits of boats that I had the time and inclination to indulge my own passion for growing the plants I’d enjoyed in favourable climes.

The big conker tree at one end of the property provided a splendid shady area.

Part of the garden was walled and the remaining boundaries I marked with camellia hedges. There are very many suitable, fastigiate varieties for this

purpose and, by placing the spreading kinds in corners and niches, I managed, with the help of the autumn-flowering sasanquas, to have most of my favourite varieties of camellia in bloom from October to May. I wanted many small-flowering trees and shrubs to fit in, evergreen if possible.

I like my plants to have many virtues – beautiful leaves, flowers of course, attractive new growth, fruit and seeds, autumn colour and even attractive bark.

Eventually I became so obsessed by my garden that I wrote a book about it.

It took me five years of enormous fun and research.

And now I’ve sold my Cornwall house and my beloved garden – and moved into a Battersea flat by the Thames. I often think about what I miss most in my garden.

I loved September, when I divided up my dactylorhizas. These wild orchids have delicate brittle roots. It’s a pleasure to separate them with a neat little shake and a tweak.

Repotting my Vireya rhododendrons was satisfying, too. They can’t bear to have soil round their roots, which makes it a challenge to stand them in their pots.

They spent their winters in the cold greenhouse where they flowered the most sensational colours; for their summer hols, I put them outside on the terrace, where they continue to dazzle.

In their native home of Indonesia, they seed themselves in the tops of trees, which they ornament brilliantly, germinating in the apex of branches.

The bare spaces left between the shrubs were covered in a mixture of ground-cover plants, including: Anemone blanda, species geraniums, hellebores, Omphalodes cappadocica, with edging of Convolvulus sabatius and Mitraria coccinea, all disliked by slugs and snails.

I loved sitting on my terrace in the sun – or very occasionally in the shade when it was too hot – from where I criticised my handiwork and saw how it could be improved. I watched my birds hop about in the birdbath or make their nests with the hairy stuff off the palm-tree bark.

All this is just as well because quite a few jobs are beyond me – I turn 100 on 19th July. I keep having to remind myself how old I am and not to climb to the top of ladders in case I fall off.

I enjoyed the extraordinary variety of members of the human race the agents sent to view my house and garden.

One lady could not bear my bottle brushes: ‘Those must go,’ she said. How odd to despise the lovely yellow Callestemon sieberi. One man thought about fitting his baby grand piano into my little office. Another man was interested if he could squeeze his vintage Bentley into my garage.

My favourite family wanted only four bedrooms, closeness to the sea and magnolias – all of which I provided: M grandiflora, M stellata and the climbing Schisandra grandiflora var rubrifolia with heavenly little scarlet flowers, which climbed up the M stellata, covering the canopy with its brilliant blooms.

The small children enjoyed rushing up and down behind my biggest camellia hedge, now 14ft high. They liked the garden best for its ‘lovely hiding places’.

The littlest girl hid behind Hydrangea ayesha, peering out between the blooms like a little pink hydrangea herself.

Many of them admired my different foliages, particularly the Podocarpus chinensis, whose new growth is especially striking, being very pale, and the Euchryphia cordifolia, which obligingly flowers in August, covering itself with little, scented, white blooms.

The ginger lilies – Hedychium gardnerianum and the white one, probably spicatum – also came in for

Top: Christian Lamb as a Wren, 1942. Middle: Euchryphia cordifolia.

Bottom: Bomaria caldasii.

Opposite page: Christian in her Cornwall garden

praise. None of them had ever seen the very late Bomaria caldasii, covered in blossoms, or the climbing alstroemeria, which has to be tightly wrapped in fleece against the frost.

Now that I’m luxuriating in the riverside flat of my dreams, revelling in the activities on the Thames, I pick up the book I wrote about my much-loved garden, and wonder what terrible destruction is taking place there.

One thing is certain: I shall never go back and see!

Christian Lamb is author of From the Ends of the Earth – Passionate Plant Collectors Remembered in a Cornish Garden (Bene Factum Publishing) The Oldie June 2020 25

Tamsin Calidas left London for a Hebridean crofter’s life. She found heartache, rejection by locals – and redemption through swimming

Treasured island I

love myths. Myth is a fire that draws you to it. Its quivering flame crackles, combusting the dry kindling debris of our daily grind.

An antidote to safe living is sensed pulsing, inexorably alive. A myth asks, would you dare to live a different life?

I was there, restless, searching, 15 years ago. A husband, but no children. Excitedly planning our move out of London, disrupting a too comfortable life. Two drams poured, my heart beating fast, holding a tiny advert for a derelict Hebridean island croft in 22 acres of wild, abandoned fields.

Outside, a darkening sky swept the fierce, lifting sea out of Oban Harbour to the gleaming horizon. One tiny island calling, far out beyond the salt breakers

and the haunting call of the geese. All the romance of my own modern myth was there, rich, potent, echoing.

We were breathtakingly naïve and optimistic, planning our great escape to the smallest minutiae yet shockingly ill-prepared. For two idyllic months, the sun shone, the swallows flew and we lived outside. We had two bags crammed full of our small belongings, an old Vespa scooter, a gas camping stove and, when summer broke, an antique battered caravan. Sometimes, it was refreshing to realise how little we needed to live; at other times, it felt precarious.

Neither of us spoke of winter’s lifting seas battering the island, or fierce winds gusting through. Arguably, by our distancing ourselves from family, The Oldie June 2020 27

friends, culture and connections, our relocation inexorably propelled us out of kilter. Out in the islands, birds flock together. Survival depends on this.

The wilderness eased our transition.

Its raw beauty was shocking. Wild grasses, running free over the hillsides, led to pristine coves. One day, fishing off the rocks, I was startled and cried, ‘The sea has turned black!’ Tiny fish were flying out of the water. Behind them, a feeding frenzy of porpoise. In winter, seals basked, their fat pelts glistening; in their singing, a beauty and strange loneliness.

In myths, we journey effortlessly.

Even in medieval tales, struggle and hardship are assuaged by the integrity and worthiness of the quest. Stepping off our career ladders in pursuit of sustainability, creative simplicity and a closeness to nature, we never questioned whether we would thrive or fail. We implicitly trusted our self-reliance.

Story-telling ritualises the pursuit of happiness; every labour of love ends well.

‘There is a first time for everything,’ we reasoned as we bought our first cows and sheep. Our first lambing was bleak and beautiful. I remember thinking how nothing will stop those lives from coming. And how easy nature makes that gift of new life seem.

Over the centuries, landscape mirrors psyche. With tight kinships and a tiny landmass, freedom of thought is restricted, despite the immense skies.

Historically, strangers were associated with incursions; incomers viewed with curiosity, suspicion, jealousy and fear.

Voices are polarised; a single-track road accentuated this dichotomy with a north-south divide.

I realised how we had taken old friendships for granted, never considering we might not be welcomed.

‘If you want to be part of the community…’ became a carrot-and-stick mantra. Belonging was an unattainable, unassailable prize.

‘How long will it take?’ I wondered, aloud.

‘Till you leave? Ten years, by my reckoning,’ a neighbour quipped, ‘or until the fence posts rot.’

‘That will never happen,’ I countered.

‘Ach, you’ll never belong,’ was the reply.

One night, at a ceilidh, as we danced traditional reels, a farmer called out my mixed-race ethnicity.

‘You see, you’re different,’ he smiled, his eyes hardening. ‘You are not family.

Not one of us.’

Living remotely has an allure, yet it demands financial capital, breathtaking 28 The Oldie June 2020

Farming is still ruled by patriarchy. A single woman is a threat and a risk stamina and shattering resilience. It takes time for your own values to be deconstructed, broken and reassembled.

Sometimes I found myself caught between a desire for acceptance and a fear that if we stayed, we might end up different from the people we knew ourselves to be.

Slowly you assimilate these shifting codes, adhere to archaic traditions, protocol, bias and conservative rules.

I felt anxious as our identities were wilfully erased; our prior experiences met with lack of interest and a cool disdain. It was confusing. For all our efforts, our home remained for ever the previous owner’s –‘Hector’s croft’, as it was called. Sometimes it made me sweat.

When our longed-for children didn’t come, trust and our marriage broke down. After my husband left, there was little empathy or support.

‘I don’t know why you’re so upset,’ a woman challenged me. ‘We all got over it months ago.’

Farming traditions are still ruled by patriarchy. A single woman is a threat and a risk. I had to run the croft and sheep alone. It was very difficult. It was hard to know where to turn. I was in debt, with the renovations incomplete.

With no completion certificate for the house, I was trapped, unable to sell.

I also had two broken hands. My left hand was badly broken in a fall on the

croft. A few weeks later, my right hand was severely injured.

Two months later, my father died shockingly, and I became seriously unwell.

It is hard not to be able to say goodbye to a parent, especially when they have been emotionally absent over a longer time. I think of my father whenever I look up at the stars. But the truth is that he is everywhere I am, and everywhere I look.

Vulnerability can trigger adverse reactions. Many men on the island were aggressive or inappropriate, and some women fiercely predatory. The mainland was no better. Selling my lambs in a busy local auction ring, the auctioneer nodded, ‘Let’s get you a good price.’ The bidding opened with whistles, shouts and catcalls, as he taunted over the Tannoy, ‘What’ll it be, boys, a flock of cross mules, or this lovely-looking ewe?’

Myth does not talk of the pain of deracination. Or how loneliness is felt like a stinging cold, salt wind. Over time, cold water will wear down even the strongest rock. With no police on the island, law and order are regulated internally, meted out by the collective weight of family hierarchies, muscle, whisky and tribal nepotism. Ostracism punishes voices that sound different.

Land is currency. Every fistful of soil counts. I realised some wanted me to fail and relinquish the croft.

I found strength in the harsh, raw landscape. Foraging to survive, I learned to eat roots, bark and leaves. I discovered the abundance of the natural world. I learned to trust in the wilderness. Some days, it feels the mountains are listening.

I did not decide to stay. I just learned to grit my teeth – and stayed. Adversity teaches you resilience. Ultimately, you have a choice. You either go under or you hang on.

I took to the sea, swimming bareskinned in all weathers, at minus 16° windchill, in storms and on heartachingly blue, crystalline days. The sea teaches you to take life’s knocks softly. You give your all, and realise you have still more to give. Over time, your internal fabric changes; you become tougher, more resourceful.

Belonging comes to each of us differently. I have survived. I have won my right to my own fistful of soil. I have grown to love this fierce, brave, beautiful, thrawn, fighting land. To trust in the wilderness. And to call this island my home.

I Am an Island by Tamsin Calidas (Doubleday) is out now on Kindle and as an audiobook. It is published in hardback on 23rd July

The Way We Live Now

Keep smiling through Trumpeter Matthew Terry leads a socially distanced march along Pashley Road, Eastbourne, for the 75th 30 The Oldie June 2020

dafydd jones

anniversary of VE Day. 8th May 2020 The Oldie June 2020 31

In the late Sixties, a miners’ club near Leeds hosted stars from Louis Armstrong to Eartha Kitt, discovers Reverend Steve Morris

Las Vegas, Yorkshire

I

What on earth did the stars make of humble Batley? Eartha Kitt, who came to perform in 1968, wasn’t keen on the local fish and chips – so she acted as chef for the Corrigans when she stayed over, cooking up a storm in their homely kitchen.

In the space of just a few years, Gene Pitney, Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison and Neil Sedaka all had short residences at the Variety. Every show was a sell-out in front of 2,000 miners and their wives, attracted by the names and the cheap entrance price – which included a meal of chicken-in-a-basket complete with plastic cutlery. Press officer at the time Carl Gresham tells me the US stars added one ingredient: ‘They had charisma. The minute the curtain was even half-up, people were on their feet, cheering.’

The Corrigans had something of a stormy marriage. Gresham says Neil

EVERETT/ALAMY

n 2016 the bulldozers moved in, and within hours the Las Vegas of the North, the Batley Variety Club, was a pile of old bricks and rubble.

The club, tucked away in a tiny West Yorkshire mining town 230 miles from London, had risen from unpromising material. It was conceived and constructed in 1967 by James and Betty Corrigan – lovers of all things Las Vegas and with a dream to sprinkle some US stardust in this tiny part of God’s Own County just outside Leeds.

The couple visited the clubs in Vegas and wondered what would happen were they to bring a bit of the model back to Yorkshire.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, the club was hosting an array of US celebrities, all flown into a local airport, put up in the Corrigans’ luxury home, Oaks Cottage, and delivered to the local chip shop for dinner in the club-owner’s Rolls-Royce.

Sedaka found their rows a bit much. One morning, he came down to breakfast and announced he had written a song that was to be a peace offering between the couple. It became a major hit. It was called The Hungry Years and charted the Corrigans’ journey from rags to riches: I miss the hungry years The once upon a time The lovely long ago We didn’t have a dime Those days of me and you We lost along the way.

All too predictably, the riches in the end turned back to rags (although, just before his death, James Corrigan scooped over £2 million in the National Lottery).

Carl Gresham has tales about all the great Americans who came. Louis Armstrong was modest and kind, he says, and had a heart for the working-class miners and their families. Armstrong earned a whopping £27,000 for his short stay in 1968 (the equivalent of £500,000 today).

When that figure was somehow leaked, it was a millstone for the Corrigans. Other stars wanted a bit more than Armstrong. Corrigan offered Dean Martin’s manager £45,000 for him to come to Batley and was told in no uncertain terms that Martin wouldn’t even ‘piss in a pot’ for that. The writing was on the wall.

At its peak, right up until 1974, the club was rammed with fans. Coaches came from neighbouring pit towns.

People dressed to the nines and glamour was the name of the game. It helped that the beer was cheap and the ticket price covered the meal.

In the end, economics sank the place.

Corrigan was spending more than he was taking. Other mega-clubs opened up, offering luxury as well as the stars.

Most of the stars deserted the Corrigans for bigger pay packets – though not all of them.

James and Betty Corrigan with Louis Armstrong, Batley, 1968; Jayne Mansfield; Roy Orbison behind the club bar, 1969 34 The Oldie June 2019

But that wasn’t before some glorious nights, not least when Jayne Mansfield came to Batley for a week of shows in 1967.

‘The problem was she didn’t really have an act,’ says Gresham. ‘She sang some Marilyn Monroe songs. On the first night, she recited some Shakespeare and there was a mass walk-out. We had a word with her and the next night she changed everything.’

Mansfield had illegally smuggled her two pet chihuahuas into the country. The dogs were badly behaved. Jimmy Corrigan moved her into a hotel so that she could leave the room in a mess and not his bungalow.

After the Shakespeare fiasco, Mansfield came on stage at her most beautiful and glamorous. She was dressed provocatively.

‘She wriggled around and sat on one of the miners’ laps,’ Gresham remembers. ‘Then she said, “Honey, would you like to see my chihuahuas?” It brought the house down. At that point, an assistant brought her dogs on stage.

‘Jayne Mansfield wriggled around and sat on one of the miners’ laps’ Those northerners loved her, and she loved Yorkshire.’

There is a poignancy in the fact that her week in Yorkshire saw Mansfield’s last public appearances before her death in a car crash in New Orleans in 1967, aged only 34. While in Yorkshire, she loved nothing more than going out for a walk in the hills and stopping for ice cream at the local ice-cream van. She was, at least for a while, normal.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Costs went up and takings stayed the same. In the mid-’70s, the club closed, and the glamour never returned. Jimmy and Betty never made much out of it and later in life struggled financially. The trips by Rolls-Royce from the airport to this little town dried up. People went back to their

normal lives – working in pits that just a short time later would be closed down and living in communities that would be torn apart. James Corrigan died in 2000; Betty in 2018.

These days the big stars travel by limo and play at arenas. The fans don’t get close and certainly don’t get cheap entry.

It is almost impossible to conceive of global stars playing such modest places.

Today, Batley is just Batley and the Variety is a distant memory.

But once, it was nearly the centre of the world. Once, it was dusted with magic. Carl remembers, most fondly, Roy Orbison, who played at the club on 9th May 1969: ‘He used to come with his wife and just bring his guitar. He was a sad sort of man. He never spoke to the audience. He told me that he didn’t need to, because his songs said everything he ever wanted to say.’

I ask Carl if he missed those days. ‘Yes and no. There were good times but, in the end, we didn’t really know our arse from our elbow and it all went tits up.’

The Oldie June 2019 35

Town Mouse

The Alexander Chancellor rule – less is more tom hodgkinson

Congratulations to the Spectator magazine, which has just published its 10,000th issue – the first magazine in history to hit that milestone.

Its success is a direct result not of hard work but of laziness. The magazine’s editor from 1975 to 1984, Alexander Chancellor, later the sainted editor of The Oldie, was notoriously idle. But it was under his direction that the magazine, founded in 1828, which had been in the doldrums and on the verge of going out of business, really started to find its feet.

Today’s Spectator, which has a record number of subscriptions, is a direct descendant of Chancellor’s Spectator.

One of Alexander’s inventions, the High Life column by Taki, is still written by the poor little Greek boy, as he calls himself.

Like that other successful idler Dr Johnson, Alexander spent most of his time doing nothing. He preferred having lunch, drinking and smoking to working.

But, like many lazy people, he was efficient – and he was also hypermeticulous about spelling, grammar, headlines and pictures. He was able to concentrate and produce a lot of work in a short space of time. His loafing led to genius ideas for columns and writers.

It’s a paradoxical process that the exuberant young Keats called ‘delicious, diligent indolence’: creative output requires fermentation, cogitation and reflection.

Johnson’s own series of ‘Idler’ essays were in part a self-portrait. Johnson got up at 2pm, spent the afternoon performing chemistry experiments and then went out to drink wine with Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick. Yet he was enormously productive. Nobody was quite sure how and when he got his work done. The answer was very quickly and very close to the deadline.

In ‘Idler’ number one, published in April 1758, Johnson outlined the idler’s 36 The Oldie June 2020

modus operandi, and anyone who met Alexander Chancellor, or any other great idler, will recognise the same methods.

First, the true idler successfully dodges any undue attention: ‘The man of business forgets him; the man of enterprise despises him.’ The idler may be despised but, unlike overtly ambitious people, he doesn’t make red-blooded, determined enemies. The thrusting nature of the ambitious excites envy and competition. The idler, though he may be a secret swot, has charm and does not threaten others.

Idlers are also creative. Johnson uses the metaphor of momentum. A long build-up leads to a quick release. The longer you lie in bed thinking, the quicker the work will get done when you finally rouse yourself. ‘The diligence of an idler is rapid and impetuous,’ he wrote.

Ideas require idling. Coleridge and Wordsworth found material for their work by going on long walks across the Quantocks or from extended periods of daydreaming.

The Romantic poets also had the self-discipline to sit down at some point and convert their reflections into something concrete. Poetry, said Wordsworth, was ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. John Lennon was another brilliant and successful idler: naturally lazy, he wrote loads of songs in praise of doing nothing, including I’m Only Sleeping and Watching the Wheels.

Is city or country life more conducive to idling? Having experienced both, I’ve found that the simple life is surprisingly complicated. There’s so much to think about. Chickens need feeding, vegetable beds need weeding and bread needs kneading.

Dr Johnson agreed. In one of his essays in The Rambler, he wrote about a young lady who moves out to the country to stay with an aunt. She is looking forward to some peace, but finds ‘a confused wildness of care and a tumultuous hurry of diligence’. Her aunt is in a perpetual state of anxiety about her wines souring, her jams moulding and her pickles fermenting. Soon the young lady longs for the relative calm of London town.

Johnson himself always lived in London, though he did enjoy long walking tours with Boswell and would go and stay with his friend Hester Thrale at her brewer husband’s manor house in then semi-rural Streatham.

For Johnson, it was all about conversation, and that could happen anywhere. His literary output was nurtured in the coffee houses and parlours of Georgian London, just as Alexander Chancellor’s was nurtured over long lunches and dinners, often cooked by him – delicious they were, too.

Idlers recognise that the raw materials of creative production are produced by mucking about, or what psychologists call ‘play’: directionless rambles mixed in with lots of laughter.

After all, what is work? There are many kinds, some good and some bad.

Bad work might be doing something you really hate just for the money, like toiling in an Amazon warehouse or selling insurance. Bad work is something you don’t want to do. Or it’s something immoral, like a Ponzi scheme.

Good work is what you do want to do, like a hobby. It’s undertaken voluntarily, and sitting around doing nothing is all part of it. And, almost incidentally, it can lead to great success – as Alexander’s time as editor of the Spectator did so splendidly.

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

Country Mouse

Achtung! My daughters have invaded my homeland giles wood

‘RAUS!’ I barked as I intercepted my younger daughter in the act of purloining the very last bag of rice from the secret store cupboard. It’s difficult to keep secrets in a small cottage.

I had hidden our emergency rations in a grotesque Irish sideboard that Mary insisted on having two beefy Ulstermen heave across the Irish Sea to the mainland in a pantechnicon.

This Victorian monstrosity, encrusted with crudely carved ornamental songbirds, now occupies a quarter of the space of Room One. Its presence there signifies the compromises that marriages entail, and in return Mary runs the house. With no head for figures I am happy to leave her in charge of anything to do with bills and brown envelopes while I have taken on the roles of cook, chauffeur and quartermaster.

I had had the vision and foresight, long before lockdown was imposed, to stock up with essential rations in case of emergency, and to use the sideboard, where no probing hands normally wander, to house the hoard.

As quartermaster, I admit I am quietly looking forward to the inevitable phase when supplies begin to run dry. My guiding light will be the sententious slogan of food writer Michael Pollan: ‘Eat food. Not too much.

Mostly plants.’

It will not be a popular phase with the rest of the family, but to me, the image of Van Gogh’s potato eaters, huddled around a table making the most of meagre supplies, has always been a positive one.

To get back to my order of ‘Raus!’ I have never used German expletives before now. But then, in peacetime, my authority was never so tested. Wartime memories have generally faded. No longer do boys with outstretched arms, in

imitation of bomber aircraft, run down school corridors in tight formation, making machine-gun noises. Neither do they read comics about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, as I did.

Why is it that the German language seems so much more likely to elicit parental respect than our native tongue?

Is it the staccato nature of the delivery?

Other German phrases have been unlocked from my early childhood. They were in constant use by my father, whose National Service involved a brief spell as a Commissioned Officer near Düsseldorf. ‘Aussteigen!’ he would command when we had spent too long in the bath. ‘Gehen Sie ganzer ein!’, he’d say when he wanted us all to jump out of a boat into a rubber dinghy.

The army had a galvanising effect on my father. His brief spell in the military was said to have ‘made’ him, in that it stopped him, an orphan by 17, from becoming a drifter. He liked the routines and the fastidious neatness, the kit boxes with emergency supplies, flasks, maps and torches, the discipline and the chains of command, a hierarchy he extended post-army to his own family, referring to us all as ‘troops’ when giving orders.

Achtung! (‘Look out!’) seems the appropriate warning as I barge into the kitchen, inadvertently crushing the occupant of the tiny space ’twixt door and fridge, who is busily preparing her third Bloody Mary of the evening for a virtual drink with friends on Zoom. And when she protests that the quartermaster needs to reorder Tabasco, I hear myself growling, ‘Beeilen Sie sich!’ (‘Get a move on!’)

I’m not saying my father’s paternalistic authority did any harm to my siblings and me, but today this sort of thing is known as toxic masculinity and my daughters and wife seem less inclined to kowtow.

In fact, on day 40 of lockdown, Mary remarked, in mocking tones, that she has never seen me in more buoyant form.

This was not intended as a compliment.

She claims the improvement in my mood and my enhanced physical prowess (in the garden) are directly attributable to what she calls Fritzl Syndrome. ‘You are enjoying having power over three helpless women who can’t drive and can’t dilute your company with that of any more emollient outsiders,’ she said.

