The Oldie June 2022 issue 414

THE GRAND OLD DUKE OF KENT – NICKY HASLAM NIGEL HAVERS ON CHARM

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen June 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 414

Macca turns 80!

Paul McCartney by Hunter Davies, his friend and biographer My dream memorial service outfit – Anne Robinson Our Platinum Queen – Gyles Brandreth and Richard Osborne Murder in the vicarage – Rev Jonathan Aitken on Rev Richard Coles

Save when you subscribe – and get two free books See page 11

Charming Nigel Havers page 25

Features 11 Watergate’s lost source Christopher Sandford 14 Paul McCartney turns 80 Hunter Davies 19 Hot fashion tips for oldies Anne Robinson 22 Cecil Day-Lewis, the forgotten poet Peter Stanford 25 My charming heroes Nigel Havers 26 The return of the hat Joseph Connolly 30 How farmers make money Jamie Blackett 32 My illuminated manuscript Bel Mooney 36 Addicted to books Barry Humphries

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 13 Olden Life: What were British Restaurants? Bryce Evans 13 Modern Life: What is goblin mode? Richard Godwin 28 Media Matters Stephen Glover 31 History David Horspool

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Hats are back! page 26

Bel Mooney gets medieval page 32

35 Letter from America Philip Delves Broughton 38 Small World Jem Clarke 40 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 41 Country Mouse Giles Wood 42 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 43 School Days Sophia Waugh 43 Quite Interesting Things about ... skin John Lloyd 44 God Sister Teresa 44 Memorial Service: Katharine Whitehorn James Hughes-Onslow 45 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 46 Readers’ Letters 48 I Once Met… Lauren Bacall Michael Theodorou 48 Memory Lane Robert Preedy 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Rant: Complicated game shows Carolyn Whitehead 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson

91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

64 Film: Lancaster Harry Mount 65 Theatre: My Fair Lady William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson

80 Hotel bugbears – and successes Jeremy Wayne 82 Overlooked Britain: Wellesbourne Bath House, Warwickshire Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Matthew Bourne Louise Flind 86 Taking a Walk: Redgrave and Lopham Fen, Norfolk

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093 For classified, contact: Jasper Gibbons 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Paul McCartney rehearsing with the Beatles in Liverpool, 1963 (Alamy)

Books 50 Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921, by Antony Beevor Owen Matthews 53 A Royal Life, by HRH The Duke of Kent and Hugo Vickers Nicky Haslam 53 Old Rage, by Sheila Hancock Roger Lewis 55 Happy-Go-Lucky, by David Sedaris Nicholas Lezard 57 Back in the Day, by Melvyn Bragg Hunter Davies 59 British Rail: A New History,

by Christian Wolmar Christopher Howse 61 Murder Before Evensong,

by Reverend Richard Coles Reverend Jonathan Aitken

Arts

67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 71 Gardening David Wheeler 71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Sport Jim White 74 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 79 Bird of the Month: Reed Warbler John McEwen

Travel

The Oldie June 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes The girl who would be Queen

To celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, A N Wilson has written a charming book, Lilibet: The Girl Who Would Be Queen.

Wilson imagines the Queen on the eve of her Jubilee this year, thinking back to her childhood.

His tone is pitch-perfect as he remembers little Lilibet and ‘Grandfather England’ (George V), who hated ‘that damned mouse’ – ie Mickey Mouse.

Wilson is a mere whippersnapper, born in 1950, but he has an ear for the cadences and jokes of the little Princess Elizabeth, as she compares Wallis Simpson to Olive Oyl. He also makes jokes about how the Princess prefigures her life as Queen. The little girl refers to the Abdication year of 1936, when ‘everything turned rather horribilis’.

This isn’t the first time Wilson has tackled the young Princess. In 1984, he published Lilibet, a poem with these poignant lines on the Abdication Crisis: Later the stricken mother would endeavour To break the news to her bewilder’d child.

‘Your Uncle David, usually so clever, Has been by an American

beguil’d.

He must away’. ‘Oh – Mummie, not forever?’

Bravely, and through her tears, the Duchess smil’d.

And while the Duchess with her daughter frets, Downstairs, the air is thick with cigarettes.

16th April would have been Kingsley Amis’s 100th birthday. And 9th August would have been the 100th birthday of Philip Larkin, his old friend from St John’s College, Oxford.

In the latest issue of the magazine About Larkin, published by the Philip Larkin

Society, there’s a selection of Kingsley Amis’s table talk.

It was recorded by a friend of Amis, Tom Miller, in restaurants in the 1980s and ’90s.

The Old Un has enjoyed Miller’s reminiscences of Kingers before. And he loves the new batch.

Apparently Amis thought Princess Diana was ‘wicked’, Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins were ‘pompous buffoons’, and as for Danny Kaye: ‘Oh, Christ! Oh God! Bad at being a human being.

Full of schmaltz.’

Amis says of John Osborne, ‘My heart sank when he came into the room.’ Peter

Among this month’s contributors Anne Robinson (p19) has left Countdown ‘to make way for an older woman’. She was on The Weakest Link. She hopes to become a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t married.

Nigel Havers (p25) was in Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India and Empire of the Sun. He starred in The Charmer. He has been in Downton Abbey and Coronation Street.

Jamie Blackett (p30), a former army officer, farms in Dumfriesshire. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and Country Life.

He wrote The Enigma of Kidson, Red Rag to a Bull and Land of Milk and Honey.

Bel Mooney (p32) is a novelist, children’s author, broadcaster and journalist. She is the advice columnist at the Daily Mail. She lives halfway between Bath and Bristol and, when not writing, studies and collects art.

Ustinov was ‘merit-free and talent-free’. Of poor Shirley Williams, Amis said, ‘People think that she is sincere because her clothes are a mess and she doesn’t get her hair done.’

He did like Yul Brynner, who ‘gave an immense amount of pleasure to millions of people’, Daphne du Maurier, Ian Fleming, Dick Francis and Graham Greene (‘He can write, damn him!’).

The most impressive people he’d ever met were Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely, writer Robert Conquest and Philip Larkin – ‘Of course, he’s better than me.’ The person he most hated was the Queen Mother: ‘She was once very rude to me.’

Amis didn’t spare himself from his own attacks. He said he was taken seriously as a novelist only ‘because there is so little competition’.

If only dear Kingers were around to give his frank opinions on today’s leading figures.

As the Queen celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, what news of her fellow lady veterans from the war?

The young Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1945, aged 18, as a Subaltern.

By the end of the war, she was a Junior Commander.

Having completed her course at No 1 Mechanical Training Centre, she passed out as a fully qualified driver.

The Oldie June 2022 5

phenomena of dating apps and sexting’.

We can only hope Jesus’s child choristers treat these informative homilies with the seriousness they deserve and do not resort to too much sniggering in the choir stalls.

Important stories you may have missed Aftershave is taken in raid Royal Sutton Coldfield Chronicle Week Camper van abandoned on wrong side of M6 Birmingham Mail

New toilets better than a rickshaw Congleton Chronicle £15 for published contributions

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‘It’s always the same with you – “Let’s hibernate on it, and talk it over in the spring” ’

Several of the Queen’s fellow veterans have talked to Tessa Dunlop, author of Army Girls: The Secrets and Stories of Military Service from the Final Few Women who fought in the Second World War. Like the Queen, Barbara Weatherill, 96, was an ATS driver in the war. She served at anti-aircraft gun sites.

Recently asked to appear on a Radio 4 programme, Barbara said, ‘Oh, they always want to know about the Queen. But she did a truncated course. I trained for longer and served for longer.

‘I’ve always been nine months older, bless her. I love her to bits. I had a Ladybird book about the Princess when I was little. There’s a lot about our lives that’s similar.’

Barbara still lives at home in Selby. She says, ‘I manage very well on my walking frame. I can’t understand why the Queen doesn’t have a walking frame. She has a silly stick. It’s the wrong shape and

ATS girl: Barbara Weatherill

size, and just one is no good.

She’d be scooting up and down those palace corridors on my frame.’

Asked whether she envies the Queen, Barbara cries, ‘Good heavens, no! She hasn’t had the freedom I’ve had.

The Queen’s only free when she’s asleep.’

Daphne Attridge, 98, was also in the ATS, as a searchlight teleplotter.

Talking from her Essex care home, she says, ‘I’m going to make a getaway soon!’

What a tough generation!

No wonder Her Majesty has been so stoical all these years.

The alumni magazine of spotlessly right-on Jesus College, Cambridge, updates donors and former students (who include such luminaries as Geoff Hoon and Prince Edward) on recent services at the college’s chapel.

Subjects for sermons have included ‘St Radegund’s sex life, racialised power and the

What will those whizz kids of the fashion world think of next?

Got one leg that gets warmer than the other as summer approaches? Never fear. Those ingenious fashion mavens are close at hand with the new style – onelegged trousers (below is a line from Browns Fashion).

Just think how many people they’re perfect for, as well as the wise fashionistas.

Long John Silver would love them. As would the ‘unidexter’ in the great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch ‘One Leg Too Few’, about the one-legged Mr Spiggott, who wants to play Tarzan.

As Peter Cook puts it to Dudley Moore’s Mr Spiggott, ‘I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is – neither have you.’

One leg too few

‘I don’t know about a book, but I have an author in me’

How to Kill a Poem Dead by Allegra Houston To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable Jargon, jargon everywhere, nor any tiger burning A poem etherised upon a table A pleasure-dome, a demi-paradise of fable Slithy toves and dappled things resist discerning To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable This naming of parts, to mince and quince a label Connotation, Attitude and Shift, the rags of learning A poem etherised upon a table Time’s winged chariot rusts unburnished in the stable The body electric fritzed by credit-earning To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable Bent double, knock-kneed, my mind unstable Nevermore! Rage, rage against the churning A poem etherised upon a table Ignorant armies will the bee-loud glade disable Leaden-eyed despair is fast returning To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable A poem etherised upon a table.

The Old Un loves poems and quizzes.

So he particularly adored this poem quiz, compiled by Allegra Huston, who wrote so movingly about her two fathers, film director John Huston and writer John Julius Norwich, in the May issue of The Oldie.

She was inspired by her 16-year-old son’s grim homework, when he was asked to use the TPCASTT method to analyse a poem.

As all poetry fans don’t know, TPCASTT stands for ‘Title, paraphrase, connotation, attitude/tone, shift, title, theme’.

Longing for a good old love of great poems, Allegra

composed the above lines.

In it, she concealed the identities of lots of famous poems and asks readers to identify them, NOT using the TPCASTT method.

The names of the hidden poems are revealed at the end of the Old Un’s Notes.

Pausing for a cuppa at Caffè Nero on Marsham Street, Westminster, the Old Un heard the rare sound of civil servants laughing.

In the purposes of journalistic research, he did some eavesdropping. The conversation was about an eco-protester who, over a long weekend, glued herself to what she thought was a glass

‘This medication won’t cure you, but its side effects will’

panel on the outside of one of the Home Office buildings.

She didn’t realise it was a sliding electric door. Every time someone approached to unglue her, the door to which she was glued went zooming sideways, taking her with it. By the time they worked out how to deactivate the door, she had done a whole day’s exercise.

Writer Christopher Winn is much looking forward to the Platinum Jubilee. But he’s still distressed by an event during the Silver Jubilee of 1977.

On 9th June, as part of the celebrations, the Queen paid a visit to Lambeth Palace. Winn was commissioned as ‘the unseen hand’, opening the doors of the Palace to Her Majesty.

The doors were operated by huge iron bolts, top and bottom. Winn practised for weeks so that he could work them smoothly and silently.

Winn recalls, ‘Come the moment, as the Queen and Archbishop approached, I pulled firmly on the first bolt and nothing happened. Didn’t budge, no matter what I tried.

I watched in horror through the peephole as they came on relentlessly, protocol dictating they wouldn’t stop.

‘As I braced myself for the dull thud of the royal body slamming up against the door, Michael Trestrail, the Queen’s bodyguard, who was standing with me, flung himself at the doors and somehow they opened.’

The Queen and Archbishop entered, unaware of how close the Royal Nose had come to being broken. Winn wept, quietly.

The news that chicken may soon be as pricey as beef would have provoked a wintry smile from Somerset Maugham. Though Maugham died a fabulously wealthy man, he said he was over 30 before he could afford to eat ‘white meat’. There were no battery farms in Edwardian times.

‘Norman, is there any chance you could just bear it – without the grinning?’

POEM QUIZ ANSWERS Jargon, jargon everywhere: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Tiger burning: William Blake, ‘The Tyger’ Etherised upon a table: T S Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ Pleasure-dome: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ Demi-paradise: Shakespeare, Richard II Slithy toves: Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’ Dappled things: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’ This naming of parts: Henry Reed, ‘Naming of Parts’ Mince and quince: Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ The rags of learning: John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’ Time’s winged chariot: Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ Rusts unburnished: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ The body electric: Walt Whitman, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ Bent double, knockkneed: Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ Nevermore: Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’ Rage, rage: Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ Ignorant armies: Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’ Bee-loud glade: W B Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ Leaden-eyed despair: John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ The Oldie June 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The Queen’s Platinum record

My first memory of Elizabeth II? Her coronation, when I was five What is your first recollection of the Queen?

Mine dates back to Coronation Day, 2nd June 1953. I am five and sitting on my father’s shoulders, in the rain in the middle of the crowd in the Mall, holding onto to his forehead with one hand while trying to manage my folding Palitoy periscope with the other. The periscope, made of cardboard and tin mirrors, was designed to let you see over the heads of a crowd, but when I peered into mine all I saw was a murky reflection of my own face. I don’t think we had assembled the contraption quite right.

I do remember the gold Coronation coach trundling past and the cheering of the crowds. And I remember seeing the young Queen’s face in pale grey close-up on television later in the day. We got our first TV set for the Coronation. We did not buy it; we hired it from Radio Rentals. The screen was set in the top part of a wooden case like a bedside cupboard, and I stood right in front of it, so that Her Majesty’s nose and mine were almost touching.

I remember my three sisters (eight to ten years older than me) squawking at me to get out of the way so that they could see what was going on. And I remember, too, how as a family we stood smartly to attention in the sitting room, facing the screen, every time the national anthem was played. It seemed to be played endlessly that day.

I also remember, at the end of the week, going with my parents to the local cinema to see the newsreel footage of the great day.

On the right-hand side of the cinema, no smoking was permitted. My father was a keen smoker (either Olivier or Craven A in those days), so we sat on the left. I sat on his knee and peered up at the screen through a thick haze of cigarette smoke. I think I saw about as much of the Coronation then as I had seen through my periscope on the day itself.

Sixty-nine years on, I am back on the Mall, popping up as part of the commentary team

Vivat regina! The 1953 coronation

for coverage of the celebrations marking the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. I have even found myself inside Buckingham Palace, perched on a gilt chair, taking part in live editions of ITV’s This Morning and BBC1’s The One Show. The Palace is being refurbished and the State apartments on the ground floor work nicely as a spacious TV studio. The place really is far too big to be in any sense a family home.

In 1952, at the time of the Queen’s accession, Prince Philip wanted his family to carry on living at Clarence House – where the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall live now. Built 200 years ago by John Nash for the Duke of Clarence (later William IV), it’s a manageable size (by Royal standards) and you could live in it (I imagine) without feeling you’re in a huge public building that’s more like a museum than like a home.

I was lucky enough to spend a morning there this month, too, interviewing the Duchess of Cornwall for first episode of the Commonwealth Poetry podcast.

HRH was just off to Canada and Rwanda, two of the 54 Commonwealth countries that, with my daughter, Aphra, I am visiting ‘virtually’ for the podcast over the next two years. Each 30-minute podcast will focus on a different Commonwealth country – some huge, like India (population 1.4 billion), some tiny (like

Nauru, population 11,000) – and the idea is to learn more about each country and explore its poetic heritage.

I spent the morning with the Duchess talking about John Betjeman and Ted Hughes (and deciding we wouldn’t ‘cancel’ Robert Burns, while deploring some of what we now know about his behaviour towards women).

We left the Mall and trundled down to Worple Road in Merton, south London, to meet His Excellency Sir Iftikhar Ayaz KBE, OBE, PhD, Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Commonwealth. He is the London representative of Tuvalu, a tiny island country in the Polynesian subregion of Oceania, situated roughly midway between Hawaii and Australia.

Thanks to the vagaries of climate change, Tuvalu (formerly known as the Ellice Islands) could be the first Commonwealth country to disappear, because at its highest point it is only 15 feet above sea level.

Sir Iftikhar is a remarkable man, more honoured I reckon than anyone I have met since my last encounter with the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma. So many and splendid are his post-nominal initials that his visiting card runs to three sides and his many awards include the World Medal of Freedom and the Glory of India Award.

I liked him enormously, the more so because he explained a mystery that has puzzled me for years. Why was Prince Philip worshipped as a god by the Yaohnanen tribe on the southern island of Tanna in Vanuatu?

‘That is easy to explain,’ smiled Sir Iftikhar. ‘When the Queen became Queen in 1952, she became the most important woman in the world. But she was a woman – so inevitably her husband had to be someone even more important.’

The fortnightly Commonwealth Poetry podcast begins on Sunday 12th June The Oldie June 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Caught short – and caught out

Want to spend a penny in Regent’s Park? You’ll need a credit card matthew norman Knowing the author to be a shining beacon of male inadequacy with so little about which to brag, that mythical beast ‘the regular reader’ will indulge this one tiny boast.

Not once in my 58 and a half years on this wretched planet have I received a conviction for public indecency.

I might have done, on reflection, had a neighbour grassed me up to the Feds that May evening in 1981 when I streaked 100 yards down the road to wrap my Spurs scarf round a letter box in honour of the FA Cup Final replay victory, facilitated by Ricky Villa’s miraculous dribble through the Manchester City defence.

But either nobody witnessed it, or those who did – having no access to the yet-unbuilt Hubble Telescope – were unable to discern any reason for offence.

However close to losing that record of decency I came that distant night, I came a bit closer this week in Regent’s Park.

For about a minute, I was sufficiently close to peeing in a public-lavatory sink to be toying anxiously with my zip.

Even in so partisan an era, all of us can surely concur about this. The voiding of a bladder into a device dedicated to the cleansing of hands falls short of the pinnacle of good form. The headmistress of an averagely competent finishing school on the banks of Lake Lucerne would almost certainly mark down a student caught in the act.

Nonetheless, the conundrum that dominated that anguished minute was what alternative could there possibly be?

Somewhere, in whichever department oversees London’s Royal Parks, there is a cabal of demonic maniacs. Whether driven by sadism or by stupidity, these monsters exist only to irk and persecute the innocent.

All parks are an ordeal, as noted here before, owing to the wanton misbehaviour of visitors: the fauxdyspraxic running styles, the tragicomical tennis, the zigzagging 10 The Oldie June 2022

walkers and (worst by far) the sights and sounds of young people having fun.

To anyone whose bloodstream is bereft of borderline-toxic levels of a benzodiazepine, parks represent a monstrous affront to the nerves. Despite this, the crazies in charge of Regent’s Park have seen fit to add two more implements to the torture chamber.

One is a parking machine of such deranged complexity that a bespoke four-year course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology might not suffice.

For those who do crack the code, and whose physical reaction to livid stress tends towards the urinary, another ordeal awaits.

What was so distressing here was in no way the entrance fee. Of course, some would take umbrage at having to stump up 20p. Dwelling on the historical roots of the phrase ‘to spend a penny’, they will deem this extortionate.

I am not among them.

For one thing, people were being charged one old penny for the privilege back when you could buy a house in Belgravia for a tenner, and have change for a fortnight in Le Touquet.

For another, it feels naive to moan about paying four shillings when, according to current inflationary forecasts, a piss will cost £2,356 by mid-October.

What distressed me was that there was no (legal) access to the porcelain

‘You’re telling me that’s the result of natural selection?’

without use of a credit or debit card, in the fashion of a tube-station barrier.

Second only to the scandalous disappearance of public toilets in towns and cities, this is as cruel an expression of ageism as we would wish to know.

Whether by accident or by design, it punishes old-timers who balk at seeing their juniors whip out a card for a pack of chewing gum. It targets those to whom the idea of a cashless society is an abhorrence.

Not having a card, and with the psychotic fury heightening the urge, I felt my thumb and index finger reflexively joining at the apex of that zip. Yet nearby voices seemed to presage a trip to the magistrates’ court, with not just a fine and criminal record to follow, but possibly a cameo appearance on the sexual offenders register.

As with approaching death, an imminent deluge appears dramatically to speed the thought process. Within a few moments, I had rehearsed a defence predicated on the sink’s placement, on the free side of the barrier, constituting the entrapment of the cardless owner of a middle-aged bladder. Within a few more, it struck me that only an incontinent beak would appreciate the argument – and that, owing to a glaring defect in the justice system, a defendant isn’t entitled to request one of those.

It was then that, blessedly, a deus ex machina arrived, albeit not from above.

A man emerged from a cubicle. As he walked through the barrier, I cashed in on the brief delay before it closed to storm through in the other direction, much like an eighties football thug charging a turnstile.

What fresh excruciation the park’s Torquemadas have in store remains to be seen. While we await the revelation, anyone with an unused catheter cluttering up the joint is invited to dispatch it forthwith.

Christopher Sandford on Nixon’s paranoia

Watergate source

I

t was a peculiar sort of start to the century’s greatest political scandal, 50 years ago.

Initially dismissed as a ‘thirdrate caper’, the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate building mushroomed into a full-scale constitutional crisis. Two years later, it saw the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The problem lay not so much in the original offence as in the bungled attempt to cover it up. An immediate apology from the White House and a few tactical firings might have saved Nixon.

The burglary attempt was botched when an unarmed security guard bumped into five men, three of whom turned out to be anti-Castro Cuban refugees, prowling around the building after midnight. They were wearing dark clothes and rubber surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

The crew stood there quietly while the guard called the police. They had walkie-talkies, miniature cameras and pen-sized tear-gas guns. One had a phonebook listing a contact at the White House. The men also had a ‘spotter’ on duty in a hotel room across the street, but this individual had become engrossed in a film called Attack of the Puppet People on TV and had failed to raise the alarm.

What exactly were the Watergate five after? The answer connects the greatest political scandal of the 20th century with its greatest literary hoax.

In early 1971, a 40-year-old minor American novelist named Clifford Irving approached his publisher with an intriguing proposal for a new book.

Irving claimed to have made contact with the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, then living in near-total isolation in a hotel in the Bahamas.

Hughes had chosen him to write his as-told-to autobiography, Irving announced. In short order, he produced a somewhat generic three-page synopsis, and in return was handed a whopping $765,000 advance, he claimed.

The whole thing was a scam. Irving was a clever fantasist, hoping Hughes would keep quiet rather than come

forward to expose him. His plan very nearly worked.

In January 1972, Hughes arranged a telephone conference call to deny all knowledge of the book, but Irving countered this with the classic ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ defence.

The story fell apart a few weeks later, when investigators learnt that Irving’s wife had been using a fake passport to deposit the publisher’s cheques in a Swiss bank account she had opened in the name H R Hughes. Irving came clean – and served 17 months in prison for fraud.

Howard Hughes may not have known Irving, but he did have a connection to Richard Nixon. Some years earlier, Hughes had given the president’s friend ‘Bebe’ Rebozo a bag stuffed with $100,000 in small-denomination banknotes. This may have been a political-campaign contribution, or it may have been to ensure favourable treatment for Hughes’s casino and airline businesses. According to the White House’s dirty-tricks supremo G Gordon Liddy, Nixon spent the money on installing a putting green and a pool table at his Florida estate.

Liddy also remarked on an unintended aspect of Irving’s hoax: it led indirectly to the Watergate burglary. In early 1972, the press gleefully reported Irving’s boast that his book would reveal certain facts about Hughes’s financial connections to the top levels of the US administration. Such stories would have caught the attention of a far less paranoid individual than Richard Nixon.

‘Larry O’ Brien [the Democratic party chairman] had at one time worked as Howard Hughes’s lobbyist in Washington,’ Liddy told me. ‘The [Irving] book was coming out and would be a sensation, we knew. So part of the equation was, “What did O’Brien know?

Could he embarrass the President?” The answer had to lie in those filing cabinets at the Watergate.’

There was quite enough there to disturb the brilliant but troubled mind of America’s 37th president – leading ultimately to the Watergate break-in.

As Proverbs 28:1 reminds us, ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’

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what were British Restaurants?

British Restaurants were public dining rooms offering price-capped, nutritious meals to people in the 1940s and 1950s.

You may associate canteen dining with the reek of cabbage and the misery of wet trays, but these sites were designed to be ‘centres of civilisation’.

The name was coined by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940.

Churchill thought the Ministry of Food’s preferred title – Communal Feeding Centres – was redolent of Dickensian poverty or Soviet monotony.

The British Restaurant had been pioneered in the First World War as the ‘National Kitchen’ and the goal remained the same: to combat food- and fuel-price inflation and boost morale, the state would subsidise attractive, yet cheap, urban social-eating spaces. After receiving a start-up grant from the Treasury, local government was responsible for recruiting a paid staff; central purchasing ensured economies and meals were affordable.

When it came to menus, a balance had to be struck between the Ministry of

what is goblin mode?

Goblin mode describes a deliberate embrace of slovenliness and squalor.

When in ‘goblin mode’, a person spends as long as they possibly can indoors – ideally in bed in egg-stained loungewear.

They will defer errands, decline invitations, spurn exercise, wave away deadlines, and spread peanut butter on a packet of Frazzles and call it dinner. At 4am.

As self-confessed ‘goblin’ and Internet-user Dave McNamee explained to the Guardian: ‘It’s about a complete lack of aesthetic. Because why would a goblin care what they look like? Why would a goblin care about presentation?’

The term emerged from the Internet message board Reddit in the late ’00s.

Goblin mode, it has been suggested, is

Food’s nutritionists, eager to get the Great British public eating more vegetables, and a general public resistance to healthier fare. To overcome an institutional feel, the Ministry insisted on pleasant surroundings featuring specially commissioned artwork; some sites in London even had paintings on loan from the Royal Collection.

At their peak, there were 2,160 British Restaurants. Today, there are half as many McDonald’s restaurants in the UK. The British Restaurant outlasted the war,

but numbers were already in decline when rationing was lifted in 1954, and few survived after that point.

Cheap yet nutritious social eating was a successful way of combating what is today termed ‘food poverty’. These were popular cross-class venues and there was less stigma attached to their use than is associated with food-bank use today.

Backers of the scheme included Barbara Cartland, grocer Alf Roberts (Margaret Thatcher’s father) and Flora Solomon of Marks and Spencer.

Although there was opposition from sections of the private food trade, retail guru and wartime Minister of Food Lord Woolton smoothed relations between the state and private enterprise.

The British Restaurant was a vital supplement to the ration book, with tangible psychological and health benefits. We need to rescue canteendining from its Orwellian image problem and recognise, in times of hardship and price inflation, its social and economic benefits.

Professor Bryce Evans

Woolmore Street British Restaurant, 1942

Bryce Evans’s Feeding the People in Wartime Britain is out now (Bloomsbury)

part of a wider ‘vibe shift’ against contemporary wellness culture, with its demands to look and feel wonderful all the time. On TikTok, people have added the hashtag #goblinmode to videos of themselves smoking and (more shocking) wearing no make-up. Others see it as an embrace of mischief or, more generally, as an appropriate end-times way of being. The world is messed up.

Why not retreat to your hovel?

There’s a definite pandemic flavour to it, too. Many of those who entered goblin mode during the two years of enforced isolation we’ve just endured are finding it hard to leave the mode.

Goblin mode has earlier, literary antecedents. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the heroine retires to her New York apartment for a year to take lots of sedatives, as a harbinger of goblin mode.

Sam Byers’s Come Join Our Disease (2021) is goblin mode taken to its logical and utterly foul conclusion.

And, further back, we have Ivan Goncharov’s 19th-century antihero Oblomov, who spends the first 40 pages of his eponymous novel not getting out of bed.

He eventually moves to the sofa, whence, after an epic day of procrastination, he returns to his bed for the novel’s climax.

Lenin complained that oblomovshchina (the condition of being Oblomov) was endemic among the Russian ruling class.

It cannot be long before we hear goblin mode chastised in similar terms.

And yet goblin mode, as McNamee stressed, is a temporary state rather than a way of being. It’s something you can adopt as the situation demands. We all need to indulge our inner goblin from time to time. Showering is overrated anyway.

Richard Godwin The Oldie June 2022 13

On 18th June, Paul McCartney turns 80. Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, a friend for 55 years, shares his memories

Macca’s long and winding road

I

first went to see Paul McCartney on 14th September 1966, in the house he’d recently moved into, a Georgian gem in St John’s Wood.

That was a surprise in itself. John and Ringo – young lads, new to London, new to untold wealth – had moved to the suburbs into mock-Tudor mansions on an estate in Weybridge, Surrey. They thought, ‘This is posh. This is what you do, as lads from the North.’

George got it even more wrong – he had moved into a horrible modern bungalow in Esher, also in Surrey. But Paul was ahead of the game, realising inner London was the place to live, in a period house, among the affluent and upmarket, arty, intellectual folk.

In his house, I noticed a Magritte above the mantelpiece. Goodness, how did a lad of 24 get to know about such artists, growing up on a northern council estate – as I had done, too.

Paul still has that same house today as his London home. A sign that, deep down, he is a conservative sort of fella…

I had gone to see him to ask him where the words of Eleanor Rigby came from. I thought they were amazing: so literary, clever and evocative. I was sure it would be the best poetry of 1966 (as if I knew anything about poetry). * Later that year, in December 1966, I went to see him again in his house. This time I was there as a screenplay-writer, not a newspaper hack.

I was working on the script for the movie of my first book (Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). The director wanted Paul to write the theme tune. Paul thought about it, but later said no.

