The Oldie magazine May issue

JAMES BOND’S DULL OFFICE LIFE – RALPH FIENNES THE ALF GARNETT STORY

May 2020 | £4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 387

Keep smiling through!

Vera Lynn on VE Day and Coronavirus

An end to Alzheimer’s? – David Cameron In praise of Young Fogeys – Will Self Florence Nightingale turns 200 – Mark Bostridge

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David Cameron on dementia page17

Features 13 Car-free – and carefree Liz Hodgkinson 14 We will meet again... Dame Vera Lynn 17 The ‘brain statin’ quest David Cameron 18 Nightingale’s journey Mark Bostridge 20 From here to immunity Florence Walker 22 Young Fogeys grow old gracefully Will Self 24 Voyage of the Beagle

Sara Wheeler 29 Who can’t read this?

David Reynolds 34 Love in the time of corona Justin Marozzi 36 Spy with an eye for Victorian Britain Eleanor Doughty 42 Plagued by social anxiety?

Mary Killen

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was Frank Matcham? Dea Birkett 12 Modern Life: What is the

Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk editorial@theoldie.co.uk

B uy o u Guide t r o Britain See p47

ABC circulation figure July-December 2019: 47,116

Will Self on triumphant fogeys page 22

British Postmark Society?

Deborah Nash 26 The Way We Live Now Dafydd Jones 30 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 31 Country Mouse Giles Wood 38 School Days Sophia Waugh 38 Golden Nuggets Christopher Sandford 39 Home Front Alice Pitman 41 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 45 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Memorial Service: Sir Malcolm Ross, GCVO James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 51 I Once Met… Jimmy Hoffa Clive Syddall 51 Memory Lane 63 Media Matters Stephen Glover 64 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 64 Rant: Age-shaming 65 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 90 Bridge Andrew Robson 90 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Digital editor and events co-ordinator Ferdie Rous Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

HMS Beagle’s bicentenary page 24

Books 53 The Ratline: Loves, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive, by Philippe Sands Richard Davenport-Hines 55 My Town, by David Gentleman Matthew Sturgis 57 The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War, by Eileen Alexander Lucy Lethbridge 57 Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild, by Lucy Jones Laura Beatty 59 Prisoners of History: What Monuments to the Second World War Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves, by Keith Lowe Margaret MacMillan 61 Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler Cressida Connolly

Travel 82 The real Hôtel du Lac William Cook 84 Overlooked Britain: Hartpury Bee Shelter Lucinda Lambton 86 Taking a Walk: Lockdown stroll in Norfolk Patrick Barkham 87 On the Road: Ralph Fiennes Louise Flind Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If urgent, please email help@subscribe. theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions Rockwood House 9-16 Perrymount Road Haywards Heath West Sussex RH16 3DH

Arts 66 Netflix: Tiger King Harry Mount 67 Theatre: Wise Children Nicholas Lezard 67 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Roger Lewis 69 Music Richard Osborne 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 73 Gardening David Wheeler 73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 80 Getting Dressed: Peter Camp Brigid Keenan 81 Bird of the Month: Chaffinch John McEwen

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The Oldie May 2020 3

The Old Un’s Notes

NEIL SPENCE

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That fine actor Kenneth Cranham got in touch with the Old Un on the death of John Tydeman in April, aged 84. Tydeman, the head of BBC Radio Drama, was the man who made Joe Orton.

‘Tydeman was urbane, enthusiastic, warm and very well-connected,’ remembers Cranham, who first acted in Joe’s plays during Orton’s ‘sardine and boiled rice poverty’, as Cranham puts it.

Tydeman, intrigued by Orton’s incarceration in Wormwood Scrubs for defacing books belonging to Islington Library, put Orton together with the agent Peggy Ramsay.

‘Peggy had decided she couldn’t take on any more writers,’ says Cranham, ‘but Joe’s charm bowled her over, as it had with John. Peggy loved Joe’s writing and became his guide. She changed his name from John Orton to Joe and, when his career took flight, persuaded

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

There are three ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for him to keep a diary [later a bestseller].’

Joe was a much better name than John, says

3. Buy a 12-issue print subscription for just £47.50 and receive a free book – see page 47. And if you want to buy a 12-issue subscription for friends for as little as £8, see our special offer on page 7.

Sign up for The Oldie e-newsletter and Barry Cryer’s daily joke During the lockdown, the Old Un is producing extra pieces every day on The Oldie website, including Barry Cryer’s daily joke. Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best pieces. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.

Cranham: ‘It perfectly suited his combination of Donald McGill and Ronald Firbank.’

Cranham says he owes a

great debt to Tydeman: ‘He kickstarted my and Joe’s careers and was a friend of mine all his life.’

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

Among this month’s contributors Dame Vera Lynn (p14) was the Forces’ Sweetheart in WWII. Her first radio broadcast, with the Joe Loss Orchestra, was in 1935. Her hits include We’ll Meet Again (1939). She turned 103 in March.

David Cameron (p17) was Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016. Since 2017, he has been President of Alzheimer’s Research UK, the country’s leading dementia and Alzheimer’s disease research charity.

Mary Killen (p42) appears on Gogglebox with her husband, Giles Wood, The Oldie’s Country Mouse. She is also ‘Dear Mary’, the Spectator’s agony aunt, and author of How the Queen Can Make You Happy.

Will Self (p22) is a writer and journalist.

His books include Cock and Bull; Dorian, an Imitation; and The Book of Dave. His most recent book is his memoir, Will. He was a regular on Have I Got News for You.

Orton in Covent Garden, 1964

In his diary, Gyles Brandreth cheers the arrival of Geoffrey Willans’s The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth, originally in Punch between 1939 and 1942, and published in book form for the first time this spring.

They could also be called Molesworth at War. They tell the story of his time at his original school, St Cypranes – fans will know that The Oldie May 2020 5

Important stories you may have missed Man breaks leg on path Bridport News

Molesworth was no fan of apostrophes. When St Cypranes is bombed in 1941 (‘cheers cheers cheers we faint with joy’), Molesworth moves first to St Guthrums and then to a girls’ school, St Ethelburgas. Only in the later books, brilliantly illustrated by the incomparable Ronald Searle, does he settle at St Custard’s (the wonderful Pont was to have done the illustrations but he died of polio in 1940). As the brilliant footnotes in the new book say, deadpan, there has never been a St Cyprane, a St Ethelburga or, sadly, a St Custard.

In another highlight,

‘Self-isolating anywhere nice this year?’

Britons. Many of the pictured members are sadly gone, including painter Francis Bacon (second left), photographer Bruce Bernard (top row, second left), proprietor Ian Board

Bottle thrown from flat just misses woman Nottingham Post Body recovered from stolen hearse i £15 for published contributions

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Birds of a feather: the Colony Room Club, Soho, 1986

Molesworth 2 pretends to be a short-range bomber and ‘shoots down skool pig in flames’.

A must for all Molesworthologists.

A new book, Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room – Soho’s Lost Bohemia, tells the story of that joyous den of iniquity. It includes the above marvellous 1986 photo of the club, taken

by Neal Slavin for his book

(dark glasses) and the Spectator’s Low Life columnist Jeff Bernard (in blue tank top). Former Dr Who Tom Baker (top left) is, thank God, with us, aged 86. And the Old Un was delighted to spot his old friend John McEwen (second right), The Oldie’s Bird of the Month correspondent.

The Old Un was dozing at his desk recently when the phone stood to

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6 The Oldie May 2020

‘I don’t know, Rembrandt. You and your selfies!’

attention. It was retired policeman Robin EdwinKirby calling to reminisce about the policeman who nicked the Krays, Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, who’s just died aged 95. Edwin-Kirby served alongside Nipper in Paddington in 1960.

‘He was a common man, in the best sense of the word,’ Edwin-Kirby remembered.

‘He’d come into the canteen and sit at your table.

He was always smiling. He was extremely honest – the only time he pulled a fast one was to get into the police in the first place. He had to stand on his toes to make the regulation height of five foot eight.’ Nipper was five foot seven and a half.

Nipper Read, Krays’ nemesis

‘He’d never have taken a backhander,’ said EdwinKirby. ‘He knew that once you’ve taken a bribe, you’re owned by the criminals. He was the only one who could have nicked the Krays. There was no witness-protection scheme then and the Krays tried to get him killed. Nipper was very brave to take them on. He couldn’t stand it when people said, “The Krays were heroes.” There was this perverse love of the Krays in the East End. ‘Dear, dear Nipper.’

We all want antibodies now. But who discovered they could be used to fight infection?

Not physician Edward Jenner, but an eccentric 18th-century aristocrat.

While hanging out in the harems of Constantinople, traveller and woman of letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu witnessed Turkish mothers scratching children’s arms and inserting pus from an infected blister.

She wrote home, ‘The smallpox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is

Lady Mary and son, Edward

here entirely harmless…

People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met an old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what vein you please to have opened.’

Lady Mary was determined to halt ‘the speckled monster’. As a celebrated teenage beauty, her looks were scarred when smallpox almost took her life. Her 20-year-old brother died.

To save her five-year-old son, she tried out the new procedure, which she called ‘engrafting’.

The British medical establishment dismissed her

‘Stay at home’

experiments as oriental folklore. But a few years later, in 1721, a smallpox epidemic hit Britain. Lady Mary had her three-year-old daughter inoculated – the first person in Britain – and launched a campaign to publicise engrafting’s effectiveness.

Six Newgate Prison inmates were part of a trial in exchange for stay of execution. They all survived. Decades later, Dr Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine.

But Lady Mary made the first scratch.

The Brideshead Revisited cover of last month’s Oldie featured Nickolas Grace and Selina Hastings, writing about Evelyn Waugh. It reminded the Old Un that novelist Anthony Powell thought Grace was the best thing in the TV series.

Powell said Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews were ‘all wrong’ as Charles Ryder and Sebastian at Oxford.

Waugh, Powell’s old friend and Oxford contemporary, was writing about ‘retarded adolescents’, not ‘beefy matinée idols’.

The Old Un hopes garden centres will be the first businesses to open as the lockdown is lifted.

During lockdown, surely it should be fine to ‘click and collect’ plants. But this isn’t allowed under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020.

Once garden centres are open, it should be pretty safe to allow restricted, socially distanced numbers into them – particularly the big, open-air ones.

And what about the threat to current stock? Colin Campbell-Preston, owner of Capital Gardens, with five garden centres in London and the Home Counties, says, ‘Trees and shrubs will be fine as these are being looked

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Seeded sourdough topped with ricotta whipped with double cream, skinned broad beans and peas, dressed with olive oil, lemon zest, mint and sea salt after. Bedding plants will need to be replenished. Vegetable plants are in short supply but we are getting new plants in now to try and fulfil orders.