Mary has the wrong end of the stick with this tasteless comparison. I am not enjoying my ‘power’ over the women, nor am I locking them in basements. What I am enjoying is the reassuring confirmation that, at a time of crisis, the male brain is superior when it comes to strategising. The females in this house have shown me that their thinking is woolly, compared with male, survivalfocused thinking which is not derailed by emotional urges.

One of the daughters, for example, wants to use the opportunity of the empty country lanes for driving lessons.

Nice idea – but I can see that this would be a mistake as our car is far too heavy and unwieldy for a stripling of a girl, and the result would be that she would lose confidence, not gain it.

It is increasingly difficult to exercise any form of paternal authority in a society where men have lost their traditional role as judge, jury and executioner. Moreover, I have discovered that in this household of Little – and some Big – Women kleptomaniacs, even keeping control of the food hoard is denied me.

It turns out that there is a service called Amazon Pantry. At the click of a button, it allows them to order overpriced items on the internet that will be delivered direct to the doorstep, thus outmanoeuvring the authority of the cottage quartermaster at a stroke.

Gott im Himmel!

The Oldie June 2020 37

A music snob confesses Alexander Armstrong once mocked Classic FM but he was wrong – the station launched a joyful boom in classical music

W

hat I loved about Radio 3 back in the olden days, when it didn’t give a toss about the youth, were the silences: socking great caesuras just left blank for quiet reflection.

The presenter, like a Swiss bank official in a film, would back off to the shadows to leave us alone with the treasure, shimmering back only once we’d quite finished.

It was poetic, seemly and unapologetically intellectual, which is why duffers like me adored Radio 3, flattered by its bone-dry erudition and smug because we’d learnt how to pronounce Boulez the proper way. You didn’t merely tune in. You committed and belonged; it was like going to church.

The only problem was that the national listenership in those days could practically have fitted into the Wigmore Hall. That was classical music’s lot.

The numbers just kept falling away.

Partly because modern classical music sounded like things falling out of a cupboard; partly because the very things we classical music fans lapped up – the old-fashioned reverence and scholarship of the broadcasters – had all the glamour and allure of an advanced-level chess lesson to those on the outside.

It was starting to look like pretty thin gruel, especially when pop music’s shiny bright ice-cream van pulled up alongside, with its queue round the block and its suspension rocking all through the night.

If we wanted anyone to listen to our precious classical music in the future, we

would have to go out and bring them in.

And we’d have to stop being so bloody precious about it.

When Classic FM launched on commercial radio in 1992, classical music’s collective sphincter tightened.

The thought of Smashie and Nicey striding into its marble halls, all scrubbed up and in dicky bows but with Mozart instead of Madonna in their record cases, sent blood pressures soaring.

In the event, Classic FM turned out to be a masterstroke. You might think I’d have to say that: I’ve been a presenter on Classic for six years and now host its daily morning show.

But then you have to consider that I too was a terrible classical-music snob – I loved the knockabout chumminess of pop radio but, when it came to classical broadcasting, my tastes were drier than a Senior Common Room manzanilla.

I was one of those, when Classic launched, who tittered into the backs of their hands at apocryphal tales of mispronunciation (‘That was ReckEM by Forr’ after In Paradisum). In 2020, Classic has a weekly listenership of nearly six million. I’m not tittering now.

Classic goes out and parks its very own shiny ice-cream van next to pop’s now rather dented one, and people flock from far and wide.

And that is its extraordinary – and rather moving – genius. Classic understood from the beginning that people love what they know. So it lays out easy lures for new listeners: a cheeky Pachelbel Canon here, Zadok the Priest there.

While doing its utmost to keep newcomers soothed, it gently weaves in more new strands for them to form attachments to; maybe a film theme or a first pass at Fuguetastic!

Smashie and Nicey go classical

some Holst. Thus, in gradual layers, listeners find themselves on nodding terms with 20, 30, maybe 100 pieces of classical music, some of them on the way to becoming dear friends.

Yes, it’s a compromise – because it has to be. Works get filleted so that the juicy artichoke heart of the fourth movement is sliced away from the prickly leaves of the first three and served up alone. But does that really matter? Especially when several million people then go off and discover the complete work for themselves (and they do).

Who cares if the playlist includes Downton Abbey and orchestral Beatles covers alongside angsty Mahler? And if the music’s constantly touted as ‘relaxing’, well, these are just further siren songs to call in legions of new fans who discover classical music isn’t a hair shirt.

We’re not an exposed shoreline where anything might come in on the tide.

We’re a lagoon; it’s safe. You can tune in late at night and know it won’t be harrowingly contemporary. We also have a partnership with nine of our very best orchestras (from the LSO to the National Youth Orchestra), The Sixteen and Opera North, which has brought phenomenal new revenues – and audiences – to live classical music all over the country.

Classical music is incontrovertibly in purpler health now than it has been for years, both on Radio 3 and on Classic FM. To get there, it has had to move out of its ancient citadel and embrace a world of jingles and charts, phone-ins and shout-outs. It’s not ideal but it is still wonderful.

So if ever I find myself hankering for the long, respectful silences of the olden days, I remind myself that classicalmusic broadcasting was a whisker away from becoming one long silence itself.

And then throw up the fader on a righteous slice of fuguetastic Bach.

Alexander Armstrong’s new morning show on Classic FM starts on 1st June The Oldie June 2020 39

Sophia Waugh: School Days

My class lost appetite for home cooking Weeks have passed, and the corridors are still empty.

Statistics tell us that only one in 20 vulnerable children invited into schools during lockdown is attending. At our school, numbers vary between six and 12 a day.

On Good Friday (we were of course open in the holidays), only one child came in.

After a few weeks, I began ringing the children in my tutor group. One mother said, ‘Oh he’ll be so happy to hear from you. He has kept saying that it would be so awful if anything happened to you.’

I was ridiculously pleased – until I realised the flip side of his concern was that he had me in the old-and-at-risk bracket.

Still, you take what you can get in this game.

Work has been set online – we’ve used an online company to deliver lessons, and we write tests for the children based on the lessons. There has been a good uptake.

Who doesn’t like an online quiz, after all?

I also set my tutor group a task to write a lockdown diary. Those who wrote it at the beginning of the lockdown were pretty chirpy. There wasn’t much mention of work; more talk about missing friends along with some happy comments about enjoying doing more with their family.

Those delivering their diaries now are more morose. They talk about finding it hard to organise themselves. They talk of

GOLDEN NUGGETS Tuesday 2nd June marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Oscar-winning actor Sir Rex Harrison (1908-90).

A handsome, debonair figure, best known for his role as Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady, he was, it appears, less agreeable off-stage.

40 The Oldie June 2020

frustration and family arguments. Some are moving between parents; some can’t see one parent because of illness. The adventure is beginning to wear thin.

In school, we try to do more than sit them in front of a computer for five hours. So each member of staff has to come in with some activity to do with the children in their off-screen time.

I decided to do some cooking. I feel strongly that the decline of cooking and eating together is part of the decline of the family – and of society. My plan involved having them all at a table eating together.

I ran into trouble straight away. One boy told me he did not want to cook and was allergic to cottage pie. What part? I asked. He opened with ‘All of it,’ finally narrowing it down to the white, fluffy stuff on top. The potato? Yes. Did he eat chips or crisps? Yes. So he was not allergic.

I came to a compromise with Potato Boy: we would have not mashed, but sliced potatoes on top of the pie. And as the children peeled, chopped and stirred, something wonderful happened. Every one of them was engaged, talking about the ingredients and taking pride. We – staff and children – were laughing, talking and working together as equals.

‘Look at that!’ exclaimed Potato Boy, ‘Who would not want to eat that?’

They went off to their sports hour while I pushed tables together and laid them: cutlery, plates, glasses and jugs of water.

And then it all went wrong. They were brought back to the canteen to see the fruits of their labours and me, the Deputy Head and the TA all smiling, ready to eat with them. While cooking, they had forgotten that we were teachers. But now, not one of them would sit at the table and eat with the grown-ups, even though they outnumbered us four to one.

They looked positively frightened at the idea. Neither would they try the food they had taken such pride in cooking. In ones and twos, they slipped away. A few came back towards the end and tried a tiny bit, but they ate it at a fair distance from us.

There was a tiny glimmer of light at the end of the day. As we saw the children out, Potato Boy stopped beside me. ‘I did come back and try some potato, miss. It was all right.’

He hadn’t. He hadn’t come near the food. But I took comfort in the fact that he was trying not to hurt my feelings. And I know that if, in the future, I am teaching English to this boy (who is already very tricky at school), we will have a shared cottage pie in our past which will help me begin to forge a relationship with him.

And these things count.

Naughty Henry Higgins!

The story goes that one night, after a performance of the first London run of the play at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, Harrison began to barge his way rudely through a crowd of fans who had been waiting for him in the rain outside the stage door.

Just as he had nearly reached his chauffeur-driven car, he was confronted by an

elderly lady, soaked from head to foot, holding out a pen and a programme for him

Not so loverly: Rex Harrison

to sign his autograph. As he pushed her aside, the woman was so taken aback that she slapped him with her programme.

The incident was noticed by Harrison’s fellow actor Stanley Holloway (playing Alfred Doolittle), who remarked that it was the first time in theatre history that ‘The fan has hit the shit’!

MARK BRYANT

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

Ideal virus cure? A box of Chilean red A teetotaller for 12 years, Mr Home Front has been unusually generous when it comes to keeping me supplied with alcohol throughout this lockdown.

At the beginning of week three, two boxes of Chilean arrived from Majestic Wine. As the delivery man offloaded our order, our near-neighbour Rita stopped putting her bins out to watch. She didn’t say anything but there was a glint of puritan disapproval in her expression.

The pandemic has turned one or two round here into curtain-twitching, judgemental Covidnosies.

Mr HF quickly snuck my shameful supplies round to the patio before more eyebrows were raised. Then, in his Howard Hughes way, he disinfected each bottle with his home-made anti-viral spray, which smells of fish and makes Destry sneeze.

Having no willpower and a constant supply of wine means I have been merrily drinking my way through the lockdown.

The sunny weather in April merely intensified the illusion of good cheer.

But Mr HF is nobody’s fool. Like Nurse Ratched handing out the pills to keep the lunatics sedated in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he knows that, when I’m on the red stuff, I’m as meek as a lamb.

In exchange, I’ve relaxed guidelines over Bullseye: he can watch as many old episodes as he likes. I am otherwise occupied upstairs, writing terrible lockdown songs on my guitar under the tragic delusion that I’m the undiscovered Joni Mitchell of Surrey.

After dinner, we reconvene in front of Twin, a Norwegian TV drama. No matter how much I’m enjoying it, I invariably fall asleep, usually at a pivotal plot point.

‘Oi, Princess Margaret!’ he barks.

‘Wake up!’

‘I am awake!’ I murmur, eyes shut, having acquired the supernatural ability to hold my wine glass without spilling a drop.

When I asked the 95-year-old Aged P if two large glasses of red a night was too much, she said it wasn’t nearly enough.

‘You should have seen what your father and I put away in the Sixties!’

During the second week of lockdown, the Aged P’s care home rang to tell me she had tested positive for COVID-19.

Her symptoms were mild but, knowing how quickly it can turn nasty, it was a

nail-biting fortnight. I had a feeling she would pull through, though, as she kept grumbling about carers mumbling behind their masks. She still phoned to tell me about TV shows on that night: ‘A whole programme devoted to Les Dawson!’ And she never stopped expounding about unsolved national murders: ‘I know exactly where the body is – it’s at the bottom of the stepfather’s garden. The police need look no further!’

Meanwhile, son Fred is exiled in a gardenless council flat in Hackney. The boy is furious, as last December he completed the first draft of a novel about a world flu pandemic from China: ‘Now everyone’ll be writing one!’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘What if Alistair MacLean had had that attitude about the Second World War? He would never have written a word!’

‘Ha ha – yeah, OK,’ said Fred, a little mollified.

A few weeks ago, he was nearly arrested in London Fields. Over-zealous COVID cops descended while Fred was meditating, as socially distanced from others as it was possible to get. Fred pointed out the hypocrisy of six more

‘This is absurd – we don’t live in a police state!’ ‘We do now!’ said the policeman

police huddled in the back of a nearby police van without a face mask between them: ‘And I’m the one who’s the Covidiot?’

Handcuffs were produced.

‘This is absurd!’ exclaimed Fred. ‘We don’t live in a police state!’

‘We do now!’ said the policeman.

A passer-by filmed the incident on his mobile, and Fred lived in fear of appearing in the papers. Betty, whose bible is the Mail Online, checked daily on her brother’s behalf: ‘Don’t worry, Fredsies, it’s mainly fat people in pyjamas fighting over loo roll.’

‘I’ll never forgive the way the police behaved,’ he told us over Skype. ‘It’s an undemocratic, sinister Brave New World.

The only people who come out of this looking good are NHS nurses and doctors – every other institution, from the media to the police, looks terrible!’

I do wonder how much longer these weekly claps for the NHS are going to last. The first few weeks were genuinely moving, but when a meaningful act starts to feel compulsory, it loses its meaning. As no one wants to be seen as the first to stop, the saucepan-bashing goes on and on. An element of performance has crept in.

A 20-something neighbour sang Britney Spears songs from her driveway last week, along with Peggy Lee’s Fever (‘Bit inappropriate,’ said Mr HF).

For next week, there is talk of a mobile disco. Sadly, it clashes with my first glass of red wine on the sofa.

The Oldie June 2020 41

Profitable Wonders

The beauty of weeds – and bombsites

WORLD HISTORY/ALAMY

james le fanu

For the gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd, pulling weeds was akin to a spiritual exercise, its soothing monotony releasing the mind to meditate on higher matters. Weeds can be beautiful, of course, but this rarely matches the satisfaction in extirpating them from the soil.

The charge sheet is a lengthy one.

They grow fast and tall, depriving flowers in close proximity of life-sustaining sunshine. They rob the soil of water and essential nutrients while at the same time inhibiting the rooting of cultivated plants. Their rapacity strangles the life out of cereal crops and renders arable land uncultivable. ‘They are so pestilential,’ noted the doyen of weed studies Sir Edward Salisbury, ‘it might be thought the less said about them, the better.’

His lifelong, if contrarian, interest in their pestilential attributes was prompted initially by a survey of ‘The Flora of Bombed Areas’ he conducted in 1943 when director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. In 1941, the massive destructive power of 27,000 Luftwaffe bombs had flattened vast swathes of London, destroying or badly damaging more than a million homes and buildings. These ‘blackened scars of war’ Sir Edward now found to be ‘clothed in a green mantle of vegetation’: bracken and purple buddleia carpeting the burnt-out nave of St James’s Church in Piccadilly; chrome-coloured Oxford ragwort infiltrating the rubble of the London Wall; violet, trumpet-shaped thorn apple penetrating the exposed cellars of Cheapside.

Everywhere there were creeping buttercups, thistles, nettles and the tall purple spires of rosebay willowherb – so pervasive as to be christened ‘bombweed’. In total, he identified 126 different species of invasive interloper.

Sir Edward would subsequently elaborate on their distinctive attributes of widespread dispersal, rapid germination

Weedy: Piper’s Coventry Cathedral (1941)

and tenacious rootedness, summarising the findings of his investigations in his classic Weeds & Aliens.

He found the colonisers to be prodigious seed-producers: the ubiquitous ‘bombweed’ generates an average of 80,000 from a single flower, ‘though a much higher number is not exceptional’. Their parachute-type plumes of silken hairs slowed their descent (timed by his standing on a high ladder and letting them drop) before being caught by the wind and transported over long distances.

He demonstrated, too, the role of human agency, growing numerous weed species from muddy boots, the dust swept from church pews and even the debris from the turn-ups of his trousers – likening himself to ‘a peripatetic censer, walking about scattering seeds’.

‘He grew weed species even from the debris from the turn-ups of his trousers’

It matters little where those seeds settle: there is no urban setting too derelict or impoverished for their rapid germination – just half an hour for tumbleweed, while the entire life cycle of the prolific groundsel is compressed into six short weeks.

And if, for any reason, the circumstances for immediate germination are not propitious, seeds have the further remarkable property of dormancy. Thirty years earlier, this phenomenon of their resting quiescent in their millions in the soil for years on end had been demonstrated famously on the battlefields of the Somme.

Returning in 1917, war artist Sir William Orpen recalled how six months earlier the terrain had been nothing but ‘water, shell holes and mud – the most gloomy, dreary abomination the mind could imagine’. But the horrors of mechanised warfare, ‘bombturbation’, had brought to the surface an abundance of dormant seeds and now ‘no words could express the beauty’ of the symphony of iridescent red poppies, white daisies and yellow charlock stretching as far as the eye could see, swaying gently in the breeze.

The most distinctive feature – the glory of weeds – is their tenacious ability to spread themselves around, exemplified for Sir Edward by the field convolvulus, or bindweed, whose beguilingly attractive pink and white bell flowers bely its ‘evil reputation’.

While above ground, it twines itself for support around any plants it encounters; its vertical roots penetrate 15 feet deep into the soil. Meanwhile its stems also extend horizontally below the surface, sending up new shoots covering as much as 30 square yards in a single season. Cut them with hoe or plough and, within days, they sprout new roots and shoots.

‘A bindweed chopped by a frustrated gardener into a hundred pieces,’ notes naturalist Richard Mabey, ‘is simply the starting point for a hundred new plants.’

Wondrous weeds indeed.

The Oldie June 2020 43

Letter from America

American bars beat British pubs hollow

ADAM SCULL/ALAMY

From coast to coast, the USA is the land of the divine cocktail philip delves broughton

Before coronavirus struck, I was in Kansas City, Missouri, at the end of a long and dreary day, looking for a drink.

If I were into craft beers, I’d have been in luck. There were any number of beardy-run ale houses. But I wanted something shorter and stiffer. A drink that spoke of the city’s ribald past, the dark clubs which once nursed a jazz scene second only to that in New Orleans, and a total disregard for Prohibition.

I found it in a bar called Manifesto. It wasn’t just my dismal eyesight that had me squinting at the cocktail list. The amperes were down to a flicker. The walls felt damp. A few couples huddled around the thin light of their phones. Only the rattle of ice broke the quiet.

There, in the Classic Drinks section, was the Pendergast, named after Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s Democratic Party boss in the 1920s and 1930s. The Pendergast is a Manhattan – bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters – with an added slug of Benedictine, to ensure it slithers into the lining between your brain and skull. You drink it in a tumbler: cold, no ice, with a twist of lemon.

You imagine craggy men, with drooping jowls, in heavy suits, doing whatever they damn well wanted. While most of America was sweating out Prohibition, Kansas City under Pendergast was wild, full of gambling, vaudeville, jazz and booze. The Paris of the Plains. A couple of Pendergasts later, I had to leave my rental car on the street and take an Uber back to my hotel.

One of the many treats of America is the ubiquity of good cocktails. None of those watery measures served in British pubs. Of course there are the lofty peaks of midtown Manhattan, where you can sit by a rain-soaked window with a great drink at rush hour, watching the poor bastards trying to find a taxi. Or the downtown joints haunted by the ghost of Peter Beard, the photographer who 44 The Oldie June 2020

wandered into the woods of Montauk and died in April. He was 82 but so vivid was his earlier life that people were still gossiping about his exploits with camera, drugs and models decades later.

But almost anywhere you go in America, you can find a barman who can sling a drink the way Rod Laver used to sling forehands. Strong wrists.

Where I live in Litchfield, Connecticut, I could show you five places where you would experience the full 6pm mood shift a proper cocktail can deliver.

American cocktails first flourished in the late-19th century, from the Gilded Age to Prohibition, which kicked off a century ago, in 1920. The Martini was invented in San Francisco in 1863, between the Gold Rush and the laying of the Transcontinental Railway. If mixed right, it still tastes of money.

The Daiquiri was created by Americans settling in Cuba after the Spanish were sent home. The classic, fruitless version still evokes white men in the Caribbean, tart and oddly joyless.

The real driver of the boom in cocktails was their efficiency. As life sped up in America, and the economic and social wheels whirred faster than anywhere else in the world, cocktails took

you where you wanted to go far more quickly than wine or beer.

If whisky merely lugs you from one melancholic peat hut to another, and gin plunges you from frenzy to tears, cocktails rapidly conjure a beautiful palette of moods. Leave the long claret sessions to Europeans. A good barman is like David Hockney with his iPad, stirring your emotions with a few deft strokes – as he’s just done with his new pictures of spring blossom in Normandy.

During Prohibition, when the cops came bursting in, you were better off stashing a bottle of rye than a case of wine. Cocktails were never about nose, legs or mouth feel. Just pure efficiency.

The last couple of decades have seen the rise in America of the ‘mixologist’, hipster for ‘barman’. The barman will pour you anything, from a Bud Light to a Harvey Wallbanger. The mixologist is the cocktail purist. But the economics of tending bar mean the mixologist often has to slum it and pull pints.

The great leap forward in American cocktails has been fabulous. I never imagined you could improve on a classic Martini until I had one with clarified milk punch. Mezcal spoke of gunslingers asleep under sombreros. Now it’s everywhere, smoky and delicious.

I even love the trend towards gigantic ice cubes. If the company is dull, you can figure out the physics of getting your drink past the icebergs into your mouth.

How little is done with the resources available in a British pub. You’ve got glasses, ice and all sorts of drinks and mixers – and what do you get? A limp gin and tonic. With a citrus zester, a jar of cherries and a freezer for cocktail glasses, you could have so much more. A proper Tom Pendergast night out – with raging headache to follow.

Wine, women and snogs: Peter Beard, the late playboy, and his wife, Cheryl Tiegs

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph

Postcards from the Edge

The Titanic is now the toast of Protestant – and Catholic – Belfast

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny loved her fully immersive experience in Ulster It may be hard to believe, but the world’s leading tourist attraction is in … Belfast.

At least, that is the claim made by the impressive Titanic Quarter complex in Ulster’s city, site of the once-great dockyards of Harland and Wolff, where the Titanic was proudly built before her fatal voyage in April 1912.

I visited during the spring, and it was indeed an immersive experience, exploring every aspect of the tragic liner and those who confidently sailed in her.

And there are so many souvenirs to buy in the vast Titanic shops! Everything from Titanic gin to Titanic crockery to Titanic T-shirts and nearly every conceivable gadget in between.

Actually, I welcome all this merchandising because it’s a sign of a positive sea-change in the afterlife of the legendary ship. For more than 90 years following the Titanic’s sinking, Belfast was ashamed of the doomed fate that befell its star liner. John Wilson Foster, Ulster’s leading academic in cultural studies, points out, in his book Titanic: Culture and Calamity, that the loss of the Titanic was, until the 1990s, almost a symbol of Northern Ireland’s failures.

The Titanic disaster coincided with the introduction of Home Rule for Ireland. Protestant Evangelists called the disaster a punishment from God, while Ulster Catholics regarded the ship as a symbol of sectarian bigotry – Harland and Wolff had an almost exclusively Protestant and Unionist workforce.

For a long time afterwards, there was an ‘embarrassed silence’ over the Titanic tragedy. Shipyards went into a sad decline.

In 1912, half of the world’s ships had been built in British shipyards and Belfast was a leading light. Last summer, the shrunken giant Harland and Wolff went into administration before it was bought for £6m by London energy firm InfraStrata.

A wry, slightly bitter Belfast joke accompanied the Titanic narrative: ‘It was all right when it left here!’

But from the establishment of the Ulster Titanic Historical Society in 1992, a rescue mission of the Titanic’s honour and engineering reputation was launched. Awareness was helped by the 1997 James Cameron movie (and by marine archaeologists’ having found the wreck). And perhaps it was also helped by the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland.