While I was with him, I suggested a biography of the Beatles – a proper hardback. There had so far been only two thin paperbacks about the Beatles.

I said to Paul, ‘If I do it properly, for the rest of your life, when people ask you the same boring questions – “Why is Beatles spelled that strange way?” or 14 The Oldie June 2022

We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah: at a New York press conference, 1968

“Where did your funny hair come from?”

– you can say, “It’s all in the book.” ’ There and then, he helped me write an arse-licking letter to Brian Epstein, their manager. I had to tell him how upmarket the book would be and how upmarket I was – har har. Well, I did have a column in the Sunday Times, and had two books published – stuff that would impress Brian. And Brian said yes.

It struck me at the time that Paul was

the charmer of the Beatles: the PR man; the fixer. * During the writing and research of the biography, each of the Beatles came to my house for a meal.

Paul brought Jane Asher, his fiancée.

They were a lovely couple.

I discovered that Paul had previously been living for some time in a flat in Jane’s parents’ house in Wimpole Street.

They were a middle-class, artistic,

musical, academic family – the sort he had never experienced in his Liverpool days.

I remember thinking this was probably why he had come to live in St John’s Wood, not too far from Wimpole Street, in a period house, and had modern art on his wall. * In 1968, my wife and I and our two young children had a year abroad.

One December night in Portugal, in Praia da Luz, Paul arrived by taxi from Faro, some 50 miles away – with no money to pay the taxi-driver. He had flown in from London on a private jet and had given his English money to someone at the airport to change into escudos – and had then jumped into a taxi and forgotten the cash.

We hadn’t known he was coming. We had no phone, but we had been in touch and he knew our address.

With him was a blonde American girl called Linda, whom I had never seen before, with a child from a previous relationship.

Our first impression was that Linda was a groupie – a one-night stand. How wrong we were. It was real love, which lasted till she died in 1998, aged only 56. * While in Portugal, we did have words one evening about bringing up children. Our son, Jake, aged two, was running around holding a lethal knife. So I grabbed it off him. Paul maintained you should leave kids to find out about danger themselves. I said, ‘You mean when they cut their hand off?’ * He himself is brilliant with all kids. Ours competed to clamber over him and play with him, as can be seen in a Super 8 family film I made at the time.

Paul knows how to relate to young children. John was useless. * What happened with Jane Asher?

I do admire how Jane has never given interviews about her relationship with Paul – and yet in Paul’s recent book, The Lyrics, he endlessly praises her influence and qualities, describing the songs she inspired. Heather Mills, whom he later married, doesn’t get a mention. * Why did he marry Heather Mills? I can only imagine that, like me after my wife died, he was motivated by loneliness and lust – which can happen even to one of the most famous, most desirable people on the planet. Then he realised he had made a mistake. * At the peak of Beatlemania in the sixties, the Beatles were on tour somewhere. Paul told me one night in Portugal that while on tour he had decided to leave the hotel in his ordinary clothes and go to a fairground, hoping to pick up a girl. As a teenager in Liverpool,

Days in the life…

Left: Paul and Linda with Hunter and wife Margaret Forster, Portugal, 1968. Below, clockwise from top left: with Linda, 1969; with fiancée Jane Asher, 1966; in 2018; with Heather Mills; with the Beatles in 1964 (in New York) and in 1967

The Oldie June 2022 15

he had always had success with girls at fairgrounds. He wanted to test whether his attraction now was all due to his fame.

He came back to the hotel on his own.

He tried a similar test with a song – written for Peter and Gordon, under the assumed name of Bernard Webb. It got to number 20 before the secret was out, but it indicated to Paul that it was his writing, not his fame, that did it. * In January 1967, after I had eventually seen Brian, and got the commission to do the Beatles’ biography, one of the directors of my publisher Heinemann said, ‘Nah, the bubble will burst. We know everything we ever want to know about the Beatles.’

You don’t hear that any more. * One of the many things I admire about Paul, apart from his amazing musical fluency –songs just flow out of him; he can play any instrument – is that he sent his children to state schools. This is unlike almost all other pop stars and footballers who are suddenly earning loads of money. * He can be a bit annoying, going on about what an ordinary fellow he is, but that’s what he tries to be, and what he still feels, despite everything. He drives his own car and does try to live an ordinary life.

He came to my house once, back in 1967, and announced he had to go and buy some cigarettes.

‘Must you?’ I said. ‘I’ll get them for you, if you are desperate. You’ll be mobbed.’

But still he walked to the newsagent round the corner. When he came back, our street was filled with hundreds of screaming girls, banging on the front door. I was furious. * Over the years, he has also exhibited his paintings and written books and an oratorio. What a polymath.

He hasn’t produced a novel yet, as far as I know. When he was staying with us in Portugal, I found him one day bashing away with two fingers on my manual typewriter. I asked what he was writing.

He said, ‘A story.’

I have since asked him if he ever finished it. He shrugs and says it is locked up in his archives. I suppose one day he might get it out again. * I admired what he did with Wings, the group he formed in 1971 after the break-up of the Beatles.

He was determined to go on the road again, starting from scratch, playing student-union gigs, often just arriving and offering to perform. He took Linda, his wife, despite her rather limited musical talent. He knew she would be mocked, but he wanted her to be with him. He so wanted to perform in public, 16 The Oldie June 2022

Paul today with his wife, Nancy Shevell

on stage again, as in the old days. He is still at it.

He clearly loves performing. He’s always taken any chance to get up and sing or play the guitar or the piano.

In Portugal, while staying with us, he went into a nearby hotel, the Penina, and sat in with the local quartet in their dinner jackets and strummed away. It is not conceit, self-regard or showing-off. It is still what gives him great pleasure in life – making music. * His dad, Jim, was like that, too.

He could play several instruments. And he was also a charmer – a lovely man. He was a retired cotton salesman. I stayed with him in the house in the Wirral Paul had bought for him.

By chance that day, the acetate of When I’m Sixty-Four had arrived from Paul. I danced to it all evening with Jim’s new wife, Angie. Paul and his brother, Michael, were not exactly enamoured when Jim got married again, after ten years or so on his own as a widower, bringing up two boys. History repeated itself some years later when Paul’s own daughters were not too thrilled by Paul’s marriage to Heather Mills. * Six years ago, I was invited by Paul to a private party, where there were several old friends, such as the artist Peter Blake. I met his present wife, Nancy, for the first time. Lucky man.

What a good choice. Attractive, gentle, modest, unpushy. * Paul’s eldest daughter, Mary, was there. I told her, ‘You were conceived in my bed.’ She looked rather alarmed.

I explained that, when her parents came to our Portuguese house in 1968, we gave up our bedroom and moved into the spare bedroom. Nine months later, Mary was born.

‘Goodness, that must mean you

are my, my, er … dunno. What, my step-godfather?’

When I came home, I told my wife what I had said to Mary. She was appalled. * I last saw Paul a few months ago, at the private première of Get Back. He does look slim, fit and well as he approaches 80, with a grand head of hair. Lucky beggar. I know it’s all real, ’cos I have inspected it. Thank goodness he has now let it go grey. It was laughable when, for a while, he touched it up and it came out a funny brown colour. * He is a sensible, sensitive fella, but also a good businessman, tougher and more controlling than he might appear. He is at ease now with his global fame – which he has had for the vast majority of his lie. * His relationship with John was always complicated – loving each other but competitive. John could be cruel and dismissive of him.

In the early years, some commentators felt Paul was the soppy, sentimental one, best at love songs, while John was the true original. That rather hurt Paul. No one thinks that today. * They could both write love songs, rock and roll, psychedelic and the experimental stuff. But Paul always had the better range. And arguably created more hits than John.

But it is silly and pointless to compare when we are dealing with such pearls. We all have our faves. Mine is still Eleanor Rigby.

Together, they have left us with over 100 classic songs which will be hummed as long as humanity has any breath left in its bodies.

The further we get from the Beatles era, the bigger they become. * At that recent event to launch Get Back, I could see all the VIP guests, some of them awfully famous, twitching and stammering the moment he arrived, manoeuvring themselves to be close to the Presence. He managed to have a brief friendly word for them all. It must be a right drag, keeping on doing that, after almost 60 years of being a public face.

John was always more likely to tell people to f**k off.

Paul is a gent. Just like his dad. And a musical genius. I think we all know that now. The scoffers have disappeared. Paul is greatly loved, and admired, by all ages, classes and countries. He has grown into a national treasure. We are lucky to have him among us.

Hunter Davies wrote The Beatles, the only authorised biography (Ebury, £14.99)

Anne Robinson’s Fashion Tips

My new style icon? Andy Pandy

The blissful alternative to tight clothes – a cashmere onesie In the Cotswolds, nearly four decades ago, my then husband would stand in the bedroom half-dressed on a Saturday evening wailing, ‘Do you think it’s a blazer do or a cardie do?’

We were arrivistes but not entirely stupid. We knew that in the Coln Valley – or Sin Valley, as it was then widely known – it mattered not too much whose spouse you borrowed for the afternoon, or had on permanent loan. Yet it mattered very much that you knew your Gucci loafers from your tasselled Trickers.

Kitchen supper for the girls meant pie-crust collars, burgundy fine tights, miniskirts, lashes of slap and loads of gold chains.

We once sailed into a Gloucestershire drawing room for dinner, for the same ex-husband to find he was the only male not in a smoking jacket, plaid trews and a pair of velvet slippers.

The pie-crust women are now in their sixties and the miniskirts have been replaced by maxis. The blazers have gone to the church fête. Today, the men mostly favour cable-knit cashmere sweaters, raspberry cords and kilim slippers.

‘Why raspberry cords?’ a Martian might ask.

‘Easy,’ I say. ‘Their mustard ones are in the wash.’

Meanwhile, Tina Brown’s newly published Palace Papers, is a riot of needle-sharp observations about the Royal Family and their chosen styles – as Vogue might put it.

She notes that, at the memorial service for Patrick Lichfield, the Duchess of Cornwall’s hat makes her look like cabin crew and you could root for truffles in the forest of bad teeth.

Sitting near the rear of the church at a spring funeral in Lincolnshire earlier this month, I spotted another aristo ‘look’, as Vogue might also note.

Hard to know from the back if she is girl or granny. Her skirt is long. Her coat,

Anne’s memorial-service onesie

which has obviously done much gardening, is considerably shorter.

But it’s the hair that mesmerises; mostly uncombed and below her shoulders except for one random bit which is held on the top of her head by a wobbly comb.

If only one’s middle-class mother had said one could go to church looking like that.

I’ve been explaining to my daughter how she will know she has eased into comfortable late middle age.

Three pointers: • Your mother no longer embarrasses you.

• It is possible to enjoy drinking tea only if it is served in a bone-china cup.

• And, most important, within ten seconds of arriving home, you need to race to the bedroom to rid yourself of tight clothes.

Dear reader, I have the answer. It is the Bamford onesie.

A cashmere knit with a bib, worn over a loose T-shirt.

They are half-price online and at Daylesford.

Your children will call you Super Mario. Your girlfriends will say, ‘Hello, Andy Pandy.’

Ignore.

I have bought one in all four colours.

Indeed, next time I am on the invitation list for a royal memorial service, I will be wearing the black one.

The hairy-arsed cyclists in our country lanes yelling at me to put my perfectly behaved spaniel on a lead are multiplying.

The other early Sunday morning, I made a brief trip in my car that turned out to be more scary than driving in a European Grand Prix.

First, the Lycra louts cycling three abreast, who never acknowledge and thank a driver who’s slowed down.

Next, the female 4-by-4-owner who thinks she is either on a one-way street or in the Dordogne. She doesn’t know how to mount the grass verge to let me pass, despite her completely suitable tyres, and she glares.

Finally, and possibly safest of those out and about, the farmer in his dilapidated pick-up who is using the rear mirror to shave.

There is a fashion point to this: I intend shortly to go online to look for a female weekend bomb-disposal outfit to keep me safe in my car.

PS I’ve never written a fashion column before. But I have spent some years doing my best to look reasonably dressed on television.

Even though I realise one’s best often is not good enough.

Here’s a handful of things strangers casually observe: ‘My wife said I was to ask you the name of your hairdresser. Not that she wants to look like you.’

‘I suppose they make you dress like that.’

Er, no. ‘’Course you’ve had dozens of face lifts.’

Just the one, 20 years ago.

‘My husband is having an affair with a redhead. What’s the name of the colour you use on your hair?’

Mightn’t it be more effective to take a pair of scissors to the crotch of his best trousers?

And my favourite, usually at a drinks party: a woman approaches with gusto.

‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I never watch any television…’

The Oldie June 2022 19

The forgotten poet

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

Cecil Day-Lewis is remembered for a scandal and his famous son. Fifty years after his death, we should salute his poetry, says Peter Stanford

In Children Leaving Home, a poem written at the end of his life for his two younger offspring, Tamasin and Daniel, the Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72) posed the question ‘What shall I have to bequeath?’ His dispirited answer was ‘a sack of genes/I did not choose, some verse/Long out of fashion, a laurel wreath/Wilted…’

Time has proved him wrong. Half a century on from his death on 22nd May 1972, that same sack of genes has seen Daniel become the only three-times winner of the Oscar for Best Actor.

Meanwhile, Walking Away, written after he dropped off his elder son, Sean, at school – with the resonant final lines, ‘selfhood begins with a walking away/ And love is proved in the letting go’ – is on the GCSE syllabus. It’s now regularly included in public polls of the top ten poems of childhood and parenthood.

Only last year, a remake of The Beast Must Die, his 1938 crime thriller (he wrote detective fiction under the name Nicholas Blake), was translated to the small screen and won a Royal Television Society award. Yet for one so celebrated in his lifetime, such a harvest might be judged thin pickings. In 1934, when, with Stephen Spender and W H Auden, he was sweeping all before him as one of the left-wing ‘Thirties Poets’, T E Lawrence recommended Day-Lewis to Winston Churchill as ‘the one great man in these lands’.

Though he still has his champions (though his most vocal, his actress wife, Jill Balcon, died in 2009), he has not so far made that elusive transition into the canon of English literature. And 50 years after his death is a good moment to ask whether he will ever make it.

There was an enthusiastic campaign by the Royal Society of Literature to have him buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. It failed. He is buried with Jill next to his hero, Thomas Hardy, in Stinsford churchyard in Dorset. The reason for the Abbey’s decision has never been made public, but 22 The Oldie June 2022

At home in Greenwich, 1968

Balcon suggested publicly that it could have been influenced by disapproval of Day-Lewis’s complicated private life.

On the eve of the Second World War, he left his wife and two small children to set up home with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Then in 1950 he split with her – a shock she never really recovered from – and married Balcon, 21 years his junior.

The domestic complications continued right up to his death at 68 from cancer.

The setting was Lemmons on the outskirts of north London, home to Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. One of Balcon’s closest friends, Howard had had an affair in 1954 with Day-Lewis – ‘one of the worst things I ever did,’ she said in her autobiography, Slipstream.

A mixture of guilt, pity and love, she later said, made her take in Day-Lewis for his last weeks, enabling Balcon to complete a commitment at nearby Elstree Studios. The ménage was the source of endless gossip in literary circles. But in the last poem he wrote, Day-Lewis presents it as the final consolation he needed. ‘I accept my weakness with my friends’/Good natures sweetening each day my sick room.’

But if he is to be remembered and discussed in another 50 years, the entanglements of his life and loves won’t be sufficient reason.

In a 1968 interview, he picked out his poem O Dreams, O Destinations as the one that might endure. Appearing in Word Over All (1943), in nine perfectly crafted sonnets it charts a journey through childhood and delayed adolescence to adulthood.

It was his response to that famous line in a 1939 tribute to W B Yeats by Auden – ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – distancing himself from the political activism of the 1930s. DayLewis also pulled back from front-line involvement – ‘slipping the painter’ of his membership of the Communist Party.

But he continued to believe that poetry could make things happen, even if it rarely did. O Dreams, O Destinations captures beautifully, with all the attendant melancholy, that only uncertainty and questions without clear answers lie ahead.

Yet his usually autobiographical lyric poetry is also memorable, as Walking Away shows, when it is simultaneously most personal and most universal.

The House Where I Was Born is his heart-rending 1957 account of a visit back to the rectory where he was born in County Laois (an only child after his mother’s death when he was four). It is for every son and daughter who has questions they should have asked their now-dead parents.

Who makes it into the canon, and who doesn’t, is an enigmatic process. But, on this Day-Lewis anniversary, do give him a try.

‘I am absolutely sure his poetry is underrated,’ John Betjeman wrote in 1972 about his predecessor as Poet Laureate (from 1968 to 1972). ‘He persists in the mind.’

Peter Stanford is author of C Day-Lewis: A Life (Continuum)

Working like a charm Nigel Havers praises his most charming pin-ups, from David Niven to Roger Moore

‘L

adies and gentlemen, please welcome the charmer himself…’

‘The charmer’ – these words have preceded my entrance to absolutely everything for the last 35 years, thanks to my appearance in the TV show of that name, which started in 1987.

Every actor complains of being typecast – sexy, baddie, mother-in-law, you name it. Actors constantly have a beef about some description or other.

So I suppose being known for being charming isn’t really such a bad rap.

But what exactly is charm? Is it hereditary? Can you manufacture it? Can it be turned on and off like a hot tap?

Smarmy, slippery, oily – these adjectives can all be applied when the charm tap isn’t running fully up to temperature and the object is either trying too hard, or just hasn’t got ‘it’.

We all know the odd charmer.

Charmers don’t appear to be trying. They smile easily, seem comfortable in their skin and don’t dominate the conversation.

They are in no way overbearing and, most importantly, they listen.

In my case, I had charming parents.

I still do have a mother who charms all before her: the waiters in every restaurant; the care workers in her residential home; almost every man she has ever met – and every woman, too.

She remembers every birthday, and sends postcards just because she’s thinking of you.

So does a child merely watch and learn – or absorb the ability to charm without even realising?

Look at some examples in public life and see who’s got it and who just misses.

Jeremy Corbyn? Not a trace! But, unexpectedly, Ed Balls has shown immense charm since leaving politics, as has Michael Portillo on his travel programmes – hence the viewing figures.

My own profession is renowned for producing grumpy, difficult and spoilt characters. But the three greats of all

Oh, hello! Nigel Havers and Fiona Fullerton in The Charmer

time, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, all had oceans of charm in their own, sometimes rather waspish, ways.

For me, the two outstanding charmers were David Niven and Roger Moore.

To watch Niven on back episodes of Parkinson is to watch an absolute masterclass. Effortless, self-deprecating and relaxed, he captivates from the first minute. To try to analyse or explain is pointless and impossible.

As for Moore, no one delivered the immortal line ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond’ with such delicate charm, tinged with authority. We used to sit having dinner at the Colombe D’Or in the south of France egging him on. ‘Go on, Rog. Go on. Say it, please.’

We knew he didn’t want to but, because he was so charming, of course he did as he was told. I never heard him say a nasty word about anybody. And every fan who came up to him – whatever the time of day, however inconvenient – got his attention and time. Everyone went away charmed to the hilt.

Now, you will notice I haven’t mentioned any women yet. I think with women charm can often be confused with flirting. For a woman to be

described as charming, she has to pass the female litmus test – is she flirting, or does she treat men and women with equal attention and charm them both in equal measure?

We get into choppy water here. Charm is obviously attractive and, in these woke times, flirting is probably frowned on. So I shall refrain from delving too deeply into this area. Safer ground can be found in politics – not noted for its female charmers, but Betty Boothroyd and Shirley Williams both graced the House of Commons with considerable amounts of the stuff. Betty is still charming her way effortlessly into her nineties.

Charm can be a negative, as with two of my television characters, Ralph Gorse in The Charmer and Lewis Archer in Coronation Street. They exuded considerable malevolent charm, making them irresistible to women, which enabled them to fleece their unfortunate victims of their fortunes. They are probably the two most popular characters with the general public I have played – make of that what you will.

So here are my ingredients to make a charm omelette. Make whoever you are talking to feel important, and give compliments freely. Whatever you do, remember names. It takes practice, but it is a knack that can definitely be acquired, and always goes down well. Look people in the eye and try to look engaged – even when the story is less than gripping – and try to smile as much as possible.

Try not to be critical – especially of people’s children. Surely you all know that by now! And don’t worry about using your hands to hug or console people – as long as they don’t wander.

Coco Chanel supposedly said, ‘The best things in life are free. The second-best things are very, very expensive.’ Just remember charm is free. You can’t buy it or invent it. But, together with good manners, it is life-enhancing and pleasing to all. You just have to be charming, whether you know you are or not.

The Oldie June 2022 25

Joseph Connolly raises his fedora to the great modern hat revival

Want to get ahead?

Get a hat

O

PA IMAGES / EVERETT COLLECTION / PICTURELUX / MIRRORPIX / ALAMY

ldies of a certain vintage may remember when the sight of an unadorned male head was remarkable.

Men’s hats were everywhere, as any old film or newsreel will amply demonstrate. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a gentleman leaving home without a hat, while the sin was not quite on a par with omitting to pull on his trousers, would still occasion censorious comment. He would be seen to be improperly dressed.

This convention had to do less with protection from the elements than with the necessary demonstration of class, rank and manners. Men’s clothes pretty quickly informed you what sort of person you were dealing with; the hat alone was an instant and infallible indicator.

The cloth cap was indelibly associated with the working classes. This image was

26 The Oldie June 2022

later consolidated by Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp. The gleaming black, silk topper became shorthand for a toff – like Lord Snooty in the Beano. In between, there was every variety of headgear, suitable for all seasons or occasions, each befitting the status of the wearer.

The hat had to be politely raised, or at the very least touched, whenever a lady was encountered.

Most trades and professions were wedded to a certain sort of hat. So you could instantly tell what people did for a living. The services wore them. The mitre and the academic mortarboard were worn. The bowler hat (with rolled umbrella) became the trademark of the civil service or of a chap who was ‘something in the City’.

Most other sorts of worker also had their own distinctive headgear: postmen, train drivers

and bus conductors – even the gas man and the railway porter – all sported a variety of cap with a patent peak and badge. They – and we – knew exactly where they stood.

No children’s dressing-up kit was worth its salt without the headgear. The cowboy hat, Davy Crockett cap, policeman’s helmet and pirate’s tricorne were among the favourites. All of them made a welcome change from the school cap, which was still very much a force.

Time moved on, and social codes began to relax (some would say unravel). For the gentleman, the spats, gloves and walking cane were the first to go. The hat was tipped, as it were, to follow. John Betjeman wrote about the winds of change in his poem Death of King George V, Left: Andy (cloth) Capp

with the extraordinary sight of the son and heir Edward VIII arriving bareheaded at the airport: Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air.

Since the end of the Second World War, people have been prophesying the total extinction of the hat. Despite a severe decline, it still has quite remarkable staying power. During the 1950s, when wearing a hat was no longer de rigueur, it became more of a fashion choice. This led to a brief flurry of ‘Robin Hood hats’, complete with little feather, but that (mercifully) didn’t last too long.

Cliff Richard was most certainly not going to flatten his quiff with anything so square as a hat. Nor, a bit later, was President Kennedy, whose hairstyle, always on display, encouraged a severe decline in American hat sales. Kennedy’s hatlessness caused the Madison Avenue snap brim more or less to expire overnight.

On television, though, certain walks of life were inseparable from their trilbies – notably detectives and gangsters. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan and John Lennon set a fleeting vogue for a cap along the lines of the Breton fisherman’s headgear. By now, men’s long hair was seen as the ultimate crowning glory. It really did begin to look as if the days of the hat were numbered.

Towards the close of the 20th century, hats were hard to spot – like pipes, they

had very much gone to ground. Aside from sporting events – the wedgeshaped tweed cap for shooting, the pork pie alive with fishing flies, the Henley boater and the Ascot topper – there was almost nothing around. The Soviet-style fur affair would occasionally emerge in winter, before the animal-rights police left it for dead. Apart from the odd oldie’s faithful trilby, that was more or less that.

And then something very awful happened: the mass surrender to, of all things, the American baseball cap by people who had never played baseball in their lives and never would. It is a very horrible thing indeed, especially when worn back to front. The hordes who did this regarded themselves as quirky, kooky and rebellious, as opposed to being mindless and unthinkingly conformist.

These days, as the stranglehold of the baseball cap is increasingly relaxed, all sorts of other hats are back in style. At the top end, Lock & Co, Britain’s oldest hatter, founded in 1676, supplying everyone from Nelson and Wellington to Churchill and the royals, is still going strong in St James’s.

My own hatter of choice for many years is Bates. A relative newcomer, around for a mere 124 years, it is now incorporated into Hilditch & Key, the excellent Jermyn Street shirtmaker, founded in 1899.

I very much favour their pure-beaverfur fedora – lightweight, rather stylish and, miraculously, quite waterproof: the best you can get. You now quite often see this style of hat, always popular with the

artier sort of fellow (such as Barry Humphries of this parish).

At the other end of the scale, just as in the old days, when cheapo hats were on sale at the seaside and funfairs, there are now vast piles of every sort in street markets and tourist magnets such as Camden Lock. There, hats and caps in every colour you can think of are quite as popular as tattoos and piercings. The baker-boy cap – as popularised by Peaky Blinders and David Beckham, who gets his from Bates – is a firm favourite, as are the variations on a straw hat or panama.

Beating the lot of them, though, is the terrible ‘beanie’ – that knitted tea-cosy atrocity, with or without pompom, which renders the wearer instantly imbecilic.

John Lewis, stalwart of Middle England, runs to 35 of the things, all looking pretty much the same, as against 11 baseball caps, nine traditional tweed caps and just the two trilbies. It is a similar story over at Marks and Spencer: so much for Middle England.

Several famous and legendary hats are unlikely to trouble us again – the deerstalker, as never worn by Sherlock Holmes; the bowler (only ever looking good on John Steed of The Avengers and the Homepride men). Still, it is clear that the history of the hat is far from over. It isn’t yet time to put a lid on it.

Below, from left: Winston Churchill, 1922; David Tomlinson as George Banks in Mary Poppins (1964); UK train driver, 1954; John Lennon, 1965; Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, 2018; rapper P Diddy in Hollywood, 2003

The Oldie June 2022 27

Media Matters

A biased press is good for democracy

A Boris-hating Mirror and a Keir-hating Mail pulled off great scoops stephen glover Many people yearn for a Press that is fairer and more balanced. They deprecate partisanship, and sometimes admiringly point to supposedly more even-handed American newspapers.

Yet it is the outrageous partiality of British publications, especially the tabloids, that often leads to light being shone into the murkier recesses of our political life. Partygate and Beergate are two cases in point.

The Daily Mirror broke Partygate.

It believes Boris Johnson is a liar, a scoundrel and an awful human being. It guns for him at every opportunity. When Dominic Cummings was still the apple of the PM’s eye, the paper combined with the Guardian in May 2020 to reveal that the errant chief adviser had breached COVID regulations by undertaking a jaunt to Barnard Castle.

Without the Boris-hating Daily Mirror, we would know less about rampant partying in No 10 than we do.

At any rate, damaging revelations would have emerged more slowly. The paper published the first of a succession of stories about rule-busting beanos in No 10 and Whitehall under the byline of its political editor, Pippa Crerar, at the end of last November.

Equally, without the Sir Keir Starmerloathing Daily Mail there would be no Beergate, and we would be in the dark about the Labour leader’s curry and alleged infraction of COVID rules in Durham on 30th April 2021.

It was the Mail that discovered that Angela Rayner, Sir Keir’s deputy, had also been present, though this had previously been denied by Labour officials.

Such investigations require enormous stamina, and this stamina has to be fuelled by political animosity. The Mirror was fortunate because, just over a week after its first story was published, ITV broadcast a video showing senior Downing Street staff joking about holding 28 The Oldie June 2022

a party in No 10 before Christmas 2020.

Nonetheless, the paper had to plug away with its stories before they were fully taken up by the rest of the media.

The Mail had a much longer slog, partly because in Sir Keir’s case there was only one alleged infringement, and partly because he stirs up less vitriol than does Johnson. When it first published a picture of the Labour leader swigging from a bottle of beer, other newspapers and broadcasters paid little attention. It took the revelations about Angela Rayner, plus a leaked memo which implied that the event might not have been as workorientated as Sir Keir had maintained, for the story to achieve lift-off.

If there were no partial newspapers, and simply broadcasters trying to be even-handed, I suspect Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer would be sleeping much more easily in their beds. The BBC, which despite everything still dominates the airwaves, very rarely breaks controversial political stories. When such a piece is published by a newspaper, Auntie ponders before deciding whether to give it wider circulation.

It’s true that newspapers sometimes indulge in political cross-dressing: they run investigative pieces that aren’t designed to finish off their enemies. It was the Mail, after all, that first published the stuff last year about Carrie’s expensive wallpaper at No 10.

That was intended to embarrass the Prime Minister, not to bring him down.

The fact remains that extreme partisanship in newspapers – perhaps especially in the less well-behaved

The BBC very rarely breaks controversial political stories

tabloids – is necessary for a healthy democracy. They must have enormous reserves of animosity to pursue their vendettas. Of course there has to be a kind of equilibrium, so that the dislikes of the Mail and the Sun on the one hand are countered by those of the Mirror and the Guardian on the other. That is why we need a pluralist Press.

Don’t take too seriously those highminded people who argue that we should have fairer and more balanced publications. We need newspapers that know how to take on their enemies.

Readers may be interested to learn how the irrepressible Piers Morgan is faring on Rupert Murdoch’s new news channel TalkTV. The answer is not terribly well.

His lowest audience so far, according to official figures, is an abysmal 24,000, though he usually does better than that.

He is, however, regularly trounced by Nigel Farage on the rival GB News.

Somewhat implausibly, Morgan maintains that TV viewing figures don’t matter very much and he is doing fine online.