But the supply chain for seeds

and vegetable plants is now under severe strain.’

Still, he says, nurseries are longing to start planning and growing crops again. Bring on the green shoots of recovery!

,

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The Oldie May 2020 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Thank God for posties – and Molesworth Never have I so appreciated the post, the phone and birdsong

I’ve not been sleeping too well during this. I am not fearful for myself. Apart from our daily walk, when we keep well clear of everybody, my wife and I are living in total isolation. I am anxious about my children and grandchildren – and my son-in-law, who is a teacher and still going into school every day.

Because I am a sensible sort, I am keeping regular hours and when I get into bed, after ten minutes’ reading, I usually nod off. But then I start dreaming and the dreams are more vivid than I am used to. And then, around 3am, I wake up.

Last night, in one of my dreams, my mother appeared. She died ten years ago aged 96, old and a tad cantankerous. But in my dream she was much younger and very helpful. She brought me a slice of brown bread and butter (cut up into little squares) and told me to count my blessings. So I did.

Curiously, I started with the cat – which is odd because she isn’t even ours.

She belongs to the house next door but, with our neighbours’ permission, she lives entirely with us. She’s a beautiful Maine Coon, huge, docile and comforting. She especially loves my wife, who especially loves her because the cat insists on sitting on her lap just as we’re getting ready for supper – which means I am doing most of the cooking.

It’s no challenge: we live on readymade stuff from the freezer popped in the microwave. I can manage to steam some vegetables or put a simple salad together.

For pudding, we are allowing ourselves a nightly mini Magnum ice cream. It’s a pandemic, for God’s sake. There have got to be some treats.

The second blessing I counted was another odd one: the postman. Normally, I take him for granted, knowing that all I can expect through the letter box are bills, unsolicited advertising, and unctuous communications from my old college reminding me that yet another

year has passed when I haven’t made a donation or decided to remember them in my will. It’s different now. The postman is a hero, on his rounds against the odds, and delivering surprises to lift the gloom.

Today’s treat was an unexpected Jiffy bag containing a copy of The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth. Remember Molesworth, ‘the curse of St Custard’s’, ‘the gorriler of 3B’, the Adrian Mole of his day (with poorer spelling and less adolescent angst)? Invented by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle, Down with Skool! was one of the favourites books of my 1950s boyhood.

Molesworth first appeared in the weekly humorous magazine Punch in 1939, and my friend Robert Kirkpatrick has put all those early Punch pieces together in a new book. It’s a gem. Get your postman to deliver it to you.

Another unexpected blessing to make my list is the landline. In normal times, I don’t answer it. It will only be an undergraduate from the same college trying to make me feel guilty. In fact, in normal times it rarely rings. Now it’s trilling hourly. I got a call yesterday from the songwriter Sir Richard Stilgoe, 76. I hadn’t heard from him in years. He was simply going through his Christmas-card list and full of bounce because he was still on the Bs. Thinking of old showbusiness pals, I Molesworth strikes back: his new book

picked up the phone myself to call Dabber Davis, 95, a variety agent I first met 50 years ago when he was looking after the likes of Cyril Fletcher, Bob Monkhouse and Lady Isobel Barnett. We condoled together over the loss of Roy Hudd and Eddie Large and then, somehow, fell to talking about Spike Milligan and the celebrated line Spike had engraved on his tombstone: ‘I told you I was ill.’

Said Dabber: ‘You know that wasn’t Spike’s line at all. He stole it from Cardew “the cad” Robinson. You remember Cardew?’ I certainly do: a beanpole comic with prominent teeth and an improbable leer. ‘That was Cardew’s line, Gyles. Put the record straight, will you, old fellow?’

When I knew Cardew, it was in my early days on the after-dinner-speaking circuit, where another of the favourites (particularly with the Ladies’ Luncheon Clubs, of which there were then hundreds all over the country) was Percy Edwards, ornithologist and animal impersonator.

As himself, Percy was quite unassuming. As beast or bird, he was extraordinary. From hippopotamus to hyena, his range was unique. He provided the voices for the killer whales in the film Orca and the reindeer in Santa Claus: The Movie. Famously, he could imitate at least 500 different species of bird.

I think of Percy every day now as I am taking my allowed constitutional around the backstreets of south-west London.

We are on the flight path to Heathrow, and one of the incidental blessings of this pandemic is that the flights these days are few and far between and consequently birds have returned to our part of town. Now, as I leave the house at 7.30am, the air is alive with the sound of birdsong. It’s heavenly. Another blessing for the list.

Take my mother’s advice: count your blessings tonight. And sleep tight.

The Oldie May 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

A dozy driver exposed my inner monster The crisis made me nicer – until I drove through Regent’s Park matthew norman

C

an anyone really change? Few questions about the human condition are older, deeper, or more divisive.

Are we inescapably trapped in recurring patterns by genetics and formative experience? Or do we have the free will to alter ourselves profoundly?

Until recently, my guide on this was Dr Gregory House, Hugh Laurie’s diagnostic genius in the hospital TV drama House. His mantra, along with ‘Everybody lies’, is ‘Nobody changes’.

After so long in daily analysis that they morphed into creatures from Greek myth – half human, half couch – various friends seemed to confirm that genuine change exists only in magic-realist fiction.

Dickens tells us Scrooge was an enduringly different man after the spirits.

In reality, the old bugger would have been back to shaking his stick at urchins

by New Year’s Eve. And yet extraordinary events offer startling opportunities to reopen the closed mind, and even perhaps to reform.

For 40 years, my stock answer to ‘If you could be anybody else, who would it be?’ was ‘With a few obvious exceptions – Hitler, Stalin, Eamonn Holmes – anybody. Anyone else on the planet.’

I’ve no idea how universal metamorphoses of this kind have been of late. But after several weeks of the lockdown, I did appear to be someone else. Someone nicer and kinder. Or, if not quite that, someone less poisonously intolerant and dementedly impatient.

Had I come across this new creature in February, I’d have wanted him dead.

His dearth of righteous rage as the queue for Waitrose entered its third hour would have ushered in the fantasy involving the electrified baseball bat and the cobra.

This person wears the soppy permagrin of the idiot saint. He drives at 26mph in 30mph zones. He shrugs acceptingly when joggers spray him with

10 The Oldie May 2020

rivulets of sweat from a distance of two nanometres.

Having the greatest of all the Creator’s gifts – the gift of easy amusement – he titters when the carrier bag disintegrates, depositing half a pint of double cream and the innards of a dozen eggs onto the kitchen floor.

This is no one with whom, hand on heart, I’d choose to spend much time. If I found him in the neighbouring seat of a delayed 777 bound for Melbourne – for younger readers, this refers to an ancient practice called ‘airline travel’ – I’d be hanging limply from the overhead locker midway through the safety demonstration.

Or that, rather, is what I would have done. This perplexing newcomer would smile approvingly when his neighbour gently exposed the pointlessness of being vexed by the pilot’s fifth announcement that take-off will commence ‘in about half an hour’. He might in fact be that neighbour.

‘You know what?’ said my mother the other day, when I voluntarily yielded the remote, and congratulated her on selecting an unusually cretinous game show. ‘This virus meshugas has changed you. You seem so much more…’ ‘Sane,’ chipped in my father. ‘Yes, yes, that’s it,’ she concurred.

‘Now it’s almost as if you’re sane.’

The game show ended, and she flipped over to The West Wing. Two pairs of eyes trained on me in expectation of the usual livid diatribe about the contrast between Martin Sheen’s idealised liberal President and the Oval Office incumbent.

‘You’re definitely different,’ muttered my dad when it failed to materialise. ‘It’s very unnerving.’

‘After several weeks of the lockdown, I did appear to be someone else’

The West Wing duly gave way to House, in which a patient showed signs of dramatic self-improvement after being cured of a cunningly disguised hepatic disorder. ‘Nobody changes,’ Laurie told resident naïf Dr Cameron with a knowing sneer.

Distressed by the cynicism, I departed for home. The road through Regent’s Park was empty but for one of those menacing black Range Rovers which those with more money than environmental concern regard – God bless them, every one – as a suitable urban conveyance.

It was dawdling at two-thirds the speed limit. I smiled that indulgent smile. Then it slowed a little more. The smile flickered. Then it slowed again.

The smile vanished and, from somewhere inside the car, I heard a voice I recognised but hadn’t heard in a while.

‘Jesus wept,’ it screamed. ‘What the f*** are you playing at?’

The relief at my jettisoning the intruder was exhilarating. Less so was the suspicion, sourced in the Range Rover’s sirens and flashing lights which greeted my audacious overtaking manoeuvre, that the car didn’t belong to a wealthy parasite after all.

Any lingering doubts about that were resolved by the approach of a courteous young policeman. ‘Good afternoon, sir.

May I ask the purpose of your journey?’

I told him he certainly may, and I explained.

‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘but actually I’m more concerned about your driving.’ ’Honestly, officer,’ I said, ‘I thought you were pulling in.’

He pondered for a second, and charitably chose to accept this. ‘All right, sir, we’ll let it go. But you really shouldn’t be driving like that. You need to change.’

‘I absolutely will, officer,’ I assured him, giving mute thanks that traffic cops aren’t equipped with polygraphs. ‘I’ll change.’

who was Frank Matcham?

No one has shaped British theatres more than Frank Matcham, the most prolific theatre architect of all time, who died a century ago, on 17th May 1920, aged 65.

During his 40-year career, he built an estimated 90 theatres and refurbished a further 80 or so: even ‘Matchless’ Matcham himself was unsure exactly how many. By 1897, in an interview with the Era, he confessed he’d already lost count. London’s Palladium, Bristol’s Hippodrome, Belfast’s Opera House and Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom were among his finest works.

Born to a Devon brewer in 1854, at 14 he was apprenticed to a local architect before, aged 21, moving to a London firm J T Robinson, where he made his first acute business move – marrying Robinson’s daughter. Here he also designed his first building, the Elephant and Castle Theatre, now a disused cinema due to be demolished. When his father-inlaw died, Matcham took over the business, designing several regional theatres. In the 1880s, he set up his own practice, Matcham & Co. Between 1892 and 1912, he built at least a theatre every year.

It wasn’t his modest frontages but his interiors that were centre stage – a salmagundi of styles from Oriental to Renaissance. Auditorium decorations were often a potpourri of Tudor strapwork, Louis XIV flourishes, Anglo-Indian motifs, military insignia and classical statuary, as if created after he’d flicked

HUFTON+CROW-VIEW/ALAMY

what is the British Postmark Society?

The British Postmark Society has an international membership of 170 – mainly retired, and often gentlemen – who are interested in all aspects of marcophily (the study of postmarks).