For something very healing occurred over the reconstruction of Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. Instead of being a ‘Protestant’ shipyard, it was embraced across the community. John Wilson Foster, who has written three Titanic books and lectured extensively on Titanic culture, says that this is one of the most outstanding achievements of Titanic tourism. The story is owned by everyone because, now, ‘We are all passengers on the Titanic.’

The Titanic Quarter surely deserves its accolade as a world tourist attraction, as a symbol of the transformation of a great tragedy to a rich, and inclusive, heritage; the tourism of redemption, we might say.

Feminists have acclaimed the Italian Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work will be, fingers crossed, on display at the National Gallery in London over the summer.

Quite a few female artists flourished in Renaissance Italy, including Agnese Dolci, Lucrezia Quistelli, Sofonisba

Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani (who established an academy for women artists) and many others.

Exploring their paintings is a positive move to increase our awareness of the remarkable female artists in the past. But if it’s a triumph for feminism, it is also usually a story of family values. Many of these female artists, such as Gentileschi, were the daughters – and sisters – of painters. They grew up in a working household where, in the artist’s studio, everyone pitched in and lent a hand.

More surprisingly, several of the popes – including Clement VIII, Gregory XIII and Paul V – encouraged and commissioned women artists. So they weren’t all ‘toxic’ patriarchs suppressing female creativity!

For obvious reasons, the fashionable book to be seen reading is Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague). Camus writes with deceptive simplicity about a pestilence in his native Algeria. His conclusion is, basically, ‘Plague? That’s life!’

I have a mild respiratory condition called bronchiectasis (not from smoking, but from a near-fatal childhood pneumonia). So when it comes to existential philosophers, I identify rather more with Karl Jaspers, the German-Swiss who explored ‘personal border situations’.

Jaspers had a congenital heart problem from childhood which meant that, throughout his life, at any moment he could suddenly drop dead. He also had emphysema. Sarah Bakewell, in her superb At the Existentialist Café, which tells you everything about the existentialists, explains that Jaspers had to budget his energies carefully, being aware that at any moment he could drop off the perch.

There’s a positive side to everything, and living on the edge made Jaspers ponder fruitfully on the borderlines of existence. And he didn’t do too badly, after all: he died aged 86 in 1969.

The Oldie June 2020 45

sister teresa

The Cooks who fed a thousand orphans Aged six, at the end of the school day I would run into rough primary-school children walking back to their orphanage in the Essex countryside.

They would stop squabbling among themselves for long enough to jeer at me as I rode by: a clean little girl on a well-groomed pony. They embarrassed me. I was too young to know about privilege, but I knew that their lives were not happy. The sound of crying was seldom absent from the orphanage.

No wonder.

In 1994, Mark and Caroline Cook visited a bomb-damaged orphanage in Sarajevo, where they saw violent, intimidating feral teenagers living by their wits alongside piteously filthy, unkempt babies. These infants were crammed into the only semi-warm room of the building, barely heated by a highly dangerous gas jet.

The couple came back to England, took their dog for a walk in the water

meadows and decided they must find a way to ensure that such children were given what they really needed and was so glaringly absent in their lives: love.

Whenever the Cooks questioned a desolate child, they always got the same answer: ‘Please, please find me a family. I want a home.’

Anyone suffering from compassion fatigue should read their book, A Silent Cry, the story of the charity they founded, Hope and Homes for Children. Its dedication page states their aim: ‘For our grandchildren … in the hope that they will see, in their lifetime, a world free from children’s institutions.’

For a quarter of a century, this retired colonel and his wife have been carrying out, to the letter, what St James urges in his epistle: ‘Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans when they need it.’

The Cooks were innocent of planning requirements, fundraising, the languages

of the countries in which they worked and terrifying bureaucracies. They didn’t even know, until they were advised by a friend, that they would need an office.

This was set up on the top floor of a barn without windows, heating or lavatory. It bore, inside and out, a close resemblance to the grim buildings that housed so many of the children they were aiming to help.

The Cooks’ astuteness lay – and still lies – in their grasp that compassion is vital. They stress that love is fundamental to all the work they undertake, and such is their eloquence that Hope and Homes for Children has gained international governmental support.

The Bible is full of references to the desirability of alms-giving. It is a relief and a privilege to give practical support to people who are generous and brave enough to undertake tough, heartbreaking work which we know we could not do ourselves.

Memorial Service

Hugh Mellor CBE (1936-2019) Admirers of Hugh Mellor gathered at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes to pay their respects to the former Chairman of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.

‘Hugh took over as Chairman of WWT in 1997,’ said the current chairman, Martin Spray. ‘The Trust at that time was in grave financial difficulties. However, Hugh, being the measured visionary, persuaded the Council of Trustees to press ahead with Peter Scott’s last great visionary project, the London Wetland Centre. This £17 million scheme was by no means a trivial decision but has taken the Trust to a different level, with the Centre being internationally renowned and influential.’

WWT founder Sir Peter Scott’s London Wetland Centre opened in 2000. David Attenborough described it as the most inspirational conservation project in Britain. Sir Peter was the first person to be 46 The Oldie June 2020

awarded a CBE for wildlife conservation.

Sir David, Martin Spray and Hugh Mellor later became CBEs themselves.

Ben Hay told how Mellor progressed from Harrow to the Coldstream Guards and Oxford, where he won an athletics Blue and might have run in the Olympics if he hadn’t been injured.

He then worked in a merchant bank, which sent him to Australia. In 1965, he met his wife Sally, then a music student and later a concert pianist. He asked if he could attend her Stravinsky lessons and they were married six months later.

In 1970 Mellor bought a farm in Buckinghamshire and became heavily involved in local conservation issues.

Daughter Sari Robinson read ‘The

quality of mercy is not strained’ from The Merchant of Venice. She said he could recite Shakespeare all the way to the north of Scotland on an eight-hour car journey. Son Andrew Mellor read from Australian Scenery by Banjo Paterson.

‘Hugh’s love of the wild was instinctive,’ said fellow conservationist Ben Hay, ‘an instinct encouraged from boyhood by his mother’s love of the country and by holidays spent at North Berwick. The thrill of first seeing gannet, eider duck and sanderling would never leave him.’

Meriel Darby, daughter of Lord Home, said, ‘I imagine him arriving in heaven, blown away by the wonder of it all but, being Hugh, quite soon looking around for ways to help things along and, armed with a shovel and pick, releasing a choked-up stream or damming it to create a wetland.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

Professor Asterix and the magic virus potion To grasp at therapeutic straws is a natural human response to a serious illness for which there is as yet no known cure.

I am not sure that I would not do it myself if I found myself in a desperate situation. Let he who has never been close to death mock at credulity.

In France, a man who has the air of both mad scientific genius and cult leader, Professor Didier Raoult of Marseille, who affects an appearance that is half-Asterix and half-ageing-rock-star (which, on his own admission, he adopted to irritate his colleagues), has become as instantly recognisable to the man or woman in the street as Prince Harry. He is a hero to some and a nuisance to others.

There is no doubt about his eminence as a clinical microbiologist; he has many discoveries to his name. He has also long promoted a drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a cure for serious viral illnesses, including (now that it has emerged in force) COVID-19.

There is some evidence in the drug’s favour. It kills the virus in vitro; that is to say in laboratory culture. But that is not the same as showing that it works in vivo, on actual patients. After all, a well-known brand of household bleach was said to kill 99 per cent of household germs, but that was not to say that drinking it cured 99 per cent of infectious diseases.

There have also been some small trials conducted by Professor Raoult, but they are inconclusive, to say the least, and have been widely criticised by other clinical scientists for their bad methodology.

The professor is not impressed by

Plucky little Gaul with the magic potion? Professor Didier Raoult

these criticisms (which seem to me justified). He says that properly controlled double-blind trials are not the only way in which medical knowledge is obtained and there, in the abstract, he is quite right. No one needed to do a double-blind trial to show that anaesthetics worked; nor did Pasteur need to do double-blind trials on his treatment for rabies, because without it every patient without exception died.

The professor says that there is no other treatment available for COVID-19, and that therefore prima facie evidence is enough and justifies his continuing to use it. The trouble is that hydroxychloroquine is not an otherwise innocuous substance. It sometimes has dangerous side effects, which those who have taken the professor at his word and gone in for a little self-medication have discovered. There have even been deaths.

Nevertheless, he has a following of almost religious intensity, and the fact is that quite a lot of what he says makes good sense. He says that the scattergun approach adopted by many European countries is wrong, indeed harmful. It would have been much better (and would still be much better now) to perform mass testing and isolate those who test positive; not those who test negative.

To lock positives in close proximity with negatives is not the best way to prevent the spread of the disease, and Professor Raoult says that it has never worked in history.

He also advocates vigorous treatment of those who test positive, and this is where he alienates many in the profession, who deny that any such treatment exists other than assistance with breathing when it becomes difficult or impossible.

His institute in Marseille had the imprimatur of the French Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale withdrawn from it in 2018 because of allegations of sexual impropriety that took place within it – not on his part, but also not taken sufficiently seriously.

How trivial, how decadent, this now seems in the light of the present situation! It was never alleged that Professor Raoult was anything other than a leader in his field.

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

A Beatle for Christmas SIR: I was interested to read the comments about Dr Richard Asher in the article by Craig Brown on the Beatles (Spring issue).

During my time as a medical student in the early 1960s I was attached to Dr Asher’s firm at the Central Middlesex Hospital. He had under his care a young teenage girl who was seriously ill and could not be allowed home for Christmas.

When Dr Asher informed her of this, she became very upset and tearful. In an attempt to console her, Dr Asher asked her if there was anything she would really like for Christmas and said that if there was, he would see what he could do. She replied (not knowing of course that Paul McCartney was staying at Dr Asher’s home) that she would like one of the Beatles. Imagine her surprise when Dr Asher visited her on Christmas Day with Paul McCartney in tow!

Craig Brown also refers to a couple of Dr Asher’s witty medical articles. A collection of 16 of his articles can be found in the book Richard Asher Talking Sense, published by Pitman Medical.

John Temperley, Broughton, Preston, Lancashire

Molesworth’s alma mater SIR: I fear the Old Un had a senior moment when, referring to the newly published The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth (Spring issue), he mistakenly wrote that the footnotes said there had never been a St Ethelburga. In fact, as I pointed out, she was a real saint, the founder and first Abbess of the monastery at Barking. The Old Un should have referred to St Guthrum, who, like St Cypranes and St Custard, was a figment of Geoffrey Willans’s fertile imagination.

Robert J Kirkpatrick (Editor, The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth), Hanwell, London

‘So, to sum up...’

vitriolic criticism begs a further question: would the people of St Neots WANT her back in the first place?

Yours from wonderful rural Northumberland!

David Shipley, Acklington, Morpeth

My aunt was Jardine’s cook SIR: Yorkshire pudding wasn’t always the awful mess described in Oliver Pritchett’s Rant (Spring issue). In Jane Grigson’s classic English Food, she describes how her grandfather, ‘who had reached heights of power and responsibility in the Bank of England’, enjoyed the remains of Yorkshire pudding, after the roast beef

Good riddance, Liz! SIR: Not wishing to deny Liz Hodgkinson her right to have a poor opinion of her home village, St Neots, and her rural roots (Spring issue), I feel her somewhat 48 The Oldie June 2020

‘Derivative or what?!’

had gone back to the kitchen, ‘with sweet condensed milk’. I too have fond childhood memories of Yorkshire pudding eaten before the roast beef, with a crispy crust surrounding a soft centre, almost like well-set custard, flavoured by the meat juices. It was prepared that way by my great aunt who had been cook to Douglas Jardine, the English cricket captain of bodyline-series fame. I still cook it her way.

Marcel Escudier, Cheshire

Asian flu v coronavirus SIR: I was very surprised when I read the article on Asian flu by Michael Barber (Spring issue). I remember that time well. I came down from Cambridge in 1957, spent the summer holiday selling ice cream on Blackpool South Pier and then the autumn doing my first term at the Institute of Education in London, with teaching practice at Bromley. All of this involved train travel, freely carried out with no restrictions. Neither university closed courses; nor did any of the schools involved in accepting student teachers – and the residential colleges and student hostels remained open with no extra precautions. I went about London and saw no sign of infection or measures against it; neither was it a common topic of conversation. In fact,

Asian flu was but a distant rumour. I would therefore find it difficult to agree that coronavirus is ‘nothing on Asian flu’.

The current situation is far more comprehensive in its impact.

Dorothy Woolley, Newark on Trent

A Fiennes romance SIR: I was intrigued by (May issue) Ralph Fiennes’s answer to the question ‘Where did you go on your honeymoon?’

His reply was ‘I spent time in the Rocky Mountains – Colorado, Montana, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona; it was a big trip.’

Where was Mrs Fiennes during this ‘big trip’? Maybe the Fienneses were strapped for cash at the time, so Mrs Fiennes perhaps just spent a clean weekend in Brighton.

Yours faithfully, Richard Langridge, Hundon, Suffolk

Greek joke No. 2 SIR: Schoolmaster to apparently daydreaming student: ‘Boy – you’re asleep! What are the infinitive and participle of οἶδα?’

Schoolboy: ‘εἰδέναι εἰδώς [I deny I doze].’

Edward Martineau, Arundel

A pox on The Oldie !

SIR: I was very glad to read the diary article (May issue) indicating that Edward Jenner is wrongly credited with being the first to test inoculation as a cure for smallpox. Yet, as a Dorset lass, I was disappointed that you showered glory on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu instead of on our own Dorset lad Benjamin Jesty.

He was the first to test the vaccine in 1774, 20 years before Jenner jumped on the bandwagon. Lady Montagu’s blister cure may have worked on occasion, but it could result in blindness and death.

During an outbreak of smallpox near his home in Yetminster, Jesty inoculated his wife and two sons with the fluid from udders of cows infected with cowpox.

Zounds! It worked. But Jesty was not given to self-publicity – so it was Jenner who collected the £10,000 award from the House of Commons in 1802. Jesty was given just two gold lancets, after a campaign launched by a local vicar on his behalf. He even refused to dress up for the presentation. His modesty is rewarded by a well-maintained gravestone, at the back of St Nicholas’s in Worth Matravers, near Swanage.

Shanie Joyce, Wareham, Dorset

Dorset tomb of Benjamin Jesty, ‘having been the first’ to inoculate with cowpox

The Fougasse de nos jours SIR: May I submit the following idea for The Oldie?

I am sure you will know about the

WITH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE GREAT FOUGASSE

Punch series of ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ cartoons by Fougasse (Cyril Bird), which were highly popular during the Second World War. What about adapting one to fit these troublous times? For example (above)…

Penelope Hicks, London W8

Stamp of disapproval?

SIR: The National Savings Association also used the swastika at, or around, the time of the Munich attempted putsch.

These are my late father-in-law’s uncashed stamps.

Ian Booth, Hathersage, Derbyshire

Statins stats SIR: Your article by Theodore Dalrymple (May issue) about taking statins (or not) quotes, in the pen-penultimate paragraph, statistics which by coincidence are identical to those given to me by my doctor recently. Dr Dalrymple might be interested to know that when I mentioned to my medical daughter-in-law that I had been told I (too) had a 20 per cent chance of suffering a heart attack or stroke in the next ten years, she very reassuringly pointed out that this means I have an 80 per cent chance of NOT having one.

THIS is why I do not take statins.

Roger Aron, Peterborough

A grave matter SIR: I was greatly flattered by Justin Marozzi’s generous reference to my conducting his mother’s funeral in Littlebourne Churchyard (‘Love in the time of corona’, May issue). My pleasure was gravely undermined, however, by the accompanying illustration suggesting that I presided at one of the Church’s Occasional Offices wearing a suit. Of course I wore the proper vesture appropriate to its solemnity – and joyful hope. Might we not reasonably expect The Oldie to be accurate in such matters?

Revd Prebendary Gillean Craig, Interim Priest in Charge of Littlebourne, Wickhambreaux, Ickham and Stodmarsh and Associate Priest of St Mary Wingham

The swastika was later replaced by an image of St George slaying the dragon

Chuff justice SIR: Giles Wood (May issue) tells that boys at his prep school began to tick days off their end-of-term chart as soon as term started. We had something similar at my boarding school (Royal Signals, Catterick, 1956–58); it was known as ‘chuff factor’. This was a number obtained by dividing ‘days done’ by ‘days to do’. When one was part of an NIG (New Intake Group) one’s chuff factor started at zero. It reached one at the end of the first year and reached infinity on demob day, when one became ‘highly chuffed’. Plotted against time, chuff factor formed an exponential curve, of course. Some of the more sadistic servicemen took pleasure in calculating their rate of change of chuff and informing later intakes that ‘my d(chuff)/ dt is higher than your chuff’.

Peter Garside, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire More letters on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie June 2020 49

I Once Met

Lord Beaverbrook As a teenager, I met Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964), my great-uncle. The first question he asked me was ‘Are you the sort of boy who likes to stir up mischief?’

When I replied, ‘Yes, sometimes,’ he cackled and replied, ‘Wal, I was a mischiefmaker when I was your age. Still am!’

Even in his eighties, when I knew him well, Uncle Max was a firecracker of energy, journalistic crusading, political intriguing and boisterous trouble-stirring.

He loved dramas. He used the fortune he made as a financier to enjoy life to the full – deal-making, art-collecting, partygiving and wooing many mistresses. But when it came to his own newspapers and to politics, he was un homme sérieux.

Beaverbrook was Winston Churchill’s closest friend and occasional rival. They were the only two politicians to serve in the War Cabinets of both World Wars.

The historian Robert Blake once told me, ‘We would have lost the First World War in 1916 if Beaverbrook had not brought Asquith down. We would have lost the Second World War in 1940 if Beaverbrook had not got the Spitfires up.’

In a cloakroom at Cherkley Court,

Uncle Max’s Surrey house, three posters hung on the walls with these slogans: Committees take the punch out of War Organisation is the enemy of improvisation I always dispute the umpire’s decision These mementos of the period Churchill later described as ‘Max’s finest hour’ produced many stories about Uncle Max’s time as Minister of Aircraft Production.

‘I had to fight the brass hats and the bowler hats of the Air Ministry 24 hours a day,’ he told me. ’When I halted bomber production to concentrate on fighter production, all the air marshals except Dowding hated me. They hated me even more when I seized control from the RAF of all spares. I sent raiding parties to aerodromes to break the padlocks on hangers stuffed so full of spare air frames and spare engines that I called them my pots of gold.

‘I gave big contracts to small

factories, against industrial policy. I bought planes from America, against Foreign Office policy. I cannibalised damaged aircraft, against Air Ministry policy. I made civil servants work seven days a week, against Whitehall policy. “No one knows the trouble I see,” I used to tell Winston, but he called it a miracle when I doubled the number of fighters coming into the front line for the Battle of Britain [marking its 80th anniversary this summer].’

In old age, Uncle Max grumbled that he’d be remembered only for his books; that his achievements as a wartime Cabinet Minister would be completely forgotten. He was almost right. The umpire of history seemed to have given him out.

Yet in 2020 the media is demanding a Minister for Medical Equipment Production, with Beaverbrook’s drive, at the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

I can hear a familiar Canadian accent chortling, ‘Didn’t I tell ya? I always dispute the umpire’s decision!’

Reverend Jonathan Aitken Beaverbrook – Aitken’s great-uncle – in 1928

The day my dad was assassinated

On 4th December 1949, I was eight years old and shopping for summer pyjamas with my mother, younger sister and brother. This was strange and exotic in icy Knightsbridge, but I was very excited; we were about to get on a ship to join my father, Duncan Stewart, 45, the new Governor of Sarawak, North Borneo. He had been in Palestine in his last job and we’d hardly seen him. He was heroic, charismatic, much loved and not often around.

On that same day, his 19th in the post, he was inspecting the guard of honour during the ceremonies to welcome him in Sibu province, when

suddenly a young Malay separatist stepped forward and stabbed him. His white glove turning red with blood, he stumbled and collapsed; years later, I learnt that he asked for the ceremony to proceed without fuss. After an emergency operation in Sibu Hospital, he was taken to Singapore General Hospital.

At the time I knew little of this. We were told that he’d been hurt, and that my mother had flown to be at his

Last post: Stewart in 1949

bedside. Photographs of her and us three blond-haired children appeared daily in the press in Singapore and London for the six days he fought for his life.

Back in England, my grandmother, breakfasting in bed, summoned the three of us and told us that his injuries were so severe that ‘God decided to take him to Him’.

I stared at the sloping wooden floor of the bedroom.

For years afterwards, I believed there were two sorts of death – ordinary ones, and the ones where God decided to relieve someone from unbearable suffering.

He was given a state funeral and buried in Singapore. We never talked about his assassination, but our lives changed for ever.

Later we had to sell Castle

Stalker, the ruined island castle my father had vowed to restore when he retired.

In 2000, 50 years after his burial, Bidadari Cemetery was demolished to make way for housing. I watched, stunned, as a gravedigger dug up his remains – visible pieces of the father I’d longed for all those years. They were flown back to Scotland. In a graveside ceremony on a blustery July day, his children, grandchildren and two little great-grandchildren reburied him within sight of his beloved Scottish home.

By Kirsteen Stewart, author of Break These Chains (out now), who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie June 2020 51

Books A N Wilson is Dickens FRANCES WILSON The Mystery of Charles Dickens

By A N Wilson

GARY WING

Atlantic £17.99 The day before he died on 9th June 1870, Charles Dickens was seen in his garden re-enacting the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

Channelling Bill Sikes, the novelist levelled blow after blow on the poor girl’s head. Apart from the friend who spotted him, Dickens’s performance had no audience; his slaughter of an imaginary woman was entirely for his own pleasure.

Nancy’s murder had become his obsession. Between December 1869 and March 1870, Dickens bludgeoned her to death during 28 of his public readings, the veins on his forehead protruding, sweat pouring down his face. His blood rate, he said, would rise during those few minutes from 72 to 112 and he needed afterwards to lie down in his dressing room until he was once more capable of speech.

During one of these readings, he suffered a stroke, watched from the auditorium by his secret mistress, Nelly Ternan, in whose bed he would soon afterwards fatally collapse, aged 58. The murder of Nancy therefore led to the death of her creator – but then, as A N Wilson argues in this utterly absorbing psychopathology of our favourite novelist, his fictions had always swallowed Dickens up, making it impossible for him to distinguish the real world from the world of his imagination.

Dickens, argues Wilson, was a profoundly mysterious man, and The Mystery of Charles Dickens is framed around the author’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

There is the mystery of his childhood,

when Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory after his father was imprisoned for debt; the mystery of his marriage, which he abandoned with astounding cruelty after his loyal wife had borne him ten loving children, and the mystery of his relationship with Nelly Ternan – did they have a child who was subsequently adopted?

Even his public readings were mysterious: why was the most successful novelist of the age, a man hardly in need of self-promotion, turning himself into a vaudeville entertainer? The greatest mystery of all, however, is where Dickens’s demented energy – for walking, writing, sex, acting – came from. Did he never sleep? Aside from his 15 novels, all written in the mornings so that he could devote the afternoon to his philanthropical organisations, he ran his own weekly newspaper, supervised the household shopping and controlled the people he lived around to within an inch of their lives.

He also controlled his readers. ‘Did Little Nell die?’ the crowds on the New York docks called up to the passengers on the steamer from England; the Americans had not yet received the latest instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop.

While Dickens poured everything he was into his writing, Wilson has poured everything he is into unlocking the novelist’s ‘mesmerising’ power. He uses this term literally as well as metaphorically: Dickens practised the art of mesmerism.