I may have strange tastes, but I quite like his hour-long show since he is opinionated, well informed and on the button. There is something rather endearing about him. Nonetheless, I can see that his long tirades against ‘wokeness’ may have limited appeal.

The main problem, I suspect, is that there are simply too many news programmes: Robert Peston on ITV, Sophy Ridge on Sky, Newsnight on BBC2, Andrew Neil (for a time) on Channel 4 and Laura Kuenssberg (soon) on BBC1, plus countless others on Sky, GB News, the BBC News Channel and now TalkTV. In such a crowded field, William Shakespeare might struggle to retain our interest after a while. How can poor Piers Morgan be expected to flourish every night?

My dairy tale How do farmers ever make money? Thanks to cows, filming – and frisky tourists, says Jamie Blackett, who farms in Dumfriesshire

U

ntil I discovered journalism, I was convinced farming was the worst-paid job of all. And it seemed inevitable it would always be so.

The raw economics of globalisation and the boundless ingenuity of agricultural technologies – mechanical, chemical, biotechnical and now digital – seemed destined to drive the price of food ever lower.

Thomas Malthus’s dire prediction – that the world’s population will grow to the point where eventually we will all run out of food – was already looking shaky. It has been finally demolished by the invention of laboratory food, which can be grown from stem cells and yeast cultures. As the last people who remembered eating Woolton pies started dying off, it seemed no one would fuss about the UK’s food security ever again.

The reality of agricultural deflation dawned on me when I wrote the cheque for my son’s first term at prep school in 2003. At the time, my main income was from arable and the price of wheat stood at £60 per tonne. When I went away to school, 30 years earlier, wheat was £120 per tonne, the costs of growing it a fraction of what they were in 2003, and my school fees were around £300 per term. My son’s fees were nearly 20 times what mine had been and all our other costs had risen in proportion.

The net effect was that it was around 100 times harder for us to educate our children. I know every generation of parents says this, but I still don’t quite know how we pulled it off.

Yes, 1973 was the peak of the commodities boom and the Russians had just thrown wheat markets into turmoil with the ‘great grain robbery’.

But, still, during the Queen’s reign, food purchases have fallen from over 40 per cent of household expenditure to around 9 per cent. That has never happened before in one reign.

It has had a dramatic effect on the 30 The Oldie June 2022

Cash cows: Jamie moved into dairy

economy: all those foreign holidays, digital gadgets and Netflix subscriptions paid for out of disposable income have been enabled by the world’s farmers becoming more efficient and tightening their belts. In my case, mostly belttightening. You’re welcome.

It was a terrifying prospect. I had taken out a seven-figure mortgage to buy back two-thirds of our farm, sold to pay death duties a generation before.

So, like most other farmers, we took on other jobs to make ends meet. I started writing, my wife, Sheri, became a photographer and we opened up our house as a B&B and converted farm cottages into holiday lets.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing, though it has been hard work.

The writing allowed me very necessary head space away from the stresses of farming. The tourism brought a steady trickle of characters, along with their money: the middle-aged couple

Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce filmed coitus in our bedroom

I found engaged in intermediate foreplay on our sofa, in the fluffy dressing gowns Sheri had thoughtfully provided, when I wandered into the drawing room to throw a log on the fire. Or Barbara and Arlene, who put the T into LGBT and us into fits of giggles as they conducted a photography session – in crinolines – on our lawn, where a visiting pack of basset hounds had just left their mark.

Then there was the time we let out the house to a film crew, and Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce filmed coitus in our bedroom – so convincingly in her case that she was nominated for an Oscar.

Somehow we survived. We gave up wheat as a bad job. We started beef farming – then gave that up as a bad job as the price of beef flatlined while our wage bill went up by 50 per cent.

Then, in response to Brexit and the prospect of cheap beef and grain flooding in on the back of Boris’s trade deals, we went back into dairy farming as we left the EU – the mirror image of my father’s decision to give up dairy farming shortly after we joined the EEC. So far, the decision appears to have been successful.

And now we have the cost-of-living crisis; the inflation no one appears to have seen coming; the blood of Ukraine paying for another Russian ‘great grain robbery’; and the sudden interest in the UK’s food self-sufficiency.

Though it feels wrong to write this, in farmhouse kitchens across the land there is relief that food prices can go up in real terms.

Still, if the price of wheat, currently up 100 per cent over the past two years at around £300 per tonne, were to reach its 1973 level, it would be £1,600 per tonne in real terms.

Now that would be a real cost-ofliving crisis.

Jamie Blackett’s Land of Milk and Honey: Digressions of a Rural Dissident (Quiller) is out on 14th June

History

Our weak island fortress

1066 and All That got it wrong. We’ve been invaded lots of times david horspool I recently ‘did the rounds’ at Deal Castle.

That, the nice English Heritage people told us, was where the phrase originated.

The castle, built in 1540 to a design personally approved by Henry VIII – which may explain why its plan looks like a Tudor rose – has three floors, and the basement is called The Rounds.

From here, soldiers would patrol in conditions that were probably cold and dank – to judge by our experience on a benign spring day – ready to fire on enemies through the embrasures.

In fact, the name of this part of the castle probably derives from the phrase – current at the time, according to the OED – to describe a sentry walking his beat, rather than the other way round.

But as we stumbled through the castle passages, lit only by the authentic glow of our mobiles, history, not etymology, was on my mind.

Deal was one of three castles built on the south coast as artillery forts, ready to repel a French, Imperial or combined invasion. That seemed possible after the Pope excommunicated Henry in 1538.

In the event, neither the French nor Emperor Charles V got their act together for long enough to launch an invasion.

The hottest action Deal Castle ever saw was during the Civil War, when it was besieged. In 1940, primed again against invasion, it received a direct hit from a German bomb. The bomb took out the handsome Captain’s House, built in the 18th century, when the castle was becoming more of a coastal country retreat than a line of defence.

Deal’s picturesque obsolescence – a state barely interrupted in its near-five centuries of existence – might seem a fitting analogy for the country. After all, doesn’t everyone know that, after 1066, England was never successfully invaded (nor were Wales and Scotland, except by the English)?

Sellar and Yeatman put it best in 1066

Stone circles: Deal Castle, 1540

and All That: ‘The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.’

Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt explained why, in terms memorable enough to be used to advertise Typhoo tea and Jaguar cars: ‘This fortress built by nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war, /… This precious stone set in a silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house’.

British (or English) impenetrability over a millennium could be explained by Shakespeare’s natural advantages or Henry VIII’s scout-like determination to Be Prepared. Except that we haven’t really been all that impenetrable.

Take that scene in Richard II where Gaunt makes his famous speech. The action that follows is presented as a piece of internal politics – a bad king, Richard, being replaced by a good one, Gaunt’s son Henry IV. But what put Henry on the throne was an invasion. In 1399, after his father’s death (ie directly after the time when Gaunt’s speech about England’s impregnability is set), Henry was in exile, banished a year before. Richard now made his sentence banishment for life.

Henry’s reaction was to invade from France with a few troops, landing first at Pevensey Bay, where William the Conqueror had come ashore. He then sailed up the east coast and landed at Ravenspur near Hull, where he gathered an army which eventually put him on the throne.

The tactic was so successful that when Edward IV found himself in exile, he too invaded at Ravenspur. And he announced that, like Henry IV, he was interested in restoring his claim only to his family inheritance, not to the crown.

You could say that, as neither Henry nor Edward fought a battle against his direct rival, these invasions don’t count.

Or perhaps, despite the fact that both were planned in foreign courts, you require more of a foreign element for a ‘real’ invasion.

In which case, I give you Henry VII. His invasion was planned in a foreign court (France) with significant foreign participation. And a man with a very slim claim to the throne triumphed over his rival by defeating and killing him in battle.

Ah, but Henry VIII was British – a concept with very little meaning at the time; his enemies made a big deal of his being Welsh.

In which case, how about William III? As foreign as you like, he arrived with an enormous fleet and marched on London. And he did fight his direct rival, James II, in 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne. There, James II earned the unfortunate Irish name Séamas an Chaca, James the Shithead.

So the next time one of those headlines about this or that ‘invasion’ of our sceptred isle is doing the rounds, may I advise the wise words of Brenda from Bristol?

‘Not another one!’

David Horspool is author of Alfred the Great (Amberley Publishing) The Oldie June 2022 31

For years, Bel Mooney longed for an illuminated manuscript – and then a dazzling example came up at auction

My golden book of hours

The Magi and the Annunciation – from Bel Mooney’s book of hours

I

t is impossible to know where obsessions start.

Was it as I first practised my own teenage signature in curly script, exaggerating the swoop of the ‘y’? Or first turned the pages of a book on Giotto in my local library? Or carefully calligraphed and illustrated all the poems in Yeats’s early volume The Rose as a gift for my new husband?

By then, I was 22 and fatally mesmerised by the glitter of ornate initials, rich blue and red pigments, and the hypnotic swirls of acanthus in wide, riotous margins.

32 The Oldie June 2022

My English degree required the study of Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English and Later Middle English and I became entranced by reproductions of manuscripts in my textbooks.

What hand made those marks on animal skin? Who read the words aloud to bestow life?

But there was also a deeper edge to this interest. Even through my years of professed atheism, I was drawn to altarpieces in Italian churches – not the mighty Baroque, but the gravity of the Quattrocento, followed by that extraordinary explosion of skill and

narrative detail as the early-15th century heralded the Renaissance.

The glow of candlelight on flat planes of gold leaf beckoned me across centuries, as unavoidable as the dread swoosh of Gabriel’s wings, confirming Mary’s fate.

Mine, too. The glory of Christian culture intoxicated me, so that in my own late middle age I began to collect sacred art, gradually acquiring some preReformation objects.

But one item eluded me. For years, I longed to possess a book of hours. I’d bought two separate illuminated leaves

Inscription in the back of Bel’s book by an 18th-century owner

(sadly detached from their texts, as so many are), but would I ever obtain a whole volume?

Studying Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts and Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands fed covetousness, my deadly sin.

The book of hours was a devotional text for private consumption – a sacred aide-mémoire, if you like. It incorporated a calendar, with the saints’ days in red – hence ‘red-letter day’. It also included Psalms, extracts from the Gospels, readings from the Mass, the Office of the Dead and the Hours of the Virgin Mary and devotions to be made during the eight canonical hours of the day.

Not all books of hours are the same, and no other type of manuscript has survived in such great numbers.

By the 14th century, it was the most used prayer book in Western Europe – a medieval bestseller. Many were made for women. The most lavish ones were status symbols and are now in museums around the world.

For some time, I have ogled manuscript books on dealer websites, but the prices were out of reach. The finest ones still would be. But, last autumn, I spotted a book of hours coming up for auction at Duke’s, in Dorchester.

The website displayed a couple of miniatures with the full description. It was impossible for me to travel to view.

So – although I’ve never been a gambler – I had to go for telephone bidding.

And it so happened that the auction turned out well for the buyer, though disappointing for the seller. For a goodly sum but less than I expected, the c1480 book of hours became mine.

The precious object is French, produced in one of the many workshops

of Burgundy, perhaps even in the shadow of the great Romanesque cathedral of St Lazare in Autun.

There are eight full-page miniatures (three more were probably planned, to judge by the gaps), all distinguished by an unusual geometric ‘frame’ on two sides which (to me) prefigures Art Deco.

The Gothic ‘hand’ is excellent. But, to be honest, whoever painted the miniatures lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

I imagine the scene in the workshop when the capable scribe hears which journeyman painter has been given the job of illustrating his text and groans, ‘Ah non!’

Still, among the eight (Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Shepherds, Magi, Pentecost, King David in meditation, Burial) is one real gem (pictured, far left). Two of the Magi are conventionally bearded and dressed while the third is an effete, 15th-century gallant straight out of the smartest bar in Autun, dressed in a yellow shirt and matching riding boots, a fancy blue tunic and a mauve turban.

He leans on his cane with a snooty look that says, ‘Faugh, comme ils sont pauvres, ces gens. Mon dieu, allons-y!’’

It looks like a portrait of a living dandy.

As I turn the vellum pages, I imagine other hands my book of hours has passed through over the centuries.

As it was being created, France was engaged in the Habsburg-Valois Wars in Italy. There followed the old, destructive pattern of treaty-conflict-treaty-conflict over centuries: the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession.

I imagine my book of hours tucked safely in a lady’s chamber (the majority of these devotional texts were owned

by women), as she waited for her menfolk to return. Did tears smudge Gabriel’s banderole in the miniature of the Annunciation?

At the back of the book, it’s thrilling to see the elegant, sepia handwriting (pictured, left) of the first recorded owner. In formal French 18th-century script, the owner wrote, ‘I desire, my dear friend, that this should give you as much pleasure as I had in giving it to you,’ with an ornate, impossible-to-read signature.

The gift was given on 12th August 1744, with all the chaos and cruelty of the French Revolution a few decades away.

As that century turned, somebody called Willemin imposed himself sacrilegiously on the first illuminated page in the volume. In the bottom margin of the Annunciation, there is an angel bearing an escutcheon. What might have been written on it? ‘Ave Maria’, maybe?

But this man has painted over the original words to claim ownership: ‘Ex libris Willemin 1800.’ And, at the foot of January in the calendar, the owner wrote in ink, ‘Gesieus 1801– an 10 de la République Française.’

Is this the same owner – proudly commemorating the tenth year of the French Republic? Had he taken part in the Revolution? I love the mystery.

The First Republic was to last only from 1792 to 1804, when it became the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

I wonder if it was Willemin who encased the folios of the book of hours in this handsome, early-19th-century library binding in dark green morocco, tooled with gold. Whoever paid for the luxury misdated his possession ‘XIV Siècle.’

Quite soon after that, the book must have crossed the Channel, to be owned by one Sir John Dalton Bt, of an ancient seat, Thurnham, near Lancaster. His elaborate bookplate with the Thurnham shield is stuck in the front. The baronet died in the year of Victoria’s accession and eventually the title and property passed to another line of the family who took the Dalton name. Sure enough, over the page there is a pencilled signature – Sir James Dalton Fitzpatrick 1862.

But, after that, where did it go? Whose hands turned these pages, perhaps with the aid of an old Latin dictionary – as I do now?

All I know is that my book of hours – entrancing and imperfect – was sold by a Bournemouth dealer in 1963 and had at least one other owner before coming up for auction in 2021. And now it lives with this new, devoted, female custodian, for a while at least – deo volente.

The Oldie June 2022 33

Letter from America

The Big Apple is rotting

Crime is raging in Manhattan – and some New Yorkers like it Philip Delves Broughton A friend of mine was mugged recently in Central Park.

He and a friend visiting from France were wandering along the bridle path in one of the park’s more genteel stretches, near John Lennon’s old building, the Dakota.

Two men stepped out of the shadows and demanded their wallets and phones.

The American handed over his iPhone, the Frenchman his sustainably made Fairphone. The criminals pocketed the iPhone and smashed the Fairphone to pieces, not believing for a minute the Frenchman’s bleating that it was a real phone – just better for the planet.

Sustainability is not yet a thing for New York’s criminal underclass.

Once their assailants had gone, the victims ran and found someone who called the police. Within minutes, there were a dozen cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, as if, my friend said, there had been a mass homicide. The muggers were swiftly caught.

The good news was the police response – swift, effective and solicitous.

The bad news was the mugging itself.

After three decades of falling crime rates in New York, robberies and assaults are suddenly surging again. In March, they were up 60 per cent on a year ago.

The pandemic seems to have unleashed the ghosts of old New York – the ramshackle, crazy and violent crime which used to be the city’s hallmark, until it got cleaned up in the 1990s.

One day, it’s a woman assaulted with a hammer; another, a man pushed onto the train tracks, a child punched in the head in Times Square, a man in a gas mask opening fire on commuters at a subway station. There is an edgy madness to it all.

The former NYPD Chief of Detectives, Robert Boyce, recently told one of the local TV stations, ‘We’re in different times, now. This is not a spike. It’s not a trend. We’re in a crime surge right now.’

The city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, a former policeman, has promised to stop the surge. But he’s a hard man to read. He showed up at the Met Gala recently wearing a tailcoat embroidered with a gun with a red slash through it, a message to end gun violence delivered amid popping flashes and nipple-baring Kardashians.

There is a school of thought that New York needs a period of cathartic social ruin. That the whole place has become Disneyland, a place for billionaires and their servant class, for influencers and the influenced. The theory, articulated by melancholy types at beer-sodden bar tops on First Avenue, is that for New York to remain New York, it needs to be nasty.

No good comes out of marble apartments, money managers and their waxen acolytes. Every season of vanities needs a bonfire, to replenish the nutrients in the soil.

If you want the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, punk, post-punk and a new wave, you need the mosh-pit filth of CBGB, the East Village dive bar which closed in 2006, with, naturally, a concert

by Patti Smith. The bohemian world Smith described in her memoir Just Kids has long since given way to coffee chains and yoga studios.

There is the sweat of a hot yoga class of junior lawyers – and then there’s the shoulder-to-shoulder sweat of a punk venue. One evokes the psychic pain of modern work; the other an explosive cultural genesis. What do you want from your city?

The problem with seedy glamour, of course, is the seediness. There is nothing glamorous about the number of homeless people on the streets at the moment.

I felt no pang of nostalgia when I discovered recently that someone had climbed onto the bonnet of my car and defecated. No sense that what is bad for my car must be good for the underground music scene.

In any case, New York is big enough and ruthless enough that there is always room somewhere for experimentation and misbehaviour. If the Lower East Side becomes one long strip of contemporary loft spaces and cheese shops, the bohemians shuffle off to Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. When that fills up with furniture designers and mixologists, there is deepest Queens and the Bronx.

During COVID, there was a moment when Manhattan emptied out to the point where rents downtown plummeted within reach of ordinary wage-earners, who swirled back in from the outer boroughs. But that window has closed again.

Not long ago, I met a billionaire’s wife who prodded forlornly at her salad as she told me that for all the comforts of her wealth, New York remained ‘the stress capital of the world’. Keeping up at every level is brutal, whether you live in the Architectural Digest version of the city or the punk, grime one. It’s a city on the edge of a nervous breakdown – a challenge that makes it such a draw.

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph The Oldie June 2022 35

Addicted to books

HI-STORY / ALAMY

While on tour with his one-man show, Barry Humphries lurks in regional bookshops, desperate for rare volumes

The plaque on the door of my hotel room said ‘Superior Room’.

Once inside, I searched for evidence for this rather grandiose claim. None was apparent, though there was a chocolate on the pillow. And the toilet paper had been folded into a neat point by a Polish chambermaid. If the Polish ever go home, England will collapse.

I am in the middle of a tour of English towns with a modest theatrical offering, which is proving to be very successful.

Most reassuring, since I was seriously thinking of auditioning for a riserrecliner commercial.

The trip is taking me to some wonderful theatres. I had not realised how much I had missed all those little pink faces peering at me out of the gloom and rising to their feet at the end of the show. If only to fetch their coats from under the seats.

One town is beginning to merge with another, but Shrewsbury was a great discovery and I am looking forward to Buxton and Cheltenham, where Nicky Haslam, the great flâneur and generous friend, has threatened to attend.

When you are on tour, the hard bit is what I call the ‘third act’. That is, when all sorts of people from all corners of your life, past and present, mingle with the fans at the stage door – on those occasions when there is someone at the stage door.

Last night, in Malvern, Julia Allen, former headmistress of the Hall School, appeared looking exactly as she did 30 years ago when she looked after my two sons. At the same time, one of my Olivers turned up at the stage door.

I was in the first production of Lionel 36 The Oldie June 2022

Bart’s Dickensian musical and in numerous revivals, in which I impersonated Fagin. Ever and anon, many of the little pickpockets I have known reappear and introduce me to their wives and children.

One of them was Davy Jones of the Monkees. Another was a singer called Phil Collins, who is apparently quite successful and widely liked.

Last night’s Oliver, Colin Patterson, had a grey beard, which made recognition challenging after an interval of 60 years. He remembered – as do I – being embraced by Georgia Brown who played Nancy and was one of England’s finest jazz singers.

Of course, there are always ratbags waiting at the stage door who haven’t been to the show. They demand my signature on multiple home-printed pictures of Bruce the Shark (an animation for which I once provided a convincing piscine voice).

There are always also a few mendicants who discourage one from inscribing their programme with their name – so you know they are planning to flog it on eBay. I am told that 20 Barry Humphrieses could win you one Danny Dyer.

Mostly, though, I love the cast of the third act, and I am always pleased that some of them have actually seen the show!

No hotel on my itinerary has failed to recognise the decorative use of otherwise worthless literature. I have made several discoveries in hotels where old books are scattered around to lend a more classy or homely touch to otherwise nondescript accommodations.

A dazzling shelf of elaborately gilded bindings in a hotel in Penang proved, on closer examination, to be a set of Danish agricultural manuals. And my room in a ‘boutique’ hotel in Casablanca contained a vitrine filled with all but two volumes of Joseph Hocking’s hundredfold oeuvre.

Most interesting are the books tourists of yesteryear left behind. In a hotel of decayed grandeur in a forest in Portugal, I ‘liberated’ a heavily foxed volume of the Monthly Review of February 1903, containing an appraisal of Machiavelli’s Dispatches from the South African Campaign – an ‘unwritten book’. The anonymous reviewer was Baron Corvo.

In a nursing home for ‘thirsty people’ near Hadley Wood, voracious readers of Netta Muskett and D K Broster, long whiles agone, must have abandoned their reading of those fine authoresses and bequeathed their books to future inebriates.

I have also found quite rare volumes and even paintings on film sets; wrack washed up from the literate past. Stacked books, often glued together, are sometimes to be seen, along with old leather luggage, in the window displays of gentleman’s haberdasheries, to impart an air of olde-worlde distinction. They proclaim, ‘I read, I travel.’

Sadly, second-hand bookshops are disappearing from many of the towns we visit. But when I find one, I always stand in a quiet corner and listen in the hope of hearing a thin, faint voice from some high and dusty shelf. ‘I’m here!’ it cries. ‘I’m the book you have looked for all your life – I’m up here! I have been for 78 years.’

It might be wedged behind volume two of George Moore’s A Story-Teller’s

Holiday and the 23rd reprint of The Roadmender by Michael Fairless. But my mobile chimes and I don’t hear the little voice and I may never again discover that impossibly rare copy of Love’s Memorial

by Theodore Wratislaw.

Yes, the mobile phone is usually a nuisance. But sometimes it’s a salvation.

I was on an American theatrical tour in Los Angeles and, one Wednesday afternoon, I decided I wanted to go to

Carl Spitzweg’s The Bookworm (c 1850)

a book fair in Pasadena. So I called my friend Bruce Beresford, the film director, who had a car, and proposed a bibliophilic excursion.

He picked me up at my hotel at about 12.30pm, and we were nearly at our destination when my mobile rang. I cursed it because I thought I had left it back at the hotel.

‘Who is it?’ I testily challenged the transmitter.

It was the theatre, asking where I was.

It was a matinée day. Bruce made an astonishing U-turn and I was onstage just before the audience had started to look at their watches.

I am now in my dressing room at least an hour before the performance.

I was not always punctual. In the bad old days, I liked to dine before the show at a restaurant frequented by many of my patrons. I would linger over my dessert until my fellow diners had fled to the theatre, after anxious glances at their watches and perplexed looks at me, as I calmly sat there, sipping my coffee and Fernet-Branca.

After a dash up the Strand and a perfunctory make-up session, I was on stage disguised as someone else, to the amazement of people who had, minutes before, sat at the next table.

It feels so nice to be doing my strange job after nearly three years of enforced inanition.

My mother used to say, whenever I was ‘acting the goat’, ‘Don’t look at Barry – he’s drawing attention to himself.’

She little knew it would become my life’s work.

Perhaps that should be the title of one of my next shows – Barry Humphries: Draws Attention to Himself.

I remember the agony of telling my parents that I was abandoning my university course for a job in the theatre.

In tears, my mother said, ‘But we don’t know any actors!’

To which my father said, ‘What about Coral?’ One of my mother’s childhood friends was a girl called Coral Browne, the Coral Browne who later married Vincent Price and distinguished herself in Alan Bennett’s masterpiece An Englishman Abroad.

‘Exactly,’ responded my mother.

‘Coral was clever in her own way, but she went overseas to England and no one has heard of her since.’ I think I might have told this story before, but it bears repeating. When you are, like me, in the Christmas Eve of your life, there is a tendency to benign reiteration.

Above all else, this tour is showing me how beautiful the countryside is and how beautiful are its inhabitants.

I have been in London too long.

Everyone needs to get out of it from time to time to rediscover England – where, not seldom, one can hear those strangely old-fashioned words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

The Man Behind the Mask by Barry Humphries is on tour until 12th June The Oldie June 2022 37

Small World

My new trolls? Mother and Father

Just when I thought online dating was safe, they hacked my account jem clarke

STEVE WAY

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

Since we got a TV for the kitchen, Mother has found more programmes to hate.

She currently hates the BBC News Channel’s Travel Show: ‘Look at her grinning ear to ear, going to abseil down something in Marrakesh on my coin. At least Judith Chalmers had the decency to dress for the beach, rather than for a quick dash to the corner shop.’

‘Mind you,’ warned Father, ‘she did do those adverts.’

‘Oh, hark at Solomon over there,’ said Mother. ‘An opinion every month. In a minute, he’ll be telling you all about how much he misses Jill Dando’s effortless presenting style. He calls me a middle-brow snob. I call him a celebrity obsessive.’

‘Strong,’ Father said.

‘When we were in Blackpool and bumped into Anita Harris in a hotel lobby, that poor woman could not get away from him. All she wanted was a complimentary arrival drink. All she got was a man with Van Morrison eyebrows giving her a complimentary lecture on the new motorway and its connectivity problems with the A roads.’

‘She asked!’ said Father.

‘She just asked, “How was your journey?” That was all! I asked Rita Coulson yesterday how her leg was – she didn’t start getting out X-rays and telling me the history of bloody anaesthesia, in the middle aisle of Sainsbury’s, did she!’

Trying to peace-keep, I said, ‘How is Rita’s leg?’

‘Ooh, now we’ve got Dr Kildare chipping in,’ said Mother, confiscating the comic I was reading for no reason.

‘They should ban Google for unsafe minds like yours. You know his search history reads like a medical dictionary?’

‘What the hell do you know about my search history?’ I said.

‘The Government sent me a leaflet all about it,’ she explained, handing me one 38 The Oldie June 2022

on ‘The internet and your child: what you should check’.

‘But I’m 52!’ I said.

‘Not according to your profile on Match.com … or eharmony,’ Father said.

I squealed, ‘What the hell – you’ve both been nosing around in my cyber affairs? How long has this been going on?’

‘Look, it’s for your own good,’ said Mother, placing my comic back in my hands as a peace offering. ‘Susan Hart’s son got radicalised online. Now they take money out of his account every month and encourage him to go to shadowy meetings about turning society back to medieval times.’

‘Mum, he joined the Campaign for Real Ale!’ ‘All I know is, within a month, Susan had to beg him at Hull Ferry Terminal not to leave the country for additional training,’ said Mother, taking a Kleenex out of her sleeve and dabbing an invisible tear from her cheek.

‘He was going to Oktoberfest in Bruges!’ I yelled.

Mother nudged Father. ‘Do you see how easily and casually he uses these terms? Ok-tob-urr-fest … Bruges. Keep an eye on this one.’

‘You’ll have difficulty – I’m changing all my passwords forthwith,’ I said.

I turned on my heel and marched resolutely out of the kitchen. This was my ‘line in the sand’ moment, when I’d finally asserted myself and become a real adult, despite my reduced circumstances and height.

‘Jem! You’ve dropped your Green Arrow comic,’ yelled Father as I reached the stairs.

In order not to lose any intensity, I pushed the kitchen door half-open and crept back into the room on all fours, reaching the comic, seemingly unseen.

But then Mother’s slippered foot suddenly appeared on top of the comic.

I reluctantly looked up.

She fake-smiled back at me, crowing, ‘Don’t change the password to Superman452, will you.’

She had known my previous 451 passwords and deduced my new one.

I was reminded of what a friend had once observed: ‘Your dynamic with your mother isn’t mother and son. It’s Holmes and Moriarty.’

As I uncreased Green Arrow’s face, I made a mental note to check online whether Newmarket Holidays do coach trips to the Reichenbach Falls.

Town Mouse

Orwell’s dream pub?

Wetherspoons tom hodgkinson

What does your ideal pub look like?

Many of you will remember George Orwell’s imaginary tavern. He called it The Moon Under Water in a 1946 article in the Evening Standard. It had good beer, no piano, simple food, an open fire, barmaids who called you ‘dear’ and a solid Victorian vibe. Children were welcome and, oddly to us, beer was served in pink china mugs.

It seems that in 1946 such pubs were rare, and Orwell says he didn’t know of one. Well, if Orwell fast-forwarded to 2022, I reckon he’d be pleasantly surprised by the state of British pubs, and the influence his essay has had.

Everywhere you go, pubs seem to get better. They generally serve good beer and simple food and do not have music.

And, in the country, you can spend the night in them – as people did in the coaching inns of old – meaning you can stumble upstairs at the end of the evening, with no worries about how to get home.

My own London local, on the edge of Notting Hill, is called The Cow. It’s owned by Tom Conran, son of Terence, and comes quite close to Orwell’s pub.

Good beer, oysters, chops, Victorian vibes, friendly bar staff, regulars and no music.

It’s a very posh pub, though. Last time I went, David Beckham was in there, and you’d need to be on his earnings level not to balk at the prices. A quick pub lunch for two could set you back £120.

By contrast, there’s a very good and modestly priced country pub I visited recently. Orwell would certainly have approved of it. Beer was £3.60 a pint, and lunch was anything you want, as long as it’s a pasty. For £4. Meaning a quick pub lunch for two would set you back a reasonable £15.20 (or, in our case, more like £30 as we had quite a lot of beer).