Subscribers attend postal auctions and receive a quarterly journal on topics ranging from hand-stamped and machine-stamped date stamps to special-event postmarks from the 12 The Oldie May 2020

through the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Among these fanciful constructions was London’s Coliseum, featuring Britain’s first revolving stage, allowing for imaginative productions such as an extravagant celebration of Derby Day, with jockeys riding real horses, galloping against the moving revolve.

Matcham was commercially successful because he combined whimsy with an ability to deliver on time and on budget, along with a solid practical approach to design. He was as concerned about acoustics and sightlines as the gold paint on the rococo panels, pioneering the use of steel (rather than wood) frames, thereby removing the need for pillars, an idea he quickly patented. Music-hall singer Lillie Langtry celebrated this elimination of restricted views when she unveiled Matcham’s Cheltenham Theatre in 1891:

Nay where (within this house you’ll all agree) Not all can sit, but all can see – The architect’s arrangements if you watch ’em (Like those two rhymes), tis hard to match ’em Matcham retired to Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, just before the outbreak of the First World War. He died at home owing to blood poisoning from cutting his fingernails too short.

There are no national celebrations planned for the centenary of this eminent architect, the Christopher Wren of the theatre world. Thought too ‘commercial’, he never joined RIBA. Contemporaries dubbed his designs ‘illiterate’ for flouting established architectural rules. In 1896, the distinguished Modern Opera House and Theatre declared, ‘To fully illustrate such theatres in a volume dealing with theatre architecture in its best sense would be anomalous as to include the ordinary jerry-builder’s cottages in a volume on domestic architecture.’

Many of his theatres were demolished or their fabulous interiors ripped out to be turned into bingo halls and nightclubs.

Only two dozen survive, with a further dozen drastically altered. London’s Coliseum is listed Grade II, as are the Hackney Empire and the Blackpool Grand. All are currently closed owing to coronavirus lockdown. But Matcham’s designs, combining ornate opulence with practical functionality, continue to define what a theatre should look like today.

Dea Birkett

20th and 21st centuries. In 2018, the Society celebrated its 60th anniversary.

The postmark is distinct from the ‘killer’ or ‘dumb cancellation’ mark that cancels a stamp so that it can’t be used twice; you might have seen this as four or five wavy lines on an envelope. In contrast, the postmark carries information: the date, time, location of the originating post office and names of additional post offices en route.

Although it comes in a variety of designs, the postmark is usually in black ink, which is the reason the first postage stamp, the Penny Black, was

replaced in 1841 by the Penny Red – to make the postmark more visible.

John Enfield, the current president of the British Postmark Society and editor of its journal, describes how he first became interested in postmarks: ‘It started as a child when my father used to bring home envelopes from the solicitors’ office. He was interested in the stamps but I was looking at the postmarks. I remember a letter from Holland addressed to 11 Bank Street, Ashford, England. It had a nice rubber stamp in purple ink saying “Not Middx.

Try Kent” – because there’s more than one

Matchless Matcham: London Coliseum

Ashford in England. Geography was always one of my interests and I know far more about the geography of the UK through postmarks than from lessons at school.’

Subjects of interest to marcophilists often range beyond a letter’s journey.

‘Quite a few of our members are also interested in railways and belong to the Railway Philatelic Group,’ Enfield adds.

Sometimes a postmark is valuable. A stamp merchant at Stanley Gibbons told me a parcel with a high-value stamp and postmark would have been unusual in the year of the Great Crash of 1929 when few could afford expensive postage, thus making the postmark significant.

This is rarely the case, however, says Enfield: ‘One of the questions the Society gets asked a lot comes from relatives of someone who has passed on, leaving behind a postmark collection.

‘They don’t know what to do with it and it’s difficult because very little has monetary value.’

Rowland Hill and a postmarked Penny Red

Sir Rowland Hill (1795-1879), who conceived the idea of the pre-paid penny postage stamp, was also an English teacher. He believed that if the

postage could be made cheaper, more letters would be sent and literacy rates would increase.

Postmarks are gems of design, typography, technology, geography and history, as well as being indications that a postal service exists and letters are still being written and sent, if less often than before. Children today are less familiar with postal vocabulary such as envelope, postmark and stamp.

I have always been a letter-writer and continue to send postcards and correspondence by snail mail.

I treasure my letters from Otto Frank (father of Anne), from artists Tony Hart and David Gentleman and also hundreds from my friends, complete with their original envelopes adorned with stamps and postmarks – as rich and individual as a handwritten address in purple ink.

Deborah Nash

ANTIQUES & COLLECTABLES/ALAMY

Car-free – and carefree I have always liked cars and have always enjoyed driving, but just recently I decided to try and live the rest of my life car-free.

So how am I coping? At first, I felt rather like one of Philip Pullman’s characters when forcibly separated from their daemons – lost and adrift.

But, gradually and to my surprise, an enormous sense of liberation emerged.

I realised I would no longer have to fork out for expensive services, MOTs, insurance, car tax, new tyres, bodywork, speeding fines or parking tickets, or complain about the price of petrol. Until you no longer own a car, you don’t fully appreciate just how much time, energy, anxiety and money you expend on it.

Particularly money, as nothing depreciates faster than a car. A friend bought a beautiful Mercedes sports car ten years ago for £50,000 and sold it recently for just £5,000. My humble hatchback didn’t depreciate quite so catastrophically, but even so when I bought it I more or less said goodbye to ten grand.

The greatest revelation is that I no longer need a car. I’ve been amazed at how much public transport has improved in the decade I have lived in Oxford.

Many small villages that were previously inaccessible except by car now have frequent bus services. There is another bonus in that these buses are free –

thanks to my bus pass, once rarely used and now pressed into service all the time.

We have two mainline stations and there are coach services to just about every part of the country. This means that instead of having to keep my mind on the road, I can now sit back on the bus or train and read, work or stare out of the window. There is another phenomenal advantage – I no longer have to concern myself with the costly nightmare of parking the beast.

I have come to bless modern taxi services. If I order a cab, it’s here almost before I am off the phone. Fast, efficient deliveries mean huge supermarket shops or drives to out-of-town shopping centres have become unnecessary. And the best thing of all is that I can go to the pub or out to dinner and enjoy a drink, because I’m not driving. Also – gosh! – I’ve

discovered something else. Walking.

Are there any drawbacks to not having one’s own iron overcoat? It’s true you can’t be as spontaneous. When your car is no longer sitting outside for you to jump into, you can’t visit a friend or a stately home, for instance, on a whim.

Journeys have to be planned in advance.

But once you get used to it, that is a small price to pay. Or, alternatively, a huge price to save. You can take as many trains and taxis as you like and it’s unlikely you will spend as much in a year as it costs to keep a car on the road.

I never, ever imagined that my love of cars would end but, at the age of 76 and still safe on the roads, I find it has – although my friends and family are still very welcome to go on driving me around.

Liz Hodgkinson

The Oldie May 2020 13

Dame Vera Lynn on coronavirus, the Queen and the 75th anniversary of VE Day

We will meet again I

’ll never forget the 50th-anniversary VE Day celebration at Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace in May 1995 – the last time I sang in public, aged just 78. I was a mere septuagenarian back then – still in my prime!

It gave me so much pleasure that the Queen Mother who, like me, had lived through the Second World War and the dark days of the Blitz, could be present at one of the highlights of my career.

Fifty years earlier, we had both been in London on VE Day, 8th May 1945 – although she had been with her family and I with mine – when thousands of people, civilians and servicemen and -women, mingled happily on the streets of London. Sadly, it’s impossible to imagine such a ‘party’ happening in today’s coronavirus-gripped world.

Despite the passing of the years, my memories of Victory in Europe Day, 75 years ago, are still vivid. None of us who were there on that momentous day could ever forget the sense of national rejoicing. It was a day when we could finally laugh, let our hair down and be ourselves again, in the knowledge that the Nazi threat to our homeland had for ever been extinguished.

I have only to close my eyes for it all to come flooding back… I can picture the houses in the bomb-damaged streets around my parents’ home in East Ham, London – where I saw in VE Day with my family – with the Union Jacks draped from their windows on that cloudy morning. If I recall correctly, a few drops of rain even fell.

But in the afternoon, the sun shone on the crowds gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square and along the Mall, and other cities across the land. Everyone in my neighbourhood, as elsewhere, had a

14 The Oldie May 2020

smile on their face; they were just happy to be alive after the long years of conflict which had seen the British people endure so much. Some people were wearing red, white and blue rosettes, others silly hats, and the crowds were thick with our brave soldiers, sailors and airmen and -women, who had made victory possible.

Yes, all of us – mothers, fathers, wives and children – knew someone who had been killed or injured in battle or in one of the terrible bombing raids. But we knew that, on this oh-so special day, those we had lost would have wanted us to celebrate the long-awaited moment of victory when life could finally start to return to normal. We knew too that they were celebrating with us in spirit…

At 3pm on VE Day, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, broadcast to the nation. My family and I gathered around the Bakelite wireless set in my parents’ sitting room. Once again, we listened to that wonderfully stirring voice which had helped sustain us as a nation through the Battle of Britain and beyond, when none of us could glimpse any light at the end of the tunnel. If only Winston could be with us today to help us see off today’s terrible coronavirus threat!

The VE Day celebrations continued the rest of that long May 1945 day. King George and Queen Elizabeth allowed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to mingle unseen with the crowds in the streets around Buckingham Palace. After sunset, there were fireworks, searchlights danced a merry jig in the night sky and children in the East End celebrated victory round bonfires made with timber from bomb-blasted buildings.

It was a special day for British children everywhere, with thousands of boys and girls tucking into sandwiches,

Above: With ‘the boys’ in Burma, 1944.

Below: On her 103rd birthday in March

trifle and jelly, washed down with glasses of pop, at street parties throughout the land. And, believe me, none of those youngsters would ever forget that day, which marked the coming of peace.

I had a comparatively quiet VE Day. I’d had a busy war and no great desire to join the revellers in the fountains at Trafalgar Square. I was happy just being with my family in my parents’ back garden after spending so much time apart from them during the war years.

I’d been ‘singing for my supper’, so to

speak, ever since I was a girl and first went on stage. By the late 1930s, I was singing on records cut by Joe Loss’s band. Then, in September 1939, the month the war began, I recorded We’ll Meet Again, which topped the hit parade.

My life was never quite the same again.

As soon I heard the song, I sensed there was something special about it. It was perfect for the times – and it’s still my favourite of all the songs I’ve sung.

Everybody hoped they would see their sweetheart again when the war was over and the boys were back home. And, while it might sound tame to some today, I think it has a timeless quality.