He was a magician, Wilson argues, but also a divided self. His ‘true’ self, the man who waged war on the Scrooges and Bumbles of Victorian England, believed in the power of kindness, while his ‘false’ self – the man who murdered Nancy – had an uncontrolled rage towards women. At the core of his mystery was his matrophobia: where in Dickens’s novels, Wilson asks, is the model of the loving mother? Whatever happened in his childhood was both unspeakably

The Oldie June 2020 53

painful and the source of his superhuman drive: had Dickens been subjected to the kind of counselling services we have now, Wilson suggests, we would have been denied the most powerful novels in the language.

Wilson clearly knows Dickens by heart, but he also knows Dickens, in the sense of recognising him. As the reader sinks deeper and deeper into these pages, it becomes hard to distinguish the author and his subject: it is as though Dickens has swallowed up Wilson. Wilson, after all, is another writer of mesmerising and demonic energy, bringing out one, sometimes two, books a year; it was only six months ago that I was reading his excellent life of Prince Albert.

The likeness between the two men is sealed in the book’s final chapter when Wilson recalls being sent as a stick-thin, seven-year-old child to a prep school he describes as a concentration camp run by perverts. Here he was beaten by a masturbating headmaster and made by the headmaster’s wife to eat until he was sick and then to eat his own vomit. This is the context in which Wilson discovered those other sadistic schoolmasters such as Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby.

It is not so much the mystery of Charles Dickens that we are finally led to contemplate, but rather the mystery of A N Wilson.

Compliments for fish CHARLES KEEN Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain

By Tom Fort William Collins £20 Can a non-fisherman enjoy a book about fish and fishing?

As a fisherman myself, I can assure anyone of the same persuasion that this is a first-class read. For freaks who do not fish, I would draw a parallel with Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Walton beguiles the reader with his songs and the idyllic rural scene he inhabits. It’s a bit affected, but it has charm.

Tom Fort, without the songs, leads us into all sorts of fishy places, with their delightful sights and smells, and introduces us to rough-hewn, fishy characters – and we love it.

Walton’s alternative title to his book is The Contemplative Man’s Recreation.

He is concerned mostly with ‘coarse’ fish, which can be caught while one is sitting on the river bank, watching a float: that provides endless scope for contemplation. Fort surveys fishing of all kinds, including netting and trapping,

‘I’m looking for an “I told you so” card for my husband’

and, of course, energetic pursuit of salmon and trout; but when he stops to contemplate, we too enjoy the scenery.

His book covers the whole range of freshwater and migrant fish, but his speciality is salmon and eels – both migrants. There is a wealth of facts and figures. In 1820, he tells us, the catch of salmon from the Tweed and its estuary was 120,000 in a year. That’s a lot of fish.

Demand seems to have been insatiable. Supply must have been assumed to be inexhaustible, as new techniques of netting and trapping after about 1700 gave rise to escalating catches of fish. It was a free for all, until order began to be restored by the gentrification of angling and the wealth that this brought to the powerful estate-owners.

The nouveaux fishers, with their splitcane rods and tweed knickerbockers, were able to impose legal restrictions on the netting industry, saving the lives of homing fish and damaging the livelihoods of their captors.

Now the conflict between money and nature’s bounty is reignited by the growth of salmon-farming, breeding them and keeping them in captivity like battery chickens. It is profitable, but has had deleterious effects on both wild salmon and sea trout. Finally, the great populations of salmon and eels have slumped for unexplained reasons.

Tom Fort suggests that a warmer Atlantic, the result of climate change, may have altered the currents that led salmon and eels to their feeding and breeding grounds – mankind at fault again.

The tale of coarse fish has had a happier outcome, but in this case thanks to humans’ getting out of the way. The rivers of industrial England, the Trent, the Don and the Irwell, have been transformed by the era of deindustrialisation. Rivers that were poisoned by the filth of Manchester,

Sheffield, Nottingham – London, too – have turned clear and clean and have been re-colonised by their indigenous fish. The ‘biologically defunct Tyne [has] reestablished itself as England’s prime salmon river’. ‘Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,’ as Horace says.

If that is the serious theme of the book – nature sparring with humans – the contemplative theme is no less compelling. We are conducted (by bicycle) over the Somerset Levels; we explore the Fens, where 40 stone of eels could be caught in a night, and the River Lea, Izaak Walton’s stamping ground, which threads its way round industrial north London, before it dives under the City of London to join the Thames.

Peculiar to coarse fishing is the conviviality engendered by the angling clubs. Excursions and competitions draw fishermen in hundreds to the Trent or the Thames for a day of sport and contemplation. Such numbers would soon clear all the fish out of a river, but the rule is that all fish caught must be returned to the water alive. Considerate, if a bit brutal? Could that be a definition of sport?

This book is about fish and fishing, a sport for some and a livelihood for others. The author states emphatically that his purpose in fishing is to catch fish, and he is enviably good at it. He is also seduced, as are most of us fishers, by the beauty of the places where fish are found and the allure of water and its accompanying vegetation.

His writing must give any fisherman nostalgic thoughts. Equally, any non-fisherman will surely be enticed by the scenes he depicts, and amazed by the facts of history and natural history he reveals.

Picture the eel setting off from Britain to find sex in the Sargasso Sea; the world of fish is full of wonders.

World, thou art sick CHARLES FOSTER Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

By Carolyn Steel Chatto and Windus £16.99 The world is sick.

Most of its organ systems (economic, environmental, political) are affected.

There are signs of an immune response but, at the moment, the prognosis is grave.

Part of the problem is that although there have been consultations with many eminent specialists, each has examined only the organ in which he or she The Oldie June 2020 55

specialises. No one addresses the body’s problems rather than the problems of a particular part. There’s no point in improving your liver function if you ignore your fatally diseased kidneys.

None of the specialists has a coherent view of what constitutes health. The nephrologist says that it is the absence of symptoms caused by kidney disease; the cardiologist that it’s to do with heart function.

In Sitopia (from the Greek sitos, ‘food’, and topos, ‘place’ – ‘food place’), Carolyn Steel defines health as a philosophical idea to do with thriving in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia.

She proceeds to a thorough clinical examination of the planet, missing little that pertains to the risk of mortality and serious morbidity.

The therapy she suggests is holistic.

We can’t go on as we are. That is a simple statement of fact, not a campaigning slogan. Continue as we are, and we die. Gaia will exact lethal revenge for all those millennia of abuse. She might use any number of agents to deliver the coup de grâce: climate change, air pollution, epidemic disease, antibiotic resistance, the loss and impoverishment of soil and consequent collapse of harvests, or unrest and war resulting from inequality.

And even if we could survive in the world we’re creating, would our lives be worth living?

Humans, whatever the reductionists say, are very complex creatures. Is there one lens through which we can adequately see them and their relationship with the non-human world?

The answer for Steel is food.

We all need to eat, and all our food is animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Our relationship with food is deeply and revealingly dysfunctional. Some 850 million live in hunger; more than twice that are overweight or obese.

The US produces nearly double the calories that can be safely consumed and in 2019 the US diet industry was worth $72 billion.

Worse, we choose to eat rubbish.

Nearly 51 per cent of our food is ultraprocessed and in the United Kingdom we eat half of all the ready meals consumed in Europe. Post-war British carrots lost 75 per cent of their copper and magnesium. Beef, an omega-3-rich superfood if it comes from pasture-fed cattle, is a nutritional disaster when cows are grain-fed. When Jamie Oliver took disadvantaged children to pick fresh strawberries, many of them gagged at the taste.

Previous generations would be

horrified that we have drained food of its symbolic significance, dignity and social healing power. One-fifth of meals in America are eaten in a car.

Family meals around a screenless table are regarded as a reactionary anachronism.

Yet eating together is well known to make us happy. It boosts our endorphin and oxytocin levels. It bonds us.

Regularly eating alone, on the other hand, is more strongly associated with unhappiness than any factor except mental illness. We live suicidally, homicidally and unhappily. How did we get here, and how do we change?

Money got us here; recovery will be hard because the world is transfixed by the idea of economic growth, and thinks it can be sustainable. This idea is oxymoronic and moronic.

Adam Smith falsely assumed that raw materials were inexhaustible and their extraction and use cost-free. This is nonsense, as a moment’s reflection would reveal. But we’re not good at reflection.

Indeed, we outsource so much of our mental lives to algorithms that it’s not clear that we’ll be capable of it at all for much longer. Let’s reflect for a moment, while we still can.

We are technological wizards, but philosophical dunces. We have forgotten Epicurus’s recipe for human thriving: freedom from mental anguish, achieved by moderate consumption and the promotion of human relationships.

That is also the recipe for the politics and economics that can save us from ourselves. We need a steady state and a zero-carbon economy. Epicurus can deliver it. Joy is what satisfies. If junk food is comfort, comfort and joy are opponents.

Steel brilliantly uses food to demonstrate our ills and their causes.

She shows, too, that food, if we value it

‘I dunno – what do you wanna do?’

properly, can heal us. There are initatives that show this can be done; look up UK Sustainable Food Cities, or the Transition movement, or the C40 Cities programme.

But before you do that, look at this remarkable, prophetic, and desperately urgent book.

Cruel sea battle FERDIE ROUS

Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of the Second World War

By Saul David William Collins £25 Saul David opens his book with a description of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War, on the morning of 1st April 1945. It was the first day of Operation Iceberg, the Battle of Okinawa.

The reserved Japanese high command and the inexperienced, wildly overconfident commander of the American 10th Army, Lieutenant General Buckner, looked on as 90,000 rounds of artillery pounded Okinawa’s coral caves.

Hundreds of amphibious assault craft and tanks ferried 12,000 US soldiers to the island’s shores. It was the largest sea armada ever assembled (1,457 ships), more than 747,000 tons of supplies were needed and over half a million men fought in the campaign.

The large number of sources allows David to address every aspect of the conflict, letting each story speak for itself.

One soldier describes his commander as having a second-rate mind with a ‘third-rate mind struggling towards the surface’. And there’s an unforgettable image of Kikuko Miyagi, an Okinawan woman drafted into the nursing corps, cleaning the pus-spurting, maggot-ridden wounds of the screaming, writhing Japanese soldiers, only for them to be killed where they lay. But jumping from sinking destroyers to the White House Map Room (FDR’s and then Truman’s centre of operations for the war) does get dizzying.

The two sides are compared throughout. Both command structures have their failings. General Ushijima, the Japanese commander, seems tired, while Buckner is far too cautious, preferring to hold to US army doctrine (artillery, not infantry, wins battles) rather than listen to the advice of his battle-hardened subordinates. Buckner failed to heed advice not to wear his general’s stars on his helmet. He was killed as a result, making him the highest-ranking American to die in the war.

Kamikaze attacks are often described, and David attempts to clarify the The Oldie June 2020 57

philosophy behind them. There is no ‘sin’ in Japanese and Shintoist perceptions of suicide, which is why they are known as jiketsu (self-determination) and jisai (self-judgement). Suicide features not only as a form of attack: many soldiers, told to avoid the ‘shame of being taken prisoner’, killed themselves before Americans could get to them. Entire command posts were found with the dead all around. Civilians killed their families. An account of two boys who are made to kill their mother with their bare hands is hard to read.

The battlefield does get monotonous.

Fresh voices, such as that of Ernie Pyle – the only newsman to earn his stripes during the war – refocus the reader’s attention with descriptions of the mosquitoes, subtropical heat and topography of the island. Pyle had spent most of his time as a war correspondent in Europe – so he notices what Pacific veterans would see as the everyday.

David’s style is immersive. His vivid descriptions hit at all the senses. The sounds and smells of the battlefield are constant and striking. The desolation of the island is notable. The quaint villages and forests become a bare landscape of empty earth and rock, not unlike Verdun or Flanders, as some soldiers noted.

On a battlefield, the bodies of the dead can be mourned. This isn’t the case in a naval war. Alexander Burnham, a radio operator on a repair ship, noted how, after a battle, everything reverts to ‘Homer’s wine-dark sea’. There will be ‘no monuments, no crosses’; just an ocean ‘for ever anonymous’.

David rarely passes judgement in his own words. He does so only regarding the atomic bomb. The monumental casualty rate of Okinawa (250,000) and the projected loss of a million more in the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands are considered reason enough to justify the bomb; to prevent, as one marine said, making more corners ‘of some Oriental field for ever American’.

Highly sprung LUCY INGRAMS Greenery: Journeys in Springtime

BOWNESS HEPWORTH ESTATE

By Tim Dee Jonathan Cape £18.99 Like the chiffchaffs, whitethroats or blackcaps that grace our northern spring, Tim Dee has a foot (or ‘wing’, perhaps) in two places, with homes in both South Africa and Britain.

His migratory lifestyle would have been hard-won a century ago. Yet, for all that, the scope of Greenery: Journeys in

Barbara Hepworth works on Curved Form, bronze, 1961. From Circles & Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists by Caroline Maclean, Bloomsbury, £30

Springtime is magnified by globalisation.

Its premise lies parallel with Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, describing a single journey, by bicycle, from Balham to the Quantocks in 1913.

In this eerie locked-down spring of 2020, when planes wait idle on their stands and oil prices turn negative, it is possible to touch the worlds, and paces, of both books simultaneously. People on bicycles and horses feel safe on the roads again. The sky is empty of jet trails and the air is loud with birdsong, as it would have been on Thomas’s ride. At the same time, there is no undoing the intervening century of technological innovation – the tracking of migratory birds, for instance, beyond the horizon.

As a ‘birdman’, Dee uses birds as his launch pad. The book lifts off with a loose flock of swallows at the Cape of Good Hope on the December solstice. Soon

they will be crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, following the ten-degree isotherm north as the flies hatch. ‘Spring moves through Europe at a speed comparable to the swallows’ flights,’ he tells us. That’s roughly 30 miles a day or, as he calculates, ‘at walking pace’.

Dee does not literally walk from the bottom of Africa to the top of the Arctic beneath migrating swallows but, zigzagging, he covers much of the ground beneath their flyways. He pauses for rich pitstops in Chad, Sicily, Bellaghy, Heligoland, a Somerset wood and Tromsø in the company of an eclectic cast of guides. We hear from poets, physicists, researchers, pastoralists, ringers, singers.

Some are well known: D H Lawrence and Charles Darwin. Others are less so, such as William, a Norwegian chimney-sweep and ‘lifelong aviculturist’.

Perhaps because he is also a The Oldie June 2020 59

radio programme-maker, Dee layers these contrasting voices to great effect.

And his visual writing shows us more than a camera could. There are eagle owls, ‘looking like old generals in dressing gowns’. An amethyst starling holds ‘in the centre of its plum-coloured face two emerald-bright grubs … a green moustache’. In a Romanian forest one evening, Dee watches for a bear which never comes. ‘In this blank, my seeing grew... If I had seen a bear, I would have seen nothing else; without the bear, I could see everything.’

The book seeds images, voices, creatures and ideas – there are discussions of Hungarian folksong, The Winter’s Tale and the Tollund Man. It grows its own rugged jizz of seasonal meditation. Occasionally, so much proliferation bewilders you into wondering if you’ve been blown off course...

You haven’t. ‘Brids, birds used to be called,’ Dee tells us, ‘brides.’ Sleepless in the white nights of the Arctic, he aches to extend the season as long as possible.

In the book’s final pages, we discover why this has felt somehow urgent. Now and then, he has described himself as a-tremble. One of the book’s last staging posts is the neurology department of a Bristol hospital, in which Dee receives a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. And so the startled reader loops back – reframing, admitting the undercurrents of grief that all along had accompanied spring’s advance.

Another grief Dee shares in these last pages is the loss of his close friend Greg Poole, naturalist and printmaker, whose brimming monotype launches the book as its cover – boomerang swifts sluicing through textured field- and leaf-work.

Texture and circularity are marks of Dee’s art, too. The way a skein of wild geese winds out of the twilight in soft, diminishing arcs to roost for the night is known as ‘whiffling’. Dee does eventually come home to roost in his own time, too.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Bible-belt preacher SAM LEITH Pew

By Catherine Lacey Granta £12.99 The narrator of Pew doesn’t talk much.

Barely at all, in fact: I don’t think they speak more than 20 words aloud in the whole novel. And I say ‘they’ advisedly – it’s unclear whether this narrator is male or female. Their age is indeterminate – somewhere between childhood and adolescence. Some think they might be black, some white. Do they have family?

A past? They don’t seem to know the answers to these questions themselves.

We know, at the outset, that they wander from place to place somewhere in Bible-belty small-town America, and like to sneak into churches to sleep. In one, they wake up during a service; they are then taken home by a kindly-seeming, God-fearing family who call them Pew because that’s where they were discovered.

The action of the novel, such as it is, takes place over the week that follows.

Pew’s silence disturbs almost everyone he/she comes into contact with. We seem to be in the territory of allegory, parable or something like it.

The assumption is made that Pew has suffered a trauma, and everyone seems – out of kindness or curiosity or unease – to want to get to the bottom of it. In practice, he/she is passed from person to person and catalyses a series of monologues about the interlocutor’s own feelings or memories. Yet Pew is ill at ease.

‘I felt all the televisions were watching me,’ he/she says. He/she has a disconnected memory of seeing a peacock spread its tail: ‘Each feather seemed to be watching me for a moment.’

Later: ‘I watched the crowd that seemed to watch me.’ Pew is inspecting the world, aware of being inspected in turn,

‘Well, if you think the Tiger Room is impressive, wait until you see the Ex-Wife Room’

resistant to being inspected, suspicious of the motives of others yet seemingly at a loss to do anything but follow along with their wishes.

As a narrator, Pew is perceptive but affectless in tone – he/she doesn’t seem to want anything, except to be left alone, and emotion is often divined by inference. When a medical examination is proposed, Pew is asked to take off their clothes: ‘My face must have said something I couldn’t hide; she told me there was no reason to be afraid, that it wouldn’t hurt, that it would only take a few minutes.’ Pew silently refuses. Her would-be helpers, in their nicey-nicey, God-fearing way, get just a little bit more pinched and tense.

Meanwhile, there’s a gathering sense of unease. The son of the family is resentful at being displaced from his bedroom to make way for Pew. The community is uneasy with strangers. The family take to locking Pew into the room.

Something sinister is happening to children in a nearby town. And it becomes clear that the town is preparing for ‘the Festival’. A slight Wicker Man or Rosemary’s Baby vibe seems to drift into the story – but, like much else, it never becomes much more than a vibe.

I adored Catherine Lacey’s short stories, but I confess I struggled with this novel. It’s solemnly portentous where the stories are humorously self-aware, and the elliptical style – along with Pew’s extreme passivity – asks the reader to forgo many of the usual pleasures of narrative. Lacey’s themes, here, are huge ones – shame and guilt, identity, human connectedness, the terrors and consolations of community, what it means to live in a sexed and racialised body and how we communicate or don’t. You can’t fault the ambition or the seriousness.

But it’s wispy, and a little one-note: every conversation is freighted with significance. Every anecdote or encounter seems to bear on the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life, and the mysteriousness of the human condition.

Pew’s narration – and the words of her various interlocutors – abound with unmoored sententiae, rhetorical questions and near-aphorisms. ‘Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.’ ‘How was it that living always feels so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?’ ‘What a terror a body lives through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.’

But for this reader, at least, Lacey would have addressed them more effectively with a story more securely pegged to the ground.

The Oldie June 2020 61

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My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting spills the beans on the extraordinary life, loves and tragedy of her controversial employer whom she knew since childhood. She lifts the veil on the shadowy underside of the glitz and glam of aristocratic life.

My Political Midlife Crisis. In 2019, as the battle over Brexit raged, Change UK came to the fore – and the PM’s sister threw her hat into the ring.

In Rake’s Progress, she remembers her brief fling with the world of politics, from a sweary tennis match with David Cameron to that long and awkward silence on Radio 4…

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Media Matters

News spreads faster than the virus Has relentless media coverage inflamed the hysteria? stephen glover

Like other oldies, I lived through the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, in which 80,000 people are said to have died. My God, wasn’t it tough! Er, no. I don’t think it was. At least not for me.

I was 16 years old, away at boarding school, and not unduly stupid. I skimmed a newspaper most days and sometimes watched the television news. And yet I can’t remember a single thing about an epidemic that killed more than twice as many people in Britain as have so far died with COVID-19. It’s true that memory dulls, but I don’t think a single master or either of my parents ever advised me to be careful, or showed the slightest degree of trepidation on their own behalf.

How can this be? Perhaps, despite causing more deaths, Hong Kong flu didn’t target the elderly and vulnerable as conspicuously as COVID-19 does.

Although highly contagious, it appears to have been even less lethal. Maybe people were also more blasé about epidemics, there having been one as recently as 1957 – though it had accounted for comparatively few deaths. I don’t recall that, either, although I do have memories of the Suez Crisis the previous year.

Let me propose another explanation for my inability – and may I rope you in, too, dear reader? – to remember what was undoubtedly a pretty serious outbreak in 1968. Half a century ago, modern mass media had not yet come into being. Even Rupert Murdoch had not imagined the nightmare of roundthe-clock television news channels. On the BBC and ITV, there weren’t correspondents all over the globe giving us frantic live accounts of the latest fatality figures. Nor, of course, did the worldwide web exist, or the furnace of social media.

As for newspapers, 50 years ago in terms of sales they were more powerful.

But they were far calmer – and duller –

than they are today. Broadsheets had not adopted the tabloid habits that either enhance or disfigure them now, according to your taste. The tabloids themselves were less noisy and sensationalist, though the 37-year-old Murdoch was dreaming of acquiring the Sun and transforming it into a provocative and irreverent masscirculation newspaper.

I don’t dispute that television and radio, as well as the press, covered Hong Kong flu – from its inception in the British colony to its progress round the world and its arrival in this country. But it was all done in a much more low-key way. When the virus hit Britain, TV reporters were not dispatched to hospitals dressed like spacemen to interview sick patients linked by coils of tubes to machines with flashing lights.

Nor did newspapers dramatically publish daily international league tables of fatalities, or fill page after page with hair-raising stories about the disease, or carry innumerable columns berating Harold Wilson’s administration for its ineptitude in tackling the virus.

In a word, it was a very different world in which the media, and in particular television, still stood back respectfully from our lives, and gave us room to think and breathe. I believe people may have had a wider interest in news than they do

today, but they weren’t the terrified news junkies we have become, hooked on hourly bulletins of death and disaster.

Is it possible that in almost every country in the world, the authorities’ extreme reaction to the current pandemic – the economy-destroying lockdowns; the temporary withdrawal of our liberties – owes something to the all-encompassing nature of the modern media? Or, to put it another way: if, as a result of some strange divine injunction, the relatively restrained media of 1968 had not evolved into the hysterical and invasive media of 2020, might we be facing a less bleak future? I’m only asking.

My friend and former colleague Stephen Fay has just died, at the age of 81. I’m sure he will have been known to many Oldie readers as a prolific author, and a fine writer on the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday. Some years ago, he wrote an illuminating profile of Paul Dacre, then editor of the Daily Mail, for this magazine.

I first met him in 1989 when we were setting up the Independent on Sunday.

Though Irish by background, he looked and spoke like a Trollopian squire, at any rate in my conception. He wanted to join the paper as a writer. In the event, he was central to its genesis and development, and soon became its deputy editor.

Stephen’s friend the journalist Philip Knightley (with whom he wrote an excellent book about corruption in Venice, published in 1976) once described him as the best journalist he had known. I wouldn’t quarrel with that.

Both as a writer and as an editor, he was a master of the long descriptive or analytical piece. Young journalists loved learning from him. God alone knows why he never became a newspaper editor. Perhaps he was too generous and too wise.

The Oldie June 2020 63

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The fog of law Time for a new will, I thought, conventional prose that is restrained is remembering Dr Johnson’s observation punctuation: the entire document that ‘when a man knows he is to be contains no comma, no colon and no full hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his stop. Every sentence is a paragraph unto mind wonderfully’. itself, with its very own number.