Instead of a bar, there is a hatch, from 40 The Oldie June 2022

which beaming staff serve the beer and pasties with great efficiency. It’s called the Square and Compass and it’s in Worth Matravers, in the heart of the quarrying area in Purbeck, south Dorset.

We visited on a sunny Saturday at lunchtime, and the extensive outdoor area was packed with bicyclists, walkers and locals. It’s more 18th-century than Victorian; which I prefer. Cosy.

When I was a country mouse, I converted a side room in our rented farmhouse into my perfect pub, the Green Man. It had peeling paint on the wall, a dart board, a picture of dogs playing pool and a couple of mirrors with Scottie dogs on them. I commissioned hippie artist Pete Loveday to make a sign for it.

The smoking ban had just come in, but you could smoke in my pub. I installed one of those big pub ashtrays

with ‘Skol’ written on it. I had young children at the time, and having a pub at home meant I could go to the pub without leaving the house.

As for pubs with rooms, I recently stayed at the Bull in Totnes, a lovely organic pub, and the Greyhound in Stockbridge, on a weekend pilgrimage from Winchester to Salisbury. Both were excellent and, to use an ugly expression, ‘mid-price’.

If you’re feeling the squeeze, let me put in a word of praise for the Wetherspoons chain. They may lack the charm of landlord-owned 18th-century coaching inns, but they still come pretty close to The Moon Under Water. They serve good beer and simple food and are quiet. They’re very democratic; everyone is welcome.

And they’re amazingly cheap: when I visited the Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedford recently, for a wake, a pint of Doom Bar cost a mere two quid.

My student children like Wetherspoons – or ‘Spoons’, as they call them. They’re friendly and cheap and everywhere: there are over 900 throughout the UK and Ireland. Founder Tim Martin, like the Guinnesses before him, has done well out of selling beer to the masses. In 2020, the chain made a profit of £76.6 million.

Presumably his children and grandchildren will write novels and become society fixtures.

Spoons might not have existed without George Orwell. Martin was inspired to create his pubs by the well-spoken socialist’s essay (though not his politics). His Leicester Square Spoons is indeed called The Moon Under Water.

Back in London, I’m a big fan of the Coach & Horses in Soho, the Dove in Hammersmith, and the Mitre in Holborn Circus, once the hang-out of Dr Johnson.

He loved a pub, declaring, ‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude.’

That fat old Catholic G K Chesterton also loved a pub. In The Rolling English Road, he celebrates drinking and swaying and getting lost: Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

Chesterton, like Orwell, had his influence on pubs – well, at least he did on the one called Paradise in Kensal Green, named after the last line of The Rolling English Road: For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Country Mouse

I love staring – in a non-sexual way giles wood

In the past, texts of a religious or improving nature hung on every cottage wall.

Victorian needlework-samplers might typically remind the occupants to ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’.

Thence to basements in the pot-smoking 1970s, where posters of the saccharine poem Desiderata (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste’) seemed to endorse the passivity of the ‘basementals’ gazing on.

As a teenager, I was very taken with the description of such texts in a fictional household within a world paralysed by genetic mutation.

In The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, the narrator describes his family home: ‘The nearest approach to decoration was a number of wooden panels with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them. KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD… ‘Frequent references to these texts had made me familiar with the words long before I was able to read… I knew them by heart.’

In a similar way, advertisers believe they have a captive audience, culturally primed to be ‘influenced’ by wall-hung admonitions – and that no more potently receptive is this audience than when on the Tube. There, passengers should be happy to alight on any distraction rather than have to catch the eye of a fellow traveller.

Except in the case of oldies, who may well be trying to catch the eye of a fellow Tube traveller as they search their memory for the identity of the sofamiliar-looking person sitting opposite.

Non-fake news – this has recently become a ‘crime’. Instead they must now rest their eyes on new notices which read, ‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.’

A modern domestic-propaganda machine comes in the form of the A Year

in the Country 2022 calendar, produced by the prolific illustrator and writer Matthew Rice.

Although the Aga cohort would seem to be the natural demographic for such a calendar, one of these was given to me in a well-meant bid to gentrify our sansAga, galley-style kitchen.

Rice’s 1970s Good Life counterpart might have advised, ‘Gather handfuls of the first nettles. They make a superb spring tonic eaten as gruel, porridge or soup.’ Rice’s advice is more aspirational.

His February tip sidesteps any hair-shirt aspects of the Good Life, instead exhorting, ‘Quick! Can you fit in a short trip to VENICE? February is the MOMENT to go to VENICE, the weeks before Carnevale are ESPECIALLY good and there can be BRIGHT, SUNNY, SPRING weather.’

Having recently been unsettled by the horror film The Witch (2015), featuring a satanic goat called Phillip leading a 17th-century Puritan, Anya Taylor-Joy,

astray, I ignore all Matthew Rice’s recommendations regarding goats: ‘An exciting addition to the yard is a small family of goats. They are EXCEPTIONALLY friendly if a little over-ATHLETIC.’ Nevertheless, from having nothing else to stare at while waiting for the kettle to boil in our so-called kitchen, I’ve learned a lot about the different varieties of goats which might appeal to the aspirational classes: ‘Golden Guernsey, Boer, Saanen, Anglo Nubian, Toggenburg…’ Today, if you’ve got an agenda, a calendar is surely the medium for spreading the message.

Moreover, I have always responded well to schoolmasterly diktats.

Consequently, in April, in response to the calendar’s command, ‘EAT whatever is fresh and green to blow away the cobwebs’, I set out from the back door, bearing a traditional garden trug. I sashay through the weaving paths into my wild larder, which one neighbour, who misunderstands my gardening style, has described as ‘nothing more than an infestation of rank weeds’.

Round here, landowners talk about ‘clean’ land, by which they mean ‘free of weeds’ – in which category they include gorse, brambles and any scrub that might have the temerity to raise its head.

My wild larder offers a goodly assemblage of saladings: including Jack-by-the-hedge, sorrel, the flower heads and leaves of ransoms and a smattering of young hawthorn leaves, which for some reason are traditionally known as ‘cheese’.

All this would be disgusting, of course, without a dollop of Mary Berry’s Classic Salad Dressing from Waitrose, a mere 15 minutes’ drive away. But how ‘tormenting’, to paraphrase Cobbett, ‘to have to attend to the provision of daily supplies from shops’. Now even more tormenting with the cost of diesel.

It took the calendar to remind me that I already have a well-stocked cottage library of books on the subject of the wild larder. The standard books on foraging are by Roger Phillips and Richard Mabey, who in their research must have stood on the shoulders of Jane Grigson and Claire Loewenfeld. Phillips and Mabey were well ahead of their time.

But now foraging and craft-based rural culture have become mainstream, and rural relocators look to Rice for their improving texts. We often laugh about one such who took a chicken to the vet, following a visit from Mr Fox. If she had bought his calendar, Rice would have warned her about this. But what if she’d been in Venice at the time?

The Oldie June 2022 41

Postcards from the Edge

The Nazi actor next door

TOBY MORISON

Jack Trevor, a cinema star backed by Goebbels, lived quietly in Deal in his last years. By Mary Kenny Deal in Kent has been nominated as ‘one of the best places to live’ in the United Kingdom for the third consecutive year, according to a survey in the Times.

The town has transitioned from being a rather rough resort back in the 1950s – natives remember brawls in the now dinky Middle Street – to a hipster’s ideal.

Not all Dealites welcome the transformation. ‘I used to meet so many people I knew when I went down the High Street,’ a neighbour lamented. ‘Now I hardly know a soul.’

But that is the way things are. Places alter, new residents arrive and a certain neighbourly familiarity is lost. The average price of a house – £334,896 – also prompts social change.

Yet Deal has had some rum residents in its time, including the actor Jack Trevor, who died in Deal in 1976.

He had been a big screen star in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Trevor, born in England in 1893 as Anthony Cedric Sebastian Steane, made 67 films in all – including some British ones. He was also a Nazi radio propagandist who enjoyed the patronage of Goebbels.

Trevor was put on trial in November 1946 on a charge of ‘working for the enemy’ and found guilty, but was released in 1947 after an appeal to Lord Chief Justice Goddard. He claimed to have been, literally, acting under duress.

A British screenwriter, Julian Paige, now living in Perpignan, has compiled a lengthy research archive on Jack Trevor, documenting his colourful life.

He was educated at Westminster and New College, Oxford. A Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regime, he was cashiered for using fake cheques.

Jack married a twice-divorced American heiress called Alma Vetstera Hayne, who died mysteriously of poisoning. He married another rich divorcee, Mary Penton, and got into movies in Germany in the 1920s, often playing an English gentleman.

42 The Oldie June 2022

After the 1940s, he made no more films, but lived in the south of France for some years. He then returned to England to live, drinking quietly in the pubs of Deal. Then it was an undiscovered seaside town, where a man could fade away in obscurity.

It was a joy when Eurostar came back on track after the long absence during lockdown, with reduced services for some time afterwards.

But, alas, the fabled train no longer stops at Ashford in Kent as it zings its way towards Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This is a grave inconvenience for Kentish travellers, for whom Ashford was so handy.

The reason, it seems to me, is that the London-Paris Eurostars are doing such good business departing from St Pancras that they don’t need to factor in another halt at Ashford. The Eurostar train was packed when I travelled on it in April. It was great to see this crucial link to the Continent thrive.

One cannot order one’s destiny, but my preferred location to die would be in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. Such hotels still exist. Parisians grumble that Montparnasse has become tacky and down-at-heel, but I’m quite fond of it that way. This is real life – not a theme park.

Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West – his timely jeremiad against blaming white Western civilisation for everything awful – alerts us to the fact that Barbary pirates once seized white captives from the British Isles, and sold them into slavery in Africa.

There is a well-established historical narrative that these Barbary corsairs – Muslim privateers thought to be Algerians, Libyans and perhaps Turks – plundered West Cork in June 1631, and kidnapped Irish captives from the coast of Baltimore, taking them off to North Africa.

It has been suggested that the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya really owed his ancestry to an enslaved Irishman called O’Duffy. I believe it was the immortal Peter Simple (Michael Wharton of the Telegraph) who made the claim, perhaps without entirely complete historical documentation.

But Baltimore (after which the Maryland city is named) remembers its Barbary pirates in song, story and tavern: the Algiers Inn is said to be one of the best pubs in that lush territory of West Cork.

I have a new German portmanteau word for my collection. Russlandversteher means ‘Russia-understander’, with the implication of a soft approach to Russia.

There is also the more critical Putinversteher – one who is especially understanding towards Mr Putin.

Angela Merkel, once so praised as a steady hand on the tiller, is now characterised as a Russlandversteher, since she communicated so frequently – in Russian – with Vladimir Putin, and then made Germany dependent on Russian gas.

Yet, in Russian literature, is it not German science and technology that are so often admired? Intense passages in Turgenev express such sentiments.

I wonder if there is a parallel word in Russian.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Kipling’s exceedingly good books The mood in my trenches is particularly grumpy at the moment. I pride myself on not complaining about new initiatives, but the latest brilliant wheeze has properly riled me.

With levels of literacy falling, in part because of school closures, schools are scrabbling for ‘catch-up ideas’. My ideas – libraries, reading lessons etc – are obviously too old-fashioned.

The problem is real. I’d like to think everyone (without a learning difficulty) arrives at secondary school able to read, but this is not the case. Though I think it is neither really my job, nor my skill, to teach people to read, these students need extra help. I remember losing my temper with the sainted head at my first school when I told him that, however high our percentage of GCSE passes was, we had failed if one particular Traveller child left school illiterate.

Those words are coming back to haunt me. Because the new initiative is as old as time – teaching children phonics.

Anyone who has read Dr Seuss to a child has practised phonics. ‘Big B; little b – what begins with B? Barber, baby bubbles and a bumblebee.’

But that was then. And now we have to go a step further; we have (apparently) to sign along with the noises. And, maybe, even to sing them. It isn’t just English teachers who are going to be trained to

deliver lessons phonically. It is every teacher of every subject in the school. So a science teacher will be phonically delivering ‘photosynthesis’, for example.

A child who can’t read is perfectly capable of understanding what photosynthesis is, but won’t be able to write the word. It seems to me that if a child really can’t read, spelling photosynthesis correctly is not the first priority. But it is this third tier – the subject-specific spellings of academic vocabulary – that we will specifically have to teach phonetically.

‘You’ve finally made it, then!’

Watching videos of earnest Americans ‘educating’ us in phonetics sent me partly mad last week. As a petty act of revenge on I’m not quite sure whom, I decided to go as against the grain as I could.

In the work for Year 7 – on Victorians and Dickens – I found the very thing.

We’ve looked at inventions, and the Queen, and touched lightly, and oh so decorously, on the Empire. Now, as one of my favourite remonstrances to children who are being wet is ‘It’s no wonder we no longer have an Empire’, I took this idea and ran with it. And who else should come to mind but Kipling?

I had a ball with Kipling. I outlined all the reasons we aren’t allowed to study him any more, introducing the class along the way to such corking words as ‘misogyny’ and ‘jingoistic’.

I underlined the pathos of his life: the House of Desolation to which he and his sister were sent by their parents from India; his dead children. I pointed out words we had brought back from India – pyjama, bungalow, curry. I told them about mutinies and brave Indians fighting for freedom. And then I read them The Elephant’s Child.

I was gloriously, rebelliously, politically incorrect for a happy hour.

And the children have heard of Kipling without my having to sign, sing or stutter e-e-elephant.

Quite Interesting Things about … skin The English words skin, nice, science, insect and segment all derive from the Proto-Indo European root sek, ‘to cut’.

The skin of a Panamanian golden frog contains enough toxin to kill 1,200 mice.

The skin is the largest organ in the human body. It makes up about 15 per cent of the body’s weight and is about 20 square feet in area.

Depending on your size, your skin weighs 10-15lb.

The skin of a hippopotamus weighs a ton.

Each square inch of human skin has 65 hairs, 650 sweat glands, 1,300 nerve endings, 9,500,000 cells, 19 yards of blood vessels and 78 yards of nerves.

Nobody knows exactly how many holes there are in human skin. There are an estimated 2-5 million hair

follicles and perhaps twice that number of sweat glands.

An average 10 million bacteria live on each sq cm of your skin. Around the nose and in the armpit, the figure rises to 100 million. On the teeth and in the throat there can be 10,000 million bacteria per sq cm.

The outermost layer of your skin is made entirely of dead cells, which are replaced

every month. We shed skin at the rate of 25,000 flakes a minute – over a million pieces an hour.

People get through about 900 complete skins in a lifetime.

Unlike a human heart or a kidney, our skin never fails.

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia The Oldie June 2022 43

sister teresa

My row over nothing with Sister Wendy Twenty years ago, I had a short, pithy and productive altercation with the late Sister Wendy Beckett (1930-2018), the art commentator, while I was cleaning her bathroom. She lived in a caravan in a wood near our monastery.

I mentioned casually that I thought it was about time I gave a talk to the community.

W: I dare say it is.

T: I’ve got nothing to say at the moment.

W: Then talk about nothing. And don’t try to show off by giving a well-composed piece. Just stress that a nun chooses to live with nothingness. Our Lord had something to say about this. He is our life and we are left with this residual nothingness. We are given to God in recollection. That is the root of all love, because it means we are paying attention.

T: I can’t talk like that.

W: Well, find a picture. [She grunted.]

I can’t really talk about anything much without a picture.

She didn’t try to inspire. She didn’t recommend any particular picture. She just left me to get on with it. She also said that, in any difficult situation, she tried to imagine what the worse possible outcome could be – and then she would give it to God. She came up with two less-thancheering samples. The first was of her going in front of a camera, without a text, being expected to explain a picture ‘off the cuff’. The worst that could happen was that she would make a fool of herself.

She said she found this very easy to give to God. She also added that God was usually good to her, and she managed.

The second sample was going to the dentist, over which I shall draw a veil.

I thought of Wendy’s admiration for the late Agnes Martin, an American artist who tended to paint large abstract

pictures, often white on white, about which I have nothing to say.

I searched the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament and found kenosis, and emptiness, and the self-emptying of Christ – but none of these is nothingness.

‘In the beginning, there was the Word’ (John 1:1) – not helpful either.

I then checked the psalms. What comes up in them over and over again is grass. This is the nearest they get to nothingness – perhaps too abstract a concept for Jewish thinking.

As for man, his days are like grass; He flourishes like a flower in the field; For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, And its place knows it no more.

(Psalm 103:15) But grass and humans alike, once created, continue to exist. There is an inevitability about the way grass grows from seed and about the way we go forwards into eternity.

Memorial Service

Katharine Whitehorn CBE (1928-2021) The Curate of St James’s, Piccadilly, Rev Dr Mariama Ifode-Blease, paid tribute to Katharine Whitehorn, veteran columnist for the Spectator, the Observer, Punch and Saga, saying she had produced many wise aphorisms.

She quoted her book How to Survive in the Kitchen (1979): ‘Some achieve good cooking; some have cooking thrust upon them.’ She said the tone of her How to Survive books was encouraging and ruthlessly perceptive.

Cousin Marcus Gray read from A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘After her husband, author Gavin Lyall, died, Kath said that, though she had many friends to do things with, she had no one to do nothing with,’ said Gray. ‘They both loved Winnie-the-Pooh stories, which may have helped them 44 The Oldie June 2022

understand the value of just doing nothing.’

He then read from Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, Chapter 10, ‘In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place and We Leave Them There’.

Former Observer colleague Charlotte Metcalf (who writes on stinginess on page 28) told friends, ‘All of us who knew and loved Kath will know she never did anything by halves. If you were going to have lunch with her, it probably involved taking the afternoon off as, with her zest for life and considerately always wanting to hear about you, it was never going to be winnowed down to a quick hour. She was as generous with her time and attention as she was with everything else.’

She read a Punch piece Kath wrote in praise of excess. Metcalf said it was ‘a

classic example of Kath at her best, that sums up her attitude to living life to the full and, as a result, being the full-on, wonderful friend that she was to so many of us here today’.

‘She never confused love with money; she never cared what the neighbours thought,’ said her son Bernard Lyall. ‘She clearly had no time for assumed authority. Whatever your position, title or award, you still had to pass the bullshit test every time you opened your mouth.

‘Katharine worked for everything she had, and never felt she was owed any more. She treated her friends like family, and her family like friends. Not the most maternal creature, she was nonetheless someone I and my brother trusted absolutely, and with whom our relationship grew as we did ourselves.’

The hymns were Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise and Abide with Me. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Is there a cure for loneliness?

The medical reasons some of us hate being alone theodore dalrymple

‘If you are idle, be not solitary,’ said Doctor Johnson, ‘and if you are solitary, be not idle.’

As usual, the Great Cham of literature was right, even though he was not a doctor. He was, however, very interested in the medical science of his time and actually performed physiological experiments on himself.

Medical attention has recently been drawn to the ill-effects of loneliness, a blight that is said to be increasing. Of course, it is undesirable in itself, irrespective of its medical harms. If, per impossibile, it were found that loneliness were good for you in the strict medical sense, should we extol it?

A recent paper reported on the follow-up for ten years of over 2,000 people with an average age of 73.

About one in seven of them had symptoms of dementia ten years later, but the risk of those who reported loneliness – defined as feeling lonely for three days a week or more – was slightly more than 50 per cent higher. Moreover, scans of the brain of those who reported loneliness at the outset showed shrinkage and the other changes associated with dementia.

The paper went on to discuss the mechanism by which a psychological condition such as loneliness might cause changes in the brain. This is not intrinsically absurd, except perhaps for those hard-line dualists who would claim, implausibly, that the mind has nothing to do with the brain. I recall the London taxi driver more than 40 years ago who, asking me what I did as he took me to my hospital, thought deeply for about five minutes, and then said, ‘You know, mate, there’s something very mental about the brain.’

In fact, the brains of London taxi drivers, after they have done the Knowledge, show demonstrable physical changes.

But the paper also mentions the possibility of reverse causation (assuming the association is causative in

one direction or the other): that the feeling of loneliness is, or can be, itself a prodromal symptom of dementia; and therefore that it is not surprising that, ten years later, those who complained of loneliness should have an increased incidence of dementia (over 20 per cent).

The reverse causation is possible because the investigation alludes only to the feeling of loneliness, without any real or deep investigation of an objective correlative, such as actual, measurable social isolation. Insofar as this question is addressed by the paper – very superficially – it seems that not much difference was found in the social situation of those complaining of loneliness and those not complaining of it. In other words, it was the feeling of loneliness rather than any cause of it in reality that was measured.

But how would you measure a so-called objective cause for loneliness?

A man may feel lonely in the middle of a crowd, if no one in the crowd shares his interests or has anything in common

with him. Nothing human is alien to me is all very well as a dictum, but it cannot be made the basis of a fulfilling social life.

Despite our urban overcrowding, loneliness is said to be increasing: about an eighth of the American population claims to suffer from it, and up to 40 per cent of those over 60. Contrarily, a hermit is not lonely ex officio.

I recall reading in a medical journal that loneliness is treatable, as if it were a disease, such as a hormone deficiency – to be cured by a dose of sociability. If so, in my case it would have to be dosed very carefully: isn’t hell other people? I like time alone and, in a crowd, often wish I could absent myself with a book.

To be surrounded by people but to be lonely is as bad as to be busy but bored.

In the meantime, I recommend a dog, the nearest to a panacea yet found.

Theodore Dalrymple has just written a biography of his late dog, a Yorkshire Terrier, Ramses: A Memoir (New English Review Press)

‘Define poorer’ The Oldie June 2022 45

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

David Niven’s empty horses

My 15-year-old mistress

SIR: David Horspool’s beautifully judged search for a Historian Laureate (May issue) misses one trick. When Joshua Reynolds established the Royal Academy, he was careful to have appointed, as Honorary Professor of Ancient History, a fellow member of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club: one Edward Gibbon. A current equivalent post-holder is Dame Professor Mary Beard, though her RA title, since 2013, is Professor of Ancient Literature.

In the same issue, Nick Brown’s excellent survey of the career of film director Mihály Kertész alias Michael Curtiz omits his 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade. Possibly apocryphally, Curtiz is said to have demanded on the set of that movie, ‘Bring on the empty horses!’, which injunction David Niven used as the title of his admirably gossipy 1975 memoir of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood.

Yours sincerely, Paul Cartledge, Clare College, Cambridge

My experience as a pupil at a coeducational grammar school in Cornwall in the 1940s was very different from Liz Hodgkinson’s ten years later (May issue).

In the sixth form, boys and girls not only shared a classroom, but were allowed to share a desk, sitting side by side. During the lunch hour, if we brought a packed lunch instead of going to the canteen, three girls and I regularly went down the hill to the nearest beach for a bathe (photograph available on request).

After school, a mixed cast stayed behind to rehearse the school play, often retiring to a neighbouring classroom to rehearse a scene. A regular pairing would be taken lightly: one teacher referred to the closest of my friends as ‘your mistress’. If 15 was seen by anyone as a dangerous age, no one, teacher or pupil, seemed to know it.

Derek Parker, Bognor Regis, West Sussex

Elvis, the King of Films SIR: Besides Casablanca, Michael Curtiz (‘Here’s looking at you, kid’, May issue) in a long career made a number of memorable films; one that is often overlooked is King Creole, which was Elvis Presley’s fourth film. The story is based on a book by Harold Robbins and starred Walter Matthau, Carolyn Jones and Dean Jagger.

Elvis made over 30 films and most were lightweight – more like travelogues, with awful music and bikini-clad girls.

King Creole was different, with strong songs and a director who knew what he was doing. After King Creole, Elvis did two years in the army, and when he came out he never again showed what he was able to do on screen.

Opportunities were lost, but thanks to Mr Curtiz we were able to see what Elvis could do, given the chance. Like many of Michael Curtiz’s films, King Creole is worth repeat viewings.

Robin Wood, Kilmarnock

46 The Oldie June 2022

Best book ever SIR: The Old Un (May issue) gives the welcome news of a new Everyman edition of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. I have read this novel twice and I think that it is one of the greatest books about war – perhaps one of the greatest works of literature – ever written.

While the Battle of Stalingrad lies at the centre of the story, there are multiple plot lines, against the background of a

struggle between two totalitarian states.

Episodes take place in both Russian and German prisoner camps. Grossman criticises Stalinism, which led the KGB to do everything in its power to prevent publication, but a copy was eventually smuggled out to the west, with first English publication in 1985.

An earlier book, Stalingrad, a precursor to Life and Fate, professed loyalty to Stalinism and was published in Russia in 1952, though not published in English translation until 2019. I found it, too, an outstanding historical novel.

If you have a list of ‘things to do before I die’, make sure that you add reading Life and Fate to it!

Best wishes, Graham Galer, Beckford, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

Communist hobgoblin SIR: The Old Un’s concern about historic bias against hobgoblins (May issue) omitted one famous example.

English translations of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto famously begin with the sentence ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’ However, an 1850 translation by Helen Macfarlane became notorious for the unintentionally hilarious opening line ‘A frightful hobgoblin is haunting Europe…’

One cannot help but wonder how

‘He’s bringing a friend with him … he’s nasty, brutish & short – you’ll like him’

different the history of the 20th century might have been, had Ms Macfarlane’s version prevailed.

Yours faithfully, Christopher Goulding, Newcastle upon Tyne

Witches’ brew SIR: To Be a Pilgrim is a favourite hymn which I play as often as I dare in our village church, and I’m grateful to the Old Un (May issue) for drawing attention to the words that diverge from Bunyan’s original, which I hadn’t appreciated.

The three hymn-books in the house, including a 1933 edition of Harrow School’s English Hymnal, all have the modernised version. However, in Songs of Praise from Bedford, 2011, the BBC gave us the full and proper text, including the opening lines ‘Who would true valour see, /Let him come hither; /One here will constant be, /Come wind, come weather’. Long live the BBC! Also, as it happens, before opening my copy of the May issue, I, who almost never drinks or buys beer, fancied one after a bike ride, and bought a bottle of Hobgoblin from the village shop, Hobgoblin: simply because it had the low in lowest alcohol content. It is spirits brewed by Wychwood Brewery, of course. The label depicts a grinning mischievous creature wielding an axe. Hobgoblins are definitely alive and well in the 21st century!

Kind regards, Nicky Cross, Llandysul, Carmarthenshire

Jean Rhys’s real champion SIR: Jean Rhys’s champion was Francis Wyndham, not Wyndham Lewis (Books, May issue, Alan Judd’s review of Miranda Seymour’s Jean Rhys biography). Wyndham Lewis is my son and was my father and my great-grandfather. The latter was also Oldie deputy-editor Jeremy Lewis’s grandfather’s brother, in Monmouthshire at the turn of the last century.

There was also the Vorticist painter Percy Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957, who went blind. Whether he knew Jean Rhys I have no idea.

Francis Wyndham (1924-2017) was the editor and reader at André Deutsch who helped shape Wide Sargasso Sea. His introduction to

‘A divorce would give us something to talk about’

the first edition (1966) still appears in Penguin Modern Classics reprints.

He became Jean Rhys’s literary executor and, with Diana Melly, edited the correspondence.

Yours, Roger Lewis, Hastings, East Sussex

Bomber Harris under fire

SIR: I found the article about Bomber Harris (May issue) a difficult read.

This ‘practical and kind’ man made it his personal mission to destroy the morale of Germany by slaughtering its civilians by the hundreds of thousands.

There have been many books written on the subject. Most cast doubt on the efficacy of this policy’s even shortening the war. I am no fan of wokeism, but the fact that his statue is still standing frankly perplexes me.

Malcolm Willgress, London N20

Gentlemen in dresses SIR: I was amused by the letter headed ‘Which side do you dress?’ (May issue).

It brought back memories of a gentlemen’s WC in Redcar, North Yorkshire. I was only a child in the 1950s and ’60s, and the sign on the wall next to the door amused me. It requested, ‘Gentlemen: please adjust your dress before leaving the premises.’

Most men did not wear dresses in those days.

Stewart Tough, Marske-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire

Dangerous vitamins SIR: The article on Vitamin D by Theodore Dalrymple (May issue) was right on the nail, but I can assure him that Vitamin A is not the only vitamin that is toxic in the wrong dose. A patient admitted under my care seriously unwell with a high calcium level proved to be taking a vastly increased dose of Vitamin D. She got better immediately it was stopped. It could unquestionably have killed her.

Dr N P Hudd MA FRCP, Consultant Physician, Tenterden, Kent

London’s last spats SIR: I was interested to read in The Old Un’s Notes (May issue) of the demise of the suit among professional young men in London.

My late grandfather, a barrister born in 1879, used to proclaim proudly that he was the last man to travel to London daily wearing spats. Quite what he would have made of ‘midtown uniform’ is anyone’s guess!

David Greig, Tiverton, Devon

lies about its age SIR: Am I alone in spotting that there were (and still are) only 19 visible candles on the ‘The Oldie Turns 30!’ March-issue front-cover birthday cake? Or was this some kind of test to see if we oldies still retain our keen powers of observation?

(I really must get out more…)

Sincerely, Wilfrid de Freitas, Montreal, Canada The Oldie June 2022 47

I Once Met

Lauren Bacall In 1973, I was working backstage at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on the musical Applause.

Most people will remember it as the stage version of the Bette Davies film All About Eve (1950).

Lauren Bacall was the star of the show.

I used to see Miss Bacall coming off stage every night. For a young aspiring actor, to be so close to Humphrey Bogart’s wife was a privilege. She certainly had all the charisma and confidence of the old Hollywood school.

I used to love the way she spoke to the deputy stage manager in that husky tone of hers, when she came off stage, with remarks such as ‘That man in the pit, he’s a disaster!’

