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