I don’t know the actual date of my One sentence has 171 words. Some of departure, and I hope it’s more than a the words seem to have as many letters. fortnight away, but the odds have plainly ‘Hereinafter’ and ‘hereinbefore’ jostle shortened. Yet it wasn’t entirely the with ‘thereto’ and ‘thenceforward’. ‘Any doctor’s comment that had prompted me. such appointment … shall take effect I’d asked my solicitor to dust off the most according to its tenor,’ the will asserts. recent effort, made in 1990, about six The executors can borrow money ‘for months ago. One glance at the new draft keeping on foot or restoring same’ – an was enough to make me drop it like a insurance policy, apparently. soggy swab: it was largely unintelligible.

Of course, no one reads this stuff, Here I must at once absolve my lawyer which these days is spewed out of a of any responsibility for the 20 pages of computer. I spotted a misspelling that gibberish he laid before me. had been overlooked, I was told, by A document written in simple English, hundreds of beady testamentary eyes. No he explained, was likely to lead to a wonder. If you can’t understand it when nightmarish contestation that would it’s spelt right, who cares if it’s spelt wrong? make Jarndyce v Jarndyce look like a Things may be worse in Scotland. A momentary disagreement between a Scottish document I had to sign recently honeymoon couple over who should sleep was full of words such as ‘effeiring’, on which side of the bed. ‘disponed’, ‘pertinent’ (as a noun), A will has to be in legalese, it seems.

Clarity is everything; never mind that clarity for lawyers is quite different from clarity for anyone else. Every imaginable ambiguity must be identified and eliminated. Every simple word must be replaced by several much longer words.

Plain English must yield to archaic pomposity. Every sentence must contain a string of clauses and every clause a string of sub-clauses. The only feature of ‘Typical – they haven’t put us two metres apart’

Church Commissioners Islip is a fine stone village just north of Oxford. It’s a real place that tempts few tourists and suffers no tea shoppes; it has a school, a surgery and a railway station. Yet much of it is old, some of it ancient. A thousand years ago, Queen Emma gave the manor to her son, Edward the Confessor, who presented it to 64 The Oldie June 2020

Westminster Abbey. Today, as it’s in the Oxford Green Belt and surrounded by Church lands, one might expect Islip to be safe from developers. One would be wrong.

The aspiring vandals are not the usual governmental or council suspects, but the legatees of Queen Emma and King Edward, the Church Commissioners who administer 1,200 acres of farmland around Islip. Three years ago, they proposed to swamp this village of fewer than 300 dwellings with 1,700 new houses. Then they had second thoughts: why not exploit the fields as well and build 3,000 houses?

‘sasine’ (aka ‘infeftment’) and ‘warrandice’. I had to look them all up in a dictionary.

Why is this state of affairs tolerated?

Some might blame a thousand years of legal history and a corpus of statutes, cases and so on written in ye olde Englishe and sprinkled with Latin. Some might say every activity has its jargon, and even something as simple as tennis uses words such as ‘service’, ‘let’ and ‘deuce’ to meet its particular ends. Others might point to the copious flow of poorly drafted legislation nowadays. And so on.

Piffle. England’s 1689 Bill of Rights is easy to understand. So is America’s 1787 Constitution. True, jargon is often useful, but that’s no excuse for using an all-butsecret language to define laws every citizen is expected to know. As for bad legislation, it should be improved; not used to justify tosh.

Other countries manage fine with plain English. In March, a judge in Saskatchewan declared valid a will scribbled on a McDonald’s napkin by a man who thought he was having a heart attack. Another Canadian scratched a valid will on the tractor beneath which he lay dying.

I suppose I should have just bought a DIY form from W H Smith. But although it would have been cheaper, I don’t think it would have done much to banish legalese. Opaque verbosity is the lifeblood of an entrenched profession of jurists.

If England’s population is set to increase by 16 per cent by 2050, why is Islip’s required to expand by 1,000 per cent?

A local canon’s letter on the subject to the Archbishop of Canterbury went to the

SMALL DELIGHTS Meeting a kindred spirit familiar with Pongo Twistleton and Gussie Fink-Nottle VALERIE DAY, WHEATHAMPSTEAD, HERTS Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Commissioners’ Head of Strategic Land Investment, who waffled vacuously about ‘sustainability’ and said her job was to ‘enhance’ the Church’s ‘investments’ – an odd term for Queen Emma’s donation.

Many non-religious people love the Anglican Church, its hymns and its liturgy. In my Oxfordshire village we clean our church and donate money to keep the tiles on the roof and prevent the tower from falling down. But why? If the Mammon-worshipping Church makes millions and millions by wrecking villages such as Edward the Confessor’s, why are we sentimental fools filling its collection bags?

DAVID GILMOUR

History

Joan of Arc’s long battle for sainthood

Canonisation was tricky for a teenage peasant girl who heard voices david horspool It took a long time for Joan of Arc to become a saint.

In fact, it was only a century ago – on 16th May 1920 – that the Catholic Church, with Pope Pius XI at its head, announced her canonisation.

George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan three years after the canonisation.

That was almost five centuries after her death in Rouen, where in 1431 she was burned as a heretic by English soldiers after a trial led by a French bishop.

The journey that brought her to that desperate end was the most extraordinary of the Middle Ages.

Joan was a peasant girl from Domrémy in the Duchy of Bar, a small pocket of territory that retained its allegiance to the French royal house in a part of the country otherwise under the power of the alliance of Burgundy and England, which controlled about half of France between them.

Joan began to hear voices when she was around 13 and, almost from the start, those voices gave her a unique mission.

She was to go to the rightful King of France, Charles VII, and tell him that she would lead an army who would expel the English and their perfidious Burgundian allies from his Christian kingdom.

The English had been in France and claiming their rights to its throne for almost a century. Henry VI’s father, Henry V, had proved an even more formidable enemy than his Plantagenet ancestors, and at Agincourt in 1415 had completed a stupendous victory. Even after his death in 1422, the English had not stopped, winning another great battle at Verneuil two years later.

Even so, France had resisted English invasions before. The death of Henry V and the fact that his successor was a babe in arms would in normal circumstances have rallied the French to the cause.

But the English had also managed to insert themselves in a long-running civil war between the French royal party,

known as the Armagnacs, and the Burgundians. This conflict had become a blood feud, opening with the murder of Louis of Orléans, the King’s brother, and receiving a new injection of poison from the revenge killing of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, hacked to death in supposed peace negotiations.

When Joan appeared at the French court at Chinon, having somehow persuaded a series of ever more influential men that she must be heard, the English were closing their grip on Orléans, 100 miles away.

Joan’s message for the King – whom she had picked out from the courtiers surrounding him after they tried to fool her by concealing his identity from her – was simple. Give me an army and I will not only lift the siege of Orléans; I will clear the way for you to be crowned as all true French kings are crowned, at the cathedral in Reims, another 150 miles further into foreign-held territory.

Perhaps more remarkably still, Charles believed her. The fact was that Orléans seemed doomed to fall unless something was done, and perhaps Joan could provide the inspiration that was needed.

Arms and the woman: St Joan (1412-31)

If she failed, she’d have been proved to be a false prophet, and France would be in no more dire a state than before.

At first, it seemed as if all Joan’s prayers, and Charles’s, had been answered. She really did ride, in armour but unarmed, at the head of an army who, inspired by her complete certainty, broke the siege at Orléans and liberated the city. Then she persuaded Charles that this victory had to be followed up and, sure enough, town after town was overawed into opening their gates until, at last, Reims itself allowed the army in.

In July 1429, less than five months after a teenaged girl dressed as a man had first been brought into his presence, Charles VII was crowned at the cathedral and anointed with the holy oil of Clovis.

Although a grateful French crown ennobled Joan’s family, and she was showered with gifts, she still had a mission, and nothing would prevent her from trying to complete it. But at the walls of Paris, her luck, or her divine helping hand, vanished. Her assault failed, she was badly wounded and the army retreated. Worse was to come. In a fairly peripheral operation to liberate another town, Compiègne, she was captured and passed to the English.

Held prisoner for months, she was tried by a group of French theologians as a heretic. Although she recanted, she changed her mind again and, unrepentant, went to the flames in Rouen.

Why did her canonisation take so long?

For all her simplicity, Joan had always presented difficulties: as a peasant among lords, as someone who heard voices, and most of all, as a woman in man’s clothing.

It was only in the 19th century that France could accept all that and look to her inspirational example again.

Only after the agony of the First World War could she find her place not just as a saint, but as the patron saint of the country she helped to liberate.

The Oldie June 2020 65

Arts NETFLIX AND FILM HARRY MOUNT THE LAST DANCE THE ASSISTANT Interested in basketball? No, nor was I – until I saw The Last Dance, the ten-part Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan and his team, the Chicago Bulls.

Jordan is a basketball player, m’lud; the most successful one in history. Now retired (he’s 57), he was the colossus of the game in the 1990s, winning the NBA Finals for the Bulls six times. Today he’s a billionaire, cushioned by the fortune from his Air Jordan basketball shoes, must-have footwear for American teenagers since 1984.

To watch him in action is to see a man defying gravity. When he starts to fly, he borrows extra seconds from God mid-air as he shuffles the ball up and down, from hand to hand, before the inevitable slam dunk.

His ability in the air is so supreme that the Bulls’ sworn enemies, the Detroit Pistons, confess their whole strategy is to batter him and keep him on the ground – once he’s flying, he’s scoring.

The series cherry-picks from 500 hours of unaired footage from the ’97-’98 season, when the Bulls won the NBA championship.

So there are plenty of shots of Jordan magically hovering five feet off the ground. There’s also lots of footage of his nearly-as-famous teammate 66 The Oldie June 2020

Dennis Rodman, celebrated for his rainbow-dyed hair; his ex-girlfriend, Madonna; and his best friend, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator.

You don’t have to like basketball to be compelled by the Jordan story: to find out what happens when you’re the richest, most famous sportsman in America – and, what's more, you’re wonderful-looking.

The cliché would demand he has some sort of downfall – but in fact it never materialises. Yes, Jordan gambles heavily – but not enough to put a dent in his billions. And he develops a worrying taste for ultra-boxy suits that make him look like he’s trapped in a mammoth cigarette packet.

Jordan also develops an ocean-going arrogance. At one chilling moment, an autograph-hunter asks for his signature, and Jordan doesn’t even look at him.

Instead, he flinches in the direction of a gofer, who duly dispatches the poor fan out of Jordan’s line of sight.

At the height of his fame, in 1993, his beloved father is murdered by robbers. A distraught Jordan retires and has a go at becoming a baseball player. But he soon returns to triumph with the Bulls. That clichéd downfall never comes.

Even Jordan’s enormous ego Walking on Air: Michael Jordan, The Last Dance

eventually comes down to earth. He realises that, however gifted he is, he wins more if he involves the lesser mortals on his team – and so he starts passing to them. When he does, the Bulls pull off that epic run of NBA championships.

The series touches, too, on race in America. The players are predominantly black; the owners and coaches white.

That works fine with the Bulls’ coach, Phil Jackson, who forms a tight bond with Jordan. It doesn’t work so well with the villain of the show, Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ general manager – diminutive, plump, cross-eyed and fantastically bad at managing the players who rejoice in ridiculing him. A joy to watch.

The same can’t be said of The Assistant (available on Curzon Home Cinema), a thinly disguised, fictional version of the Harvey Weinstein story.

You never see the grotesque, bullying Weinstein movie-mogul figure. Instead, you follow his poor assistant, wiping up post-coital stains on the office floor, lining up erectile hypodermic needles and juggling the aspiring actresses waiting to be ‘auditioned’ by the mogul.

The film, directed and written by Kitty Green, is nowhere near as compelling as documentaries about Weinstein or even footage of Weinstein going to court. It has none of the wit of The Devil Wears Prada or the skill in skewering work life of The Office – and it has no plot.

Instead, you get endless shots of Jane the assistant (a valiant Julia Garner) washing up mugs and working the photocopier in washed-out, off-white interiors. They think this is what they call ‘artistic’. It’s what I call ‘boring’.

One of the effects of lockdown is that people are watching, on the same screen, quicksilver, witty, biting TV series and baggily edited, self-indulgent gloomfest films. When Michael Jordan takes on The Assistant, there’s no contest.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD BOUND Southwark Playhouse Bound begins in darkness, a lone voice singing something atmospheric, low voices humming in the background.

When the lights go up, you realise, from the fact that there isn’t very much light, and that there are no props on stage except the wooden decking the actors are standing on, that the Bear Trap Company, who are performing the play, are going to be relying a lot on atmosphere conjured up solely by themselves. (‘Austerity theatre’ is the correct term, I gather.)

This is the quayside of Brixham, in Devon, where the Violet, a fishing boat, is about to set off after an unsuccessful trip.

It’s a question of survival: if they don’t make a big haul, they go bankrupt. It is also, we learn, a question of survival in its more visceral or literal sense.

When they board her, the only props are a table, which, when turned side-on to the front of the stage, serves as the bridge; lengthways, with five wooden chairs around it, it’s the mess. The regular crew have been joined by a Pole sent from an agency. I wish I could tell you who played him, or any of the other five crewmen, but Southwark Playhouse’s website lists just the cast’s names and not the characters. Still, as they’re all very good, I’ll name them: Thomas Bennett, James Crocker, Joe Darke, Alan Devally, Daniel Foxsmith and John McKeever.

One of their Devon accents wasn’t quite convincing, or lapsed a little bit, but I'll let him hide in the crowd.

This was the first play written by Jesse Briton, who also directed it. It won a heap of awards at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010, and Briton won the Most Promising Playwright Award from the Evening Standard the next year. I can see why – but only kind of. This is no fault of Briton’s but rather that of the sound engineer, who had what I suspect is the impossible task of trying to get the right balance when recording in the vaults of the Southwark Playhouse. A charming note on the website warns people that it can get chilly there, adding, ‘…obviously this was written Before Times and is no longer valid because this is a video of the show but we thought we’d leave it in, in case you want to turn the heating off in your house and put a jumper on for … “atmosphere”.’ If you are the kind of person who doesn’t like loud, echoey restaurants, you might have a bit of trouble picking out the dialogue at times.

All hands on deck: a Force 11 storm in Bound

But it doesn’t matter too much: you get the idea most of the time. Funnily enough, the most consistently comprehensible character on stage is the Pole, Kirk – I think (it’s been shortened by the rest of the crew from something they can’t pronounce). He’s also a useful addition to the mix in that his anxiousness to fit in brings the others’ characters into sharper relief than if he had not joined them. After all, one bearded Devonian in oilskins and with a beanie jammed over his head looks very much like another.

The remarkable thing is how well they manage it. The play is punctuated by darkness and, every ten minutes or so, the cast sing venerable sea shanties, a capella and in close harmony. This could have been over-earnest but the singing is very good, and Brixham has been a fishing port for centuries – so they’ve earned the right to celebrate the tradition.

Fishing is also traditionally a fantastically dangerous way to make a living, and this is very much addressed, as is the other traditional attribute of the profession: its exclusively male character.

There is a female-shaped gap in their lives, with their wives either, at best, waiting for them or, more likely, decamped elsewhere. One of the fishermen says he’s not exactly what the average woman is looking for. Graham, the boat’s joker, tells him that he’s ‘the definition of the average man’, living as he does in a semi-detached house, and even being called John.

What this very simple and straightforward story is about, then, is danger and pride; it’s elemental. The good thing about Briton’s script is that it doesn’t have anything implausible in it

(although I suspect that in real life there would be a lot more swearing, and the talk about women would be somewhat more indelicate, but this isn’t a criticism).

And how they mime being on a boat in the middle of a Force 11 storm without looking silly is really quite something: with one swinging, wire-caged bulb, they use the power of darkness to bring us the terror of death.

View online at southwarkplayhouse.co. uk/archive2011/bound/#tab-3-1

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘Before COVID-19,’ Nick Hornby wrote this month, ‘the BBC was under attack from politicians. Now, the way it has guided us through the crisis means we should value its calm intelligence more than ever.’

I think ‘calm intelligence’ reasonably sums up what Radio 4 delivers: news bulletins laced with scepticism. Grim discussions garnished – tra-la! – with poetry, music and the tweets of real birds.

The pitfalls are the boring repetitiveness of daily briefings – thanks, Evan Davis, for cutting these short on PM – and the mawkish indulgence of inviting the newly bereaved to speak at length. Of course bereavement distresses families, and elicits sympathy. But it is not kind to the listener or to the grieving to air the family’s sobbings.

Vox populi is encouraged by Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 or You and Yours on Radio 4, to expose the minutiae of people’s lives. ‘Tell us how your lives have changed.

Tell us how your finances have been The Oldie June 2020 67

‘I had ants for lunch. Do you have any zucchini?’

affected. Tell us how you are getting on with your family at close quarters. Tell us about your hair.’ That revealed so much distress, despair, such (stupid) debt and so many damaged young lives, balancing on tightropes. It rather blighted with guilt my lockdown dog walks in sunshine and silence, but was good for the soul; good for pondering on how civilisation might improve post-virus.

One happy woman phoner-in told Vine, ‘You know, Jeremy, I often used to wish that everything could just come to a stop one day. Everyone was always in such a mad rush, with too much to do.

And now it’s happened!’ Naturally, Lionel Shriver, asked on Woman’s Hour how she was dealing with lockdown, replied, ‘All too well.’ It’s bonus time for crabby, antisocial writers.

Also for pundits – more welcome than politicians. Every day brings forth professors from obscure university departments – of the Public Understanding of Risk, the Future of Humanity, and the Economics of Innovation and Public Purpose. How did those profs fill their days before being rung up every hour by radio stations?, I wonder. And can we please have Sir Max Hastings and Dame Margaret MacMillan doing their doubleact regularly? And Peter Hennessy and the admirable Sir Paul Nurse.

The grandchildren enjoy Greg Jenner’s Homeschool History, I’m told, and so do I. Repeats are welcome: Down the Line and Cabin Pressure. Tributes to Tim Brooke-Taylor prompted reruns of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Tom Stoppard introduced a Radio 3 reprise of his clever and funny 1991 play, In the Native State, with Peggy Ashcroft. This was a tribute to the late John Tydeman, who launched Stoppard the radio dramatist, along with Joe Orton and Sue Townsend.

And I was breathlessly riveted by Radio 4’s ten-part Book of the Week, Tunnel 29, the true story of students tunnelling their way from East to West Berlin. Its author, Helena Merriman, reads in a lovely conversational way, as if recounting the story to just a single listener.

For an injection of laughter, I 68 The Oldie June 2020

prescribe the opening sketch in Michael Frayn’s Magic Mobile series on Radio 4, about a pharmaceutical company wondering what to name their new drug.

‘Any combination of syllables you like,’ the Pharmaceutical Nomenclature committee is told. ‘The more ridiculous, the better. No thinking necessary.’

Everyone shouts ideas: ‘Photospirophyl?

Oxitoxipol? Zotohexamine! How about alliteration – Demidoxidrin!’

Amusement for pill-popping oldies.

On Broadcasting House, Julian Worricker, self-isolating with psoriatic arthritis and his beloved piano, played for listeners the Bing Crosby song Busy Doing Nothing from a 1947 movie. What a pity he didn’t sing the words: ‘We’re busy doing nothing, workin’ the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do…’

A silly song – and the perfect lockdown anthem.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS As a mimic, Michael Sheen can reproduce show-offs like Tony Blair, Kenneth Williams, David Frost, Brian Clough and now Chris Tarrant with an accuracy to rival Mike Yarwood. He knows how to work the teeth and jaw, and give an arrogant tilt to the head, and he quite nails these people’s manner and style; duplicates their nasal voices.

There’s enough of his own self left over, too, to give an actual thoughtful performance; attend to script nuances.

Sheen was exceptional in Quiz, Stephen Frears’s latest exploration of an English scandal. In a blond wig, fake tan and terrible shiny suits, with all the

The tiring Dutchman: Mark Warren in Van der Valk

buttons done up, Sheen’s Tarrant was all too credible as a television parlour-game host, glazed with boredom at the meaninglessness of General Knowledge, but more than happy to puff on a cigar and bank his generous fees.

Matthew Macfadyen played Major Ingram as bashful and rather affecting. If the drama had any force, it was to convince us of a total miscarriage of justice. It was hard to believe that the videotape of extracts, edited by the production company, with amplified splutters and enhanced camera angles, was admitted as evidence – the volume of coughs and noises had been deliberately manipulated. And what was Mark Bonnar, as the television executive, doing sitting in the public gallery of the courtroom, if he’d been subpoenaed as a prosecution witness?

I actually admired the diligence and ingenuity of the people who tried to work out how to beat the system. It was the producers who were venal, popping champagne corks as Ingram’s life was ruined. Apparently, with today’s computer technology the contentious footage could be examined in greater forensic detail. An appeal must be heard; a retrial ordered.

Like Sheen, Stanley Baxter was a great impersonator, and he loved climbing into a frock to become a Hollywood star – Bette, Mae, Ava or Ginger. Fond of displaying his long legs, he was more of a drag queen than a pantomime dame and, despite his fastidiousness, the months of rehearsal, the Glasgow accent was always apparent.

Nor was there much he could do about concealing his pinched, tense face and bottle-opener of a conk. He was a clenched performer, hard and ambitious.

Comedy National Treasures: Stanley Baxter was a lavish tribute, with Miriam Margolyes, Barry Cryer and Rory Bremner chuckling obligingly at clips.

But it was all very historical. Arthur Negus, Simon Dee and Gordon Jackson are not topical names, and Baxter’s careful impressions now fall flat. Nor have I ever much liked musical dance sequences, not even when Morecambe and Wise did them – these tiresome spectaculars. So I am not a good judge; not an enthusiast. On the other hand, why isn’t he Sir Stanley Baxter?

Van der Valk is back, with Mark Warren, whose eyes look in several directions at once. It was thoroughly formulaic, like Inspector Morse in Amsterdam. There was even a comical pathologist. Like Morse, Van is morose, lonely, crabby and has difficulties with girls. Any girl he quite likes is revealed as having links with organised crime – so he’s a rubbish judge of human character and behaviour. By the way, I once met the

Ed McLachlan

LEBRECHT/ALAMY

‘An elephant got into the room!’

original Van, Barry Forster. A frightful shit, exactly like the serial killer he’d played in Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

I watched In My Skin because the foul-mouthed granny was played by the wonderful if cylindrical Welsh actress Di Botcher. It was all about Cardiff schoolgirls being beastly, and how one of them, Bethan, coped with a terrible home life by inventing a fictional existence for public consumption – nobody can come back for tea because, for example, a conservatory is being built. In actuality, her mother was a sectioned schizophrenic and her father permanently slurped from tins of cheap cider. Gabrielle Creevy as Bethan was mournful and tormented.

Phobic about watching or listening to myself, I wasn’t able to look at Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy, in which I am a talking head, but my family assure me I wasn’t a total embarrassment. My scene was shot in a suite at the glorious Royal Victoria Hotel in St Leonards-on-Sea, the windows

festooned with theatrical velvet.

The producer’s next project is Dusty Springfield. When I once said in a newspaper that Dusty had one of those big lesbian chins, the better to go bobbing for apples with the vicar, instead of realising I was making a silly joke, po-faced readers made complaints to the Home Secretary. I have a feeling this is what I’ll be remembered for. People – complete strangers – still bring it up.

closure of London theatres, cinemas and concert halls.

Misled, as governments often are, by soothsayers and statisticians, they soon rethought. On 10th October 1939, the National Gallery lunchtime concerts began; and though the BBC dropped the Proms like a hot potato, the concerts themselves continued largely uninterrupted throughout the war, albeit under independent management, until the Corporation recovered its nerve and renewed its patronage.