I never found out what the problem was between her and the conductor, as I never saw the show from out front. But she certainly spoke her mind and didn’t seem to care who overheard her!

My contribution to the show, apart from my moving a few chairs around, became suddenly very important when I was told by the stage manager that I was to winch on the chaise longue on which Miss Bacall sat in one scene.

It was a simple action but a very

Bacall in Applause, 1972

important one, as Miss Bacall was very fussy about the positioning of this chaise and my predecessor had not always got it right. She had complained to the deputy stage manager, ‘It’s never in the right place!’

Imagine my trepidation when I was told I had to do this job. In those days, there were no electronic buttons. You turned a steel winch handle until a

marker appeared level with your eyes – that was the moment the chaise was in the right position on stage!

On the following night, all was set for me to do the job. Two guys placed the chaise in the off-stage groove, ready for it to be winched on. Then I awaited the dreadful command from the deputy stage manager: ‘Chaise, GO!’ I was sweating a bit, but the chaise seemed to move to the right position.

Miss Bacall then came over to me by the winch and said in her husky tones, ‘You’re the only one who’s got that chaise in the right spot! Well done!’

I felt the stage boards rumble beneath my feet and my height rose ten feet. ‘Is this me she’s referring to? God, I’ve been complimented by Humphrey Bogart’s wife!’

I developed a great fondness for the sheer style and quality of Miss Bacall’s stardom. I remember it to this day vividly, and I inwardly celebrate that Hollywood star system which has all but disappeared today.

Come back, Miss Bacall, and let us speak and sing on that beautiful chaise longue of yours!

Michael Theodorou

The Battersea Big Dipper tragedy

Fifty years ago, on 30th May 1972, I was on duty at BBC Radio London when we learnt about a devastating accident in south London.

Battersea’s Big Dipper, packed with 31 riders, began its ascent of the initial incline.

Seconds later, it hurtled back down. Three children were dead. Sixteen were seriously injured, with two more to die in subsequent weeks.

Battersea Fun Fair was part of the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank, where the Skylon enthralled young baby 48 The Oldie June 2022

boomers. Two miles upstream was the fairground.

Both sections were planned to last for one year.

In autumn 1951, the South Bank was stripped but the Pleasure Garden gained an extension. Sadly, in 1952 crowds diminished, but a third year was sanctioned and numbers increased, as directors Sir Leslie Joseph and Charles Forte negotiated a longer lease.

Many rides required refurbishment. The Mountain Scenic, owned by John Collins, was forced out in 1954, being described as ‘a discredit with its rotten timber’. Collins also operated the Big Dipper.

John was the adopted son of Pat Collins, who ran a park near Sutton Coldfield. Here, in 1937, an American crew built an impressive rollercoaster.

John was inspired to build a bigger ride for Glasgow’s 1938 Exhibition.

During the court case, scant detail was revealed about the Collins Dipper. Arriving at Battersea in November 1950, it had operated at Sutton Coldfield since 1946. During the war, its parts had been stored at Southport, together with the Mountain Caterpillar.

These were bought, at scrap value, by John Collins in 1945.

Both operated in Southport until 1940. Disturbingly, the Battersea Dipper had been constructed in 1922.

A Dipper cashier said that managers were often drunk, teenage staff used drugs and maintenance was minimal, with one manager ‘out of his depth’.

John Collins, ill at the time, left control to his sons, who

the judge maintained were not responsible. A monthly safety inspection had to comment only on the visible condition, not the mechanical operation.

The teenage brakeman on the final ride was never questioned by police, nor called as a witness.

No one was ever convicted, although, in a later civil action, the owner’s son was fined £5,500 and admitted liability.

A memorial to the victims is currently being considered

by Wandsworth Council.

By Robert Preedy, author of Battersea Fun Fair (Joyland Books), who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books 1917 and all that Owen Matthews admires Antony Beevor’s account of the Russian Revolution – caused by riots, hopeless trains and imperial hubris

A

fter his monumental works on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, Antony Beevor’s history of the Russian Revolution triumphantly confirms him as Britain’s leading military historian.

The narrative brio, magpie eye for telling facts and confident handling of a vastly complex cast of characters and stories that made his previous books modern classics are fully in evidence.

One of the great strengths of Beevor’s writing is use of little-known sources (the book is chivalrously dedicated to his long-time researcher, Lyuba Vinogradova). The conservative politician Vasily Shulgin, one of these sources, delivers this pithy verdict on Tsar Nicholas II’s vacillating rule: ‘Autocracy without an autocrat is a terrible thing.’

And Viktor Shklovsky, the commissar allocated to general Lavr Kornilov’s Eighth Army, describes his prickly and reckless chief as viewing ‘the army just as a good driver views his automobile’.

Beevor quotes the diaries of military doctor Vasily Kravkov extensively.

‘Bloody jacqueries have started like those of Stepan Razin and Pugachev!’ writes Kravkov, whose initial enthusiasm for the February Revolution of 2017 had quickly descended into appalled shock. ‘The 50 The Oldie June 2022

uncontrolled frenzied masses have their own ways to celebrate freedom … There are moments when I want to get out of this nightmarish dark pit of anarchy.’

Various Brits have unexpected walk-on parts. The future Viceroy of India Archibald Wavell served as a liaison officer to the Russian Army. Arthur Ransome was an amateur spy, as was the concert pianist Paul Dukes, who had been signed up to the British Secret Intelligence Service by Captain Mansfield Cumming.

Dukes found himself among the crowds at Petrograd’s Finland Station shortly before midnight on 3rd April 1917, when Lenin’s sealed train arrived, bringing the Bolshevik leader back from exile in Switzerland.

The following year, General Lionel Dunsterville – a schoolfriend of Rudyard Kipling and the original for Kipling’s character Stalky – commanded a British expeditionary force sent to protect the oilfields of the Caucasus.

It is impossible not to think of the parallels with Putin’s war against Ukraine

The ground Beevor covers is familiar from Orlando Figes’s masterful A People’s Tragedy – but the narrative is nonetheless studded with striking and unfamiliar details.

The fuel-and-bread shortage in Petrograd that led to mass unrest and revolution in February 1917 was not, Beevor points out, due to a lack of grain and coal but to a chaotic and mismanaged railway system that was failing under the pressure of war mobilisation.

And the refusal of the Volynsky Guards to fire on protesters – ‘in Communist mythology … the incident which brought the Petrograd garrison round to the revolution,’ says Beevor – was in fact motivated less by their sympathy for striking workers than by the troops’ reluctance to obey pending orders to be sent to the front.

The socialist writer Maxim Gorky, later fêted by Stalin, also emerges as an unexpectedly sceptical voice. Seeing the ruin caused by riots in February 1917, he predicted that revolution would lead to ‘Asiatic savagery’.

Gorky, who had lived in close proximity to Russia’s underclass, was, unlike the liberals who led the Provisional Government, ‘under no illusion that the Russian people were

GARY WING

the “incarnation of spiritual beauty and kindness”.’

In the wake of the Bolshevik coup on 7th November 1917, Gorky fearlessly – and prophetically – wrote that ‘the working class should know that miracles do not occur in real life, that they are to expect hunger, complete disorder in industry, disruption of transport, and protracted bloody anarchy … Lenin is not an omnipotent magician but a coldblooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the life of the proletariat.’

It is impossible to read the story of imperial Russia’s hubris, military defeat and chaotic collapse in 1917 without thinking of the parallels with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly disastrous war against Ukraine.

Like Putin, Nicholas II and his Empress Alexandra were surrounded by yes-men who convinced them that the ‘real’ Russian people adored them.

‘I now have the great pleasure of knowing that the whole of Russia, the true Russia, the Russia of humble folk and peasants, is with me,’ the Empress told Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna.

In the wake of political upheaval, thousands of members of the former classes (bourgeois opponents of the regime) – then, as now – fled to Tbilisi, Georgia.

‘A nice town, a poor man’s Moscow,’ observed Shklovsky. ‘I spent one night with the Georgian Futurists. Nice kids, more homesick for Moscow than Chekhov’s sisters.’

And the Bolsheviks shared both their Tsarist predecessors’ and Putinist successors’ arrogant contempt and distrust for Ukrainian nationalism. After a brutal occupation by the Red Army, citizens of Odessa came out in droves to greet German officers arriving to arrange their withdrawal in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

The Germans in their Pickelhaube helmets ‘came down the steps, straight as ramrods. Suddenly the crowd started yelling “Urrraaa!” without any restraint, and threw their hats in the air and applauded,’ wrote Elena Lakier, another little-known source. ‘The Germans, rather surprised, turned to bow, and their automobile departed.’

For the Ukrainians, even support from

their recent enemies, the Germans, was welcome if it helped to get rid of Russian overlords.

There are a few minor lapses. The anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin was indeed a nobleman but not a ‘Prince’. In Russian, an iron stove is known as a burzhika, a female bourgeoise, not a ‘burzhui’. And – in a surprising slip for a former British officer – ‘case shot’ refers to Napoleonic-era artillery, not the fléchettes or air-burst rounds used against infantry in The First World War, which Beevor clearly has in mind.

Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 is a glorious read – pacy, engaging and filled with moving personal testimony. Just as in Stalingrad, Beevor brings a grand historical epic to urgent, teeming life.

Owen Matthews, former Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, is the author of Stalin’s Children Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£30) The Oldie June 2022 51

The Grand Old Duke of Kent NICKY HASLAM A Royal Life

By HRH The Duke of Kent and Hugo Vickers Hodder & Stoughton £25 Forget those ten thousand men, marched up and down to the top of the hill by some dotty, 18th-century antecedent.

The number is negligible compared with the tally of people Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, 86, has encountered throughout his long life; the global distances he has travelled; the potentates he has mollified; the warlords he has disarmed; the troops and regiments for whom he has been the commanding officer.

He says his life has been devoted to the service of his monarch and cousin, but the impression given by this book is one of more than mere family duty.

Selflessness and sincerity shine from every page.

It can’t have been easy. The loss, at the beginning of the Second World War, of his father in a fatal plane crash when Prince Edward was only seven – which tellingly did not deter him from learning to fly – placed him, as the youngest royal duke, in an unexpected spotlight, which simultaneously reduced the position of his suddenly widowed mother Princess Marina.

While by lineage royal through and through, and by nature cosmopolitan, she was now regarded, owing to the custom of the time, as a slightly lesser member of the family. With, mid-war, three very young children to raise, and enforced separation from her close-knit kin and loved friends, this bereavement made family life at nearby Coppins, Buckinghamshire, somewhat straitened.

Despite some support from her in-laws at Windsor, not until the Duke, and his sister Princess Alexandra and younger brother Prince Michael, grew up enough could a youthful spirit enliven Princess Marina’s life. She re-emerged as the elegant, witty and beloved figure they and her friends hold in their hearts.

Besides his British birthright, through his mother the Duke is descended from most European royal bloodlines. This varied ancestry, and his age, mean that – now almost uniquely – he saw and knew a world that has completely passed: émigré Russians, displaced Balkans, dethroned monarchs, widowed queens,

charm-filled diplomats and dubious statesmen who are today the stuff of the period’s diarists.

Yet his outlook is totally modern, without an iota of sentimentality. He has amusing recollections of the many eccentric relations and figures who peopled that past. But there was always an enquiring mind, an eye for knowledge and indeed pleasure in the new age he grew into. Mechanics, technology, electronics, engines, marksmanship, sport and very fast cars – he’s had three serious crashes – are more his thing.

The traditional education followed an unsettled childhood: bully-ruled prep school; less severe Eton (I was intrigued to read that the few beaks who encouraged him were the same as mine, a few years later).

But his chronic sinusitis enforced a switch from swampy Slough to salubrious Switzerland. At Le Rosey, a more international set honed innate diplomatic skills, and an aptitude for other languages rare in many of his family.

Nevertheless, an army career beckoned. In the course of it he served with distinction, from square-bashing barracks, peace-keeping forces and violent hot spots to, ultimately, the rank of Field Marshal.

But this education was frequently interrupted by sudden summonses back to London for family events, not least the Queen’s crowning. A cousin who flew with him was given his school’s permission: ‘Reason: coronation of a relative.’

Throughout – and since – the army years, the Duke has many times represented his sovereign at State ceremonies worldwide; ceremonies now questioned and mocked, but at the time of deep significance.

And, during that career, marriage and children – all of whom have stayed,

except occasionally by dint of beauty and original outlook, modestly below the radar. Their children’s wide-eyed impressions of any occasional involvement in state occasions emphasise this lack of assumption.

Equally, the Duke shrugs off any praise for this endeavour. ‘It’s not my book – it’s Hugo’s,’ he says.

Vickers has chosen an ideal format.

With his minimal yet informative editorial interlacing, the voices and reminiscences of family and friends merge seamlessly, giving the impression of gathering round the fire on a winter evening.

We realise how fortunate it is for the Queen to have such a reliable, humane and sensitive figure to shoulder so many of her responsibilities, and how selflessly indeed he has served his cousin and monarch.

Carry on raging ROGER LEWIS Old Rage

By Sheila Hancock Bloomsbury £18.99 Should Dame Sheila Hancock come stomping towards you, perhaps on the Hammersmith towpath, steer clear.

Declaring in her new book ‘I am a grumpy old woman’ and ‘I am by nature aggressive’, which is odd for a Quaker, she reveals that the past few years have seen her ‘in turmoil’ because ‘misery has swamped my brain’.

The chief problem, next to automated ticket barriers that won’t open, rude airport officials and the prospect of £106 billion utterly wasted on HS2, is Brexit. As Hancock reminds us, 51.89 per cent voted to leave, 48.11 per cent voted to remain – which was hardly an appreciable margin – and 30 per cent of the adult population didn’t bother to vote at all.

The Oldie June 2022 53

Hancock has long kept a home in France, and the xenophobia the referendum churned up she took personally. ‘Everything I believed in and, in my small way, fought for, has seemingly been abandoned’ – liberal virtues, European unity.

She’d liked the prospect of ‘a big, multicultural, European hotchpotch of races, striving to share our wealth and success and troubles with one another’. Her picture was bigger than trade deals and economics – Hancock wanted to commingle with a world that gave us Beethoven.

What’s horrible, in Hancock’s reckoning, is the populism suddenly revealed – whipped up by all these chancers who’d not have been out of place in the thirties: Rees-Mogg (‘patronising, insensitive, condescending and appallingly derisive’), scruffy Dominic Cummings (whose ‘simplistic brainwashing slogans’ are worthy of Hitler), Farage (with his ‘obscene, gape-mouthed, roaring laugh’), Boris Johnson (‘has worked hard on his boyish messiness’) and Trump (‘nasty, tacky, with silly blow-dried hair’).

The trouble is, Hancock can’t rant about this to her contemporaries, as they are either dead or doolally, ‘apathetic and detached’, preferring to talk about tea and cakes.

Yet if old people are bores, truly animated only when subjects such as strokes and knee replacements come up, Hancock, at nearly 90, is aware of physical deterioration. Rheumatoid arthritis is her latest burden – limbs and extremities full of pain, inflammation levels in the joints elevated.

She’s been prescribed heavy doses of steroids, which ‘gave me frenetic energy’.

Suddenly the actress was scrabbling on the peaks of Scottish mountains and going on narrow-boat excursions with Gyles Brandreth, who tripped on the poop deck and blackened his eye.

Then the pandemic came about and Hancock underwent house imprisonment – which she didn’t much mind, even if her earnings fell to £57.38, her slice of the DVD sales of a television programme shown abroad. London free of motor traffic was blissful. Bird song could be heard. Plants sprouted along the Thames.

But it’s more than this. Twenty years on from being widowed – Hancock’s book about John Thaw’s terminal cancer and her bereavement, The Two of Us, is rightly an established classic – if her grief is blunted, it is because Hancock has discovered the joys of solitude.

Manhattan mystery NICHOLAS LEZARD Happy-Go-Lucky

By David Sedaris Little, Brown £18.99

‘I have freedom,’ she now says. ‘I can live a totally selfish life, eat when I like, go where I like … without having to fit in with someone else’s life.’ Lockdown consolidated this.

Thaw, by all accounts, was a moody article, reclusive, friendless by choice – his taciturnity the result of shyness, apparently, or being northern.

Hancock can still feel ‘his presence, his energy’; their marriage was, as she says, ‘turbulent’ – but all of this made him the great actor he was, his characters, like Morse, temperamentally chippy, dissatisfied.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of Old Rage is Hancock’s perceptive description of performers: Russell Brand’s ‘edge of mad recklessness’, Nicholas Parsons’s ‘old-fashioned cravat-and-blazer-type charm’. Like many comics, Brian Rix was ‘an intensely serious man’. Vera Lynn’s gift was that ‘she didn’t dance about and pull funny faces. She just stood there.’

I fully endorse Hancock’s amazement that we have been allowed to forget the likes of James Mason, Kenneth More, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton.

Aware she’ll be remembered chiefly for playing Senna Pod in Carry On Cleo – and there’s nothing wrong with that – Hancock, who has worked up from OBE to CBE and now DBE, looks back with nostalgia at the theatres after the war: the ‘cracked black-pitted mirrors surrounded by broken light bulbs’, and mice eating the make-up sticks.

Her co-star in Torquay and Bournemouth was a bombastic David Baron, who had ambitions to be a writer.

He changed his stage name back to his original name, Harold Pinter, and went on to do quite well.

I shall begin with a disclaimer of sorts: parts of this review may be motivated by envy.

For what Sedaris does is, essentially, what I do in the New Statesman: that is, mine my personal life for humorous or wry observations. The crucial difference is that Sedaris is, by several orders of magnitude, wealthier than me.

To illustrate: I live in a tiny onebedroom flat in Brighton which I can barely afford; Sedaris bought the flat on the floor above his in central Manhattan so that his partner could practise the piano undisturbed by anyone else’s presence.

And, to make things somehow worse, we learn in this book that his sister Amy, with whom he has many times collaborated, bought the flat upstairs from her central Manhattan apartment so she could have a break from her pet rabbit, who had apparently been running amok.

Somehow I don’t think either of these apartments is tiny, and if Sedaris’s piano isn’t one of the better grands, I will be very much surprised.

That said, Sedaris is very good at what he does, as you probably know, for he has been a regularly recurring performer on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra; and his books sell well, too. And he also works really hard, spending months at a time on tour.

So I suppose he deserves his comforts, as I do mine.

And also: he really, really wants it. I notice this in the first piece in this book, ‘Active Shooter’, in which he and one of his other sisters, Lisa, go to a shooting range in North Carolina called ProShots.

The instructor, for some reason, decides he is called Mike, not David. Here is Sedaris’s reaction: ‘From then until the time we left, my name was Mike, which was more than a little demoralising. Not getting the “Wait a minute – the David Sedaris?” was bad enough, but being turned into a Mike, of all things?’

Note that ‘was bad enough’. I have had ‘Are you Nicholas Lezard?’ three times in my life, and two of those times the person asking the question was a bailiff.

Elsewhere, he retells a story about the legendary American humorous columnist Russell Baker, and Baker’s mother’s being (possibly because of dementia) wholly unimpressed that her son had The Oldie June 2022 55

won a Pulitzer. Sedaris closes with the line ‘Seek approval from the one person you desperately want it from, and you’re guaranteed not to get it.’

Ah, I thought – so it’s approval he wants. That’s why he puts the hours in.

But after reading the following, I realise it is not just approval and recognition he wants – it’s a reaction. Here he is, in his sixties, talking to someone at a garden party in West Sussex: ‘ “My boyfriend will turn twenty-one this coming Wednesday,” I continue, “and you are so right about the moodiness of young men his age. I mean, honestly, what do they have to be so angry about?” ’ He goes on: ‘I do this all the time – tell people misleading things about Hugh … sometimes I say that he’s been blind since birth or is a big shot in the right-tolife movement, but the best is when he’s forty-plus years my junior.’

Now, this is very funny to contemplate, but there is one thing that bothers me, and that is the veracity of his accounts.

This is a bit of a problem in that his stories are billed as being true, but it turns out they’re not, or not all wholly true. The New Yorker used to publish his work under the category of non-fiction; they still publish him, but not under that heading. I think this is problematic because when he’s writing about his father’s horrible creepiness when Sedaris and his siblings were children, I think it’s important to be confident that we’re being told the truth.

And, while we’re at it, does he really tell people at garden parties that his partner is 40 years younger than him/ blind etc? Is he lying about lying? The head begins to spin. (I looked up ProShots. It exists.)

I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end.

Here we have a perfectly entertaining book, some very funny jokes (slightly cheating in one chapter, which is full of jokes you’d tell someone in the pub, but hey), a work lightly themed with the pandemic in New York, his father’s last days, and his amusing sisters (with the exception of one, a suicide).

‘It’s time we talked … the lap is mine’

King Melv of Cumbria HUNTER DAVIES Back in the Day

By Melvyn Bragg Sceptre £20 Melvyn Bragg is our greatest living Cumbrian – even bigger than haulage king Eddie Stobart.

Like Wordsworth, Melvyn is Cumbrian born and bred, and has never really left Lakeland or stopped loving it.

He is now a national treasure, loved by all, especially Radio 4 listeners. I am in awe at the way he handles those academics on In Our Time and his ability every week to mug up on a totally different and awfully erudite subject.

His life peerage, unlike that of so many recipients, is well deserved. I don’t know anyone who does more for the arts than Melvyn.

My wife, Margaret Forster, and I, also Cumbrians, grew up in the big city of Carlisle, while Melvyn was brought up in Wigton, a small town ten miles away – out in the sticks where they had straw in their ears, or so we city slickers thought.

We did not meet till we all came to London in the sixties. He and my wife had the same publisher, Secker & Warburg. He and I had the same agent.

Our first meeting was supper at the Arts Club, on 22nd November 1963 – the day Kennedy was killed. That’s why I remember it.

At the time, Melvyn did still seem a country lad, with big specs and rather greasy hair. Now look at him! Wow! So well dressed and handsome, with luxurious hair. Makes me so jealous.

When my wife was alive, she was always saying, ‘Why don’t you get a suit like Melvyn’s, or wear leather shoes like Melvyn?’

Today, many fans and admirers of his excellent radio and TV programmes tend to forget he is also a distinguished author, with almost 40 books to his name. I remember, back in the sixties, his editor at Secker telling us Melvyn was the new Thomas Hardy. I rather scoffed, being a big-city Carlisle type.

But now, all these decades later, I can see what he meant.

Melvyn’s first memoir, Back in the Day, is about growing up in Wigton and working-class life in a small, rural, northern town in the fifties. It is beautifully written, lyrical and romantic, touching and tender.

When I went through Wigton as a boy, there was an awful smell from the

cellophane factory. Little did I know that life inside Wigton was a microcosm of the best of all England, full of honest, God-fearing men and strong women.

Melvyn was born in 1939 – not in Wigton, as people assume, but in Carlisle. His mother, Ethel, went to the maternity hospital there to give birth, returning to Wigton. Her husband, Stan, became the tenant of a Wigton pub, the Blackamoor, and Melvyn, an only child, was brought up in a flat above the pub.

At Nelson Thomlinson, the local grammar school in Wigton, he wasn’t a high-flyer in his early years. In fact, he worried his grades wouldn’t be good enough for the sixth form. Aged 14, he suffered some sort of panic attacks or out-of-body experiences – very like those experienced by Wordsworth at the same age. His schoolwork suffered, but he managed to settle down, determined to study hard and prove wrong those who suggested he should leave school at 16 and get a job, like most boys and girls at that time.

He sings in a skiffle group, joins the scouts, attends church, takes endless bike rides into the Lakes, plays rugby for the school and starts going out with girls – all the usual growing-up stuff, but well and evocatively told.

One episode relates something that never happened to me. He and three other boys fancy the same girl, who agrees to be taken into the woods and, one by one, they have ten minutes lying on top of her. Fully clothed, of course.

None of that knickers-off nonsense. This is the fifties. The most they got, through four layers of heavy clothing, was a feel of a breast.

She then chooses which one she will go out with. And it is not Melvyn – sob, sob.

Eventually, he does meet the love of his life, a girl called Sarah. He goes to see her father, a farmer, to ask if she can go youth-hostelling with him in the Lakes, promising nothing untoward will happen to her. I can’t quite believe Melvyn has remembered the exact dialogue after all these decades, but the tensions ring true.

Sarah leaves school at 16 and goes to work in the Midland Bank. Melvyn gets into the sixth form – and wins a scholarship to Oxford. That is where the memoir ends, alas. I enjoyed and admired it all and wanted to read more.

What happens to Sarah when Melvyn reaches Oxford?

As all Cumbrians know, Melvyn has never really left Wigton. His heart will be there for ever.

The Oldie June 2022 57

Not the age of the train CHRISTOPHER HOWSE British Rail: A New History

By Christian Wolmar Michael Joseph £30 You can tell Christian Wolmar is really keen on trains when he enthuses about the ‘acrid burning smell’ the brakes used to make on the Seventies 125s. He found it ‘not entirely unpleasant’. The problem took 15 years to sort out.

Extraordinary details keep breaking in on the half-century of Britain’s nationalised railways, 1948-97. The book might have been dry, had the author kept to his declared aim of showing how British Railways’ ‘reputation has been traduced by those who sought to break it up’.

Wolmar, a long-time railway journalist and Labour politician, leaps to defend the British Rail sandwich, which he denies was curly, and was in any case saved by Prue Leith and shrink-wrap.

But even if those sandwiches were as fresh as new-mown cress, they went with something nasty in the trainshed that happened between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP (or, to be exact, five days after it, in March 1963). I mean Beeching.

And, linked with the Beeching Report, a couple of years later came the cosmetic change to British Rail that gives this book its title (although British Railways remained the legal name).

Beeching, like Suez, is more often cited than explained. Wolmar beguilingly narrates the events that, like Dutch elm disease, transformed the way the British saw their own country.

Richard Beeching, on more than twice the Prime Minister’s salary, shook to bits a railway system sprained by war.

It covered 20,000 miles at nationalisation in 1948, employed 640,000 men and 7,000 horses, and until 1958 ran special trains to take 80,000 hop-pickers into Kent. It had last made an operating profit in 1955.

Beeching decided to close a third of stations and 5,000 miles of line.

The election of a Labour government in 1964 did not stop the cuts. Only 940 miles had been closed by the end of 1963, compared with more than 1,000 miles in each of the next three years. From 1974, under Harold Wilson, Tony Crosland wanted more fare rises and more service cuts. The financial methodology for judging profitability was lamentable. There was naturally no inkling

Apotheosis: Sir Edwin’s Office Party by Lutyens’s assistant R Walker. From Lut: Life in the Office of Sir Edwin Lutyens, ed Mark Lutyens (Anthony Eyre, £25)

that in a few decades an alternative to oil-guzzling cars might be wanted.

When Labour didn’t renew Beeching’s contract, John Lennon invited him to sort out the Beatles’ finances. He wisely declined.

But once the British Rail label was adopted in 1965, a lot of changes were made – for, I think, style reasons at best.

Euston Station, with its Great Hall – ‘by far the most impressive railway waiting room in Britain’, as Wolmar acknowledges – had already been demolished so that its replacement could seem like an airport, though one with no seats.

Worse, many a small station waiting room, with simple benches and a cheery coal fire kept up by railwaymen, was replaced by a boxy prefabricated building system called Clasp which required ‘no design work before it appeared on site’. Some of the units came with asbestos, too.

The double-arrow logo (a word unfamiliar in 1965) and a livery of blue-green that ‘carried dirt well’ attempted to suggest modernity like the Mini and the miniskirt. The British Rail corporate-identity manual was sold as a coffee-table book for those already taking an interest in Terence Conran.

Nameplates for locomotives were guiltily dropped for bucking the trendiness, and not brought back until 1977. That would be on diesel locos, for the 16,100 steam engines in service in 1958 had gone, every one, by 1968.

They had to go, but they were hustled out sooner than necessary, on passenger services first, and the large variety of diesel replacements were prone to breakdown. Here, Wolmar includes a fine gricer’s detail of British Rail’s Vale of Rheidol narrowgauge line that in fact retained steam till the 1980s.

The Oldie June 2022 59

So if this was the Age of the Train, it was one with advertisements fronted by Jimmy Savile. In came surprisingly troublesome attempts at fast trains that tilted (to get round curves) which left passengers feeling it made the going queasy. Out went the esprit de corps of coalmen and firedroppers, cranemen and shedmen, water-softening-plant attendants and timekeepers.

It wasn’t nationalisation that made the railways lovable any more than privatisation in 1997 directly caused train crashes. British railways have always been astonishingly badly run. As with democracy, though, the railway is the worst form of travel except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Christopher Howse is author of The Train in Spain (Bloomsbury)

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Murder in the vicarage REVEREND JONATHAN AITKEN Murder Before Evensong Reverend Richard Coles Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 The Reverend Richard Coles is already famous as a colourful clerical character and a pop star in the Communards.

But the flashy stuff he struts on Strictly Come Dancing and on TV chat shows is lightweight ephemera compared with his sparkling new literary creation, Murder Before Evensong – the first novel in the Canon Clement Mystery series.

Canon Daniel Clement is the Rector of Champton St Mary’s, a jewel of Perpendicular architecture, where time has stood still. The church has managed without a lavatory for four centuries.

The novel opens with an exquisitely comic account of a church meeting at which leading members of the congregation oppose the rector’s plans to modernise the facilities. Their reasons range from ‘No one wants to hear flushing during worship’ and objections to removing pews, to darker unexplained secrets which go back to the wartime billeting of Free French Officers in Champton.

The plot tickles rather than thickens in the early chapters, as Coles entertains his readers with a pyrotechnic display of literary skills. These include similes worthy of P G Wodehouse. A son of the village squire has ‘the frog-faced look of

an unmistakable English aristocrat’ whose stately home is ‘as cosy as a Cistercian monastery’.