I was so touched that last month the Queen echoed the words of my wartime hit in her address to the nation, when she declared, ‘We will meet again.’

I carried on working through the Blitz, presenting the popular wartime BBC radio show Sincerely Yours, reading out messages to troops overseas and singing their most-requested songs. I would often drive to work through the darkened streets of London during the blackout in my little green, soft-top Austin 10, with dimmed headlights and my tin helmet at

my side. I’ll never forget the ‘pop-pop’ of the anti-aircraft guns, either.

But I was lucky in a way. Being an entertainer, I was allowed extra petrol coupons so I could get around. I suppose I was a ‘key worker’ of the day, just like all those brave doctors, nurses and other vital support staff helping Britain get through today’s pandemic, which has already claimed so many lives. On one occasion, I had to take cover in a public air-raid shelter. It was so claustrophobic.

After a while, I thought, ‘Anything’s better than this,’ and I walked out. I knew I was taking my chances but I couldn’t stand it any longer. Food was in short supply from 1939 to 1945, too: a tiny piece of butter had to last a week!

I travelled to the Far East to entertain the troops of the 14th Army in the mosquito-infested jungles of Burma, which the Japanese invaded in December 1941. It was rare for an entertainer, and a woman at that, to go to a war zone to perform for the troops, but I felt the call of duty – just like those entertainers who are continuing to do their bit for Britain today. I performed concerts on makeshift stages in forward

camps a stone’s throw from the fighting.

The boys – our British troops – would come out of the jungle and then quietly slip back in afterwards. Even after all these years, I think about the suffering they endured, and the soldiers who never made it back to see their beloved Blighty: they touched my heart.

The country deserved its VE Day party in 1945 after we had all pulled together to see off a ruthless, deadly enemy.

I sense we are again pulling together as a nation now, and drawing on that wartime spirit of solidarity, in the face of a very different but similarly deadly modern enemy, coronavirus: the biggest threat to our way of life in decades.

When we’ve finally emerged triumphant from the current crisis – as we surely will, although right now it might be hard to glimpse much light at the end of the tunnel – perhaps we can throw a similar victory party.

Dame Vera is President of the Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity. At 9pm, on May 8, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, she’ll be joining a national charity singalong of We’ll Meet Again The Oldie May 2020 15

The ‘brain statin’ quest A treatment to delay – and even stop – dementia is on its way, says David Cameron

RHINO45/ALAMY

T

he coronavirus pandemic has swept across our world and is changing life as we know it. But even as we fight COVID-19 – a fight that will bring hardship to so many – other battles continue. One of those is against dementia.

The search for a life-changing treatment is urgent. It is estimated that, without treatments, one in three children born today will eventually contract diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which cause dementia. The cost to the economy – from healthcare to lost working hours – is a staggering £26bn. Yet government funding for research remains just £82.5m per year, compared with £269m for cancer. Indeed, we can do little more for a person with Alzheimer’s today than we could when Dr Alzheimer first identified the disease in 1906.

I’ll never forget visiting local care homes as a young MP. Every time I went, it seemed a new floor or wing was being added to look after the increasing number of people slipping into this world of darkness. And yet many at the time seemed to assume this was simply an inevitable part of ageing.

That’s why I decided to make dementia one of my big focuses in politics: to address both the communications challenge of this assumed inevitability and the medical challenge around a lack of research and understanding.

In the years since, there has been progress. In government we doubled funding for dementia research. We put it at the heart of the global agenda when we hosted the G8 Dementia Summit. Most people accept now that it is not inevitable – and, crucially, share the belief that it must be halted.

But perhaps the biggest change to our world in the two decades since I became an MP has been in technology.

Smartphones, watches, smart speakers – each of these everyday devices is a magic machine, not just in the

Do not go gentle into that good night

convenience, connectivity and entertainment it offers but also in the insight it gives us into our health, from counting how many steps we take each day, to assessing how long we’ve slept, how we speak and how we move.

Since leaving politics, I have several focuses: two of the biggest are dementia and technology. And it was as President of the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK that I convened a round table with academics, tech companies and drug companies to discuss how technology like this – one that is already collecting data about our lives – could help us make breakthroughs possible.

We know that early diagnosis is crucial to understanding and treating these diseases. They can start 20 years before symptoms become visible, yet by the time they’re diagnosed a great deal of damage has been done. And we know that subtle changes in a person’s brain and activity can indicate the early signs of diseases that cause dementia. The proposition behind that meeting was about ascertaining whether such subtle changes could be picked up by the sort of technology we use in our day-to-day lives.

All this has resulted in a new partnership with leading organisations in data science, clinical and neurodegenerative research: the Early Detection of Neurodegenerative diseases initiative, or EDoN. Funded initially by

Alzheimer’s Research UK, the Iceland Foods Charitable Foundation and Bill Gates, the programme will see expert teams looking for patterns in a huge range of existing data – brain scans, memory tests, genomic information and blood tests – alongside data gleaned from technology, including sleep, speech and gait. These patterns will, we hope, help us work out where to intervene, when and how.

Drug development is a big part of that intervention, and there is progress there, too. For example, the world is currently waiting to see whether the drug Aducanumab will go all the way to approval in the US. (This antibody, which latches onto and helps clear away one of the proteins that build up in the brain in Alzheimer’s, is different from similar drugs that have been unsuccessfully trialled because it targets clumps of this amyloid protein.)

What we are striving for is what I like to think of as a ‘statin for the brain’, a treatment to delay or even stop the onset of dementia. That goes hand in hand with the greater insights technology will offer us.

Of course, there are things we can do ourselves to spot the signs of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, which include memory loss that’s getting worse or interfering with everyday life, plus disorientation and mood or personality changes. Some types of dementia can also start with declining language abilities and movement problems. And there are things we can do to reduce our risk of developing dementia, whether that’s regular exercise or eating a healthy, balanced diet. Think ‘what’s good for the heart is good for the brain’.

Ultimately, it comes back to research.

We all know how cruel this condition is.

But we don’t know enough about why it develops. When we do, we can intervene.

We can crack it the way we are cracking heart disease and cancer.

And this initiative is one of the greatest strides towards that yet.

The Oldie May 2020 17

200 years after she was born in Florence, Mark Bostridge follows in Florence Nightingale’s footsteps, from Scutari to Harley Street

Nightingale’s journey

GRANGER ARCHIVE/ALAMY

N

o Victorian has had a more decisive impact on our daily lives than Florence Nightingale.

From founding the first secular training school for nurses, to pioneering the use of statistical data in health care, to establishing the principle that society has a collective responsibility for the health of all its members – just three of her more important innovations – Nightingale’s influence has been felt worldwide.

On 12th May, the world will celebrate the bicentenary of Florence

18 The Oldie May 2020

Nightingale’s birth. Encapsulating her life and work, here are ten key sites that allow us to follow in the footsteps of this great reformer.

Escape from the crowds besieging the city of Florence, take the Porta Romana along the Via Senese and, as you climb the steep hill, you will quickly come to the Villa La Colombaia at a bend in the road. Now a Roman Catholic school run by the Sisters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, it was the country house selected by William and Fanny Nightingale for the birthplace of their second daughter (the elder one,

Parthenope, was born in Naples (originally called Parthenope) the previous year, on the first leg of the Nightingales’ honeymoon tour). A kindly nun will show you the ‘grand salon’, where Florence is said to have been born.

Outside, a walk down a tree-lined path will bring you to a stunning, panoramic view overlooking Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome.

Florence was brought up at two family homes. Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, on the edge of the village of Holloway, was the Nightingales’ summer residence, developed from a Jacobean manor house

on the family estates. In recent years it has been renovated and several rooms are available for bed and breakfast.

Listen to the roar of the River Derwent from the upper casement windows and take with you a copy of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South. Gaskell finished writing her condition-of-England novel in one of the bedrooms upstairs in the winter of 1854.

It was always a wrench to leave Lea Hurst at the end of the summer. Living there, Florence enjoyed a life of relative tranquillity and she was in easy reach of the sick poor. Her lifestyle at the Nightingales’ Hampshire residence, Embley Park, was a complete contrast.

This vast, red-brick house, set in 4,000 acres, was where the family entertained the good and the great (it was next door to the Palmerstons’ home at Broadlands).

Since 1946 it’s been a school; if you enter the grounds, you may see the two majestic cedar of Lebanon trees under which Florence reputedly received her ‘call’ to God’s service, aged 16.

After almost a decade of struggling to be allowed by her family to follow her vocation of nursing, in 1853 Florence became superintendent of a London institution, the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness. The original house at 1 Upper Harley Street (now 90 Harley Street) has long since disappeared, but there is a plaque to mark the site’s significance. It was here that Nightingale developed some of the ideas about care of the sick that surfaced in her bestselling Notes on Nursing at the end of the decade.

The Crimean War was of course what brought Florence Nightingale authority, influence and everlasting fame as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. In October 1854, Sidney Herbert at the War Office asked her to lead a team of nurses to Scutari (modern Üsküdar), on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, opposite Constantinople.

Here they found the British Army atrociously underequipped medically and lacking essential supplies.

Nightingale’s reforms, and the arrival of a sanitary commission from England to flush out the sewers, eventually reduced the terrifyingly high mortality rate from disease.

The Barrack Hospital is currently the closely guarded HQ of the Turkish First Army. This gigantic structure has to be seen to be believed. Visits to the small Nightingale museum there are permitted by arrangement with the Protocol Office.

Be warned that security is high – I almost had my camera confiscated by an armed soldier while taking pictures – and that the North-west tower, where the

museum is located, is almost certainly the wrong tower. Nightingale’s quarters were on the other side of the building – not open to the public.

22 Albemarle Street W1 doesn’t have a commemorative plaque, but it should have. Nightingale worked here on the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army and designed the famous ‘coxcomb’ statistical diagram showing the causes of mortality in the Army, which she included in her report.

The aftermath of the war left Nightingale suffering from a crippling disease, severe brucellosis, and turned her into a recluse, dedicated to her reforming work. She lived in the Burlington Hotel in Old Burlington Street (demolished in the 1930s), and in rented accommodation in central London and Hampstead. In 1865, she finally settled at 35 South Street, off Park Lane (later renumbered 10 South Street W1). An apartment block now stands on the site, marked with a blue plaque.

Nightingale probably never realised that one of her neighbours opposite was the great courtesan, Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters, lover of, among many others, Napoleon III of France and the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).

Claydon House, Bucks (National Trust), was where Nightingale frequently stayed in her later years, following Parthenope Nightingale’s marriage to Sir Harry Verney. She often brought her menagerie of cats with her (a story did the rounds that she kept 17 cats, with a nurse to attend to each, and that the cats were periodically sent to the country for a change of air). Admire the staircase of inlaid ivory and marquetry, but also ask the staff to show you the servants’ bell for ‘Miss Nightingales [sic] Bed Room’ near their offices.