Even so, all was not well with Neville Cardus, music writer extraordinary, who had made his name between the wars as the first great chronicler of cricket. In January 1940, writes Duncan Hamilton in The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus (due in paperback in July), Cardus walked past Lord’s in the foggy dark, finding the ground ‘blind, vacant, lost to the world’.

A thought crossed Cardus’s mind that he might never see cricket again; at which point ‘he fell over a sandbag into a filthy heap of melted snow’.

Writing about cricket, even for C P Scott’s revered Manchester Guardian, whose circulation Cardus greatly enhanced, was for him but a means to an end, ‘that end always being music’. Yet it was cricket writing in tandem with music that later in 1940 bore him to the sunshine of the Sydney Cricket Ground. Already a national hero in Australia for his cricket dispatches, Cardus had been summoned back by press baron Sir Keith Murdoch to cover both cricket and Sir Thomas Beecham’s imminent (and as it turned out diplomatically disastrous) royal progress through the land.

Taking the Murdoch shilling involved compromise. To a Manchester Guardian man who had once been carpeted by

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE NEVILLE CARDUS A WRITER FOR ALL SEASONS To lose cricket and live music at the same time might be termed ‘unprecedented’ (dread contemporary buzzword) – were it not for the brief period after the declaration of war in September 1939, when cricket stopped and the Government ordered the immediate

A music and cricket all-rounder: Neville Cardus, c1924 The Oldie June 2020 69

PHOTO CENTRAL/ALAMY

Scott for using the tautology ‘from whence’ in the pages of his newspaper, it came as something of a shock to discover that the Murdoch presses neither possessed nor desired semicolons, Cardus’s most treasured punctuation mark.

It was his predecessor as music critic for the Manchester Guardian, the great Samuel Langford, who told Cardus during a Roses match at Old Trafford in 1919, ‘Throw away your notebook, watch the players, and get the hang of the characters.’ It was Cardus’s eureka moment. From then on, he resolved to treat each cricketer ‘as an actor in a play or a figure from a novel’, drawing on Dickens for narrative power and descriptive élan and Walter Pater for the more ‘aesthetic’ side of his art and craft.

To relish the reality, turn to the opening essay in Rupert Hart-Davis’s superb 1949 anthology Cardus on Cricket – as fine a piece as has yet been written on the bond between England and cricket – or those essays in Full Score that immortalise the work of such master instrumentalists as Claudio Arrau and Artur Rubinstein.

More literal-minded sports writers accused Cardus of romancing, of being loose with the facts. Even some players concurred. ‘Tha’ knows tha’ made me oop,’ said one of Cardus’s favourites, ‘the grizzled, squat, bandy-legged’ Yorkshire all-rounder Emmott Robinson. Cardus denied this. ‘I enlarged him. I drew out of him what was natural and germane to his character.’

Music, to which Hamilton devotes rather less space than Cardus’s earlier biographer, Christopher Brookes, came to him, as it came to many, through music hall. There was the minstrel Eugene Stratton, for instance, ‘dancing with no weight in him, feet only brushing the boards’, singing the popular songs of Leslie Stuart. Then there was Edward German’s Tom Jones, ‘the experience that determined me to have a long love affair with music’. And finally the revelation of Hans Richter conducting the première of Elgar’s First Symphony in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall one foggy December evening in 1908. ‘From now onward the sound of any chord by Elgar, played at random and overheard by chance, would bring to my mind the living image of the man.’

Such, too, is the mark of the great writer. Cardus rarely responded to the inevitable question ‘Do you play?’ Only in his eighties did he write, ‘Thousands of folk can perform on some musical instrument or another; precious few can write a page of English that signs itself.’

Cardus’s final match report in 1939 concluded, ‘And as the sunshine of the 70 The Oldie June 2020

evening fell on the field, most of us felt that the world had grown a little less stupid than at breakfast time, when the barrage of newspapers challenged our nerve and our philosophy.’ A day on a cricket field, he added, can be ‘extremely sanative.’ As, indeed, can a day savouring the work, sporting or otherwise, of this incomparable writer.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON GET DOWN IN LOCKDOWN Another lifetime ago, I went to moleskin magnate Johnnie Boden’s 50th-birthday party in Dorset.

Just writing that intro fills me with achy nostalgia for a time when there was music and moonlight and love and romance. Now we must face the music and dance to another tune, and a slower beat, as the future is a foreign country, and we will do things differently there.

During dinner and speeches, we were told there was a surprise act later.

Would it be Jools Holland? Squeeze?

The Wurzels?

The dancing began and then there was a sudden surge of drunk super-Sloanes, in jolly party wear, into a mini-marquee where a leggy brunette with china-white skin writhed in a fringed mini-dress onstage. ‘It’s murder on the daaaance floooor,’ she sang, in Cheltenham Ladies’ College tones.

I dived in, mum-dancing like a madwoman, and there I stayed till the small hours. Sophie Ellis-Bextor did a private set and it remains one of the musical highlights of my middle-middle age.

The reason I bring this up now is

because, eight years later, Sophie Ellis-Bextor is owning lockdown with her Friday-night kitchen discos. Looking not a day older, she puts on her glad rags (lurex romper, mini-dress) and livestreams from – guess where? – her kitchen, complete with bay window, planked floor and at least four adorable kids who join in, occasionally putting on masks and kidding about.

It is a measure of how low my expectations of fun are these days (I hyperventilated at the prospect of being able to go to the tip again) that EllisBextor’s domestic gigs make me almost weep with joy and praise.

She also invites everyone to come to the ‘after-show party’ at 7pm, where she sings an encore that ‘isn’t disco’. She did Favourite Things by Julie Andrews in a voice of pure sweetness.

It is impossible not to feel cheered up by this. Music has had to go online, rather than outside. We’ve had musicians playing from their front rooms for the One World: Together at Home event, curated by Lady Gaga – headlined, if that’s the right word, by Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and the Stones, who have also released their first single in eight years, ‘reflecting life in lockdown’, called Living in a Ghost Town.

I can’t say the concert designed to ‘promote the practice of social distancing’ did it for me. Didn’t light my fire.

I commend Sophie Ellis-Bextor on Instagram and Twitter to Oldie readers; as if mainlining good vibrations straight into the old jugular, she is just the ticket these drear times.

She has joined Johnnie Boden as one of my favourite things. See you at her Friday-night disco!

Queen of the Friday-night kitchen disco: Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Torrentius’s Allegory of Temperance, oil on panel (1614)

OLD MASTERS HUON MALLALIEU

RIJKSMUSEUM AMSTERDAM

MY FAVOURITE DUTCH PICTURE I have a particular pleasure when I accompany Oldie groups to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Oldies are not mere tourists to be herded, but travellers, in the 18th-century sense. So I give an introduction in the Hall of Fame and the Night Watch Room; then they roam at will.

However, I do point them to one other painting. Badly hung, the Allegory of Temperance is little known, and the postcard does it no justice. But it is the only known work by the greatest of all still-life painters, and one of my very favourite paintings. He would not divulge his methods, and his pictures were so perfect that only magic could explain them.

Among scandalous artists, perhaps not even Cellini or Caravaggio could match Jan Simonsz van der Beeck (‘of the Stream’), who Latinised himself as Johannes Torrentius (1589-1644).

The fledgling Dutch Republic was at war with Spain, and he was a Catholic – so he was suspect to both the Calvinist

parties vying for supremacy. His father had the distinction of being the first occupant of Amsterdam’s new jail. In 1612, Torrentius contracted a brief marriage, and soon he too was imprisoned, for non-payment of alimony.

After moving to Haarlem, he got into much more serious trouble. In 1627, he was charged with, inter alia, being ‘a seducer of burghers, a deceiver of the people, a plague on the youth, a violator of women, a squanderer of his own and others’ money’.

After torture, he was found guilty on 31 counts, including ‘godlessness,

‘999? My husband’s unresponsive’

abominable and horrifying blasphemy, and also for terrible and very harmful heresy’. The prosecutor demanded the stake but, thanks to the Prince of Orange and other powerful patrons, he merely got 20 years – with costs against him, and all his paintings to be burned as obscene.

Two years later, another powerful patron, Charles I, arranged for him to be exiled to London. The inventory of Charles’s collection recorded seven Torrentius paintings, including the Rijksmuseum’s Temperance: ‘On a round bred [board] donne 1614 is his fynest piece which is a glass with wyne in it very well donne, between a tynne pott and an errthen pott, a sett song under it and a bitt of a Brydle over it.’

In the sale after Charles’s execution, it made £15, with the most expensive royal Rembrandt at £5. In the mid-19th century, it surfaced in a Dutch bakery, and until 1913 a grocer was using it as the lid for a raisin barrel. Charles I’s seal was still on the back. It was spotted by an art historian, who passed it to the Rijksmuseum.

The allegory itself is fascinating, and a major theme in the book I am working on. I long to see it again.

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Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER TURNING JAPANESE I have no strong urge to visit Tokyo.

Anyway, all thoughts of foreign travel are shelved for the time being. But I do yearn to see the flora of rural Japan and, if the crowds could be avoided, some of the temple gardens in smaller cities.

This horti-yearning stems from a late realisation that many of my longstanding favourite garden plants – hydrangeas, azaleas, hostas, maples, flowering cherries and many more – emanate from the Japanese archipelago, a 1,900-mile-long stretch of land incorporating more than 6,000 islands, including Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Okinawa. Each enjoys its own botanically propitious climate and a diversity of altitudes and terrains.

Distinct forms of hydrangea include the so-called ‘big leaf’ kind (Hydrangea macrophylla), generally confined to Japan’s southern coastal regions. They bear either mophead or lacecap flowers, from pure white to deepest burgundy or indigo, depending on soil conditions.

The similarly hued, smaller-leafed H serrata is from mountainous areas and therefore hardier. The white, cream or blush-coloured paniculata types can make large bushes but are easily controlled by annual pruning.

The climbing H petiolaris can cover an expansive, north-facing wall in just a couple of seasons. All are mid- to late-summer flowering, some reaching perfection as late as September. Shrubby species delight in semi-shaded or woodland conditions, where they adopt a laxer pattern of growth, superior to those tightly formed examples that proliferate in exposed British seaside locations.

Spring-flowering azaleas also flourish in shaded places. They’re quite able during April and May to smother their deciduous

or evergreen foliage with a profusion of trumpet-like flowers of red, orange and yellow – colours unknown to hydrangeas.

Flowering cherries have two seasons: spring for blossom; autumn for leaves of fiery countenance. A love and, indeed, care of them was touchingly portrayed by Naoke Abe in her recent book, ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms. Collingwood Ingram grew many specimens in his Kent garden, repatriating several varieties to their homeland where they had become extinct.

Hostas are a new love. I’ve grown them for years, always troubled, alas, by their susceptibility to the mollusc brigade. Now I grow them in slug- and snail-deterring terracotta pots – mindful, though, of hostas’ excessive need for water, which such containers absorb.

This is at least something I can attend to rigorously right now, thanks to lockdown.

I’m not crazy for the jazzier variegated varieties, preferring subtler leaf colours, especially in the ‘blue’ range, for example ‘Halcyon’, ‘Sea Lotus Leaf’, ‘Kingfisher’ and the diminutive ‘Blue Mouse Ears’.

Being no fan of the hostas’ prevailing wishy-washy, pale lavender flowers, I treat them as foliage plants, with the spectacular exception of Hosta plantaginea. It has an abundance of handsome, satiny, mid-green, ribbed leaves, above which, according to hosta

Big in Japan: hostas

queen Diana Grenfell, co-founder of the British Hosta and Hemerocallis Society, rise ‘very long-tubed, widely funnelshaped, exceedingly fragrant, white [flowers] on an upright to oblique, leafy, chartreuse, 32-inch scape from late summer to autumn’. The species has sported several superior forms, such as ‘Aphrodite’, which probably shows best in a warm shaded greenhouse.

‘Venus’ and ‘White Swan’ have double flowers. I will acquire them when travel and shopping restrictions have relaxed.

Japanese flora is superbly documented, thanks to generations of intrepid, literary-minded plant-hunters, botanisers, missionaries and travellers. I doubt I’ll seriously follow in their footsteps but, if I can survive the horrors of a 12-hour flight to Japan, I might yet step excitedly into one of the south’s floriferous hydrangea forests or sip a glass of sake beside a bosky-fringed lake – kanpai!

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD MULBERRIES In these dark times, planting a tree seems a good idea; a new life beginning in 2020 after all the life that has been lost.

My choice is a mulberry tree, partly because the fruit are so difficult to buy and also because, with enough space, the tree can last for hundreds of years. I remember going to the Drapers’ Hall in London many years ago and admiring their mulberry tree which was said to have been planted in the 14th century. It lasted until 1969.

A mature mulberry tree, with spreading branches and large, heartshaped leaves, is ideal for providing shade in the garden. Alternatively, it can be espaliered against a south-facing wall.

If space is limited, the best advice is to buy a container-grown tree which can be transferred in time to a root-control bag or larger pot.

The Oldie June 2020 73

Pomona Fruits are offering a variety, Chelsea, which should be available in containers in June. This is the black mulberry (Morus nigra), originally grown in the Chelsea Physic Garden in the reign of James I and the only one to produce sweet-tasting fruit.

James planted thousands of them in London to provide food for the silkworms and to compete with the French silk trade. Unfortunately he didn’t realise that the silkworm feeds only on the leaves of the white mulberry.

When planting out, choose a sheltered spot and make sure the ground is deeply dug and watered regularly in summer.

Some varieties fruit early in their life, but others will not bear fruit for about eight years.

Suttons advertise a dwarf mulberry bush, Charlotte Russe, which will grow in a pot to a height of no more than five feet and produce fruit in its first year. It won Plant of the Year at Chelsea in 2017 – but reports of the fruit’s taste have not been favourable.

Whichever variety of tree you choose, it might be appropriate this summer, remembering the old nursery rhyme, to ask any small grandchildren to dance round the mulberry bush, singing ‘This is the way we wash our hands…’

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD BAKING THE BISCUIT Anyone can dream – which at the time of writing is pretty much all that’s available to those of us who usually leave the baked goods to others. Me, for one – though I’ve been known, if the need arises, to turn out an acceptable round of shortbread petticoat tails and a pretty good fatless sponge.

Help is at hand. Maîtresse pâtissière Ravneet Gill’s The Pastry Chef’s Guide: The Secret to Successful Baking Every Time delivers the professional lowdown through numbered steps in lively, non-technical language. She has a psychology degree, trained at Leith’s, did seven years as a jobbing chef and earned praise from Fergus Henderson for culinary cheekiness, as expressed through her cherry-and-custard pie.

Recipes for the dessert trolley include hazelnut roulade, Victoria sponge, spotted dick and rhubarb crumble, along with five varieties of crème pâtissière and detailed instructions for tempering chocolate. What else does anyone need?

Ravneet describes herself as a bona fide bad ass. So get your effing fist out of the cookie jar, chef – there’s work to be done.

74 The Oldie June 2020

Ravneet’s perfect chocolate-chip cookies The classic American cookie made easy.

I’ve shortened the recipe a little for reasons of space – apologies to the author. Makes 14-15 cookies 140g unsalted butter, softened 140g soft dark brown sugar 110g caster sugar 1 egg ¾ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda ¾ teaspoon flaky salt 250g plain flour 180g roughly chunked dark chocolate Beat the butter in a bowl or mixer with the two sugars until pale but not fluffy.

Add the egg and beat in quickly till evenly combined. In a separate bowl, mix together the dry ingredients – bicarb, salt, flour – and fold into the butter mixture.

Add the chunked chocolate and fold in until evenly distributed. Immediately scoop out 60g portions of the dough, roll into balls and place, evenly spaced to allow spreading, on two baking sheets lined with baking parchment. Chill overnight.

The next day, preheat the oven to 160°C (fan)/180°C/Gas4. Bake the cookies for 12 minutes or 14 if straight from the fridge – no longer, as you want the middle to be slightly under-set. Allow to cool on the paper.

Sablé biscuits Perfect with strawberries and cream, these crisp little French mouthfuls are, says Ravneet, the type of biscuit that would please your nan. Just the thing for dipping into a strong British cuppa.

Makes about 3 dozen 90g icing sugar pinch of salt 250g plain flour, plus extra for dusting 175g cold unsalted butter, diced small 2 egg yolks (about 40g) Stir the sugar, salt and flour together in a bowl. Rub in the butter with your

fingertips to the consistency of breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolks, then mix to bring together as a dough (you may need a little cold water). Roll into a cylinder, diameter about 7cm, on a lightly floured board, wrap tightly in clingfilm and set in the fridge for 20 minutes or so.

Preheat the oven to 160°C (fan)/180°C/ Gas4. Slice the cylinder into thin discs – about 3-4mm – and place on two baking sheets lined with baking parchment.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. Leave to cool, then remove to a baking rack. These keep in an airtight tin for up to two weeks. If you’d rather bake in batches, store the unbaked dough cylinder in the freezer and slice off what you need with a sharp knife dipped in hot water.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE The synchronicity of the pandemic with the 75th anniversary of our great escape from invasion – as invoked by HM the Queen – is the sort of dream coincidence that not even Boris and Dominic Cummings could ever have conjured up.

It has been easy for them to tap into our national sense of ‘triumph over adversity’. The message is clear: if we could suffer the austerity of wartime rationing under the terror of the Blitz, we can certainly dig our way to victory now.

Albeit with the help of Ocado.

Yet our innate Protestant predilection for austerity was actually reignited in the First World War, when the ascetic, stamp-collecting George V taught us that it was not just undignified to care about good food; it was unpatriotic and morally reprehensible, given that our boys were being mown down at the front. He not only abstained from alcohol for the duration but forbade it at all court dinners, allegedly in sympathy with the munitions workers, who had seen pub licensing hours reduced from 19½ to 5½ hours a day.

King George revelled in the new propriety, sending out royal proclamations, whether urging us to stop eating bread and pastry or instituting meatless Tuesdays, at home and in restaurants. A Simpson’s menu of 1917 warned customers that potatoes were available only on Tuesdays and Fridays, again by royal proclamation.

Dowdy Queen Mary was his partner in virtue. She opened the first National Restaurant in 1917 in Westminster Bridge Road, dutifully serving up the rhubarb jelly herself. Even ice cream was stopped. They must have welcomed the deprivations of rationing when it was introduced in 1918, restricting people to 8oz sugar, 8oz bacon and 5oz butter a week.

Although there was good reason to fear we might run out of food – at one

point in 1917, German U-boats ensured we had only three to four weeks of food supply left – one can’t help thinking that there was an underlying delight in this rebuke of the excesses of the belle époque, over which his father had presided. In 1900, thanks to Ritz and Escoffier, London had been the European capital of haute cuisine, home to 5,000 French chefs.

The standard eight-course menu of the Edwardians never returned. Our latent puritanism was adopted by the press under the slogan ‘Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight’. Journalists were on the lookout for the wealthy breaking the new rule of eating only three courses at dinner and two at lunch – which some people evaded by counting fish, poultry and game as halfcourses and not counting cheese at all.

The lasting damage to British gastronomy was that we learned how to make do. A new spirit of accepting second- and third-rate cooking, of not making a fuss, had crept in and didn’t go away until the 1960s or later. Rather like prisoners of war, we developed ingenuity that knew no bounds. We learned how to make imitations of mayonnaise and to pronounce it to be as good as the real thing. Lord Devonport, the first ever Minister for Food, suggested polenta and rice cakes as substitutes for bread rolls.

Our monarchs have always set the tone for our gastronomy. Charles II’s restoration saw our first restaurant boom. This ended with the anti-Jacobite cries of John Bull for plain beef under the Georgians, who outlawed any produce from France. Queen Victoria was more interested in quantity than in quality.

And here we are now with our own dear Queen, a champion of Tupperware. And chocolate cake.

DRINK BILL KNOTT I’VE DRUNK MY CELLAR DRY I have been drinking the good stuff, ransacking what passes for a cellar in our Shepherd’s Bush flat. The pillage started in mid-March, when our usual supplies of vins de soif had been severely depleted, nobody was delivering anything, the supermarket shelves were bare and I wanted something to drink with a nice piece of trout.

The small hatch above the cellar is easy for the sylph-like Mrs K to negotiate (I fear becoming wedged in like a post-prandial Winnie the Pooh), so it was she who emerged with a bottle for our supper, a pleasingly dry, aromatic white from halfway up Mount Etna.

Very good it was, too, but the real treat was that it brought back the sights and

smells of Sicily: the carpet of wild fennel in spring, the olive groves bulging with fruit in late summer, the pungent aroma of grappa-spiked espresso … airports may be deserted, but the memory can fly wherever it likes.

A case of Macon and another of Chinon arrived the next day, but I carried on plundering the cellar. A bottle of Assyrtiko brought back fond memories of wine-barhopping in Athens; a Barolo conjured up a misty autumn morning in Piemonte, as we tramped through tangled undergrowth in search of white truffles; a sip of Grüner Veltliner whisked me up an Austrian Alp more serenely than any ski lift.

This temporary stillness – even in the middle of a city, there is no traffic noise, no jets overhead, and the air seems almost bucolically pure – offers the chance to concentrate on the unalloyed, distraction-free pleasure of something unique and uplifting: a piece of music, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Or, indeed, a glass of great wine: the vinous version of Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.

Too many bottles spend their lives in musty mausoleums, yearning, Miss Havisham-like, for the ‘special occasion’ that they were promised decades before, while age saps their vigour and dims their beauty. Recent experience has taught me that a bottle of really good wine at the peak of its powers is a special occasion in itself: a wallow in nostalgia, perhaps, but a delightful one.

Build an evening around it: choose the food to suit the wine, rather than the other way round, and keep it simple. Pick a few flowers for the table; put on some music, if you like, or just savour the silence. Then pour a glass from your newly liberated bottle and let it transport you to a happier time and place. You can catch up on the news tomorrow.

My cellar is now catastrophically depleted, but I do not regret a single drop. I will start the onerous task of building another cellarful of memories when this crisis has finally passed, at which point I will politely ask Mrs K to retrieve one of the few surviving inhabitants from beneath the floorboards: a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal 2009. Now that really will be a special occasion.

Wine Richard Davis – the ‘D’ in DBM Wines – tells me his company is doing a roaring trade and can usually deliver the next day.

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Celler de Capçanes, Sense Cap Blanc, DO Catalunya, Spain 2019, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 A blend of Grenache Blanc and Macabeu from a great Catalan co-operative: aromatic fruit and a crisp finish.

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‘Are you going to eat that?’

The Oldie June 2020 75

SPORT JIM WHITE COMETH THE HOUR,COMETH THE FAN By the time you read this, live sport may have made something of a tentative return to our lives.

Everyone is anxious to see it back: the governing bodies desperate for broadcasting revenue; clubs stripped of income and facing oblivion; even government ministers sensing the role it might play in lifting the nation’s morale.

But one thing is certain: if sport does come back, it won’t be in any form we recognise.

There was a hint of what might be on its way when the Korean football league opened for business in May by staging its first competitive match for over three months. In the country that has managed to corral COVID-19 better than most, they were not taking any chances. Players were banned from shaking hands, and spitting was a yellow-card offence.

Substitutes had to wear face masks as they sat on the bench. The most pertinent difference from what we were used to, however, was that the game had to take place behind locked doors. Instead of the stadium’s being rammed with supporters, the only thing occupying the stands was a plinth displaying a car manufactured by one of the league sponsors.