Several of the character portraits are up to the high standards set by Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. This reviewer laughed out loud over the diocesan bishop’s visitation on a mission to promote a parish merger of Champton St Mary with Upper and Lower Balsaddle. With the Rector and the Lord of the Manor (also the patron of the living) regarding the neighbouring Balsaddles as ‘like Ulan Bator’, the episcopal mission fails.

Readers will laugh over multiple passages throughout the book. Coles has a gift for subtle comic writing, with echoes of Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, A G Macdonell’s England, Their England, Penelope Keith in To the Manor Born and Dawn French playing the vicar of Dibley. If he can keep this up for a series, Coles will surely have his niche in the pantheon of English literary humour.

The central character of the book, Canon Daniel Clement, is a quintessential if mythical figure, the saintly English country vicar. He has no faults at all except his bad driving. He loves his dogs, his mother, the daily offices, the Coverdale translation of the Psalms and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. He knows his parishioners well, extending the benefit of the doubt and forgiveness to even the most irritating and wayward sheep of his fold.

But not quite. This scholarly rector becomes worldly wise and intuitively suspicious as the plot begins to develop.

When murder most foul hits Crampton, Canon Clement gradually morphs into Miss Marple with a dog

collar. He befriends the detective in charge of the case or cases, DS Vanloo.

Together they narrow down the suspects. No plot-spoiling here, but watch out for the ancient wartime secrets and their link with medieval – as distinct from Victorian – pews.

As a mystery story, this book manages to maintain momentum right to the end of its 358 pages. Yet the greatest joy of Murder Before Evensong is the quality and at times brilliance of the author’s writing.

Coles is not only good at humour; he can also capture atmospherics, essences, ambience and even smells. Here is an elegant extract about Canon Clement’s beloved dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda, and their olfactory instincts: ‘Their enjoyment of scent, even the most pungently revolting, was utterly promiscuous. He watched them sometimes suddenly sniff, not a delicate savouring of a faint scent like a parfumier, but something which involved the whole body, a great Hoover that came from the depths of their long chests, sucking the smells through their flaring nostrils, and sending the data into the large part of their small brains that decoded scent.’

Canon Clement’s nose for the scent of the village murderer brings the novel to an exciting denouement. And beyond the fascinating story with its rich characters, the real discovery here is the sniffing out of the author’s formidable talent for writing about English life with English humour.

Roll on the rest of the series!

Reverend Jonathan Aitken is a former Cabinet Minister and prisoner. He is now Chaplain of Pentonville Prison The Oldie June 2022 61

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Why can’t the English learn to talk?

TOM PLANT

Let’s talk about talking Why are the British, when they congregate, at ease only if they talk about the weather? A possible answer is that their education system values above all else reading, writing and arithmetic.

I’ve always found that odd. It’s not just that only one of ‘the three rs’ actually starts with an r. It’s more that concentrating on this trio neglects the activity that occupies much more of our time than maths or the written word and is central to our ability to communicate. I’m talking about talking.

Why aren’t we taught how to talk?

I can hear a clatter of dissent. The weather’s jolly interesting. We talk about it because it’s uncontroversial, and we don’t want to give offence. Anyway, we chat about our health, and sport, much more than the weather. And some people are indeed taught how to talk: there’s elocution and rhetoric and oratory for would-be public speakers. Gresham College in London has been appointing professors of rhetoric since the 16th century. Moreover, we don’t need to be taught how to speak. We just pick it up as children: walk at one; talk at two.

If you think that’s all right, I invite you to turn on the telly or the radio. Have you not sighed when hearing on the Today programme yet another interviewee declare, ‘It’s been a rollercoaster. I was in a good place, but so many challenges, I had mental-health issues. Like, I’ve been on a journey really. Now I’m in a bad place’?

Complicated game shows Whatever happened to straightforward TV quizzes, such as Double Your Money? A weekly highlight.

Hughie Green would gush, ‘I mean that most sincerely, folks,’ and gently tease the contestants. Now we’re bombarded with endless, complicated game shows,

Have you not heard foreigners, from footballers to flood victims, speak eloquently while their British counterparts struggle to express themselves?

Have you not growled as politicians spew forth platitudes about ‘level playing fields’, ‘perfect storms’, ‘windows of opportunity’, ‘toxic’ this and ‘multiple’ that, ‘iconic’ anything, ‘groundbreaking’ everything, ‘thoughts and prayers’ and all on ‘a daily basis’?

And have you not reached for a figurative rotten tomato to throw at those actors who swallow their words and mumble their lines?

I’m not suggesting that children be taught to orate like Demosthenes or Cicero, though I believe all would benefit from learning and declaiming poetry. Nor do I share Professor Henry Higgins’s horror of phonetical infelicities: as far as I’m concerned, the rine in Spine can run minely dahn the drine. I’m all for regional accents. I don’t even mind some mangled grammar interspersed with an occasional ‘you know’ during the endless vox pops.

It’s the vacuous clichés that get to me.

The British are proud of their writers, their prose and their poetry, but they speak much less well than they write.

Perhaps that’s because everyday speech goes largely unrecorded, and therefore uncorrected. It’s become a habit.

Until the 19th century, it was impossible to reproduce talk except by writing it down. Even today, when digital

often two or three times in one evening. ‘Not another one,’ roars hubby. ‘Change the channel.’

Racking up the excitement is everything. ‘Let the battle begin,’ bellows a hidden voice.

Cue menacing drum rolls, a cave with blazing yellow flames – and a shadowy figure appears, like an evil warrior. Don’t panic.

It’s only the resident expert clever clogs from The Chase.

Many other shows have hyped-up presenters piling on the pressure. ‘Wotcha finkin?’ one yells. In the final round of another show, the hapless competitor had to answer six questions in 37 seconds to win. Not a chance. I didn’t even hear most of them – let alone get them right. ‘Who

and electronic recording abounds, most of the speech put down on paper has been considered, if not prepared, before being uttered, and often it has then been tidied up. The ers, ums and ahems are removed.

Obscenities and profanities are purged.

The grammar may be corrected. Even Hansard, Parliament’s ‘substantially verbatim’ official record, removes repetitions and allows MPs to burnish their syntax after they have made a speech.

In any event, most of what we say is lost in the breeze – so why bother to teach people to speak well? The quantity of talk now broadcast by radio and television has vastly increased, and has been amplified many more times by the internet. We are thus able to hear ‘authentic’ chat, gossip and argument all the time.

Much of this is good. Broadcasting, for example, may have hastened the decline of dialects in Britain, but by providing channels in Welsh and Gaelic it has also helped to save endangered languages.

And the internet gives a public platform to almost everyone. Future scholars interested in everyday talk will have much richer sources than their predecessors.

But how much of our extempore ranting and cursing on social media will strike later listeners as well put, let alone eloquent? Not a lot, I fear. For that, perhaps we should look to another kind of daily intercourse, conversation. That’s a challenge I’ll share with you next month.

was the youngest member of Take That?’ No idea.

Think you might win?

Maybe. Watch Lightning, for example. If you make it to the last leg, you have two minutes to answer ten questions to pocket £3,000. If you decide to stop at £1,000 and just take the money, you can’t.

SMALL DELIGHTS The relief when a painkiller finally kicks in.

BRENDA MATHEWS, BURGESS HILL

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

You have to face five more questions just to keep it. Fail to do this in the remaining time and you leave with nothing.

In other quizzes, such as Bridge of Lies, one contestant must play on to the bitter end and, yet again, it’s all or nothing.

The Wall is the worst example.

Thank goodness these programmes eventually finish – but then another comes along.

I’ll stick with Pointless, even with its faults – including some of the strange choices of topic.

‘Rare breeds of poultry’ keeps popping up. I like the fact that even if the contestants don’t win, they always get a coveted trophy to keep, as winners of that episode.

CAROLYN WHITEHEAD The Oldie June 2022 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT LANCASTER (PG) Well, that’s the 2023 Oscar for Best Original Score sorted out.

The opening credits of this exemplary documentary show a Lancaster bomber, flying over a lake and dam. The background tune isn’t The Dam Busters March, as you might imagine, given that the Lancaster was used in the 1943 raid.

Instead, you hear the stirring music of the low, gentle, rising hum of the Lancaster’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.

The engines of the ‘Lanc’ – as its aircrew called the plane – made it a superior bomber. It celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. In 1942, the Avro Lancaster grew, almost by accident, out of an earlier incarnation, the Manchester, with its lacklustre Vulture engines. When the Vultures were swapped for the Rolls-Royce engines used in Spitfires, the Lancaster was born.

As in all the best documentaries, there’s minimal voiceover in this one.

Instead, the talking is done mostly by the remarkable old boys who were there. My God, they look in good nick for men in their late nineties.

There isn’t a whiff of triumphalism from the last of the aircrew, drawn from Britain, Canada, Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand.

As one of those aircrew, Peter Kelsey (who has sadly died since filming), says, the bombing was ‘fundamentally wrong’ but circumstances dictated that they had to do it. The only way to take the battle to Germany was to bomb it.

For decades after the war, members of Bomber Command were criticised – not least because Churchill let Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris take the flak for the area bombing of Dresden and Hamburg.

Only with the unveiling of the Bomber 64 The Oldie June 2022

Command War Memorial in 2012 did the tide begin to turn and the heroism of these extraordinary men become properly recognised.

The Spitfire has long been hailed as a vital instrument in the Allied victory.

David Fairhead and Ant Palmer, the directors of Lancaster, made another fine documentary, Spitfire, in 2018, to record that wonder plane’s contribution.

Now the Lancaster gets its turn.

The Lanc was noisy and cramped, but comfort came second to the plane’s purpose as a precision-targeted bomb-dropper.

The pilots drool over its capabilities – ‘responsive but very powerful’.

Lancasters were constructed on a vast scale in Britain and Canada. Some 1.1 million people were employed in building 7,300 of the aircraft. And the Lancaster proved lethally effective in swinging the war the Allies’ way.

Lancasters bombed the industrial heartland of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, known ironically as ‘Happy Valley’ by the aircrew because it was so well defended.

Most famously, then came the Dam Busters’ raid under Guy Gibson, still only 25. His old comrades are honest about Gibson – a ‘disciplinarian’ but a ‘brilliant’ one. What terrifying odds they faced, travelling at 240mph, 60 feet above the water. Fifty-three aircrew were killed on a single night and three were captured, with eight aircraft shot down.

Guy Gibson, 2nd left, and Dam Busters, 1943

Later in 1943, Lancasters bombed Peenemünde, where the V2s were launched. Things got even hairier in the Nuremberg raids of 1944. 96 Lancasters were shot down over the city. Bomber Command lost more men that night than Fighter Command lost in the whole Battle of Britain.

As one veteran remembers, that meant ‘672 empty chairs at breakfast’ the next morning. Waitresses wept over the gaps at the mess tables.

In the face of the non-stop slaughter, the aircrew developed a poignant kind of gallows humour. Returning pilots even paid into a kitty to reward the pilot who correctly estimated how many comrades had been shot down. There’s no element of ruthlessness – just natural defence mechanisms to deal with the horror.

Whenever there was a ‘stand-down’ from the ops, the boys had a whale of a time at station dances. They danced and drank furiously to Glenn Miller, never sure whether this would be the last girl they danced with.

Many of them were innocent teenagers. One veteran, Jack Watson, says of Yvonne, a girl he met at a dance, she ‘taught me more about the facts of life than [our instructors] did about the Lancaster’.

The Lancaster grew ever more accurate towards the end of the war.

Lancasters attacked Normandy gun emplacements on the eve of D-Day – pilots talk movingly of returning over the Channel to see the water packed with the Allied invasion fleet.

By 1945, the Lancasters had grown terrifyingly precise in their bomb-aiming – with tragic results for Dresden in particular. This masterly film doesn’t ignore the agony of the Germans. Nor does it rejoice in the Allied victory.

But, as one diffident old boy puts it, ‘If we hadn’t bombed Germany, we wouldn’t have won the war.’

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK MY FAIR LADY London Coliseum Most oldies will be familiar with the genesis of My Fair Lady, how Broadway duo Lerner and Loewe transformed George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant but wordy play Pygmalion (1913) into one of the finest musicals of the last century, made into the 1964 film.

I went along to this revival expecting to see a quaint period piece. I didn’t expect to see a show that felt so relevant and alive.

Watching this sumptuous production (which opened at New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre in 2018, and has now transferred to its spiritual home, around the corner from Eliza Doolittle’s Covent Garden), I kept thinking how much my grandmother had in common with Shaw’s heroine.

Her story wasn’t quite as dramatic as Eliza’s. Like a lot of women of her generation, she merely ascended from upper working class to lower middle – Shaw would have understood the importance of these distinctions.

His fable speaks for countless women like her, who pay a heavy price for their ambitions.

My grandmother was born and raised in New Cross, not so far from Eliza. She learnt to speak proper and to better herself, and ended up in no-man’s land, estranged from her working-class roots but never accepted by polite society. She spoke slowly and carefully. She sounded like Princess Anne. Only when she lost her temper did her Sarf London accent break through.

Today a working-class accent isn’t such a social handicap, but there are other barriers to advancement, which is why the casting of Amara Okereke as Eliza is inspired. Okereke’s ethnicity adds a new dimension to the drama, and her heartfelt performance lights up the stage. Her transformation from Cockney flower-seller to ersatz gentlewoman is dazzling, and the emotional depth she brings to the role makes it live and breathe.

Feisty yet fragile, defeated but defiant – she breaks your heart as you watch her fulfil her dream of becoming a lady, only to realise the prize she’s won is hollow. I never would have guessed she’s a new addition to this seasoned show. She’s so self-assured in the big song-and-dance numbers and so vulnerable in the quieter moments, it feels as if she’s been playing this part for years.

Abso-bloomin’-lutely loverly! Eliza Doolittle (Amara Okereke), Mrs Higgins (Vanessa Redgrave) and Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton)

Harry Hadden-Paton is similarly subtle and complex as Henry Higgins, the posh professor of linguistics who reduces Eliza to a specimen in a sociological experiment. As the show’s American director, Bartlett Sher, says, Hadden-Paton ‘knows the world of this show’ (he went to Eton and has been in Downton Abbey and The Crown).

Hadden-Paton resists the temptation to play Higgins as a heartless Svengali.

Rather, he reveals him to be emotionally stunted and constricted, hiding his insecurity behind a mask of intellectual savoir-faire.

A fresh-faced 41, he’s a younger Higgins than usual (Rex Harrison was in his mid-fifties when he played the role in the movie), and he plays him as more like a 31-year-old, which brings an added layer of sexual tension to his relationship with Eliza.

There are other fine performances right through the batting order.

Stephen K Amos is delightful as Eliza’s feckless, charming father. And what a treat to see Vanessa Redgrave, 85 years young, as Mrs Higgins, 55 years since she played Guinevere in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot.

Sher moves his ensemble around the stage with superb aplomb, yet his directorial influence is discreet – he is ‘more like a conductor than a composer’, as he puts it. If only all directors were so restrained. Nearly 70 years since its US première (with Julie Andrews as Eliza), the songs feel as fresh as ever: With a Little Bit of Luck; I Could Have Danced All Night; On the Street Where You Live…

It’s almost an embarrassment of riches, and my only gripe is that, at three hours (including a 15-minute interval), this production feels 15 minutes too long.

The climax of the play comes right at the start of Act Two, and some of the later scenes are a bit flabby, with reprises of three numbers from Act One – is it just me, or do these songs never sound quite as good second time around?

It’s like one of those hotel buffets where everything is so delicious that you stuff your face and end up feeling rather bloated. I feel sure a few discreet cuts in the second half would make this super show even better – but what do I know?

The opening night got a standing ovation.

I’m sure it’ll be the first of many.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE It is disturbing enough to listen to Start the Week and hear Russell Foster on circadian sleep patterns – followed by the story of the Sackler family’s evil drug OxyContin (Book of the Week).

But have you tried Radio 4’s Lusus, where you’re immersed in a mad metaverse? You share the life of a ‘Gen Z Urbanite’ plagued by FOMO (fear of missing out). She wakes at 3.44am (always 3.44am) telling herself not to check her messages – ‘Everyone is sleeping’ – only to see a friend is posting from a business-class lounge, or lying by a pool with a lover and a cocktail.

‘Stop scrolling. There is nothing better happening anywhere else right now. Be in the moment!’ soothes The Oldie June 2022 65

Caroline Faber, the honeyed voice of the mindfulness narrator on the programme.

Oh, the digitised life is fraught with nightmares. Lusus, acted by a huge cast of creatives and fine actors, hurtles through the disconcerting panics and robotic voices – ‘This number is no longer in use’; ‘This service is unavailable’; ‘Please enter your 16-digit…’; ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t detect a response’ – that induce helpless fury in over-40s. Enjoy!

After several threatening episodes of Lusus, I fled to the real universe. What pleasure on Poetry Extra to hear a 1963 recording of Sir Ralph Richardson reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by ‘prisoner C.3.3’ (alias poor Oscar). ‘With midnight always in one’s heart / And twilight in one’s cell’. It was ‘wrung out of me’, Oscar wrote, ‘a cry of pain’.

How superb to listen over three afternoons to The Reckoning, Mike Walker’s drama revealing the Machiavellian mystery behind the fatal stabbing of Kit Marlowe, with Charles Nicholl narrating from his own book.

I enjoyed, too, Red Lines (by Craig Oliver and Anthony Seldon) about David Cameron’s meeting with Putin, starring Toby Stephens and Jon Culshaw.

A documentary from Cheshire, where a pair of ageing bachelor brothers named Piekarski curate their cuckoo-clock museum lifted my spirits – as did a totally unexpected history of Spam, Monty Python’s ridiculed foodstuff which is apparently a national dish in Hawaii.

There is even a Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. How can the dystopian metaverse compete with such riches?

Marybeth Hamilton’s episode of Dietrich in Five Songs (Radio 3) on Falling in Love Again was brilliant.

‘In her 1972 concert [at age 71], her wrinkles pulled taut by needles, her high heels biting into her ankles, she sang every song the audience wanted to hear.’

In the final episode, Paul Morley (with his northern hard g in ‘song’, ‘singing’ and ‘singer’) rather overstated his evocation of the fleshless, boneless, ethereal, psychosexual, celestial, subversive, mesmeric, timeless essence of Marlene.

John Wilson (This Cultural Life) sought reminiscences from the venerable writer Penelope Lively, who’s announced her retirement at 89. During the war, staying in Government House in Jerusalem with her nanny, she saw Charles de Gaulle.

‘We were sharing a bathroom,’ she said. ‘And there he was – in his paisley dressing gown, with his sponge.’

And another sponge emerged in 66 The Oldie June 2022

a World Service documentary about HM the Queen, celebrating her longacquired diplomatic skills – speaking Gaelic in Ireland etc – and the weekly conferences with her 11 prime ministers.

‘Everyone can come and tell me things, and unburden themselves,’ she said. ‘It’s rather nice to be a sort of sponge.’

The power of Radio 4. In his programme (and podcast) Just One Thing, Dr Michael Mosley mentioned beetroot juice: beneficial to the gut and also a bit of an aphrodisiac, as the ancient Romans discovered.

Hours later, I found the kitchen sink full of beetroot. ‘Did you by any chance hear Just One Thing?’ I asked my husband.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘And Michael [the greengrocer] said, ‘You’re the third man who’s been in today asking for beetroot.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON In December 2001, Kathleen Peterson, a successful telecoms executive and mother/stepmother to five children, was found in a pool of her own blood at the bottom of a staircase in the family mansion in Durham, North Carolina.

Her husband, Michael Peterson, a 58-year-old writer of crime fiction and possibly the creepiest man alive, called 911 to say she was still breathing, but he did not for some reason perform mouthto-mouth. Because the police didn’t buy his story that Kathleen slipped on her way to bed, the Peterson mansion became a crime scene.

Todd and Clayton, the eldest of the Peterson children, are the fruit of Michael’s first marriage to a woman of very little brain called Patty. The middle two, Margaret and Martha, were adopted as babies when their own mother, Elizabeth Ratliff – a friend of Michael and Patty – died, and the youngest, Caitlin, is Kathleen’s daughter from her previous marriage.

All except Caitlin, who believes that

Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen Peterson in The Staircase

Peterson killed her mother, stand by their father, despite the surprising revelations thrown up by the case, including the large quantity of hard-core gay porn on his computer. What’s more, 20 years earlier, Elizabeth Ratliff had similarly been found dead by Michael at the bottom of another flight of stairs, with precisely the same number of lacerations (seven) in her head.

So Margaret and Martha discover that they have lost both their birth mother and their adoptive mother to a fall down a staircase after an evening with Michael Peterson – but does their devotion to him waver for one moment? Not a bit of it.

Meanwhile, in Paris, just as the investigation in North Carolina is beginning, an Oscar-winning film maker called Jean-Xavier de Lestrade hits on the idea of making a film about the case in real time, including interviews with Peterson, his children, his defence team and the DA’s office. More than happy to have a film crew follow him around for the next two years, Peterson, a worldclass narcissist, hands them so much material that the one-hour documentary they have planned becomes a 13-episode docuseries called The Staircase, first broadcast in 2004, which can now be watched on Netflix.

It contains priceless moments such as Clayton’s admission, when asked by a private investigator if he had ever suspected his father’s bisexuality, that no, he hadn’t, despite having walked in on him once when he was ‘jacking off to something, kind of, gay’.

The docuseries has now been turned into an eight-episode Sky drama starring Colin Firth – confusingly also called The Staircase – with actors playing Lestrade and his team of camera crew and interviewers. This means that the Sky drama has, at any point, about 30 people in each scene, because not only do the Peterson family never leave their father’s side, but his legal team has set up camp in the house along with the French filmmakers.

If you have a couple of weeks to spare, I recommend watching the docuseries of The Staircase alongside the drama mini-series, because it shows how self-indulgent and pointless this ‘remake’ is. Colin Firth’s impersonation of Michael Peterson, who has that irritating habit of ‘upspeak’, is so exact that it does not allow any interpretation of his character.

Short of giving them all plastic surgery, hair and make-up, the filmmakers have done everything in their power to ensure that the cast are dead ringers for the real-life originals.

Ed McLachlan

‘I must say, this is the most hostile desert I’ve ever explored’

Viewers interested in trivia will enjoy the fact that the part of Peterson was originally offered to Harrison Ford.

Margaret is played by Sophie Turner, who, as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, was similarly attuned to familial violence.

Todd is played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold and great-nephew of JFK. On top of all this, the Netflix documentary’s editor, Sophie Brunet, ended up having an affair with Peterson.

Neither the docuseries nor the drama draws any conclusions to account for the mystifying hold that Peterson has over his children. As Kathleen’s sister says in the trial, ‘I have no idea who the hell Michael Peterson was then, or is now’ – and neither do I. You can hear even more about the death of poor Kathleen Peterson, including an extended interview with

the odious Michael, in an 18-episode BBC podcast called Beyond Reasonable Doubt.

Also beyond reasonable doubt is that we will soon be treated to The Staircase: The Musical and a Christmas special, The Staircase on Ice.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE GLORIANA – FOR ELIZABETH I & II I have only the vaguest memory of where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I’ve almost no recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis when nuclear Armageddon supposedly threatened.

But I can still see my young self walking slowly down a dank tree-lined avenue on the morning of 6th February 1952, after the headmaster’s

announcement that the King had died and there’d be no more school that day.

Why I remember it quite so vividly has never been entirely clear. Is it because, as the years pass, the image has been refreshed by the recognition of just how momentous the occasion was?

Not so much the end of one reign, but the inauguration of another under which it has been both a privilege and a blessing to spend the greater part of one’s life.

In the closing scene of Benjamin Britten’s great coronation opera Gloriana, Elizabeth I reflects, ‘I count it the glory of my crown that I have reigned with your love, and there is no jewel that I prefer before that jewel.’ Afterwards, an off-stage chorus murmurs the opera’s haunting refrain, ‘Green leaves are we, red rose our golden Queen.’

Gloriana was conceived shortly after the king’s death, while Britten and Peter Pears were on a post-winter skiing holiday with George and Marion Harewood, in the west Austrian resort of Gargellan.

It was Britten who had introduced the young opera-loving 7th Earl, first cousin of the new Queen, to the Viennese-born pianist Marion Stein, who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938.

After a day of ‘wild & eccentric skiing’ in Gargellan, the conversation turned to national operas. Smetana’s The Bartered Bride was mentioned, as were several Russian epics and Verdi’s Aida, which Britten particularly admired.

‘No such English opera,’ lamented Britten.

‘Well, you’d better write one!’ rejoined the 7th Earl, throwing down the gauntlet.

Harewood mentioned Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History, which he’d recently read. True, the story had already yielded one operatic gem, Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux: theatrically compelling, albeit a touch free with the historical actualité.

Britten and his librettist, the poet William Plomer, would be more meticulous, supplementing Strachey with a close reading of J E Neale’s classic 1934 biography, Queen Elizabeth I. The libretto, said Britten, should be ‘crystal-clear, with lovely pageantry but linked by a strong story about Queen & Essex – strong & simple’. The result is a masterpiece of distillation. Married to Britten’s superbly crafted score, the libretto serves well the intended aim of creating a ‘national’ opera which remains first-rate music-drama in its own right.

Britten asked that the piece be part of the official coronation programme. Given that the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, was also a member The Oldie June 2022 67

less ephemeral piece than that.

It’s an opera that needs to be both seen and heard. And nowhere better than on the DVD of Colin Graham’s celebrated Sadler’s Wells staging which English National Opera revived during George Harewood’s time as managing director.

Mark Elder conducts, with Sarah Walker catching every facet of the Queen whose realm and personality Plomer and Britten so memorably distilled.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON THE STONES V THE BEATLES

PIERRE ROCHON / ALAMY

Sarah Walker as Elizabeth I in Britten’s Gloriana at the ENO, March 1984

of the Harewood clan, the request was readily heard. Britten was, after all, the country’s most accomplished living composer. Nor is it true that the royals were a bunch of musical illiterates; certainly not where the Queen Mother and her two daughters were concerned.

There was, however, one blunder.

The Covent Garden première on 8th June 1953 should have been before the great and the good of the arts world, not the ‘stuffed pigs’ (Britten’s phrase) of the Diplomatic Corps, party-wearied aristocrats and ‘Official London’. Peter Pears said it was like singing to an empty auditorium.

The gossip columnists had a field day with this embarrassing first-night ‘failure’; as did, sad to report, a number of leading music critics – including those of the Times and the Daily Telegraph – whose relations with Britten were far from cordial.

Worse, 1953 was the year in which Churchill’s Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, launched his McCarthystyle campaign to rid the country of what he called the ‘plague of homosexuals’.

Since just about everyone of importance involved with Gloriana was carded for investigation – the composer, the librettist, the lead tenor, the Royal Opera’s general administrator and others besides – there’s little doubt that the public ridiculing of the opera was being encouraged from within government itself.

I hold no truck with the argument that the subject – an ageing queen proud of her rule, yet riven within by both private passion and continuing fears for the security of her people – was unsuitable to the occasion. Gloriana is a greater, 68 The Oldie June 2022

Since the sixties, anyone with a pulse has been either a Stones or a Beatles person.

This division – far more than Blur v Oasis – was and is the great cleavage of rock ’n’ roll. You could not be both.

This has led to an argument that has dragged on for six decades as to which band is ‘better’. It hotted up nicely the other day (I find our rock legends often throw out these grenades when they either have a world tour to publicise or are about to turn 80, or both).

Roger Daltrey was the latest to back the Beatles over the Stones, whom he called ‘a mediocre pub band’. Oof! You will remember that last year Paul McCartney – celebrated by Hunter Davies in this issue on the occasion of his 80th – said of his rivals, ‘They’re a blues cover band – that’s sort of what the Stones are.’

If I had to take all the Beatles music or the Stones music to my desert island, I would find it almost impossible to choose. It’s like arguing about whether cats are better than dogs (they’re not, obviously), but with one vital difference.

The Stones played their first gig

60 years ago, on 12th July 1962, at the Marquee. A new book by Lesley-Ann Jones, The Stone Age: Sixty Years of the Rolling Stones, salutes the anniversary.

I first saw the Stones live at Wembley in the summer of 1982 for the Tattoo You tour. Being a pushy sort of person, I pushed my way to the front, and there I stood, wilting in the heat, for many hours till the Stones pranced on and the entire stadium surged forward and I thought I would be crushed to death.

They are playing dates in the UK again this summer (Hyde Park, London, and Anfield Stadium, Liverpool). I’m trying to score a VIP pass this time, so I’m not trampled underfoot again.

This is the important distinction, which I thank a former Rolling Stones WAG, Jo Wood, for putting so pithily when I interviewed her last year and asked about Macca’s ungracious comments.

‘I can’t believe they’re still arguing about it after all these years – who’s better, the Beatles or the Stones,’ Ronnie’s ex said. Then she quoted back Mick Jagger’s mild riposte to Macca: ‘Well, we’re still filling stadiums and you don’t have a band.’ Touché!

The Stones are playing across Europe to celebrate ‘60 special years together’.

The official website, I note, describes them as ‘the greatest rock-and-roll band of all time’.

Mick is turning 80 too next year, and while the Stones are selling out Hyde Park, sadly all that’s left of the Beatles is Ringo and Macca.

‘See them while you can, kid,’ Jo Wood advised me, sagely . ‘As my mother told me on her deathbed, none of us gets out of here alive.’

Jumpin’ Jack flashes: the Rolling Stones at Wembley, 1982

Left: David Remfry watercolours. From top: Dancers, 2001; Cabaret Night, 1995; Three Heads, 1998

Above: from Seafaring, Hastings Contemporary.