Nightingale was an expert on hospital construction, consulted by governments all over the world on design according to the soundest sanitary principles. Her prize ‘pavilion’ hospital was the 588-bed St Thomas’ Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament, opened by Queen Victoria in 1871. It had seven pavilions – now down to four, thanks to enemy action during the Second World War – and was designed by Henry Currey in fashionable Italianate style.

Florence Nightingale died at the age of 90 in 1910, and was buried in the churchyard at East Wellow, near Embley, in a grave with a simple inscription.

Her major national memorial is at London’s Waterloo Place, off Pall Mall.

This is a nine-foot statue on a pedestal, sculpted by A G Walker, showing Nightingale in her famous guise as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ (though holding a Grecian oil lamp, not the folding Turkish fanoos that Nightingale would have been familiar with at Scutari).

Unveiled without ceremony on a snowy February day in 1915, during the depths of the First World War, it was the first public statue in the capital of a woman, other than royalty. The new statue narrowly avoided being blown to smithereens when it was discovered that there was a gas main running directly beneath the site.

A miniature version of Walker’s Nightingale sits today in the White Drawing Room at 10 Downing Street.

She’s probably shaking her head in disbelief at the dire shortage of nursing staff in the UK – and the current stresses they’re working under.

Mark Bostridge is author of Florence Nightingale – The Woman and Her Legend (Penguin)

Nightingale’s nest: Villa La Colombaia, Florence. Top left: at Scutari, 1855 The Oldie May 2020 19

From here to immunity There’s no quick way out of the coronavirus pandemic. Vaccines need money, time and luck, says Florence Walker

W

hen I read the headline ‘LOSS OF TASTE SYMPTOM OF KILLER VIRUS’, I lifted

an eyebrow.

That moment, I was lathering up a fried-egg sandwich with enough English mustard to blow the nose off an elephant.

I couldn’t taste a thing.

Did I have it? I’m certain I did. For me, as it will be for the majority of the world, Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) was no more inconvenient than losing my wallet. And yet even the small percentage of people who will have a life-threatening response translates into a number of patients that might overwhelm the NHS. This in despite of public-health policies to flatten the curve which have led to the lockdown.

Can’t we hurry up and find a way out of this thing? Let’s just vaccinate everyone and have done with it. Can ‘scientists’ please just pull their finger out and find a ‘cure’, preferably by next Wednesday? Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford says she’s 80% sure there’ll be a vaccine by autumn. Here’s hoping – but it’s likely to take much longer than that.

A quick primer. Your immune system is the most ingenious piece of kit you own. It’s so clever that no one’s certain how it works. But it’s along these lines: exposure to a bit of pathogen causes the body to recognise the pathogen as a thing it needs to get rid of. Vaccines introduce either live, dead or very similar-looking pathogens to the body in very small quantities to let the immune system gear up for battle and produce a response (sometimes antibodies; sometimes not) specific to that pathogen.

See it as a dress rehearsal. When the body encounters the pathogen for real, it knows what to do. Well, that’s the plan.

To make a successful vaccine, you need three ingredients: money, time and luck. The vaccines with an element of the miraculous about them have had luck on their side. Mucking around in labs 20 The Oldie May 2020

has led to some stunning discoveries.

John F Enders, Frederick C Robbins and Thomas H Weller quoted Claude Bernard, a French physician, in their joint speech for the Nobel Prize in Medicine: he called for researchers ‘to act somewhat at random so as to try fishing in troubled waters’. It was this strategy of being guided by luck that led them to develop the vaccine for polio.

Someone was certainly rubbing a rabbit’s foot when smallpox was eradicated in 1979. If it had been any later, that vaccine wouldn’t have been suitable for anyone with an immune system compromised by HIV, an epidemic that took hold a few years after.

Never mind the fact that, without the existence of cowpox (very similar to smallpox but less biologically terrifying), there wouldn’t have been anything to make a vaccine for smallpox from.

Is luck on our side? We’ve been casting our bread upon the waters since the SARS epidemic (closely related to this coronavirus), trying to develop a vaccine for similar coronaviruses. But no one wants to put money on a horse like SARS, whose race has already finished.

Or a race that won’t win you great returns. The common cold can be caused by a coronavirus but, despite its costing

the US economy around £32 billion a year, the medical system tends to look for bigger, sexier fish to fry. With SARS eliminated, money for research on coronavirus vaccines dried up.

Fortunately, the research got far enough to produce more than 20 potential candidates for a vaccine which are currently undergoing a dusting off and repurposing. So there is hope and there certainly isn’t a lack of money now.

But then we’ve still got the problem that the original SARS vaccine had. By the time one is certified as effective and safe, it’s possible we’ll have reached the herd-immunity threshold and the vaccine will be redundant. The herdimmunity threshold is the percentage of the population that needs to be immune to an infectious disease to prevent its spread.

But how long will immunity last?

Immunity of a few months will prevent us from reaching the herd-immunity threshold. And a virus that doesn’t cause a lengthy immunity is much more difficult to create a vaccine for – you’d have to be vaccinated every few months.

The only way out would be to eradicate the virus completely. This has been done in humans only once before.

In 1980, the World Health Organisation eradicated smallpox after the completion of a vaccination programme that began in 1959, two centuries after Edward Jenner first published his hopes of ridding the world of that awful scourge.

We haven’t even dealt with the problem of anti-vaxxers who will fight tooth and nail to avoid the prick of the needle, lest there’s an imagined side effect.

Even if the development of a vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 sounds like trying to hit a moving target with a bow and spoon, it is still theoretically possible. And, at the moment, what else do we have to do?

You give me fever: Elvis is vaccinated against polio, The Ed Sullivan Show, 1956

Florence Walker is doing an MSc in Epidemiology, specialising in TB

In the 1980s, Will Self mocked journalists who worshipped the past.

But they’ve remained ageless, while he’s become a burnt-out shell

Young Fogeys grow old gracefully

‘W

hy are we racing to be so old?’ warbled prematurely-ageing punk uber-nerd Elvis Costello in Two Little Hitlers, unleashed on the world in 1979. Why indeed?

For the vast majority of Baby Boomers who had any truck with the zeitgeist, the equivalence between miserably old and irredeemably square was axiomatic. Born in 1961, by the time Elvis was adjuring me I was so ensorcelled by the fact of my own avant-garde juvenescence, I couldn’t seriously imagine a world of the future in which people still did any of the following: sing ‘God Save the Queen’; wear suits and ties (or, alternatively, suits and pie-crust collars); not smoke marijuana on a more or less hourly basis.

Then came the 1980s – a matte-black decade, true enough, but for all that still full of suits, pie-crust collars and ever-resurgent patriotism. I once asked Peter York which era he’d visit should he happen to have a time machine. This was at a party in the noughties – a decade so lacking in self-awareness that people did indeed stand around discussing such things at fashionable parties. The author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook answered with alacrity, ‘Oh, the eighties, darling – I was HUGE then.’ He was – as were other so-called style gurus; for, by then, the teenage subcultures that originated in the 1960s had come of age and were transitioning into the adult mainstream, so requiring a degree of consolidation and interpretation.

Perhaps the oddest subculture to emerge during this fertile period was the Young Fogeys – who in some ways were the slightly older, tweedier relations of the Rangers. Centred on the Private Eye 22 The Oldie May 2020

coterie of Richard Ingrams, Christopher Booker and Auberon Waugh – but with offshoots into the wider journalistic world via such uptight-and-recondite vectors as A N Wilson and Alexander Chancellor. Married to the latter’s niece in 1988, I had if not a ringside seat on Young Fogeydom, at least one higher up in the bleachers. I ate dinner at Waugh’s Somerset manorial demesne a couple of times – and lunched with him as well.

Bron, as he was known to family and friends, was always kind to me personally – except when waspishly putting me down at his dinner table. But then isn’t that the general tenor of upper-middleclass English sociability: the lower-sixthform common room at a second-rate public school? He published a few of my reviews in his magazine, the Literary Review – refusing copy only on the grounds that ‘If I can’t understand it, the

King of the Young Fogeys: A N Wilson

readers won’t either…’ A perfectly reasonable criterion, when you come to think about it. As to the vexed question of Waugh’s own Fogeydom – whether the bigoted, homophobic comments expressed by his diarist alter ego were really his own – I’d say there was enough ambiguity here to taint the Young Fogey brand, as we must perforce call it.

Tweed jackets, flannel trousers, Viyella shirts patterned with the finest of … graticules: the Young Fogeys looked out on the polymorphously perverse – and rampantly commoditised – cultural landscape of the late 1980s through jaundiced eyes. Whether or not they were bigots au fond was beside the point – unlike the rest of us, they weren’t racing to be old, having precipitately arrived.

The affectation of the old-fashioned was perhaps no such thing – they had, after all, mostly grown up with nannies, fives courts and spotted dicks of all sorts. I had lunch with Richard Ingrams at about this time, because the publisher and literary agent Cat Ledger (who sadly recently left us) thought we might ‘get on’ – having a common interest in collecting newspaper clippings detailing doctor-created diseases and other such mass delusions.

A fan of Private Eye since near infancy, who’d tried for some time to get my cartoons into the magazine (one batch was returned to me by the Eye’s then Cartoon Editor, Tony Rushton, with the words ‘NO BLOODY GOOD’ scrawled across the envelope in blood-red marker pen), I was intimidated by Ingrams. He, as if to confirm me in my lack of sophistication, sat stock-still for the full lunch hour, his eyes hazed with a thousand-yard stare, and occasionally pronouncing a soft, ex-cathedra

MICHAEL HEATH

anathema on this or that contemporary figure or figuration. It was only later that I learned he was in fact not intimidating at all – but painfully shy. But then shyness itself has a quality of bilious flannel and six-mile cross-country runs – shyness is a province of Young Fogeydom quite as much as waspishness.

And not only shyness – brashness, too. A certain tendency in contemporary hipsterism – that tawdry merchandising of the formerly counter-cultural – clearly owes its inspiration to the Young Fogeys quite as much as to the ageing hippies. They, no doubt, would despise the moustachewaxing riders of fixed-wheel bicycles

round Old Street roundabout quite as much as any hairy and superannuated anarchist, but could not deny that craft beers and hand-tooled leather satchels are also objective correlates of their own precocious conservatism. Anyway, if Peter York wanted to return to the 1980s in the noughties – how much more devoutly must he wish to now?

