The Old Un’s Notes

The girl who would be Queen

To celebrate the

Platinum Jubilee, AN 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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, knock-

kneed: 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’