Top: Cecily Brown’s Oinops, oil on linen, 2016; below: Chris Orr’s The Small Titanic, etching, 1993

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DAVID REMFRY: WATERCOLOUR Royal Watercolour Society, Whitcomb Street Gallery, to 30th July SEAFARING

CECILY BROWN / THOMAS DANE GALLE

Hastings Contemporary, to 25th September In 1822, the not-yet-Royal Watercolour Society negotiated a ‘very advantageous’ seven-year lease of £250 per annum (around £33,000 today) for a gallery.

It was being built by John Nash to the north of Pall Mall East, which remained its base until 1938.

Four years ago, the Society did it again, negotiating a still-more advantageous return to part of the building, now in Whitcomb Street, beside the National Gallery. Initially, the developer Alaska offered a 25-year free

tenancy of the extensive vaults for exhibitions and storage.

Everyone knows that artists, especially watercolourists, are unworldly folk. They turned it down but eventually secured a rent-free 250-year occupancy of the vaults, together with the ground floor for a reception area. The Society has also kept its tenancy at the Bankside Gallery,

by Tate Modern.

The new spaces, which opened to the public on 12th May, will be used for exhibitions by individual members or drawn from the Society’s diploma collection. That collection dates back as far as 1804 and includes many of the greatest of the English School. Bankside, also home to the Royal Society of PainterEtchers, will house larger group shows.

David Remfry, who will be 80 on 30th July, began as an oil painter but, in 1979, he contracted the lung condition sarcoidosis which made the medium impossible for him. He did not change his approach, still using an oil painter’s

techniques and working on a scale generally thought unfeasible for watercolour. His portraits are superb, whether of individuals or of blended groups. He is obsessed by nightclubs, dancers, grotesques, tattoos, hats and, most recently, lift shafts. This retrospective show makes one sway to the beat of the figures on the walls. It is a joy.

Seafaring at Hastings is a serious pleasure too. The ubiquitous James Russell has curated both it and the Remfry show, which guarantees intelligent quality. About 50 paintings, drawings and prints, from 1820 to date, and from Turner and Tissot to Maggi Hambling and Chris Orr, deal with all aspects of the sea. Shipwrecked sailors, luxury liners, mythical creatures, bathers, gulls, submariners, fishermen … they are all here.

Several of the modern pictures refer directly to their great predecessors Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee.

The Oldie June 2022 69

Pursuits coastal stretches of Japan, North Korea, north-eastern China and, perhaps surprisingly, Siberia, with a continuity of single white flowers from early summer into deep autumn.

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER A ROSE BY MANY OTHER NAMES Rugosa roses stand up well to wind, cold, heat and rain. They flower profusely over many midsummer weeks. And they sign off – in most varieties – with splashes of bright golden autumn foliage and an abundance of fat, sealing-wax-red hips.

Almost that alone makes them worth having.

White, red and pink are the rugosas’ principal flower colours. To my eye, the finest in that order are ‘Blanche Double de Coubert’ and ‘Nyveldt’s White’; ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ’ (indispensable) and ‘Mrs Anthony Waterer’; ‘Pink Grootendorst’ and ‘Fru Dagmar Hastrup’.

Each of them is reliable, long-flowering, long-lasting and worthy of any amount of space you can grant them. But as my fondness for these roses extends across the whole brigade, and as room here for love notes about each is unavailable, I must leave you to explore them for yourself.

Yellow flowers are rare among rugosas.

Still, that complexion manifests itself in the hybrid ‘Agnes’, which bears many small, fully double, buttery, amber-tinted petals that fade to cream. Bred by Canadian nurserymen B and W Saunders in 1922 – happy centenary, dear girl! – she’s strong and bushy and will attain a height and width of about six feet. Her ‘delicate and unusual fragrance’, according to the late David Austin, emanates from ‘a mixture of the not-altogether pleasing scent’ of her co-parent Rosa foetida ‘Persiana’ – combined with that inherent in the rugosa. It proves again the delightful serendipity of cross-pollination.

In a set of new mixed beds, we’ve recently planted three ‘Agnes’ roses, contrasting their gilded flowers with perennial blues such as agapanthus, ground-covering vinca and ajuga, and several good, sapphire-hued geraniums.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SAFFRON

Rosa ‘Pink Grootendorst’

Rugosas come novice-friendly, requiring no strict or precise pruning regime to keep the plants in shape. In most cases, they are grown on their own roots (not grafted). That means they can be slashed to ground level in early spring, only to sprout fresh flower-bearing stems on manageable-sized bushes by midsummer. Ancient, unwieldly specimens can be similarly assailed.

Rugosas are best on light soil – sandy ground makes them ideal seaside dwellers; hence one of their common names, the beach rose. They’re happy, too, on poor soil; a first choice for gardens around new developments that might be riddled with builders’ rubble. Rugosas also make colourful, impenetrable hedges – prettier by far than any barbed-wire construction.

Like old mouths with missing teeth, elderly hedges with many gaps line our garden. The rugosa’s ability to take – indeed, its craving for – beneficial, drastic pruning qualifies it superbly for being slipped in between venerable stumps of privet, beech and hawthorn that must annually succumb to the trimmer’s blade.

Nothing fancy here – just good old R rugosa ‘Alba’. It’s a hardy, disease-resistant species found along

It was Walden in the 14th century. Then it was Chipping Walden until, at the beginning of his reign, Henry VIII approved a change of name for the Essex town to Saffron Walden.

Saffron was originally grown as a dye for the woollen industry and later as a spice. It was popular in that part of England for more than 200 years, but lost its commercial value to cheaper, imported saffron, mostly from Spain and India.

Saffron Hill also gets its name from crops of the spice grown in that part of London until the late-18th century. But then the neighbourhood went downhill, described by Dickens in Oliver Twist as ‘a dirty and wretched place … impregnated with filthy odours’.

It is encouraging to learn that once again saffron is being produced in this country, in Essex, Cheshire and Norfolk. Not only can English saffron

Crocus sativus, the saffron plant The Oldie June 2022 71

threads be bought, but the corms or bulbs are also available for planting at home.

They prefer a light, chalky soil and can be obtained from the Tourist Information Centre in Saffron Walden, and from the Cheshire Saffron Company. A bag of up to 20 corms will cost about £6. They can be pre-ordered for planting in late July, with flowering expected in October/November.

It is worth stressing that only Crocus sativus will produce saffron, and is not to be confused with the crocus that appears in early spring. Before embarking on a crop of home-grown saffron, be aware that 20 flowers, each containing three red strands, will produce about one tenth of a gram of saffron. It is, after all, known as red gold and is the world’s most expensive spice.

There is a pale substitute for saffron called safflower, an annual thistle-like plant related to the sunflower, with yellow and red petals. They have little taste, though they’re added to food in some Muslim countries, and safflower oil can be used in cooking.

It would not surprise me if the flavourless yellow powder once sold to me in Morocco as ground saffron was derived from the seeds of this flower.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD FRENCH FOOD WITH JULIA CHILD

ELISABETH LUARD

Embrace the butter with Julia Child.

You’ve seen the new TV series about her, Julia. Now cook the food.

Mrs C caught the Zeitgeist in apple-pie America with Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It was first published in 1961, when the Kennedys were just installed in the White House and everything French was all the rage.

The recipes, then as now, are a challenge for all but the most enthusiastic of home cooks. Even the simplest (like those distilled below) run to two or three pages, reflecting the unfamiliarity of Julia’s audience to the principles of haute cuisine – perfection achieved through precision.

And then there’s the butter.

Unreasonable amounts of butter.

Apologies for the need to reduce Mrs Child’s precise (and very lengthy) instructions to manageable size. For the full glory, buy the book.

Poulet rôti au beurre For a 3lb chicken – a small French bird to serve four – you will need about 6 tbsps melted butter. The cavity is seasoned with salt and butter, and the skin rubbed 72 The Oldie June 2022

now a gloriously crisp-crusted, deliciously buttery brown cake.

Crêpes Suzette Prepare three hand-size crêpes per person.

To serve four, beat half a pound of softened butter to a cream with its own volume of orange juice, pounded zest and a little orange liqueur. Chill till needed, then melt in a chaffing dish till bubbling. Dip in the crêpes one by one, and fold into quarters. Sprinkle with sugar, drench with brandy and more orange liqueur, and light with a match. Pouf! Bon appétit! with butter. The bird is then browned lightly for 10 to 15 minutes at 425°F/230°C; then the temperature is reduced to 350°F/180°C and the chicken turned and basted till it is done.

Start the bird breast up for 15 minutes, then turn on one side for 10 minutes, and then for 10 on the other. Allow an hour and 10-12 minutes’ cooking time.

A simple, short deglazing sauce is made with stock and the juices in the pan, giving just a scant spoonful for each serving. To finish à la Normande, baste at the end of cooking with thick Normandy cream.

Pommes Anna Thinly sliced potatoes are packed in layers in a heavy pan, bathed in clarified butter and baked in a very hot oven, so that the outside crusts enough for the potatoes to be unmoulded without collapsing. The key to success is a very heavy pan and a very hot oven. To serve four, you’ll need half a pound of butter to three pounds of boiling potatoes.

Preheat the oven to 450°F/230°C. Clarify the butter: melt gently, skim off the scum and spoon the clear liquid off the residue. Peel the potatoes and slice ⅛in thick, then dry thoroughly (don’t rinse).

Pour ¼in clarified butter into your heavy cast-iron pan (diameter 8in, depth at least 2in) and set over a medium heat.

Place a potato slice in the middle and overlap a circle of slices round it. Pour in a spoonful of butter and season with salt and pepper. Overlap more slices in the opposite direction, and continue till the potato and butter is used up, doming the middle with extra slices. Shake the pan to ensure the base is not sticking.

Butter the bottom of a heavy saucepan and press it down hard on the surface.

Cover with a buttered lid, place in a roasting tin to catch the buttery drippings and bake for 20 minutes.

Press again with the saucepan bottom, and bake uncovered for another 20-25 minutes. Pour off excess butter and unmould, onto a hot plate, what is

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE CHEAPO MICHELIN MAN I always become anxious when I’m asked by someone I don’t know to recommend a restaurant.

There are just too many variables, not least cuisine, décor and noise – and budget is the top trump.

People invariably start off full of bravado by asking for ‘somewhere really nice’. There’s a pause while they watch me whirling through my mental Rolodex of delights before they land the killer qualifier – ‘but obviously not too expensive’.

Then they get a little worried that I’ll send them somewhere dismal. So they recite meagre price ranges, in total denial that London has become more expensive since the last Lyons Corner House closed.

So this has become my stock reply.

Pick any one of the UK’s 105 Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurants, which proudly display the red sign with the white Michelin man licking his lips.

For me, this is a far greater contribution to world gastronomy than doling out stars to hyper-manic chefs, terrified the inspectors might have noticed the ladies’ loo is a towel short.

The concept is simple: ‘A Bib Gourmand is awarded to restaurants deemed to be both good quality and good value by Michelin’s team of inspectors, with those listed having a menu that serves three courses for £28 or under.’

It’s more like £30 but you get the drift.

There are 448 in France, 249 in Italy and 245 in Spain (all listed at guide. michelin.com/en/restaurants/bibgourmand). Just click on ‘Filters’ and then ‘Region’. Ireland’s got 19. There used to be about four in tiny Dingle when I visited five years ago. Clearly the inspectors had indulged in a weekend’s intake of Liffey water.

I’ve already recommended some of London’s 35 Bibs: Brutto, Brasserie Zédel (the ultimate Bib), Imad’s Syrian

Kitchen, Palomar, Hoppers, Volta do Mar, Trullo and Smokestak. And here are some recent finds: two are Persian (Kateh, in Maida Vale, and Berenjak, in Soho).

I am not sure what the protocol is on whether one should use ‘Persian’ or ‘Iranian’ in the nomenclature. But the former is certainly more seductive, and befits such sensual cookery.

I took my godsons to Berenjak in January. It’s typical of the new wave of long, thin restaurants in Soho, where the open kitchen runs down the side and you can watch the flames from bar stools. The boys asked for a ‘Feast’ menu of four shared starters and a main course for £37.50.

So abundant was this extraordinary banquet that we could have had two feasts between the three of us. It was the best culinary start to the year.

Two weeks ago, we arrived late at Kateh, which is very prettily set in a mews. They could not have been more welcoming. We had chicken livers, followed by a delicious chicken stew with the very best rice.

Bancone could reasonably claim to serve the best pasta in London. Our winning dish was the spicy pork and ’nduja ragu with mafalde, and don’t miss out on the polenta stuffed with gorgonzola.

Michelin is undoubtedly far more biased towards formal European restaurants. They certainly wouldn’t make the journey down to Tooting Bec, where I had my best-ever bhaji at the Pakistani Mirch Masala with Piers, the man behind Aleksandr the meerkat. Just £27 for a feast for two. Simples.

Berenjak, 27 Romilly Street, London W1D 5AL; tel: 020 3319 8120; www. berenjaklondon.com Kateh, 5 Warwick Place, London W9 2PX; tel: 020 7289 3393; www. katehrestaurant.co.uk Bancone, branches in Soho and Covent Garden; www.bancone.co.uk

DRINK BILL KNOTT GEORGIAN WINE ON MY MIND I first tried Georgian wines during a bizarre press trip to the breakaway Georgian republic of Adjara, in March 2004.

Most of our party were election observers – the renegade president of Adjara, Aslan Abashidze, was desperately trying to cling on to power. I was there to write about Adjaran food and drink.

I spent much of my time in a restaurant near the conference centre in Batumi, where Abashidze was making

interminable speeches. I ate Adjaran khachapuri – wonderfully fresh, buttery cheese bread baked with an egg yolk inside – and drank chacha, Georgian grape-based vodka (the local wine was red, medium-sweet and undistinguished).

My departure was delayed several times. I felt rather like the hapless William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, especially when at lunch I was seated next to Abashidze. Through an interpreter he told me that ‘Sakaashvili [the Georgian president] knows you are here. While you are here, he will not send in the tanks.’ There must, I thought, be something in the Geneva Convention deploring the use of food and drink writers as human shields.

Eventually, they let me go home, the Georgian government brought Adjara to heel, and Abashidze resigned, fleeing immediately to Moscow. And I had decided that Georgian wine was not to my taste.

Until, that is, I visited Estonia – with which Georgia has very little in common, apart from sharing the world’s noisiest neighbour, Russia. One of my fellow guests at a Tallinn food and drink conference was John Wurdeman, an American painter who had fallen in love with Georgia’s ancient wine culture and started a winery in the east of the country. John had thoughtfully brought several bottles of his Pheasant’s Tears vintages, and they were delicious.

John ferments all his wines in kvevri: egg-shaped, earthenware vessels lined with beeswax and buried in the ground.

They protect the wine from the extremes of the Georgian climate and let it develop subtlety without the overbearing influence of oak. It is a technique that has been practised in Georgia for 8,000 years or so: by comparison, Greek and Roman amphorae are arrivistes.

John’s wines are imported to the UK

by Les Caves de Pyrène and are widely available, mostly priced around £20.

I tried more kvevri wines from several other importers at a recent trade tasting. I particularly liked those from Geo Naturals (geonaturals.co.uk), the Georgian Wine Society (georgianwinesociety.co.uk) and Lea & Sandeman (leaandsandeman.co.uk).

Many are made with extended skin contact, which gives the whites (and ‘orange’ wines in particular) an astringency that works very well with rich food – a classic Adjaran khachapuri, perhaps.

In fact, had I drunk kvevri wine instead of chacha at that restaurant in Batumi, I might not have fallen asleep for the last four hours of Aslan Abashidze’s speech.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three French wines: a Chardonnay that should appeal to lovers of Mâcon-Villages; a classic Beaujolais packed with juicy Gamay fruit; and a Côtes du Rhône that would go very nicely with the Sunday roast. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

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The Oldie June 2022 73

SPORT JIM WHITE SILLY DRINKING GAMES We’re about to embark on the best time of year for watching live sport.

Or so conventional wisdom has it.

Wimbledon, the Open, Henley, the British Grand Prix, Ascot, the Derby and half a dozen test matches will follow one another at a gallop in a glorious procession of sun, strawberries and wonderful outfits. Not forgetting the drink. Gallons of it. Because, for thousands of us Brits, this is less the start of a summer of sport, more a season on the booze.

It is one of the enduring ironies of our unmatched sporting traditions that they are pickled in alcohol. Well, not so much those taking part. The men and women we go to watch whack balls, drive cars, ride horses and row boats avoid the stuff when they are in action, more than aware of its performance-diminishing effects.

It’s the sporting bodies who are dependent on the bottle. To pay for the performers, they need large numbers of us to get blotto.

Take the cricket match when England plays South Africa at Manchester’s Old Trafford in August. In those five days, the hosts, Lancashire County Cricket Club, build up their profits. They will make in that one week enough to pay the team’s wages for a season, largely from bar sales. With outlets designed to minimise queuing and maximise churn, the aim is for 100,000 pints to be sold each day.

That’s an average of four pints for every person attending. Given that a lot of those spectators are driving, fancy only a swift half or simply don’t drink, it requires a sizeable proportion of the crowd to make up the numbers.

The last time I went to watch a test there, the three blokes in front of me quietly set about doing their bit for Lancashire’s bottom line. By the close of play, they were a collective incoherent mess, covered in vomit, a trio of helpless wrecks. One of them was slumped unconscious in his seat, having missed most of the afternoon’s play, as he sank into an alcohol-induced stupor. Huge snakes of empty glasses were passed above our heads throughout the match.

The stomach pumps at Manchester Royal Infirmary were in for a busy night.

It will be like that at the Derby, too.

Never mind the racing – long ago, it changed into an orgy of alcoholic excess.

At the last event at Epsom before lockdown, on my way back to the car 74 The Oldie June 2022

park a couple of hours after the last race, I passed, in quick succession: a man spreadeagled on the grass as if he had been crucified; a drunk husband and wife engaged in a full-on fist fight; and a chap gingerly seeking help from the crew of a St John’s Ambulance, having soiled himself. His plight was clear to anyone passing – he was wearing a white suit.

Pity the paramedic with the wet wipes.

But this is the unspoken truth of so many of our most prestigious sporting occasions: they are financially reliant on large numbers of spectators’ getting wasted. And it seems to get worse every year. The encouragement to drink yourself silly becomes ever more a part of the occasion. How long can it go on like this before someone in charge thinks: is this really a good idea?

MOTORING ALAN JUDD ARE YOU A GOOD DRIVER? How good a driver do you think you are?

Research suggests that most of us rate ourselves pretty generously, men more so than women. It partly depends, of course, on what we mean by ‘good’. Does it mean safe, skilful or both?

We probably all know drivers who have never had accidents and keep rigorously to speed limits but who thoughtlessly block the middle lanes on motorways at a steady 50-60mph, blithely unaware of who or what is behind. These same drivers may also slow and signal so long before junctions or roundabouts that no one is quite sure what they intend.

We probably also know a driver who is keenly observant of everything in the vicinity, has rapid reflexes and can handle any car like a Spitfire in a dogfight. But this awareness of other drivers brings with it a competitive urge which encourages our skilful friend to drive as if he (it probably is a he) has a Formula 1 Red Bull, with permanently full-on throttle or full-on brake and

The Alan Partridge school of steering

nothing between. He has the odd prang.

Pondering this, a friend decided to qualify for the IAM (Institute of Advanced Motorists, now with a silly new name – IAM RoadSmart).

This comprised a course of six lessons with a police instructor, although my friend’s six soon became twelve. One effect, he reckons, was to make him drive faster, as close as possible to the speed limit, even on roads where he felt it was unsafe to do so. He was told not to go down through the gears when approaching junctions or roundabouts, but to brake at the last minute and only then change down. That’s how they teach young drivers these days.

I guess it’s partly a question of age.

When I learned to drive, brakes were less efficient and less reliable (ABS unheard of) and we were taught to slow gradually, going down through the gears to save on brake wear and maintain full control so that we could stop or accelerate instantly.

I still do it, partly because I enjoy gearchanging. I even double-declutch sometimes, to reassure myself I still can.

I’m doubtless an exasperating person to drive behind.

But the main lesson my friend took away was greater awareness of his own driving and of those around him (he had to provide a running commentary of his progress). This can only be good. The more aware you are of what you and others are doing – the more you make yourself take an interest in it – the less likely you are to potter along in a dream that comes to a nasty end.

In one sense, modern cars don’t help.

Of course, they’re much safer, but they’re also much faster, quieter and more comfortable, all of which makes daydreaming much easier.

I suspect that’s my main driving fault, apart from the general complacency of assuming I don’t have any. It’s what the charge sheet would call driving without due care. It’s so easy to let the mind float freely as the engine hums remotely, the road slips smoothly by, the steering is fingertip light and the speed-limit signs approach and recede unnoticed. Or the stop lights of the car in front merge with all the other lights ahead.

The truth is, we could all be better drivers if we forced ourselves to take an interest in driving, to heed what we – and others – are doing. But our minds aren’t like that. Ever restless, we rarely concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes together without drifting off (try it and see). Not to mention the need for strategies for staying awake.

But that’s another matter.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

All that Twitters is not gold I have much enjoyed the fuss surrounding the proposed purchase of Twitter by gazillionaire Elon Musk. Finally, there is something interesting to say about Twitter.

Perhaps it’s my lack of imagination or my grumpiness, but Twitter doesn’t work for me, and I don’t care who owns it. Oh, I read it from time to time and I will occasionally promote an Oldie-related thing on my account, but if I were without it I wouldn’t miss it.

However, I did enjoy the fuss. When Musk announced his bid, Twitter’s board huffily said it wasn’t interested. Then the shareholders quickly pointed out that Musk’s offer was the best opportunity to sell they’ve had for a while, and they’d prefer his cash to be in their pockets and not his – thank you very much.

You can’t blame them. You would have paid about $50 for Twitter shares when they floated in 2013. Since then, they

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have rarely been worth that much and have paid no dividends. Taking Musk’s $53.20 must feel like a lucky escape, if it really does materialise.

I’ve never really seen the point of Twitter, and I suspect shareholders grabbing the Musk shilling have reached the same conclusion. In case you are unfamiliar with it, here are the basics.

You join – anonymously if you want – and then you can publish short notes, pictures or videos. Anyone can see them, but those most likely to are people who ‘follow’ you, or those who look for the keywords you have used – assuming they are not deemed inappropriate by Twitter’s sinisterly named Trust and Safety Council.

In reality, however, when you look at Twitter, you see only the latest few messages posted. To see more, you have to scroll down for miles, in the vague hope you might come across something worthwhile. If, like me, you don’t have that patience, the unread tweets pile up, never to be seen.

It’s all very hit and miss, unless you give it your undivided attention all day and night, which does not appeal.

Twitter is not even as popular as you might think. Fewer than 30 per cent of people in the UK use it, and I bet that a

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‘Derek has been middle-aged for as long as I’ve known him’

decent proportion are like me and barely look at it. In the USA, the home of Twitter, the numbers are even lower: only 25 per cent of the population have a Twitter account.

So tweeters can’t be representative of the population. The trouble is some people think they are. Twitter’s influence is disproportionate in certain circles, notably the written and spoken media. When you hear a broadcaster saying ‘online reaction is fierce’, they usually mean a few people on Twitter have commented, some probably anonymously.

I recently heard a grizzled editor of a regional newspaper complaining that his younger writers think they have desk jobs and can gather all local news and public opinion solely from social media. He spends much of his day chasing them out of the office to talk to real people, who are, of course, mostly not on Twitter.

So who does tweet? Some do it to promote their work; fair enough, I suppose – I’m in that category. Some companies impart information: your train is late; they have a new product. That’s all part of the warp and weft of commerce.

But most tweeters do it because they love the sound of their own voice, and think others will, too. They would do well to remember Dr Johnson’s wise words: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’

So I don’t think it matters much who owns Twitter. If you disagree, you may be overestimating Twitter’s importance.

Consider this: the main UK political parties have about 2.5 million followers between them. The footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has 100 million followers.

That’s how serious Twitter isn’t.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Hate NHS queues? Go private There are two ways of looking at private health care – either it enables wealthy people to jump the queue or it is a way to take pressure off the struggling NHS. Whatever you think, private treatment is becoming common. To avoid waiting in pain for months, patients are using money not spent on holidays during 76 The Oldie June 2022

lockdown to pay for operations. Others are borrowing from family or are even crowdfunding so they can be seen as soon as possible.

And the NHS is sending patients to private hospitals to help clear the backlog.

In many cases, you have the legal right to choose where you have NHS treatment,

including in one of the private hospitals that provide services to the NHS. A merging of the NHS and private treatment had already started before COVID caused so much disruption.

When the scale of the problem became clear, the government block-booked private hospitals. For the hospitals, it was

a lifeline, as they were unable to treat their usual patients – particularly the profitable ones from overseas who couldn’t travel to the UK. The main advantage of going private is to avoid NHS queues but, with private hospitals taking on more patients, appointments might not come up as quickly as they once did. Countering that, though, the current squeeze on household budgets might reduce the numbers of self-funding customers.

We are already used to paying for some of our healthcare. For eyesight, the over-60s get only a test without having to pay, and there is no completely free dental treatment available. Now it is possible to pay private companies for immediate GP appointments and to get medical tests.

An alternative for people with no immediate need for care is to take out private health insurance. This is mainly a perk for employees, but young people in particular are increasingly paying their own premiums.

Whether insurance or pay-as-you-go

is cheaper is a gamble, as is any insurance policy. For older people, the premiums are eye-watering, costing hundreds of pounds a month, depending on your age, state of health, the waiting period, the excess you choose to pay and even your postcode.

The private health-insurance industry is also adapting its policies to meet employers’ obligations to support their workers’ physical- and mental-health needs. Included is more affordable ‘telehealth’, which uses computers and mobile phones to provide information about medical problems and contact with doctors.

A cheaper though limited alternative to private health insurance is the health-care cash plan, which can cost £10 a month for over-65s. This allows you to claim up to £70 a year for dental treatment and another £70 towards opticians’ bills plus payments for a few other situations, whether NHS or private.

For higher premiums, you can recoup more each year.

‘She’s watching neighbours’

There is also critical-illness insurance, which pays a lump sum if you are diagnosed with a named condition; and income protection, which pays a monthly amount if you lose salary through illness or injury.

The quality of medical treatment is the same whether you are in an NHS or a private hospital, but the NHS remains the only place where you can get emergency treatment. It must be cherished.

‘Bless – his first words’ The Oldie June 2022 77

The Reed Warbler

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd It is now a popular refrain that the pandemic’s health and safety restrictions had an unforeseen effect: advancing contentment through a heightened awareness of nature. Taking an ‘awe walk’ is what a ‘happiness officer’ might suggest.

Londoners certainly discovered the truth of Pitt the Elder’s remark, in the 18th century, that the ‘lungs of London’ are the parks. Only the ‘pandemonium’ forced me, like untold others, to explore the royal parks. And it was only a now much-missed friend who drew my attention to an unknown haunt of the reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus).

Alister Warman, Director (1983-91) of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens and last Principal (1991-2003) of the Byam Shaw School of Art, died from cancer in May 2020.

He was a bird-loving walker from boyhood. His last text to me was to ask if the reed warblers had arrived from Africa to nest in the reedbed by the Serpentine Lido. In 2010, 380 yards of reedbeds were planted to fringe the Serpentine in Hyde Park and – its continuation – the Long Water in Kensington Gardens.

I hastened to find out and, sure enough, as the unheeding public flooded by, there were the unmistakable trills and scratchy warbling of a reed warbler. It fleetingly revealed its well-camouflaged self before resuming its song from the safety of the thicket.

A patrolling policeman joined me, hoping to spot a sand martin among the swifts, with swallows and house martins hawking for insects over the water. He told me I might also see a reed bunting and that house martins nested under the eaves of the French and Kuwaiti Embassies, flanking the Albert Gate entrance to Hyde Park. Fifty years in London and I had never noticed. After he left, a splendid cock reed bunting duly confirmed his prediction.

Reedbeds bind loose soil to prevent

water erosion, absorb pollutants and provide shelter and breeding grounds for diverse plants, animals, birds and insects. Ninety per cent of them have disappeared over the last century. In 1992, the government signed the Rio Convention, committed to halting biodiversity loss.

The resulting London Biodiversity Partnership, which included the Royal Parks, was part of a national Biodiversity Action Plan to enable local authorities to fulfil a requirement of the 2006 Environment and Rural Communities Act. In modified form, this continues.

The reed warbler, a favourite host of

the cuckoo, has seen its numbers double since the late 1970s, to 155,000 (2016).

Eastern England, particularly the Fens, has the greatest density, but Welsh expansion and new colonies in Ireland (Eire, since 1981) and Scotland (1987) have also occurred. Reedbed increase is one explanation.

Alister once also flushed a woodcock in Kensington Gardens. At the Byam Shaw, he was brought another, found exhausted in the hubbub of the Holloway Road by one of his students.

He released it to recover in the perfect habitat of nearby Highgate’s overgrown old cemetery.

The Oldie June 2022 79

Travel How not to run a hotel My bugbears – and my dream hotels, by insider Jeremy Wayne

I

love good hotels. Who doesn’t?

Clean, crisp sheets, bath towels the size of sails, hot and cold running room service – what can possibly be bad? Well, quite a lot, as it happens.

My standards are simple and scrupulously fair. A hotel must be at least as comfortable as my own house, which is a pretty low bar since my house isn’t especially comfortable.

But even the shabbiest home has advantages over the grandest hotel. At home, you know where the light switches are. You know the direction to turn the taps to make the shower water hot. Plus you have the ability to fix yourself a drink or rustle up a sandwich, any time of the day or night, with the minimum of fuss and without it costing an arm and a leg.

Hotels, while they can obviously spoil you, can also irritate you in equal measure.

Here, then, are my top hotel bugbears – and some hotels where such headaches are never likely to occur.