From time to time I run across the delightfully waspish Andrew ‘A N’ Wilson, another of the Young Fogey tendency’s original cohort. When Andrew was first pretending to be old, he was actually in his late thirties – and while I was but a decade younger than he, he

nonetheless appeared ridiculously fusty and aged from my zeitgeisty perspective.

Thirty very odd years on, Andrew looks exactly the same – while I’m the burntout shell of the man I once was. It occurs to me that Andrew is the very personification of the uchronic – that atemporal realm that the English aspire to, as other nations aspire to inexistent utopias. He abides eternally, together with the other for-ever-Young Fogeys, in a Merrie England of organic social relations, where there’s always honey for tea; meanwhile, those of us who made the cardinal error of trying to keep up are falling at the wayside … in droves.

The Oldie May 2020 23

GRANGER/ALAMY

T

wo hundred years ago this May, a new 235-ton brig slipped into the Thames at London’s Woolwich Dockyard.

She was a petite 90 feet, a gun sloop of the Royal Navy Cherokee class, a common type of warship. But HMS Beagle was to become one of the most famous ships of all time. Charles Darwin sailed in her on his epic five-year voyage round the world. When he returned, he published On The Origin of Species, a book that rocked Victorian England and changed natural science for ever.

Two months after the launch, the Beagle sailed upriver to join the festivities for the coronation of George IV (his obese majesty was half an hour late for the service). The Navy subsequently fitted her out as a survey vessel and dispatched her on a global voyage. This first expedition was a success, despite the suicide of captain Pringle Stokes.

On the Beagle’s return in 1830, the Admiralty decided to commission another circumnavigation to chart the South American coast further and to obtain a more accurate fixing of longitude; the chosen ship was HMS Chanticleer. But that Chaucerian brig was in a poor condition, so the still youthful Beagle again hoved into history’s view.

The slight, patrician figure of Captain Robert FitzRoy was again at the helm (he had taken over from the benighted Stokes on the first voyage). Through a more or less random connection, on 5th September 1831 FitzRoy summoned the 22-year-old Darwin and offered him the post of (unpaid) onboard naturalist.

Although Darwin had a Cambridge degree, his academic career had been at best mixed, and he was destined for the clergy. But he had long been passionately interested in natural history. He leapt at this opportunity.

Darwin saw his new home in Devonport shipyard, west of Plymouth, where she had been practically rebuilt, being rotten from her last engagement. Newly sheathed in two-inch fir plank, felt and copper, her tonnage had increased to 242. It was love at second sight (the prospective naturalist had first set eyes on a Beagle denuded of masts and bulkheads).

‘No vessel has been fitted out so expensively and with so much care,’ he wrote home. ‘Everything that can be is made of mahogany.’ But HMS Beagle was indisputably a small ship – the adjective recurs in all accounts of her, and Cherokees were known in the navy as ‘coffin brigs’. Darwin also wrote to his mentor, ‘The absolute want of room is an 24 The Oldie May 2020

Charles Darwin adored the tiny, mahoganyrich ship that carried him around the world and made his name, writes Sara Wheeler

Voyage of the Beagle

evil that nothing can surmount’ – and this before they sailed.

The Beagle inspired affection. Many of the crew had sailed on her before and had volunteered for another engagement.

The voyage was to last two years, possibly even three or four. The company were 74 in total, including three Fuegians whom FitzRoy had picked up from Tierra del Fuego on his last voyage and transported to London to parade before William IV and Queen Adelaide. Now they were returning home to spread the good news about Christ and civilisation.

The ship edged out of port on 10th December 1831 after a blizzard of

Charles Darwin (1809-82) in 1840, by George Richmond. Right: Beagle, South America, 1832, by Raymond Massey

delays. Darwin, not the brooding figure of later years but a carefree extrovert, started noting, collecting, recording and observing straight away, stalking the decks in topcoat and tails, doublebreasted waistcoat and high-collared shirt with cravat. He fashioned a fourfeet tow net of bunting to catch sea creatures which he then spread on deck, where they wriggled in spiny mounds alongside the polished brass cannon and coils of rope, all soon glistening in equatorial sun.

They made it to Brazil in 63 days.

There the ship’s artist painted the Beagle, in all her majesty, in wide Atlantic bays, her four boats beetling to and from shore, with canoes manned by indigenous peoples drawing alongside holding up baskets of cashew apples, guava and oranges. The whole scene was dwarfed by the coastal cordillera and the Andes, miasmic in the distance. ‘I can only add raptures to the former raptures,’ Darwin wrote of the Brazilian coastal landscape.

He began to make forays inland, living ashore for weeks – even months – with a volume of Milton’s verse in his pocket while the Beagle surveyed up and down the coast. Darwin brought anacondas to the ship, army ants, phasmid stick insects, spiders of the genus Lycosa and, from Punta Alta halfway down the Argentinian coast, the fossilised bones of creatures which had vanished from the earth many millennia before.

In short, Darwin was in heaven, and he began sending crates of specimens home. ‘I find the ship a very comfortable house,’ he wrote to his father, ‘with

everything you want and, if it was not for seasickness, the whole world would be sailors.’ He was proud of the Beagle and boasted in letters of her performance when on manoeuvre among other ships.

‘They all say,’ he wrote of the townspeople, ‘we are now the no. 1 in South America.’

On Sundays, FitzRoy conducted divine service on the afterdeck, and sails billowed as male voices rang out over the painted ocean: ‘Oh hear us when we call to thee…’ There were sad services, too.

The purser, in his mid-thirties and the oldest man on board, perished in lonely southern waters and everyone stood bareheaded on deck to hear FitzRoy intone as the ratings lowered the body into the deep, shrouded in a Union Jack.

The longest period Darwin spent ashore – and, to a certain extent, the most fruitful – was in Chilean Patagonia, a place where land splinters into cold channels and cadmium mists roll over the steppe as upland geese loft in unison and hover like washing flapping on a line.

Having myself spent many months both on and offshore in those parts, I can say that the scenery has changed little since Darwin swooshed his butterfly net and caught ostrich-like rhea with bolas, stones tied to a leather thong whirled round the head and lobbed at the quarry.

Along with hired gaucho guides, he roasted puma and armadillo, the latter best cooked in its shell, and camped on the pampa with his saddle as a pillow.

As for the Beagle, she wove around the uninhabited islands in those arctic blue Pacific fjords. When she drew close to shore, the men could see shadows of black-necked swans flickering on the mountainsides and a solitary condor describing circles in the sky. Later,

Darwin often quoted the Bible ‘as an unanswerable authority’

reunited with Darwin, the ship cruised for a month in the Galapagos, where heavy tropical fish flopped on deck.

Homeward bound, via the South Seas and Australasia, FitzRoy invited Queen Pomare of Tahiti aboard for a formal reception. Beagle was dressed, the yards manned and, after dinner, fireworks rocketed through the starry skies.

On 2nd October 1836, the Beagle docked at Falmouth. Darwin was fomenting a theory. The world the Victorians knew was not created in a week; it had evolved and was changing still. This was revolution indeed – and ironic, as on the Beagle the young naturalist had often quoted the Bible ‘as an unanswerable authority’, much to the amusement of some officers.

She went on sailing without him. After she made another survey of Australia, in 1850 the Navy decommissioned the Beagle and sold her to the coastguard as a static watch vessel. After 20 years of further adventure in English waterways, she sailed to the maritime knacker’s yard.

The Oldie May 2020 25

The Way We Live Now

Tyrannosaura Regina During lockdown, a girl called Georgia lifts the boredom by walking to the local shops in dinosaur costume.

26 The Oldie May 2020

dafydd jones

A pair of walkers look on, keeping social distance. Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, 1st April 2020 The Oldie May 2020 27

Who can’t read this?

Over seven million British adults are illiterate. It’s a soul-destroying condition, says David Reynolds, an adult-literacy teacher

VLADYSLAV STAROZHYLOV/ALAMY

A

n elderly man was sitting at a table, tracing round one of those plastic letters that people put on fridges: ‘R’ – for Ron, his name. He was 80. His wife had died, and throughout their long marriage she had done the paperwork.

He seemed a little lost, as if sitting at a desk with coloured letters wasn’t really for him. He was still a strong man. He had worked as a hod-carrier for 50 years, beginning when he was 15.

I was observing an adult literacy class as part of my training as a literacy teacher. As well as Ron, there were 12 or so others, divided into groups. Their ages ranged from 18 to 80. The teacher told me to speak to – work with – Ron. She felt he was lonely working by himself.

In the UK, a staggering 7.1 million adults are ‘functionally illiterate’ – 16.4 per cent of the adult population.

Teachers are badly needed. I qualified and was taken on to teach three classes a week.

I met my pupils on enrolment day and, except for a posh young man with Tourette’s, they were not outwardly unusual. With my help, they filled in forms giving their reasons for enrolling.

A school-dinner lady said, ‘I want to get a better job.’ A retired seamstress: ‘I want to write a letter to my sister.’ A man who ran his own cleaning business: ‘I want to be able to read the Sun.’ A man who had been in and out of prison for drugdealing: ‘I want to go straight.’

All had missed a lot of school: some had played truant; some had been excluded for bad behaviour, now regretted; some had cared for a sick parent. In later life, many had done more than survive. Sometimes lack of literacy created only minor problems.

Dave was a delivery driver for a London brewery. He had passed the driving test when he was 17 – and been in work ever since, married and had children. He had come to college after a trauma at work: during a computerised multiple-choice test on health and safety,

he couldn’t read the questions or answers. As his friends finished the test, the ‘young lady’ in charge recognised his problem and read the questions and answers to him. He passed the test and kept his job, but ‘it was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened.

No one knew I couldn’t read.’

A young woman called Catherine worked at Asda, walking round a huge store, picking up items that customers had put in the wrong place and taking them back to where they belonged. Even though she couldn’t read the words on a tin or packet, she recognised each item and remembered where she’d seen others like it. She practised this ambulatory form of pelmanism for hours every day, and was fed up with it. Improving her literacy should get her a better job.

Progress was slow. Sometimes Catherine was cheerful; sometimes glum.

A small, middle-aged man called Don suffered from appalling dyslexia. When he was a child, his left hand had been tied behind his back in an attempt to make him write with his right hand – a classic cause of befuddlement. He and I made no progress whatsoever. But he was sociable and liked coming to classes.

A welder, he made roof racks and had invented a tube – inside which plumbers transport pipes – that you see welded to the roof racks of vans everywhere.

The young man with Tourette’s was angry, and the drug dealer was soon back in prison. A young woman called Sonia – perhaps because of long illnesses – had left school without learning to write even the letter ‘a’. She was a hairdresser’s assistant, washing people’s hair and sweeping the floor. She was desperate to become a haircutter, but needed to pass a written health and safety test. She sat in the corner copying letters on prepared sheets, scowling and sometimes tearful.