And immediately it became clear how odd, how unnatural, this was, how strange that the principal noise was the shouts of the coach, yelling from the sidelines. The organisers tried to compensate for the lack of atmosphere by broadcasting recorded crowd noise across the publicaddress system. But, detached as it was from the rhythms of the game, not swelling as an attack formed, it just sounded vacuous. And, critically, the accompaniment was switched off at 90 minutes, which meant, as the game lingered on into added time, that instead of a roar of relief and delight at the final whistle, a tense home victory was greeted instead with eerie silence.

It is not just football. It will be like that with every sporting occasion stripped of its live audience. Imagine if last summer’s cricket World Cup final or that extraordinary test match at Headingley had been played out to a backdrop of empty seats. Instead of the moment – so beautifully captured by the television cameras – when the packed west terrace erupted as one as Ben Stokes hit the winning boundary, his resistance would have raised no applause at all.

Try to conceive of Ascot without the spine-tingling cheer as the favourite gallops up the home straight. Or think about the Ryder Cup without the 76 The Oldie June 2020

constant buzz of anticipation that fills the air from the second the first tee shot is executed. Still, since this year’s Ryder Cup is due to take place in Whistling Straits golf club in Wisconsin, there are some who could probably do without an overweight middle manager in chino shorts and a Keep America Great cap shouting, ‘Get in the hole,’ every time someone attempts a putt.

What we will come to discover as sport feels its way into the new normal is this: the supporter is absolutely critical to our appreciation of grand sporting events.

The governing bodies may tell us success is due to their astute management, the players might believe it is all about them, but, as we will see, without the fan sport is stripped of much of its imperative.

It is the crowd who articulate its meaning, purpose and drive. As many a sports person will acknowledge, the crowd also fuels the players’ determination. Fans don’t just provide an exciting backcloth for the television audience; they make things happen.

Without them, it just won’t be the same.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD THE ROADS LESS TRAVELLED Penny Phillips, esteemed custodian of this column, recently travelled the A303, that great highway linking London and the M3 with the West Country.

Normally we hear about the A303 only if there are holiday jams or in connection with Stonehenge, by which it passes.

Penny’s experience was different: needing to get home in time for lockdown, she drove the length of it back to London at midnight on a Sunday. The only other car she saw in Somerset was a taxi. Thereafter, all the way to London, she passed a few lorries but saw no other cars at all. Not one. It was surreal and spooky, like surviving a nuclear war.

When was the last time anyone drove that distance on the A303 with no other cars? The Second World War? Or before there were cars?

It’s a road I grew to love many years

Go west: the A303 meets the A344 in the 1930s (Stonehenge on the horizon)

ago following a few lucky journeys on summer evenings when it was relatively uncrowded and the great sweeping cornfields of Wiltshire and north Hampshire made me feel as though I was surfing a golden ocean.

In those distant days, Stonehenge was not a fenced-off heritage site with car park and visitor centre; just a circle of big stones a little way off the road. You could pull onto the verge and wander across the field, stroking them and sitting on them while wondering about the people who put them there. Much as antiquary John Aubrey described them 400 years ago.

Lack of traffic during lockdown has made it easier to appreciate many of our great roads. The novelist Ford Madox Ford wrote of the beautiful, empty high roads of England in the late-19th century, formerly busy with coaches and wagons but then deserted by all but a little local horse-drawn traffic and the occasional tramp. The reason was the railways. It took a few decades for cars and lorries to repopulate those roads.

There are still many you can enjoy, even in normal crowed times. One of my favourites is the A66, which runs across the spine of England, linking the A1 at Scotch Corner with the M6 at Penrith.

Heavily used, much of it is now dual carriageway, but the hills and valleys of Teesdale never fail to lift the spirits.

I recall one night especially, guiding my last Discovery eastwards through near-blizzard conditions as far as Brough, then branching high up into the dale on narrow roads in search of our favourite inn. The signposts were snowed over, the descents treacherous, the corners abrupt and not a light to be seen.

But the Discovery coped with aplomb until at last we found the inn, the glow from the windows reflected by the snow, a coal fire in the bar, supper and room waiting. That’s the kind of motoring I like.

Or take the A9 to Inverness, then the A835 north to the A832. That carries you in a great loop through glens, lochs and mountains and back along the spectacular west coast.

Choose your time and you can still do it in solitary splendour, but if you don’t – and thanks to Prince Charles’s naming it as part of his favourite 500-mile route around Scotland – you may find yourself amid swarms of motorbikes and herds of caravans.

Other favourite roads, both main and minor, I selfishly keep secret.

It’s the paradox of prosperity: too little and life is brutish and short; too much and we’re too many. The answer? Drive with discretion.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Strange joy of Mum’s internet funeral I have now attended my first online funeral and digital wake; they were unexpectedly heartening experiences, despite my considerable forebodings.

One week into the coronavirus lockdown, my mother died. It was no tragedy; she died of ‘old age’, mercifully, not infected by COVID-19.

Nevertheless, that virus casts a long shadow, and it affected her final days, her demise and her cremation. We would have found it all much tougher without the internet and help from an industry new to me: ‘bereavement technology services’. It would have been very different 20, or even 10, years ago.

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

The butterfly effect https://ukbutterflies.co.uk A site run by butterfly enthusiasts for lovers of butterflies.

Gates of prophecy https://tinyurl.com/webster388 In 2014, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates gave a talk predicting something like COVID-19.

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

When, after her nursing home was locked down, we could no longer visit my mother, the wonderful staff arranged for internet video calls. Once it became clear that the end was near, her doctor was allowed to examine the patient by video and, in due course, issue the cause-ofdeath certificate. In more normal times, a physical examination is a legal requirement – and would have been complicated, to say the least.

Formalities for obtaining the death certificate could now be completed online, rather than in person, by appointment, as previously required.

We decided on a brief cremation with a much jollier memorial service once the churches reopen. Not that we had much choice; the COVID-19 rules decreed a maximum of ten at the crematorium, all socially distancing, and we were asked not to encourage people to travel far.

In the event, it was possible for only four of us to be there in person. On the face of it, this could have been a melancholy little band, especially given that my mother had a very wide range of friends and relations who would normally have packed the chapel. I wondered how we could best reflect this.

We didn’t need to. Technology took over.

The service was broadcast live on the internet for anyone with the password to watch. This meant that many people on several continents were able to take part.

We had distributed orders of service by email, and I gather there was some lusty singing in distant corners of the world.

The vicar, too, made a point of

addressing her remarks directly to the remote congregation. This was inspired.

Not only did it allow them to feel a real part of the service; it allowed the few of us in the pews to sense their presence.

The service was placed online for four weeks, so anyone living in a less helpful time zone could catch up. The whole process was completely unobtrusive, and even the music we chose was beamed from a website into the chapel sound system. The internet was everywhere.

In the past, I have always resisted filming weddings, christenings and so on; I believe these things generally live better in the memory. But this experience has given me pause for thought. We had many appreciative messages from long-distance mourners, and somehow the knowledge that we were not alone lifted the spirits of the handful of us in the chapel.

Of course, there was no opportunity for the normal party afterwards, but the grandchildren were not to be denied.

That afternoon, they organised a Zoom party, for which almost 20 family members across three generations gathered online from our various points of self-isolation. We told jokes, remembered Grandma – and we could all drink, since no one was driving.

So, to some extent, it was on the internet that my dear mother died and was committed to her maker, and we who mourned her were the better for that.

I can’t help thinking that, like death itself, this sort of online farewell will from now on be with us always.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

How dirty is your money?

Dirty money used to mean ill-gotten gains that needed to be laundered. Since the warning that anything we touched was a potential source of COVID-19, honest cash has also become a dirty term.

It has long been known that viruses and bacteria, including highly dangerous ones, reside on our currency and give a different meaning to the idea of ‘filthy lucre’. Despite that, the Bank for International Settlements reckons the 78 The Oldie June 2020

possibility of catching COVID-19 from handling cash is low and less likely than from touching a PIN pad or handrail.

The move to shopping with plastic or mobile phones instead of notes and coins was well underway before we heard of coronavirus. Shops were already encouraging us to flash contactless cards rather than count out money, and some retailers had started refusing payment in cash at all. We got used to the idea that it

is acceptable to use plastic cards for items costing only a pound or two.

Then, when the lockdown was imposed, cash became redundant. We could no longer go out shopping, except to buy essentials, and cash-spending halved within a week. This could have tipped us into being a properly cashless society – but the drawback there is that vulnerable groups and people without bank accounts are stranded.

High-street banks and central banks need us to trust our currency and, around the world, they are now actively urging us to keep using cash.

It is banks that have pulled us back from the brink of abandoning cash altogether. Having spent so long trying to persuade us to pay with plastic cards, they are now keen for us to carry on using cash. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, banks raised the spending limit on contactless cards from £30 to £45.

The change started in April, though it is taking time for all retailers to update their terminals.

For many years, we have been able to withdraw small amounts of cash, usually up to £50, when paying for groceries with a debit card. This suits the supermarkets because they then have less cash to deposit, which cuts their cost of banking.

Soon more shops will be offering this service. Mastercard and Visa, with their partner banks, are encouraging any retailer to offer cashback by paying them 12p every time they dispense money to a customer. This provides additional income for local shops and access to small amounts of cash for people who have no nearby ATM. It also recycles bank notes within a local community.

‘Rescued at last ! After all these years – can’t wait to get home, call in on my old mates, a few pints at my old pub, a big nosh-up at my favourite restaurant, football at…’

Shoppers might eventually be allowed to get cashback without making a purchase first, but that’s just an idea now.

As for ATMs, four cash-machine providers have responded to the current crisis. Barclays, NatWest, PayPoint and Sainsbury’s Bank all promise, when local communities apply,

to install free-to-use cash machines if the only one in the area disappears or starts charging for withdrawals.

There is around £70 billion worth of bank notes in circulation, kept in wallets, shop tills, banks and cash machines and even under mattresses. The cashless society is still a long way off.

The Oldie June 2020 79

Getting Dressed

‘I didn’t feel like – or look like – a lesbian’

JUDITH JONES

Beatrix Campbell’s new book on the Cleveland child-abuse affair, Secrets and Silence, will be published next January.

It promises, like most of her nine others – from Wigan Pier Revisited to Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy – to ignite much controversy and discussion.

By pure chance, the prize-winning political writer and journalist and I are locked down in the same village in France. I have a holiday home here.

Campbell her partner of 29 years, Judith Jones, an independent social worker and official child guardian – and sometime co-author – have a permanent home here. They even have a vineyard. She says, ‘We often laugh together – who’d have thought it? Council-house girls! As my mother would say, “Nothing’s too good for the workers.” ’ Campbell’s mother was a Dutch nurse, who met her father in Holland towards the end of the war – he had enlisted at the age of 16. Campbell, 73, remembers fondly that if people accused her mother of being a bloody foreigner and asked where she came from, she would say firmly, in her strong Dutch accent, ‘CARLISLE’ (which is where they lived). Her mother worked in a geriatric home. Her father, determinedly selfeducated at night classes, became a teacher.

Both her parents had become Communists. No surprise, then, that Campbell, the eldest of three, was a born fighter.

At 14, she insisted on taking part in one of the CND Aldermaston marches. A couple of years later, she became a member of the Young Communist League. Her parents insisted she make this decision herself, and not because of them.

At 23, she came out as gay, and in the past decade has stood as a T-shirt by Jean-Paul Gaultier, ‘vegetarian’ (non-leather) trousers from a forgotten shop, patent trainers from M & S 80 The Oldie June 2020

Green Party candidate in local and national elections.

She went to a Carlisle grammar school but barely passed A-levels. Her writing life began at 19 when she was persuaded

by Bobby Campbell, a Scottish musician, political activist and boxing correspondent of the Morning Star, whom she met at a commune in London, to join him on the paper.

She married him soon after and though they subsequently divorced, she still holds him in high regard and credits him with being partly responsible for her eventual success: ‘I was flaky and failing when we met; he gave me confidence. We remained great friends until the end of his life.’

In the early ’70s, the women’s liberation movement was taking off and for the second time Campbell found herself: ‘That’s when I became alive.

Suddenly, being in rooms, meetings, conferences full of women, I just fell in love. Fell in love with women in general and in particular.

Women’s liberation for me was an experience of great political energy and joy.’

When Campbell came out, she was fearful of her father’s reaction. But by chance he had just watched on television The Naked Civil Servant, the story of Quentin Crisp, had been touched and was sympathetic – as were most of her family.

One of her relatives congratulated her on not looking like a lesbian.

‘She didn’t understand. I

VAL WILMER

Writer Beatrix Campbell was set free by women’s lib brigid keenan

Campbell in 1975, the UN’s International Year of Women, when she felt ‘alive’

didn’t feel like – or look like – a lesbian, whatever that might be. I was just a woman who loved and desired women.’

A friend once told Campbell, more astutely, that style was all about income.

‘She was right. One of the first things I bought when I began to earn decent money at the end of the ’70s was a pair of white cotton Katharine Hamnett trousers. Glorious – still got them.

Then I discovered the key: jackets! If I acquired nothing else in any one year, I’d buy jackets. Karen Millen, Kooples, Adolfo Dominguez … above all, Vivienne Westwood – and currently a lovely little All Saints leather jacket.’ She wore Vivienne Westwood to collect her OBE in June 2009.

She has always been slim and energetic. When she lived in London she bicycled everywhere; now she works hard in the garden in France and vows to exercise more as she gets older.

For years, her skincare has involved nothing more elaborate than E45 cream; lately she has begun to like Clarins. She uses French Nuxe hair oil. ‘My hair was always my best feature as far as my mother was concerned: I wasn’t clever, but I was nice and I had lovely curly hair.

The first time I went to a hairdresser, I wanted to cry. Then I cut it myself; now I just go and have a little cut at Karine, our local coiffeuse.’

The nightjar

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The summer migrant nightjar, Caprimulgis (‘goat sucker’) europaeus, is in the UK most numerous in southern England, especially the New Forest, Dorset and Surrey heathlands and Suffolk’s Thetford Forest.

A revival in its numbers is due partly to felled tracts of commercial conifer forest, which offer a brief resurgence of insectattracting vegetation until replanting.

In its British homeland, many of the heaths it once enjoyed have become airfields. This column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, President of the John Clare Society, particuarly regrets the loss of Wittering Heath, near Stamford and ‘Clare country’.

For Clare, nightjars were ‘fern owls’: That lonely spot she wakes her jarring noise To the unheeding waste till mottled morn Fills the red east with daylight’s coming sound And the heath’s echoes mock the herding boys From The Fern Owl’s Nest Carry tells of an attempt to see them in Norfolk: ‘My birder pal Steve Brayshaw and I wandered Kelling Heath one summer night, each following justdiscernible paths towards the intriguing sound of the bird, seemingly from this direction and that. Eventually we returned to my husband waiting patiently by the car who, without knowledge or interest, had seen the strange-sounding bird as it flew close past his head.’

The sound is uttered by a perched male, usually at dawn and dusk, repeated at intervals and sometimes lasting up to 10 minutes. As Thomas Hardy wrote, The dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn…

From Afterwards Analysis reveals 1,900 notes a minute.

Spinning fishing reels come to mind; ‘Jenny Spinner’ is a nickname. Both sexes

hunt for insects, making ‘cuick’ calls. Males also offer trills and wing-clap displays. Its froglike gape is surrounded with bristles to funnel its prey, principally moths. A reflective layer (tapetum lucidum) beind the retina, which shines in torchlight, sharpens its night sight. Nocturnal mystery has made it heir to every superstition of the dark; its malevolent sucking of milk from goats was first reported by Aristotle.

In Yorkshire’s Nidderdale, the ghosts of dead, unbaptised children were believed to enter nightjars.

Approximately 10,000 come to the UK. A geolocator revealed that a bird bred in Thetford Forest took eight weeks to

arrive from Congo’s rainforests. Its homeward journey began in February and ended in May. It is the sound of the nocturnal nightjar that betrays its otherwise extreme secrecy. BB reckoned them the best camouflaged of any bird, their greys and browns blending with a branch on which they, alone among birds, sit lengthwise. As I drove along a deserted sunlit road in Ayrshire hill country, what appeared to be a stick sprang into hawklike life and away, with a glimpse of white on wings and tail. The arrival of motoring has meant that sunbathing on roads sometimes proves a nightjar’s downfall.

The Oldie June 2020 81

Travel My Canterbury tale 850 years after Thomas à Becket’s murder, Ferdie Rous revisits his Kent school, the oldest in the world, and exorcises his bullies’ ghosts

I

t’s cold when I arrive at Canterbury station. I’m still not sure I want to come back to my old school, King’s, Canterbury.

As I make my way down the hill – Bell Harry, the cathedral’s central tower, and the disgusting, grey, glassy Marlowe Theatre poking out of the flat skyline – I remember making the reverse journey seven years before.

It was the middle of the school term. I was coming home on exeat for a weekend. I didn’t return for two months.

Boarding got the better of me. I was stuck in a house with 50 other boys, commanded by a man whose only interest was a sport I couldn’t play. Badly bullied at school, I became bitter and cruel. And I am still not over it. I had refused to leave, when given the chance.

That would’ve meant accepting defeat.

Saving face was all.

As I get to the entrance to the cathedral precincts – also the entrance to my school – hesitating to go in, I see Sir John Boys House, named after the MP. Built in the 17th century, it is a delight to the eye. Also called the Crooked House because of its squashed doorway, caused by a structural collapse, it is now a charity bookshop.

After much umming and aahing and

82 The Oldie June 2020

three cigarettes, bought specially for the day – I quit eight months ago – I pluck up the courage to go in.

The King’s School, Canterbury, the oldest school in the world, founded in 597 by St Augustine of Canterbury – the first Archbishop of Canterbury and the founder of the English Church – takes up a good half of the cathedral precincts with boarding houses and its mix of medieval and modern classroom blocks.

The first thing you see is the School House and the warm, yellowish stone of the much-painted Norman staircase (pictured), from which King George VI

presented the school with its Royal charter. The entire school stood before him in Memorial Court – a simple, flagstoned spot, overshadowed by the dining hall – its only feature a cross commemorating boys killed in both wars.

We would line up there in full Canterbury dress – our pinstripe uniform – for Remembrance Sunday. A thousand pupils and teachers would stand – in regimented order, by house – in this small grey space to hear, in silence, the names of the dead. Each name is engraved on a plaque by the nearby chapel. Once, during the two-minute silence, one of the boys in my house fainted. Nobody noticed until the reveille.

The school proper surrounds Green Court. The tradition that allows the head boy or girl to keep a goat on the grass was never followed, but we lived in hope. It does have some regular occupants, though: the Dean’s herd of guinea fowl. They were viscerally hated by everyone, the bane of exam time and silent study.

Facing the cathedral on the court is the school dining hall. I remember going to lunch one day with a housemate. After we’d sat down, I went to get some water,

DE LUAN/ALAMY/FERDIE ROUS

Opposite: the King’s School’s Norman staircase.

Left: Thomas à Becket’s murder.

Below: Becket’s tunicle, a holy relic, housed in 17th-century glass

only to find my tray had moved. Someone else was sitting in my place. A small thing, but painful to remember.

As I head towards the cathedral, past giggling pupils, a stern-looking gym teacher and prospective parents with their pre-teens – I can only wish them ‘Good luck’ – I get to the Dark Entry. This is a passageway below the Prior’s Lodging – a sort of guardroom between the school and the cathedral’s hallowed ground.

It’s supposedly haunted by a servant girl who, objecting to the affair of an elderly prior, poisoned his mistress. As a punishment, she was buried (possibly alive) beneath the flagstones. And her ghost is often seen – but only on Fridays.

Recollections of my neurotic superstitions surged back as I hopscotched around some of the flagstones while making sure I jumped on others.

The cathedral choir is mid-rehearsal as I enter. I look up into Bell Harry, then down the long archways to the nave. I feel small, cowed by a medieval God. Past the dark wood panels and red seats of the quire is Trinity Chapel, where the shrine of Thomas à Becket stood before it was destroyed by Henry VIII. A lone candle commemorates the shrine. If you look closely, you can see a lip on the floor, made by the thousands of pilgrims who knelt before it, praying.

The 850th anniversary of Becket’s murder in 1170 is this year, on 29th December. The Vatican are loaning the

cathedral Becket’s tunicle – a religious vestment – for the summer, if the cathedral is open after the lockdown.

Below my feet is the crypt. I’ve never been before. It is dark and oppressive.

Antony Gormley’s sculpture of a figure, made with iron nails from the cathedral roof, hangs over the site of Becket’s original tomb. The sombre brutality contrasts with the lavish, if faded, 12th-century paintings in St Gabriel’s chapel, only feet away.

Over the road from the cathedral, beyond the city walls, are the remnants of St Augustine’s Abbey, a monastery from 598 AD until its dissolution in 1538. The abbey was rescued in 1844 by Alexander Hope, a local landowner and MP. It became the site of a college that trained missionaries for imperial service. In its day, the abbey would have competed in size with the cathedral (founded a year earlier, in 597 AD). A small, covered

space shows the site of Augustine’s original church – a modest place for the birth of English Christianity.

Before I go, I take one last look at the school. I bump into the tutor who got me through the dark times and the headmaster who made a point of comforting me when my grandmother died.

I go looking for my French teacher, a Hector of sorts (with none of the flaws that mark Alan Bennett’s character in The History Boys). In his slightly awkward way, he says, ‘It’s good to see you. Well, because … there were times … when you weren’t quite so well.’

Yes, quite.

With that, he shrugs, smiles and races off to the staff room.

On my way back to the station, I walk down the high street. Families stroll together (this is before the lockdown).

Two boys chase each other down the street. It’s cheering.

As the train pulls out of the station, heading back to London, a weight lifts from my shoulders. I’m glad I came.

Thomas à Becket’s tunicle will be on show in Canterbury Cathedral from 4th July to 3rd August 2020, if the cathedral is open by then The British Museum will hold its 2020 exhibition on Becket once the coronavirus crisis is over The Oldie June 2020 83

Overlooked Britain

More eccentricity, vicar?

lucinda lambton The Rev Stephen Hawker designed his own Cornish vicarage, was friends with Tennyson – and liked dressing up as a mermaid At first glance, the Old Vicarage at Morwenstow in Cornwall appears to be a pleasing but somewhat ordinary 19thcentury stone house.

Find out more and you will be entranced to learn that its five chimneys are models of church towers.

Furthermore, they are the favourite church towers of the renowned prelate poet the Rev Stephen Hawker, who built and lived in the house from 1837 until his death in 1875.

A most magical figure, a most winning eccentric, this was no ordinary man of the cloth. Considered to be ‘a picturesque exception to the Tractarian tradition of formal churchmanship’, he kept company with the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Kingsley.

Longfellow also greatly admired him, although Hawker was somewhat dismissive about the American poet and his fellow countrymen.

He complainted, ‘Certain it is that there is something naturally narrow and meagre in the American mind. There is not, it is said, one original book among their publications; not a single master mind as an orator or a poet (Longfellow is tuneful but mediocre) or statesman or divine. They copy England with a second-rate power.’

Hawker won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford. Tennyson delighted in admitting that, as far as poetry went, ‘Hawker has beaten me on my own ground with his Quest for the Sangraal.’ He was also responsible for The Song of the Western Men, a patriotic song, considered to this day to be the Cornish national anthem.

He built a tiny hut nearby, on the cliff’s edge, rearing up over the sea. There he would plunge into talk with his distinguished pals. Today, it’s Britain’s smallest National Trust property.

In 1843, Hawker introduced the first Harvest Festival into the Church of England, as well as introducing regular and engaging innovations to church life.

At Morwenstow, he would process up the aisle – laid ankle-deep with thyme, southernwood, sweet marjoram and 84 The Oldie June 2020

wormwood – accompanied by nine cats and his dog. They had all walked with him from the vicarage, so as to be affectionately patted and scratched throughout the service. He excommunicated one cat for devouring a mouse in the midst of prayers. For some reason deeming it essential that the congregation should see the priest’s feet – as well as having a good view of the dog – Hawker removed the bottom panel of the pulpit.