1. The googling concierge ‘Concierge’ and ‘Google’ are two nouns that should never be used 80 The Oldie June 2022

in the same phrase or sentence; their functions are entirely separate.

The first is a hotel professional, a repository of essential information.

Part-human encyclopedia, partconnoisseur, the perfect hotel concierge pairs his ability to ‘read’ the guest with intimate local knowledge.

How many times have I asked a hotel concierge for a nugget of local intel – a barber shop, a florist, a train time – only to have him start tapping on his keyboard? These days, all travellers have smartphones – so any fool can google.

We need an informed opinion, a point Always check the shower: Bates Motel

of view, an original recommendation or a secret hideaway – something we can’t discover for ourselves.

Daniel Bethel, head concierge at the beautifully restored Cadogan Hotel, London (belmond.com), where Lillie Langtry once held court and from where, in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118, is not a googler. A member of Les Clefs d’Or, the association of elite concierges, for 19 years, he has a ‘black book’ of restaurant directors, doctors and museum curators. He can arrange an engagement party in the square (complete with string quartet) in no time or rustle up a private jet within a couple of hours, should you need one, all without googling.

2. The sensor-activated minibar You know the set-up: the hotel minibar that automatically charges you when you remove – or even, in some cases, merely touch – an item, regardless of whether or not you consume it. Look to see whether the label on that bottle of water says ‘still’ or ‘fizzy’, or remove a can of Coke to make space for your own bottle of milk or perhaps contact-lens solution, and find on departure that an additional 98 euros has been mysteriously added

to your bill. Talk about minibar – more of a mini-minefield, I’d say.

The Ace, New Orleans (acehotel. com), doesn’t do minibars as we know and hate them. It does a full-size Smeg refrigerator in jaunty lime green. It’s crammed with five kinds of whisky as well as other spirits, three kinds of house-distilled vermouth and bitters and at least two tons of chocolate. Not a sensor in sight – you pay for what you consume on an honesty basis. The first Ace Hotel I came across was in New Orleans. There are now 20 of these beauties, with Kyoto and Sydney the most recent openings.

3. Baffling technology I’m no Luddite – no journalist can afford to be. But touch screens, impenetrable lighting layouts and electrically operated curtains in my hotel room all drive me nuts. I like to turn the lights on and off with a simple on/off switch and open and close the curtains with my own two hands.

I don’t like blue light, LED displays or anything in the room that beeps, buzzes or otherwise wakes or startles me.

Nestled in the pines above a partsandy, part-rocky beach in a crook in the glorious bay of Palma, the wellestablished Hotel Bendinat, Palma de Mallorca (hotelbendinat.es), is a celebration of old-fashioned comfort.

Light switches are where you expect them to be and have only two positions – on and off. The heavy curtains draw easily, and the TV (not that you’ll ever want to watch it) is straightforward to operate. I don’t think there can be a more comfortable or relaxing hotel in the entire Mediterranean.

Whether there’s a wedding for 400 people in full swing in the hotel’s splendiferous Belle Époque ballroom, or the couple in the next room are going at it hammer and tongs, fear not: you will never hear a sound.

5. Music that offends I rather like music in hotel lobbies.

Oscar Peterson on the piano, say, or the silky purr of Acker Bilk’s clarinet – these can give any lobby an air of gentle sophistication.

My issue is with loud music, or any music that impinges on human conversation. Please, hoteliers, no Guns N’ Roses at breakfast – in fact, no vocals whatsoever before midday.

Worst of all – inappropriate music. At an otherwise lovely hotel in Provence last year, sunbathing by the delicious swimming pool, I was subjected to the following rap assault on my ears: ‘I’m looking up north while you touching down south.’ And those were some of the tamer lyrics.

At the Kimpton St Honoré, Paris (kimptonsthonoreparis.com), the zingy new ‘boutique’ hotel from the InterContinental group on the site of the former 1917 La Samaritaine department store, diagonally opposite L’Opéra, they get the music absolutely right.

In the hotel’s Montecito Café, there’s extra light, Avoid the Fawlty School of Management

barely audible jazz. At the bar on the hotel’s wonderful rooftop terrace and garden, with a view of the Eiffel Tower, you’ll (just about) hear Charles Aznavour warbling La Baraka or Françoise Hardy mouthing Find Me a Boy or All Over the World. Heaven.

6. Water babies I love children – although I can never manage a whole one. I really do love them. Nice well-behaved ones, for preference, although the odd rascal can be quite endearing too. What I don’t love is what happens when children come into contact with water – specifically swimming pools. Suddenly, all restraint and awareness of others evaporate.

If you ever get inveigled into taking your grandchildren to Disney World, the first thing I want to say is, ‘I’m sorry.’ The second is that there’s a panacea: the Four Seasons Resort Orlando (fourseasons.com). This lovely property, large by Four Seasons standards but intimate by Orlando ones, has a five-acre children’s water park, complete with ‘splash zone’. It also has a dreamy adults-only pool and sanctuary, aptly named Oasis, where children – no matter how winsome their smiles – are never admitted by the professional, well-drilled Four Seasons staff.

Jeremy Wayne was restaurant editor of Tatler and the Guardian.

He advises hotels in the Relais & Châteaux group

4. Noise I like peace and quiet in my hotel room.

I’m not going to complain about a Saturday-night dance in the dining room with a small orchestra playing Bésame Mucho or Strangers in the Night, the sounds wafting up to my room – rather lovely, in fact. As long as it’s over by midnight. But the hotel gardener sabotaging the siesta hour with his growling lawnmower, or local youths revving their Vespas outside the window at three in the morning, these can wreck any hotel stay.

Built as a private villa in the late-19th century by the English admiral Cecil Domville, with a magnificent view over the bay of Palermo, the exquisite Grand Hotel Villa Igiea (roccofortehotels. com), has beautiful bedrooms (thank you, Olga Polizzi) that are so quiet you could swear you were the only guest.

The Oldie June 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

If you go down to the woods today...

LUCY LAMBTON

lucinda lambton ... you’re in for a Georgian surprise. Wellesbourne Bath House is a grotto wrapped in a temple, by architect Sanderson Miller As you drive along a long, rough woodland track in Warwickshire, it is a surprise and a half to come upon Wellesbourne Bath House.

It is a little, elegantly neat, neoclassical building in the midst of the trees.

Graceful and temple-like, it was created in 1748.

Step through the door and you are surrounded by surprises. Rocks are fashioned into pillars and arches. They seem to drip from the ceiling in abundance, too.

Those rocks are designed, if you please, to show off a handsome yet icy plunge pool.

Your next surprises are the great sweeps of an octagonal, domed ceiling with a wealth of plaster icicles, radiating from a central cluster. On the walls hang eight-foot-long thick swags of larger shells, tied up with plaster bows.

You then descend yet further to the bottom of a narrow, circular staircase. At the bottom, you find a stone grotto surrounding the pool.

This is all the fanciful conceit of Sir Charles Mordant of Wollaston Hall. He was following the 18th-century grandees’ fashion for beautifying their estates with exotic and judiciously sited buildings.

Bath houses, with their classical associations with ancient Rome, were considered to be particularly cultivated contributions to the landscape.

Sir Charles was plagued with gout, for which there was no better cure than to plunge one’s feet into cold water.

The architect of this little building is thought to be Sanderson Miller, a renowned protagonist of first the Gothic and then the neoclassical style. A ‘gentleman architect’, he was said to be a most engaging and likeable man.

Famed particularly for his sham castles, he designed the great hall at Lacock Abbey and wrote copious diaries.

An expert stonemason, he is assumed to have created the grotto.

The shell work was probably designed

by Mary Delany (1700-88). She was famed for such fanciful decorative 82 The Oldie June 2022

Rural rustication: Wellesbourne Bath House, Warwickshire, built in 1748

delights, as well as for exquisite botanical drawings, fine needlework, plasterwork and ceramics. She was most renowned for paper pictures, made from the most delicate cutting-up of umpteen layers of paper. Having worked at the art from an early age, she became famous for it at the age of 72.

Most appealingly, she called them ‘paper mosaiks’. The art of découpage, as it was also known, was already fashionable with the ladies of the court, to which she had connections.

Yet her versions had no equal, with their detailed and botanically accurate depictions. The composer Joseph Haydn was a most surprising admirer. ‘For these mosaiks,’ he wrote, ‘are coloured paper,

representing not only conspicuous details but also contrasting colours or shades of the same colour so that every effect of the light is caught.’

She had many notable friends. One of particular interest to me was the Dowager Duchess of Portland, who lived at Bulstrode, only a few yards from my house. There Delany would go to relish the company of such illuminati as the naturalist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks.

He gave her particular delight by showing off his samples and drawings from his travels with Captain Cook. The great Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander – who circumnavigated the globe with Banks – also stayed in the house.

What august company! They all

Stone grotto and plunge pool; octagonal ceiling, with Mary Delany’s shell work

hugely developed her skills as a painter of flowers. How I delight in the thought of them all gathering together in Buckinghamshire, just up the road from me.

Delany created 985 of her ‘paper mosaiks’ after the age of 71 – until, in her eighties, her eyesight failed her. Haydn tells us more: ‘With the plant specimen set before her, she cut minute particles of coloured paper to represent the petals, stamens, calyx, leaves, veins, stalk and other parts of the plants.’ HURRAH! In 1734, Delany wrote most poetically of this bath house, ‘The stucco is meant to represent a wall worn by water drops, with icicles sticking to it. The festoons of shells are additional ornaments – or how could they could have come in that form, unless some invisible sea nymph or triton placed them there for their private amusement? I should not wonder indeed that so pretty a place allured them.’

This rare little building survives thanks to the Landmark Trust, who rescued and restored it between 1987 and 1991. The ceiling had fallen in, most of the plaster icicles had gone and only a shadow of the shells remained. The whole building was starting to slide down the hill on which it had been built.

Earlier photographs had been taken, some shells had been saved and a few icicles were found under the floorboards – from which moulds for new ones were made. The architect was William Hawkes. Diana Reynell, with her expertise in decoration with shells, was the Mrs Delany of our day.

The Trust’s founder Sir John Smith – my hero for a long time – was responsible for saving umpteen buildings at risk. They were historical structures with which neither the National Trust nor English Heritage was concerned.

The Landmark Trust came into being in 1965. Today, the Landmark’s collection is a cavalcade of some 200 remarkable structures.

The 1880s classical temple of a pigsty at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire is one.

Then there is the 18th-century Gothic salmon coop at Netherby in Cumbria.

What, too, about the ornate 1730 music room in Lancaster, with its baroque interior that took 6,000 hours to repair?

And Nicolle Tower in Jersey is worth a mention, with a third floor added in 1943 by the Germans as an observation point.

Many of these buildings are of superlative beauty. They would no longer exist were it not for The Landmark Trust.

Last – but by no means least – are the tremendous charms of the Wellesbourne Bath House.

The Oldie June 2022 83

On the Road

Lord of the dance? Fred Astaire Matthew Bourne, choreographer of Swan Lake and Mary Poppins, adores Gene Kelly – and Fred and Ginger. By Louise Flind

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

I come from the East End and we’d go to holiday camps and love it. There were fancy-dress and knobbly-knees competitions, and outmoded things like beauty pageants. We discovered camping in France when I was 12, and went to Spain when I was about 13. It was lovely discovering things with Mum and Dad. What is your favourite venue for musicals and ballet?

Our home base is Sadler’s Wells and it’s unique in that it presents only dance. But we’re a touring company as well and we go to many lovely theatres. I’ve got a soft spot for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where I went as a teenager. The East End singalong feeling gave me a love of a certain type of theatre.

What is your favourite ballet?

You’ve got to love them to do them, really. I study them a lot and know all the versions and try and find something that’s mine. The more you study them, the more you love them. And I love Frederick Ashton’s work.

What is your favourite musical?

West Side Story’s a pretty perfect musical and I’m a real succour for Rodgers and Hammerstein.

What is your favourite dance style?

Fred-and-Ginger style – something akin to ballroom and musical theatre, and I can’t resist tap.

Was it a natural progression from dancer to choreographer?

I started training when I was 22 and never expected to have any career as a dancer. Directing and choreographing were something from childhood. I used to put on shows with my brother – he’d be my Ginger…

Do you miss dancing?

Not really – I live through the dancers I work with so much.

How did you come up with your famous Swan Lake?

I hit on the idea of male swans instead of female swans, and creating movement that is swanlike but with different bodies, so it would essentially look different.

What did you think of Billy Elliot? Did it open up access to ballet?

I think it’s had a really good influence on young guys who want to get into dance but, then again, our Swan Lake has as well, and I think Strictly has too.

Who is your favourite dancer?

Fred Astaire, always.

Who was the better dancer, Fred or Ginger?

There’s a lot of joy in her, where he’s quite slick and amazing. The combination is unbeatable.

Are you a fan of Gene Kelly?

I’m a friend of Gene’s widow, Patricia Kelly, and I’ve learnt so much about Gene’s work. She says he was much happier behind the scenes than on screen and I think that’s the difference between him and Astaire, who was very uninterested in that. My heart is with Astaire and my head is with Gene.

What’s the process of taking Mary Poppins and Edward Scissorhands and turning it into dance?

You try to capture the essence of what people love about them, and then do

something completely different. People still feel they’ve experienced what they love about that piece.

What are the best books/stories that transfer into dance – or can you dance about anything?

Simple stories and simple, big themes are good for dance – love stories and sex.

Are you a traveller?

My partner, Arthur, and I try to do a little adventure twice a year. We’ve just been to see the Northern Lights.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We didn’t really go anywhere – we didn’t really have a wedding [he laughs]. We had a civil partnership and it was very, very quiet.

Do you lie on the beach?

I had a little cancer scare a few years back and I need to keep out of the sun.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Horrible sea-sluggy things in Japan – I find the sushi out there is rather scary…

What’s your biggest headache?

Not knowing enough about the place I’m in and feeling I’m missing out.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

I slept in a tepee once on Catalina Island, just off Los Angeles, on a tour with the company. I didn’t enjoy it because I felt the creepy-crawlies were coming in.

Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man is at the Royal Albert Hall, 9th to 19th June The Oldie June 2022 85

Taking a Walk

Paddling in Norfolk’s moat

GARY WING

patrick barkham

When you picture a great watershed between two rivers, a mountain ridge probably comes to mind – not a reedbound marsh barely 20 yards above sea level. But Redgrave and Lopham Fen is a miraculous, albeit low-key place.

This hidden fen is the source of both the River Waveney, which flows 59 miles east to join the sea at Great Yarmouth, and the Little Ouse, which flows 37 miles mostly west to the Great Ouse and then north into the Wash. The spring power beneath one modest marsh turns the county of Norfolk into an island.

I was seeking the magical point where the map marks ‘Source of the Little Ouse’ and ‘Source of the River Waveney’. I was abuzz with the riddles of this quest. How can this spot produce two such beautiful lowland rivers? Why does such low land dispatch spring water in utterly opposite directions? And how is Redgrave and Lopham Fen, which appears to be mostly in Norfolk and partly in Suffolk, wholly owned by Suffolk Wildlife Trust?

I also hoped to hear a cuckoo, see a hobby and watch the fen raft spider, one of the largest, most spectacular and rarest British spiders, a mahoganycoloured ambush arachnid with yellow ‘go-faster’ stripes along its body. It walks on pond water to seize its prey.

For all this excitement, my children and I reached the fenside slightly worse for wear after the Bank Holiday traffic jams. Nevertheless, the marsh defrazzled us in an instant. Its vast, calm green arena of reed beds, pools and soft peaty pathways was completely silent, insulated by groves of oak and poplar.

Like most nature reserves, Redgrave had a whiteboard where visitors could scrawl their latest sightings – ‘Water vole! Peregrine! Velociraptor!’ – which raised expectations, despite someone’s adding the downbeat ‘2 x poo-bags’.

On the children’s instruction, we took the Spider Trail, which I like to think wasn’t wholly because it was just a mile long. No one was there except for a procession of sedge warblers, which gave 86 The Oldie June 2022

us intimate concerts from bramble thickets barely a yard away. ‘It’s like someone playing a computer game,’ said Esme of the haphazard, frenzied ‘tune’.

It was quicker and even more half-crazed than the similarly staccato reed warbler.

Both would be music to the ears of the con-woman cuckoo, seeking to drop eggs into the warblers’ nests.

Above billowing sallow, we admired our first swallow of the year, and as we gazed at a buzzard soaring high in the thermals, I saw some really large swifts.

‘Hobbies,’ said Esme, before I fumbled my binoculars for a proper look.

Correct. I’d only ever seen them singly, but here there were four, circling and then plummeting for early dragonflies.

They’re the most dynamic, turbocharged scythe-winged raptors.

We walked on, admiring orange tips, brimstones and peacocks dancing through the sunshine. A short walk became a long dawdle, and we added drama to our picnic by crossing the border to eat it in a new county: Suffolk.

We mooched beside some waterways, trying to decide whether they were the first expression of the Waveney or a

young Little Ouse – I think the former – but much about this watery landscape remained uncertain, and was all the better for it.

In the heart of Middle Fen, we found the ‘spider ponds’ but, despite binoculars and Esme-vision, we couldn’t find another deadly female: it was a little early.

On the north side of the fen, we followed a path of climbable oaks in their brilliant first green, ears straining for the cuckoo that had been calling before we arrived but fell silent for our three-hour amble.

By the end of our walk, we’d found just one of our nature quests – the hobby. These liminal headwaters and their inhabitants had evaded most of our scrutiny, but they bewitched us all the same.

We were wholly refreshed by the otherworldly tranquillity of this strange and special place.

Free parking (Suffolk Wildlife Trust donations welcome) at Low Common Road, IP22 2HX. Three circular marked trails and access to longer routes on the Angles Way

Genius crossword 414 el sereno Just a normal crossword for people who don’t like them unnecessarily complicated!

Across 1 Such a driver sees a violent disturbance in good humour (10) 6 Vehicle beginning to disintegrate for ace, perhaps (4) 10 Impromptu party after 6 regularly! (2-3) 11 Part of institution dealing with form and space? (9) 12 Man in station providing such a container (8) 13 Theatre night’s back - showing no sign of life (5) 15 Sells one stocked by roofer going west (7) 17 Humanist thinker may see total reversed by ages (7) 19 Mark needing to move delicately - not yet! (7) 21 Group pressure finally comes after erotic dancing (7) 22 Type of sultanate on the east of Qatar (5) 24 Tales about new partner for match official (8) 27 Becoming fond of accepting student’s rebuke (7,2) 28 Man perhaps after a passage (5) 29 A danger to shipping that’s not on the radio? (4) 30 Background information during bullfight showing list of errors (10)

Down 1 Cable company on a vote (4) 2 Shared out date with local drunk (9) 3 El Sereno’s down, with no student to inspire (5) 4 Diplomacy needed to entertain international American historian (7) 5 Former politician drowning in beer, for instance (7) 7 Agreed to make reparation (5) 8 Missed tea being served with special cups (10) 9 Candidate pairs off with worker (8) 14 Administrator favouring custodian of collection (10) 16 After I left, floor covering is a state (8) 18 People at home may see hell for this! (6,3) 20 Everybody for example runs round having played quickly (7) 21 Openness and love found in 75% of dogs (7) 23 Trace elements sent up in scrap? Quite the opposite! (5) 25 Dross incorporating new words commonly used (5) 26 Chester could be ruins with no station (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries.

Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 29th June 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Thesaurus and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 414 Across 1 Corridor (5) 4 Term for the BBC (4) 7 Cargo (4) 8 Give up (8) 9 Financial obligation (9) 10 Moose (3) 12 Trousers; spirits (6) 14 Immediately (6) 16 Attempt (3) 18 Ad hoc group (9) 21 No hems up (anag) (8) 22 Track (4) 23 Cowshed (4) 24 Heading, championship (5)

Genius 412 solution Down 1 Ban, get rid of (7) 2 Mutton chop (8) 3 Enter, recruit, sign up (5) 4 Unhappy (4) 5 Do very well at (5) 6 Part of foot (6) 11 Weakness, fondness (4,4) 13 Careless (6) 15 Drama (7) 17 Spacious (5) 19 French impressionist (5) 20 Give way (4)

Winner: Charles Barr, Norwich Runners-up: Peter Kilmister, Elsted, Midhurst, West Sussex; E L Forst, Marple Bridge, Stockport, Cheshire

Moron 412 solution: Across: 1 Beast, 4 Wrong (Be strong), 10 Diverse, 11 Metal, 12 Pasta, 13 Realist, 15 Calm, 17 Mates, 19 Image, 22 Pity, 25 Realism, 27 Socks, 29 Extra, 30 Elevate, 31 Cruel, 32 Lying. Down: 2 Eaves, 3 Surface, 5 Rumba, 6 Nothing, 7 Adopt, 8 Pearl, 9 Slate, 14 Emit, 16 Asps, 18 Adapter, 20 Mystery, 21 Cried, 23 Impel, 24 Asked, 26 Irate, 28 Chain.

The Oldie June 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO In most walks of life, one plus one equals two. Sometimes at the bridge table, one plus one can equal one.

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable

West ♠ J 10 7 ♥ Q 10 5 ♦ J86 ♣ Q 10 7 2

North ♠ A42 ♥ 9632 ♦ K5 ♣ 8653

South ♠ K53 ♥ AK874 ♦ A742 ♣A

East ♠ Q986 ♥J ♦ Q 10 9 3 ♣ KJ94

The bidding South 1♥ 4♣ (1)

West Pass Pass

North 2♥ 6♥ (2)

East Pass end

(1) Splinter bid looking for a heart slam, showing club shortage. In truth, a tad optimistic facing a weak raise.

(2) North’s hand is HUGE in context. He has the perfect holding opposite a splinter – length with no wasted pictures. He has a working ace and king. And he has the fourth trump.

West led the knave of spades and declarer thanked North for his dummy.

‘Looks as if we need a two-two heart split,’ he decreed.

Declarer won the spade in hand and cashed the ace-king of hearts, East discarding a spade. ‘Drat,’ he said. He crossed to the king of diamonds, returned to the ace, ruffed a diamond, crossed to the ace of clubs, ruffed his fourth diamond, and conceded, one down. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. I must lose a spade and a heart.’

Actually, there was something declarer could have done about it. The key is to try to organise matters so the defensive spade trick falls on declarer’s heart trick at trick 13. Watch.

After winning the king of spades and cashing the ace-king of hearts (East discarding a spade), you cash the ace of clubs. You cross to the king of diamonds and ruff a second club. You cash the ace of diamonds and ruff a diamond. You ruff a third club, then cross to the ace of spades and ruff a fourth club, and pleasingly West follows suit.

In the two-card ending, you have a losing spade and a diamond in hand. Dummy has a losing spade and a heart. Lead your diamond. If West ruffs, you discard dummy’s spade. Say West therefore discards. You ruff, and that’s 12 tricks in the bag leaving both opponents (in a sense) to win the last trick. One defensive winner plus one defensive winner equals one defensive trick. Slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 280 you were invited to write a poem called Cutting.

My cue was a 19th-century Norwegian painting I’d seen of a woman cutting bread. You widened it to cutting hair and grass, being cut down to size and cutting people dead in the street. Philip Machin praised the railway cutting: ‘Brunel knew well the weeks of toil,/ The lines of navvies digging soil,/ The horse-drawn carts removing spoil,/ That made the gap at Sonning.’ Mrs Pat Castle described the cutting out of her mother’s wedding dress in 1945, with material bought by friends’ pooled ration coupons. Fay Dickinson told of an annoying husband cutting corners and ending up cutting his finger.

Commiserations to them, Peter Murawski, Vic Cole, D A Prince, Sue Smalley, Katie Mallett and Bill Holloway, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Thesaurus going to Con Connell’s cut-down villanelle.

Is fifteen minutes really all we get?

Was Warhol right? Was it worth calling ‘fame’?

How quickly all the world seems to forget As life goes on, as if we’d never met.

As if our headlines never made the frame.

Is fifteen minutes really all we get?

I saved the cuttings. Knew I might regret Discarding them. They fanned the transient flame.

How quickly all the world seemed to forget.

‘She saved his life’ – the ‘hero’ epithet.

No cuttings presaged what we both became.

The ticking fifteen minutes all we get.

She left me. Unlike the emotional debt I carry. Millstone by another name.

The fifteen minutes really all we get As, thankfully, the world seems to forget.

Con Connell A woodpecker was here, green, yellow, red, A second’s miracle of colour, seen As we steamed through this manmade small ravine.

On these unnatural slopes the navvies raised, That happy instant of astonishment Dismissed a callow mood of anxious gloom, A private Easter after private Lent.

Well, all is changed, the railway line long gone; Instead this grassy track where now we stand.

Five years had yet to pass before we met, Fifty gone by since first I held your hand.

You, too, my love, brought colour to the world, New life, miraculous and unforeseen.

Like pilgrims now we come here to salute Your long-dead harbinger, red, yellow, green.

Peter Hollindale Black-gowned, the doctors cut the living thread Between her childlike body and her child.

The King must have a healthy son – he’d said.

Clasping her ‘worthless’ girl, she weeps and smiles.

That monarch’s love she’d grasped in slender hands – Dark-flamed ambition in her gleaming eyes; Within the hourglass sifts the restless sand, As crimson morning stains the watchful skies.

Daily, she sees her daughter grow apace, Toddling blithely amongst early flowers – But menace blooms beyond that sheltered space, Where sundials only tell the happy hours.

Mounting the scaffold, fearful, innocent – Kneeling, she scours the heavens for a speck: Some bright, avenging angel to prevent The whistling blade, which severs her slim neck.

Catherine Guillemin If you want him, take him: I’ve surely had enough!

He may well be a diamond, But he comes with too much rough.

The cleave-and-saw is hopeless – He is neither round nor squared – And, despite some brilliant promise, His clarity’s impaired.

I thought that I might polish him – Bring out the parts that shine…

But, after years of digging, I’ve still not found much spine.

His mother’s got a timeshare – On that, please, be informed – So if you want him, take him!

You have been duly warned.

Eve Best COMPETITION NO 282 You are invited to write a poem with the title Unpacking. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any 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 282’, by 30th June.

The Oldie June 2022 91

UK Travel

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The Oldie June 2022 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Our dinner party nerves

Q

My wife and I have been invited to an indoor dinner party with around 15 guests.

We are concerned about catching COVID, but would go if we knew everyone had had a negative lateral-flow test first. Our hosts have made no such request with the invitation and we wonder how to approach them about our concerns.

If they say they are not prepared to ask their guests to self-test, we will decline the invitation – but we do not wish to fall out with our hosts. When we entertain indoors, we always ask our friends to test first and never have a problem, only comments that they will test but wouldn’t have done so otherwise. How do you suggest we deal with our dilemma?

C Sanderson, Isle of Wight As one who caught COVID after a lunch party before which no one was asked to be tested (we all went down like flies), and who spent a good six weeks recovering from a particularly horrible dose, I would still find it an imposition these days to be asked to test. I realise it’s a childish reaction in some ways but, being old and ready to go anyway, I prefer to take my chances. In your case, however, I absolutely understand where you’re coming from and would suggest that you simply write and say that you’d love to come but that, silly as it may sound to them, you’re still frightened of going anywhere indoors where others are untested, so reluctantly you’ll have to refuse the invitation.

End on a cheery note, perhaps asking them for a meal and adding ‘as long as you’ve tested negative, of

A

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98 The Oldie June 2022

course!’ at the end. Your meaning will be perfectly clear. And if they don’t issue the edict to be tested to all their friends, don’t think it means they don’t value your friendship. It’s just that on this particular issue your opinions differ.

Mum’s alarm anxiety

Q

My mother is adamant that she won’t wear an alarm round her neck, even though I’ve begged her to – if only to put my mind at rest. She says she doesn’t want to be monitored all day and however much I explain that she won’t be, she’s paranoid. She says it would make her feel as if she were living in a totalitarian state. Not only that – she says she doesn’t want to wear an ugly pendant making clear that she’s ‘vulnerable’. How can we persuade her, when emotional blackmail has failed?

Bruce G, Rochester, Kent Some older people are happy to wear the alternative – a smaller, lighter button the size of a wristwatch, worn on a soft fabric wristband. It is light enough to forget about and, with the button turned to the inside of the wrist, it suggests that she’s been to some incredibly exclusive, ubercool rock festival rather than being a doddery old crock. You can reassure her that the device only works within a certain range. It is no good if you fall over at the end of your garden.

A

Lover comes back to me

Q

I am in my seventies and had reached a point in life where I never expected to have

ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk To order a print subscription, go to subscribe@theoldie.co.uk or call 0330 333 0195 Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £47.50; Europe/Eire £55; USA/Canada £57; rest of world £65.

another relationship. However, fate conspired to bring me together with a lovely woman, not much younger than me, whom I first met 40 years ago but had lost touch with.

Now we are in a wonderful relationship … but I don’t know how to describe her to friends and members of the family. ‘Girlfriend’ seems completely inappropriate – and ‘partner’ doesn’t sound right to us either. Do you have any brilliant suggestions?

BK, London W4 I am often asked this question, and I really don’t know why it’s so important to have a special term for a new relationship when you’re older.

You only have to say, ‘And may I introduce my friend, blah,’ and everyone with a smidgeon of sensitivity will understand what you mean. If you say, ‘And may I introduce my new friend, blah,’ it’ll be even clearer. Just the way you look at each other, stand together or engage in conversation with each other, will speak volumes – and I think you underestimate how much everyone around you picks up, just from your demeanour and body language. If you really want to drive the point home, put your arm round her while you’re introducing her. Terms like ‘other half’, ‘new squeeze’,‘special friend’ or ‘girlfriend’ could be really embarrassing at our age.

Having said that, I’m delighted you’ve found someone at this age! Sometimes the gods of romance leave the best till last.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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