Yet there were successes.

Thelma, in her sixties, wanted to

read her own letters instead of having her husband read them to her. Within a few months, she was doing just that – and, after a year, she read a book: a ‘Quick Read’, written for ‘emergent readers’ and containing mostly one- or two-syllable words. (Not many three-syllable words come easily to adults who are poor readers – just a few that are frequently seen, notably supermarket, cigarette and alcohol.) Thelma moved on to fat beachreads which she swapped with her daughter.

Jimmy joined the class and told me about his six-year-old son, Mike. ‘He came to me with his book and said, “Daddy, can you help me read this?” I had to say, “Go away. I can’t help.” But I want to help.’ Jimmy had left school in Jamaica when he was nine to help his fisherman father. Now he was a builder’s labourer – and a quick learner. Much that he had learned before he was nine came back to him. When I mentioned commas, he called out, ‘Hey, Teach’ – he insisted on calling me Teach – ‘I remember commas. We was doin’ them when I left school.’

After coming to two classes a week for a month or so, he was reading at home with Mike. ‘Can I bring him to class with me, Teach?’ And he did – to the evening class that ended at 8.30pm.

For the rest of the year, father and son sat side by side learning together.

Sometimes Mike made even Sonia smile.

David Reynolds, one of the founders of the publisher Bloomsbury, has worked in publishing for 47 years

The Oldie May 2020 29

Town Mouse

How to work at home?

Keats has the answer tom hodgkinson

Keats once wrote to his brother Thomas, outlining his plan for home working.

He would get up every day, he said, and shave and dress carefully as if he were to go to the office, even though the commute to his desk was clearly a very short one.

We are not sure whether the young genius managed this, but he did manage to become one of our very greatest poets – and this was partly thanks to his ability to work from anywhere.

Dr Johnson was a home worker. He completed his dictionary from his rented house in Gough Square, central London, which you can visit today. The top floor was given over to an office and hosted several freelancers.

Johnson though was tortured by what he called his ‘lassitude of habit’. He tended to get up late, dressed scruffily and was perpetually disorganised.

He was forever resolving to get up earlier and work harder but never quite managed these feats. He would rather do anything than work, and his chief distractions were talking and doing chemistry experiments.

But though he himself was slovenly in dress, he always advised others to dress smartly, and would have agreed with Keats on his advice to home workers.

I’ve talked about Carlyle before in this column. He worked at his house in Chelsea for 35 years and produced a ton of work but was driven crazy by the noise of the Victorian streets. Parrots, organgrinders, pianos and cockerels were his chief enemies.

The august historian never had children, which must have helped. Plus he had a soundproofed attic study, a wife who managed the household and a maid.

Most writers would consider that to be a pretty luxurious situation.

Cyril Connolly said domesticity was the enemy of literary progress: ‘There is 30 The Oldie May 2020

no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’

Cyril’s hall must have been fairly prosperous if a pram could fit in it. Our own hall is too narrow for a pram.

In my own case, I worked at home for ten years when I was a country mouse.

Being lazy and addicted to sleeping, I imposed a strict discipline on myself – though not long hours.

I had a study and would retreat there at nine every morning and emerge at one for a cheese sandwich. Afternoons were for sleeping, walking, gardening and drinking tea.

‘A dressing gown and slippers!

Those great symbols of liberty’

In this way, I managed to get a lot of writing done.

The management guru Charles Handy is an advocate of ‘Oxford hours’. Oxford hours – nice name – involves work in the morning followed by lunch and a long gap for sleep and walking till four or five, followed by another couple of hours of work till six or seven.

The good thing about home working is that you are the master of your own time.

You can create your own routine and be free. Blake said, ‘Create your own system or be enslaved by another man’s.’ In other words, domesticity could mean freedom rather than slavery.

To many, home is synonymous with domesticity and a feeling of being trapped. But this is only personal judgement.

Chesterton said that it’s at home that you can be most free. ‘The home is the only place of anarchy,’ he wrote.

At home, you can ‘make an experiment’ or ‘indulge in a whim’ without fear of judgement. He says, ‘A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house.’ A dressing gown and slippers! Those great symbols of liberty.

All these writers didn’t have to suffer the outrageous distractions of the internet and the Daily Mail’s website.

The first step to efficient home working would be to quit Twitter.

The great Craig Brown tells me that he is so drawn to the ‘sidebar of shame’ on Mail Online that he has invested in a computer programme which prevents you from accessing websites for a specified period.

My friend the poet Murray Lachlan Young, who works at home and therefore could smoke opium every night and sleep all day on his divan, has the mantra, ‘Just do office hours.’ It’s the same with former KLF pop star Bill Drummond, now a playwright, who says he does a nine-to-five.

At the other extreme, there are bed workers like Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and, perhaps surprisingly, Florence Nightingale – currently celebrating her 200th birthday, as Mark Bostridge writes on page 18. After her brief stint as a nurse, she spent most of her life writing letters from the comfort of her own bed.

The best thing about home working is not that it gives you an opportunity to be lazy; more that you are unsupervised.

No one knows if you are working from bed or your office or whether you have shaved or not.

You are master of your own time – but you must also rouse the boss within.

Country Mouse

Mary and I live in different time zones giles wood

The onset of British summertime always sparks confusion in our cottage – aka the grottage – not least because each battery-driven clock from Poundland already shows a rival time to that indicated by its counterparts in the 11 other (lavatory-sized) rooms.

Mary originally panic-bought the clock mountain, including one with a three-foot diameter to go on an exterior wall, to put an end to my explaining that I had not done certain things because I had had no idea how late it was.

However, their works always seem to grind to a halt shortly after she has installed a new battery.

I have no wristwatch since they are a nuisance when one is gardening and I don’t have a relationship with an iPhone.

But never mind what the correct time was. Had we lost an hour or gained one?

I yelled this question up to Mary in the bathroom above. This is the busiest (we are isolating three females) room in the grottage, where the Dimplex wall fan is stealing Greta’s future to offset the vicious and unseasonal east wind rattling around the eaves.

‘We’ve lost one,’ came the muffled reply.

Paradoxically, even though I stand rightly accused of never knowing what time it is, I find it unnerving when the clocks go backwards or forwards because the artificiality of the whole concept of time is made manifest by this arbitrary meddling with it. It prompts the recall that there is a cadre of very clever folk versed in relativity and quantum theories who declaim that there is no such thing as time.

Twenty years ago, a Roy Harris of Hassocks, West Sussex, sent a letter to the Telegraph on the same theme. I still have the cutting. Mr Harris refers to ‘clock time’, which we arbitrarily divide

‘It’s not a jungle out there’

into equal divisions called hours, minutes, and seconds.

He claims, ‘Time, then, is a process of association and basically is immeasurable. It follows from this that time can be neither stretched nor squashed.’

This may be true in the ivory towers of academe, but tell that to the front-line servicemen like my milkman. Moreover, it is entirely at odds with my experience of how time was indeed both squashed and stretched at my boarding school in north Wales. The holidays were squashed – they were over in a flash and always haunted by the voice of leading ladies’ man of the time Noel Harrison: ‘Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that you said?’

For Max Beerbohm, in his essay Going Back to School (1899), the last day of the

‘A tsunami of divorce petitions is waiting to surge forward after isolation ends’

holidays could be stretched with mental effort. Well do I remember how, on the last day of the holidays, I used to rise early, thinking that I had got 12 more whole hours of happiness, and how those hours used to pass me with mercifully slow feet. Three more hours! Sixty more minutes! Five! I used to draw on my pocket money for a first-class ticket, that I might not be plunged suddenly back among my companions, with their hectic and hollow mirth, their dreary disinterment of last term’s jokes.

In my prep school, Heronwater in Denbighshire, some boys started end-of-term charts on the very first day and ticked each day off.

Even as a schoolboy, decades before theories of the brain’s neuroplasticity came into being, I could see that those who used this calendar-countdown technique were on a hiding to nowhere. It would only increase the boys’ perception of the school term as a prison sentence.

But now, in a world with coronavirus, to me time seems genuinely to have been stretched again, to have slowed right down.

Enforced isolation may be the only significant ‘pause’ in the Netflix drama of every Briton’s own story. It is salutary that the Chinese symbol for crisis consists of two pictograms: one for danger; the other for opportunity.

Still, I can finally tackle a book I have had next to my bed for 30 years: An Experiment with Time by J W Dunne (1927). Its introduction declares without fanfare, ‘It contains the first scientific argument for human immortality.’

What could be more important? And yet all these years I have been too busy to tackle it. When I tell Mary that I am ‘shattered’ at the end of a busy day, she often asks me to demonstrate the project into which I’ve poured my energy, as all she sees is ‘messes in the garden’.

In the meantime, I will continue to live, under lockdown, in the extended, timeless moment of the type endorsed by mystics. In all honesty, it suits me to have the clocks wrong.

Allegedly there is a tsunami of divorce petitions waiting to surge forward when isolation rules come to an end, but the isolation has had no effect whatsoever on our marriage.

Mary and I have been living in different time zones for many years. I start my day five hours later than she does and she ends her day a couple of hours before I end mine. It means there is much less scope for territorial battles and power-broking.The owl and the lark are the enemy of the divorce lawyer.

Perhaps other isolators can learn from this formula.

The Oldie May 2020 31

Love in the time of corona Thanks to the virus, the funeral of Justin Marozzi’s mother had no hymns, music, friends or grandchildren. And it was perfect

‘E

veryone knows you don’t put colour on wet hair!’ my wife told me, overestimating male knowledge of the mysterious world of female hair maintenance.

But this is no time to get it wrong. We are preparing for my mother’s funeral at a time when hairdressers have been hors de combat for weeks.

‘Hair and make-up,’ my wife used to joke with my mother, geeing her up during her uncomplaining struggle with cancer.

I do my best with a strange minipaintbrush and apparently it’s a decent job. The coronavirus is making hairdressers of husbands and boyfriends up and down the country.

TONY SIMPSON

My mother, Rosemary Marozzi, died, aged 81, in a care home less than 20 yards from the house she had lived in for more than 25 years. It happened in the early hours of 12th March, just before the coronavirus transformed our lives. Given three months to live last summer, she surprised everyone by living another eight, invariably in high spirits. She adored the carers and they adored her – a reminder that NHS nurses are not the only heroines out there. We were lucky to be able to visit her right until the end.

The pain at not being able to spend time with a dying relative is unimaginable.

The ban on mass gatherings has struck down the nation’s funerals, piling grief upon mourning.