Pacing up and down the aisle, as well as to and fro behind the screen, while orating half in Latin and half in English, he would suddenly appear before the congregation and prostrate himself on the floor in front of the altar.

Let us dwell for a moment too on his pet pig, written of in glowing terms by his biographer, Anglican priest and eclectic scholar the Rev Sabine Baring Gould – author of Onward Christian Soldiers and Now the Day Is Over: ‘He had a pet pig of the Berkshire breed, well cared for, washed and curry-combed, which ran beside him when he went out for walks and paid visits. Indeed the pig followed him into ladies’ drawing rooms, not always to their satisfaction.’

Gyp the pig was intelligent and obedient. If Mr Hawker saw his hosts were annoyed at the intrusion of the pig,

Hawker, 66, in his fisherman’s outfit

he would order it out; and the black creature slunk out of the door with its tail out of curl. Beat that for charm!

Hawker restored the church, insisting that the roof be covered with oaken shingles – ‘tiles of wood, the material of the ark and cross’.

The vicarage was to be built from scratch, with a plan whereby ‘frugality may be exercised without the appearance of poverty’. He found the plan in T F Hunt’s Designs for Parsonage Houses and then applied himself to his own spirited architectural additions, with five of the six chimneys modelled on the church towers where he had had the living: Stratton, Whitstone, North Tammerton and two in Oxford.

‘The sixth,’ he wrote, ‘perplexed me very much, till I bethought me of my mother’s tomb; and there it is, in its exact shape and dimensions.’

Inside the church, there was a tiny door in the screen that led to the pulpit and could be squeezed through only with considerable difficulty. Hawker refused to enlarge the door, saying it typified ‘the camel going through the eye of a needle’. It could be passed through only backwards on leaving the pulpit.

One of Hawker’s great pleasures was to release a trapped visiting preacher with the whispered words, ‘It is the straight and narrow way and few there be to find it.’

His clothes positively sang a hymn to originality, with a coat described by one admirer as ‘a long-tailed affair of a claret colour.’ He wore a blue fisherman’s jersey – showing that he was ‘a fisher of men’ – knitted with a red cross to mark the entrance of the centurion’s spear. On his head, he wore either ‘a Wide-awake Beaver’ or a pink fez hat. He had bloodred gloves and anything black was out of the question: ‘I don’t make myself look a waiter out-of-place or an unemployed undertaker.’ His hessian boots up to his knees added another picturesque touch.

Shipwrecks were the curse of his life at Morwenstow, ‘with the breakers roaring after their prey to seek their meat from

STEVE TAYLOR ARPS/ALAMY

Old Vicarage, Morwenstow: Hawker’s five churches inspired his chimneys

God’, smashing ships against the great boulders beneath his house.

He would stand helpless as bodies, alive or dead, were hurled onto the rocks around him. But he was always there, to save lives or bear the corpses in mournful procession up the cliffs to conduct a proper Christian burial.

Hawker was grimly meticulous in his accounts of what he saw: ‘The search for the bodies still goes on. Limbs are cast ashore. Lumps of flesh have floated above high water and been buried in the ground. Five out of seven corpses had no heads – cut off by the jagged rocks.’

He wrote that, one daybreak in autumn, ‘I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom door, followed by an agitated voice: “There are dead men, sir.” ’ In a moment he was up ‘in my cassock and slippers’. In front of him ‘stood my

lad, weeping bitterly and holding out to me in trembling hands a tortoise alive.

He had grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and marvellous arrival from the waves.

‘I ran across my glebe, a quarter of a mile, to the cliffs, and down a frightful descent of 300 feet to the beach. It was indeed a scene to be looked on only once in a human life. On the ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man who had found the wreck, with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark.’

It was said that Hawker’s deep voice could vie with the sea and was to be heard a valley away.

He delighted in his congregation: ‘My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hues.’

One Mary Cloutman was his first pauper from the Union Workhouse. ‘A meek and humble old creature’, she told

Hawker that she had never had any parents. ‘No, sir, I was found in a basket tied up to the Mayor of Torrington’s door, with a little pink frock on. I never knowed who my mother was. The woman they got to nuss me was called Cloutman and so I took her name.’

‘Is that not a strange history?’ wrote Hawker, gleefully chronicling his Cornish life.

One of his most startling departures from the everyday was that the Rev Stephen Hawker would dress as a mermaid, with oilskins on his legs and seaweed dripping from around his head.

He chose Bude for this display where, perched on a rock, he would comb his locks with feminine allure while he flashed mirrors at the gaping crowds who had gathered to see the sight.

Just as suddenly as this apparition appeared, it would vanish and, with a spirited rendition of God Save the Queen, Parson Hawker would dive into the sea.

The Oldie June 2020 85

Taking a Walk

A Broads sweep down to the North Sea

GARY WING

patrick barkham

Over recent weeks of lockdown, the sea is the thing that many of us miss most.

I’ve been reading James and the Giant Peach to my son, where poor bullied James Henry Trotter is imprisoned on a hill by Spiker and Sponge, his psychotic aunts. To add to his torment, on a clear day, he can make out a distant line of blue – the seaside.

I guess I live a similar distance to James from the sea – a dozen miles – but unlike in his world, there is no hint of it around my home. The Broads are low-lying, wooded, and humid. No salty blast here.

I craved the sea for its sense of clarity and freedom. So I decided to walk there, even if that stretched the government’s definition of daily exercise.

This is, truly, a golden age for walking.

Road traffic has – temporarily – blissfully lagged to the level of a Sunday in childhood. I met barely a car on this wiggling route by lane and path.

The tranquil minor roads were scented by yellow-green Alexanders, a Canary Islands plant introduced by the Romans, which once thrived only close to the coast. The silence was broken only by 86 The Oldie June 2020

a blackcap, belting its wine-rich melody from the brambles.

I could have found my way simply by keeping the fresh north-easterly wind in my face. It swept over the flat, intensively farmed countryside, which was studded with stately flint churches. The first was Tunstead, its cavernous size testimony to Norfolk’s medieval wool wealth. It could accommodate hundreds but had only an old rectory for company.

I turned onto an old Roman road, dotted with a straggly settlement of tiny old houses with pretty names like Lilac Cottage, and infill bungalows from the 1970s. Time gave the cottages a picturesque patina, but this was ungentrified countryside.

Money was tucked away in handsome old farms with their Lithuanian labourers living in caravans, but there weren’t affluent retirees or city second-homers here.

Gardens were devoted to useful sheds, horses, old machinery, exhausted Land Rovers, eggs for sale and the occasional flag. A banjo played in my head.

Long walks are like cricket matches or box sets, unfolding slowly, epic in scale, and containing highs and lows. The high

came when I crossed the unfarmable swamps beside the River Ant. Between thickets of alder, oak and tumbledown willow, I followed Broad Fen Lane, a lovely green mile tracing the five-metre contour line. A heron rose from a ditch; a stoat dashed for cover.

The low came when I climbed High Hill – all 15 metres of it. This mile crossed three prairie fields, a desert of wheat and barley, without a hedge or a tree. The farmer had ploughed and sown over the path and offered a tyre track for a path instead. I was supposed to be thankful – but why do we traduce the land and rights of way like this?

Next came East Ruston Old Vicarage, the polar opposite of the arable desert.

Here was an act of love to the land, a stunning modern garden created by Alan Gray and Graham Robeson (and to be reopened to the public after lockdown).

I was excited by a moated farm on the map – but saw only chicken sheds and no moat. North-east Norfolk can fulfil your gentrification dreams, folks!

The cheery red-and-white stripes of Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Haysbruh’) Lighthouse rose on the horizon but there was still no view of the sea from this low land. I didn’t see the surf until the lane climbed the old dunes at Cart Gap and abruptly turned into a slipway.

Ah! The full force of the north-easterly struck. The usually calm, brown North Sea frothed with silver fury and pounded the old sea defences. The air felt as if it was 100 per cent oxygen. The only living things in sight were gulls floating adroitly against the gale.

In case you’re wondering, I cheated and got a lift back. A minute after I departed, a police car beetled down to the closed car park to chastise anyone enjoying this magnificent sea.

Start at Hoveton & Wroxham railway station and walk towards Tunstead, crossing the Ant at Tonnage Bridge, past East Ruston, ending at Cart Gap. OS Map OL40 The Broads

On the Road

Absolutely glamorous Joanna Lumley tells Louise Flind about Asian flu, her childhood in the Malayan Emergency and life as an Avenger and Bond girl

Anything you can’t leave home without?

For the documentaries, a torch, a penknife, drawing things, rubbers, pens, Sellotape and a compass.

Studios, and all kinds of people would walk through: movie stars and people dressed as Cybernauts and others from Jane Austen. It was like a kind of Hollywood.

Something you really miss when abroad?

Home and salted peanuts.

What about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969?

In Switzerland, right up in the Bernese Oberland, in a village called Mürren. We caught the cable car up to the Schilthorn, a vast mountain with a restaurant on top.

Do you travel light?

No – because I quite often have to take clothes to wade through an ice swamp or meet the president.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

We didn’t have them. But we were in Malaya at the time of the emergency. My father was ADC to General Templer.

Wearing a cardigan going up into the hills (normally I wore just a cotton dress), the smell of wood smoke for a fire to warm a house and the extraordinary scent of roses – it was like a fairy dream.

Thoughts on the coronavirus?

I’m old enough to remember Asian flu. It was 1957 and we all had to be confined to dormitories; even the nuns got ill. I don’t think I did because I’m not often ill.

Did you go on any exotic locations in your modelling career?

Exotic at the time because it was in the middle of the Cold War – going to Russia for six days on Aeroflot, which had string overhead lockers and people stuffed things like Primus stoves and chickens in them.

Plastic bowls were slammed down in front of us, and then a cross-looking woman came round with a huge serving spoon and thwacked a mass of caviar in – and Russia was the grimmest place.

Your favourite place in the Caribbean, now that you’ve just done a series there?

I loved Cuba.

Was it upsetting visiting Haiti?

Horrifying and heartbreaking.

Where did you film The New Avengers?

Both series were done at Pinewood

And The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013?

In New York. DiCaprio’s character, Belfort, comes to see his wife’s aunt – me – supposedly in London. Martin Scorsese hates flying, so they rigged up a park in Brooklyn to look like Hyde Park.

What’s your favourite place in London?

I’ve fallen in love with Clerkenwell – it’s part of old, old London and still feels like that.

And the world?

Kashmir, where I was born.

Are you a traveller?

Yes, and a good one. I’m not afraid. I’ve slept on concrete floors and under shrunken heads. I had a week on a desert island.

Where did you go on honeymoon?

Stevie and I didn’t have a honeymoon: we got married after his last performance at Scottish Opera [Stephen Barlow is an opera conductor] and stopped in Harrogate for the night.

Do you go on holiday?

No, we don’t. We’ve got a cottage in Scotland and whenever we can, in normal times, we pack and run to the hills.

Do you lie on the beach?

No. I’d love to. I’d like to look as though I were made out of crocodile skin – so cracked, old, brown and leathery, with Ambre Solaire spread over everything.

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away?

No. I’m always filming – up early, and there’s either a candle or a ghastly light I do my make-up vaguely under.

Are you brave with different food abroad?

Yes, but I’m vegetarian and in countries that might not understand, I say, ‘It’s against my religion to eat meat or fish.’

The strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In Japan on a bullet train I took a bite of dumplings that completely silenced me.

It was like eating a bit of your duvet.

Your best experience in restaurants when abroad?

Curries in Sikkim in India.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

Quite often the friends you make are the fixers.

Do you have a go at the local language?

Yes, as a courtesy.

Biggest headache?

Is there an iron?

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in while being away?

I think in an orange single tent in the Nubian Desert with a lot of men, and nowhere to go to the lavatory.

Do you like coming home?

Love it.

Top travelling tips?

If you’re far away, phoning somebody when they’re trying to unblock the sink at home and telling them about the herd of elephants that just charged you doesn’t really work. Write an email.

Is there anything you’d like to plug?

Eat less meat and less fish.

The Oldie June 2020 87

Genius crossword 388 el sereno 7 clues share an absent definition. One clue has a superfluous word which identifies where you might find these 7 Across 1 Article once used to defend and counter the French right (7) 5 Claimed free treatment as a result of this (7) 9 Call for help, accepting footballers must have places to relax (5) 10 Broker who may be egomaniac at heart? (9) 11 Delicatessen expenses incurred by sociable son (9) 12 Edge into empty theatre to find subject of discussion (5) 13 Girl getting married needs no diamonds (4) 15 and 1 down. Fools rejected two men on board (8) 18 Fruit containing revolutionary centre (8) 19 American garden that’s good for Democrat (4) 22 Pair of musicians back in Georgia (5) 24 Checks announced to identify unconventional types (9) 26 Austrian relocated across the west of Germany (5,4) 27 Topping characteristic American dish with curry (5) 28 Study one’s put back - that is indefinitely (4,3) 29 Improve in French opportunity with leader absent (7)

Down 1 see 15 (6) 2 Restaurant clubs celebrate in song (9) 3 Girl seen on Circle Line? (5) 4 Converted miner is with church talk of the past (9) 5 The majority of understated fashions (5) 6 This may scrub text allowed in River Island (6,3) 7 Temperature maintained by tailless celestial body in orbit (5) 8 Beam that’s essentially normal in telecommunications (6) 14 Criminalised, and thence transported (9) 16 Train for film once in America? (4,5) 17 Story of people importing an expensive car (9) 20 Eliminates English jokes on air (6) 21 This may be left and right of centre, say (6) 23 Most of military detachment working for alliance (5) 24 Make a mess of missing the N in horn (5) 25 Shape up, beginning to hope for laughter (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: 26th June 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 388 Across 1 Thick shellfish soup (6) 4 Strikes (4) 9 Reserved (3) 10 Exciting (9) 11 Acquitted (7) 12 Part of flower (5) 13 Remains; corset (5) 15 Hirsute (5) 20 Broadcast (5) 22 Bullfighter (7) 24 Pain reliever (9) 25 Chop (3) 26 Tidy (4) 27 Interfere (6)

Genius 386 solution Down 1 Cut in half (6) 2 Fashion (5) 3 Completely (7) 5 Does nothing (5) 6 Captain (7) 7 Unrefined (5) 8 Nimble (5) 14 The going (ground) (7) 16 Recital (anag) (7) 17 Deadly (5) 18 Shatter (5) 19 Wriggle; squirm (6) 21 Doctrine (5) 23 Cubed (5)

Those clues lacking a proper definition are: 6 Sleeves, 17 Beret, 17 House, 12 Horns, 22 Peace.

Each of these may be preceded by the word Green, which can be seen in the bottom row of the grid.

Winner: Florence Proctor Runners-up: Sylvie and Nick Vanston, David Heath

Moron 386 solution Across: 1 Fault, 4 Heat, 7 Ours, (Fawlty Towers) 8 Uprising, 9 Adversity, 10 Rye, 12 Trader, 14 Rankle, 16 Bet, 18 Financial, 21 Innocent, 22 Owns, 23 Sing, 24 Yield. Down: 1 Founder, 2 Unsteady, 3 Thugs, 4 Husk, 5 Annoy, 6 Writer, 11 Anecdote, 13 Ruined, 15 Learned, 17 Ennui, 19 Aptly, 20 Long.

The Oldie June 2020 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO I was recently kibitzing (spectating) a rubber in which East was holding consistently mediocre cards – although from his whining you would have thought they were far worse than that. He then picked ♠ K Q 10 4 2 and eight low cards and heard his partner pass as dealer.

Expecting his opponents to bid and make the inevitable game/slam, he was surprised and no doubt delighted that – after four rounds of bidding and much soul-searching – they reached 6 ♠ .

However, rather than pass and collect three or four hundred in vulnerable undertricks, East greedily doubled. South immediately scampered to 6NT, and all he had to do was to make it and East’s misery would be complete. Here is the deal: Dealer West North-South Vulnerable

West ♠9 ♥Q963 ♦J8652 ♣9 7 6

North ♠ AJ873 ♥J2 ♦K ♣A Q 10 5 3 South ♠ 65 ♥AK54 ♦AQ43 ♣K J 2

East

♠ KQ 10 4 2 ♥ 10 8 7

♦ 10 9 7 ♣8 4

The Bidding South West North East

pass 1 ♠ pass 2 ♦ pass 3 ♣ pass 3 NT(1) pass 4 ♣ (2) pass 6 ♠ (3) pass pass double (4) 6NT pass pass pass (1) Very conservative.

(2) North should clearly pass.

(3) I confess I don’t understand this bid.

South is right he has a great hand – with three ‘cover cards’ (♥AK and ♦A) facing partner’s three red cards. However, why not bid 6♣?

(4) Extremely unwise.

West intelligently led ♠ 9 and declarer won dummy’s ♠ A. With 11 top tricks, declarer needed to score a trick with ♥J. He unblocked ♦K, crossed to ♣J and led ♥4 towards ♥J, hoping West held ♥Q and no more spades. West played low, so ♥J scored. Declarer could now cash out for 12 tricks – slam made.

West was puce with rage (in a wellmannered sort of way), wanting to know why his partner had not left North-South to stew in 6♠ . East was – unusually for him – speechless. However, East had missed the best retort, because actually his partner had allowed 6NT to make. Can you see how?

West should have risen with ♥ Q on declarer’s ♥4 lead, then led a second round of clubs. Declarer would have been unable to untangle his winners – try it.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 254, you were invited to summarise a Shakespeare play in a single limerick. The example I gave came from Twitter, but two of you pointed out that it was written by Stanley J Sharpless (1910-1998) for a New Statesman competition in 1975, and then appeared in a collection edited by the wonderful Arthur Marshall and later in The Penguin Book of Limericks edited by E O Parrott.

So I was right to admire it, but wrong to trust Twitter.

You sent lots of excellent entries.

Timothy Jones sent a limerick for each play, including Henry VIII, which was impressive but a mixed blessing.

Commiserations to those for whom there is no room. Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £12.50, with the bardic bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to David Jeans.

The Tempest It’s Love Island for our handsome pair, But their fathers have issues to square; ‘I’m so full of remorse.’

‘We’ll return home?’ ‘Of course.’

‘You be duke; hide your wand over there.’

David Jeans The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio’s taming the shrew, Using methods extreme, to subdue Her resistance – he’s proud.

When Kat’rina is cowed, The ending’s a case for #MeToo. Sylvia Fairley

On the word of Iago, who’s yellow.

Janey Wilks Two Gentlemen of Verona Two gents, in Milan, each feel sure The Duke’s daughter will fancy them more.

And a cross-dressing page Finds him/herself upstaged By a scene-stealing dog in Act IV. Con Connell Measure for Measure When Angelo’s running the city, He meets a young nun who is pretty.

He tries to corrupt her, And thinks that he’s tupped her.

He’s fooled. He does not deserve pity.

George Simmers King Lear The old king, since his thinking is hazy, Flips Cordelia the bird. Whoops-a-daisy!

He is destined to find Cordy’s sisters unkind.

Soon he’s not only stupid, but crazy.

Max Gutmann COMPETITION No 256 A verse postcard to a grandchild, please, describing something we used to do, with the title Before the Virus.

Maximum 16 lines.

This month we cannot accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 256’, by 25th June.

Titus Andronicus Having vanquished the Goth army fast, he Comes home with some captives at last. He Alas does the same When they kill and they maim, Serving up the Queen’s sons in a pasty.

Timothy Jones King Lear Cruel gods drive this dire diorama, Lear’s realm, overwhelmed by bad karma: Gloucester loses his eyes, Almost everyone dies, Quite the norm for Shakespearean drama.

Mike Morrison Othello This military Moor named Othello, A noble yet insecure fellow, Slays his virtuous wife, Then takes his own life,

‘If you let him back in just once, he’ll want to sleep with us every night’ The Oldie June 2020 91

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Exhibitions

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Books & Publishing

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Wanted

OLD POSTCARDS WANTED

by private collector. Contact Grenville Collins. Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenville@collins.safeserve.com Personal

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The Oldie June 2020 95

Education

Clothing & Bedding

Societies

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The Oldie June 2020 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Zoom and gloom

At 75, I have been so depressed at the idea of anyone over 70 being confined indefinitely to some kind of lockdown that I have actually been trying to get hold of some pills on the internet so that if it happens to me I can take my own life. My husband died last year and I honestly live only for the visits from my daughter and grandchildren once a week. That way, I can just keep going but, if I can’t see them, my life has absolutely no meaning. I don’t drive, I’ve never been a joiner, I live in a quite isolated part of the country and I find talking to my family on Zoom just makes the loneliness worse, if anything.

Name and address supplied I know the feeling. Seeing loved ones on screen just isn’t the same. It’s like the difference between seeing a play and watching a film. Totally different experiences.

Real-life people emanate heat, warmth and some kind of chemical that makes their presence nourishing and lovely.

And touch – from a kiss and a hug to just the brush of a hand – is crucial to human existence. But can I be irresponsible on two counts? First, in the unlikely event that a more stringent lockdown for the over-70s were enforced, it wouldn’t be indefinite. And secondly, if it were, I would be absolutely furious and the first to lead the march for my and other oldies’ civil liberties to be restored.

You could join us, as could everyone else who feels the same way – of whom there are thousands. So don’t think about pills quite yet. To the barricades, my brothers and sisters! Otherwise, mass suicide! We’ll all go together.

A

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

98 The Oldie June 2020

Separation anxiety

Q

In your reply to Geoff (Spring issue), you describe his parents’ obsessive separation of composite materials, such as the backing of ordinary paper from silver paper, and other actions relating to recycling as ‘fairly harmless and benign’. But have you considered the resources that go into doing those things – like the water, power and detergent? That the manufacturers’ thoughtlessness in producing such material is beyond his parents’ control doesn’t make his parents’ waste of other resources in dealing with the problem harmless or benign; perhaps their time would be better spent writing to the food-manufacturers asking that such wasteful packaging be avoided in the first place.

VW, East Sussex I couldn’t agree more. I still haven’t worked out in my head whether swilling out bottles, plastic pots, Tetra Paks and cans with lots of detergent and hot water balances out in any way, environmentally.

And is there any point in recycling carboard boxes still with their plastic tape stuck on? Apparently it’s OK to recycle envelopes with cellophane windows in them – at least in my borough – but what about packaging that features shiny gold lettering? It’s very difficult to be committed when the guidelines are still so woolly – and vary from area to area.

A

Q

It’s your funeral I have paid for my funeral in advance. It was going to be quite a lavish affair with a

ISSN 0965-2507.

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choir, black horses with plumes, an expensive coffin and an elaborate service and reception. I wanted to make it fun for everyone who came, a spectacle for my friends, and a wonderful party. But now I find that there may be a chance that in certain circumstances my funeral will be allowed to be attended by only an extremely limited number of mourners – and there’s no question of a party. Obviously there’s no point in the ceremony I had planned.

If this is the case, can my family get my money back from the funeral company?

G Simmons, Bury St Edmunds I absolutely see your point.

There’s no point in providing a show if there’s going to be almost no one in the audience.

Presumably you’ve given your children money for the party and the choir.

So the only things you’ve paid the funeral-planners for are perhaps the horses and the coffin. According to the Funeral Planning Authority, your options are either to cancel the plan – bearing in mind there’ll probably be a cancellation fee – or to use the plan and seek a refund or alternative services for those elements included in the plan but not provided. The FPA says, ‘We would expect our registered providers to respond reasonably and fairly, given the current restrictions, to such a request.’ So contact them if there are any problems.

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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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