Day by day, week by week, my mother’s funeral, in my childhood village of Littlebourne, near Canterbury, has been getting smaller, until we reach the stage of graveside-only for immediate family.

The putative congregation dwindles down to my two sisters and me, with our respective spouses. No church, hymns, music, friends or grandchildren. Flowers, one of our mother’s great loves, prove hard to come by. There will be no Handel (Largo) or Mozart (Laudate Dominum).

We have been dreading this. Not giving a 34 The Oldie May 2020

beloved parent a proper send-off seems incalculably cruel, an insult not so much beyond the grave as beside it. Yet I don’t think my mother would have minded one bit. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she would have smiled. ‘It’s all in God’s hands.’

Besides, we are extremely fortunate to have her new vicar in charge of proceedings. Fresh from a stint as vicar of St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, where his congregation included David Cameron, Michael Gove and Amber Rudd, the Reverend Prebendary Gillean Craig combines great personal compassion and kindness with towering spiritual authority.

There is no pussyfooting about here or tiptoeing around God, Christ and other little details of the Christian faith that the Church of England would sometimes rather not discuss. Father Craig acknowledges that the coronavirus has ‘viciously cut down’ the funeral, but he also promises a ‘stonking’ thanksgiving when normal life resumes. My mother, a woman of tremendous faith, is on her way to heaven, he tells the three husband-and-wife groups, standing two metres apart. His assurance is immensely comforting.

There’s a lot to be said for gallows humour. When my mother was in hospital last summer, a patient in the room opposite was at death’s door. My

deaf aunt was speaking loudly, prompting a young woman to rush across the corridor and plead with us, ‘Can you keep it down, please? My nan’s about to go!’

It became a slightly tasteless family joke and the first line in the diary my mother kept during the seven months she lived in her care home. Months later, during her final hours, my sister and I glimpsed an unusual mug in the dining room downstairs. It bore the legend ‘I’m one fart away from a poo.’

One of the carers, whose mug it was, was mortified. When she saw we were more amused than appalled, she revealed that there was a rudest-mug competition ongoing among the carers. A clear favourite had already emerged: ‘Busier than a cucumber in a women’s prison.’

I think that might have been a bit strong for my mother.

When I heard the news of my father’s death 17 years ago, I was on honeymoon in the Antarctic Peninsula. Stricken with grief and wondering what to do about the imminent toga party on board our Russian icebreaker, I stepped out onto the deck.

I watched in wonder as a stiff-winged albatross ploughed his lonely furrow through the notoriously stormy Drake Passage, skimming so low over the waves it looked as though he would crash into them.

Today, this sunlit patch of Kent, in the Garden of England I grew up in, recalls a favourite poem by Louis MacNeice. We are ‘grateful too/For sunlight on the garden’.

The graveyard teems with spring flowers and the birdsong is ballistic as we say goodbye to our mother. Chiffchaffs and chaffinches vie with blue tits, blackbirds and goldfinches. The cloudpiled sky is in full chorus.

‘They’re singing your mother to heaven,’ Father Craig says.

Far from being a sad little affair, we have had the perfect family farewell.

As Prince Charles reveals his love of Vanity Fair cartoons, fellow collector Eleanor Doughty tells their story

Spy with an eye for Victorian Britain

Y

ou’ll have seen them in country houses, pubs and officers’ messes: Vanity Fair caricatures.

Commonly known as Spy cartoons – after the nom de crayon of the magazine’s most famous artist, Leslie Ward – they have a habit of turning up in smart people’s downstairs loos, too.

Now the Prince of Wales has revealed he too likes to visit Vanity Fair. As he opened London’s new Nightingale Hospital by video link from Birkhall, 36 The Oldie May 2020

where he was self-isolating, a pair of Spy cartoons could be spotted, obscured by a lamp. One of them was the 1898 depiction of David Longfield Beatty, a captain in the 4th Hussars, described by the magazine as ‘born to sport’.

There have been several magazines called Vanity Fair; this one was founded

by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868, for ‘those in the know’. As Roy T Matthews and Peter Mellini describe in their book, In Vanity Fair, the magazine ‘reviewed the newest opening in the West End

and the latest novel in the club’s library’.

Its caricatures – Bowles’s brainchild, which sent the magazine’s circulation soaring – remain its most popular feature today. Bowles quickly began recruiting artists. In 1869, he got Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’). In 1873, he hired Leslie Ward (‘Spy’).

The first caricature, published on 30th January 1869, was by Ape – of the newly deposed Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Dizzy was accompanied by the caption ‘He educated the Tories’.

Opposite page: W G Grace, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling (top), Anthony Trollope.

This page: Fred Archer (top), Tennyson (left), Edward VII (as Prince of Wales) and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee portrait (1897)

A week later, it was the new premier – and Disraeli’s deadly rival – Gladstone, who was lampooned (‘Were he a worse man’). And so it went on for the next 45 years. On 14th January 1914, Joseph Chamberlain was the last caricature to appear. Later that year, the magazine was absorbed by Hearth & Home, Bowles having sold it in 1899.

With over 2,300 caricatures, the subjects cover the broad range of society.

Some greatest hits appear more than once. Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, was in twice; as was his uncle (thus the expression, ‘Bob’s your uncle’) Lord Salisbury.

My own ever-expanding collection contains newspaper editors, explorers and European royalty. They vary in price.

I bought the Earl of Onslow on eBay for £1.99. Oscar Wilde can cost £600.

The catalogue is a who’s who of aristocrats – generals, landowners, huntsmen and royals. Queen Victoria was drawn, seated in a carriage, in 1897.

Edward VII appeared four times.

Alexander II of Russia was drawn in 1869, and George V in 1911.

Writers were also subjects. A tophatted Lord Tennyson was drawn by Ape in 1873, with the caption ‘The poet laureate’. Oscar Wilde appeared in 1884, and Thomas Hardy, sporting a bowler hat, followed in 1892. Anthony Trollope

also made the list. His 1873 caricature resembled, as R C Terry put it, ‘a wildmaned, pot-bellied, Victorian squire in baggy pants’, and upset its subject. Later, James Pope-Hennessy wrote that Trollope looked like ‘an affronted Santa Claus who has just lost his reindeer’.

Surprise, surprise – Winston Churchill was a regular. He was drawn at the age of 25 by Spy in 1900, before he was elected MP for Oldham, and again by ‘Nibs’ in 1911, as Home Secretary. His father, Randolph Churchill, Chancellor the Exchequer, made the magazine three times.

The majority of cartoons were done in the subject’s lifetime. But when Captain Robert Falcon Scott set off for Antarctica on the Terra Nova expedition in 1910, he hadn’t been drawn for Vanity Fair. In February 1913, almost a year after his death, the magazine printed his almostghostly caricature, drawn by Wallace Hester, with Scott wrapped in a fur-lined trench coat. The caption was simple: ‘The South Pole’.

Trollope is ‘a wildmaned, pot-bellied, Victorian squire in baggy pants’

For some collectors, the key to the cartoons is in the funny, short captions below each picture – there are longer write-ups on the neighbouring page. The 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke (1905) is called ‘A MFH with a sense of humour’.

W G Grace (1877) is simply ‘Cricket’. The great Giuseppe Garibaldi – ‘This splendid child of revolution,’ said the write-up – was just ‘Revolution’. Lord Halifax, son of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes the prize: ‘He fell off his horse into the peerage’.

The cartoons are an unparalleled way of imbibing this period of history. Of the seven Prime Ministers between 1869 and 1914, all appeared in Vanity Fair – as well as the Labour Party founder, Keir Hardie, in 1906, and future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law in 1912.

Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail, appeared in 1895. And between 1871 and 1900, nine different members of the Rothschild family were in the magazine.

These funny little drawings are a joy to collect, particularly in these grim times.

The next cartoon for the Prince of Wales’s collection should be one of his ancestor, another Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Vanity Fair calls him ‘the pacificator of Europe’. Here’s hoping peace – and freedom from disease – return to Europe very soon.

The Oldie May 2020 37

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Armageddon in the classroom There is, of course, only one subject under discussion.

Every part of our world is now in turmoil, albeit a bizarrely calm turmoil. I don’t want to say teachers and students are the worst hit because, after the ill and dying, the most affected are NHS workers. But our circumstances have been extremely distressing.

Year 11 students were on the home run to GCSEs. They had just finished their mocks and we were marking them. Then came the news that school would close two days later, followed by the news that they would not be sitting their exams. I have (or had) two Year 11 classes – a top set and a set three (of four).

The top set were the first I saw. These are students who, mostly, have worked incredibly hard for the last two years.

They’ve been watching their results – on assessed pieces and exams – steadily improve. And, as they saw it, it was all for nothing. Some were in tears; some were enraged. All were confused and unhappy.

I tried to reassure them their grades would, somehow, reflect their achievement. I pointed out that nothing learned is wasted; they have encountered writers they might not otherwise have read; they have learned skills that will stand them in good stead.

GOLDEN NUGGETS Remember ‘East End git’ Alf Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell, in Till Death Us Do Part (1965-75)?

The name passed into our everyday language – and politics. Oswald Mosley called Enoch Powell a ‘middle-class Alf Garnett’.

The character was created by erudite Irish writer Johnny 38 The Oldie May 2020

It was a grim hour – the grimmest I have spent with them. The classroom felt like a place of mourning. One of my boys sang me a ballad (and yes, I’m afraid I found I had some dust in my eyes). One of my girls asked if she could come and see me, drink coffee and talk about books when this is all over. But nothing could really lift our gloom.

My other set was – partly – jubilant.

‘Hooray!’ one cried. ‘GCSEs without any work! Result!’ Their anger was about missing the prom and missing out on not having to wear school uniform on the last day. With a little more reflection, most of them became subdued at this truncated ending to their five years with us.

And now the school is closed, and stands almost empty in the bright sunlight. I am one of the skeleton staff covering the children of key workers, and yesterday was our first day of closure.

Not many children turned up, and those who did were muted and unsure.

They were in their uniforms and were allocated computer rooms by year group.

There was a ratio of at least one member of staff to four children. We have uploaded work for the students to be going on with, and those in school were following a phantom timetable; they and we both wanted some kind of order to

this Mary Celeste. The site staff were still ever present, spray disinfectant to hand; the cooks were cooking; a few teachers still wandered the corridors with piles of exercise books. But the place was dead.

When we thought we might be closed for a fortnight, pre- or post-Easter holidays, we had a festive air about us.

But this is no snow day, as our head carefully pointed out. We can’t just revel in God-given time off. We have work to do. The setting of work was easily done, but how are we to persuade our students to do it and submit it? The only piece of work I have had submitted so far is from a Year 11, an essay on A Christmas Carol which was set before Armageddon. I am touched – but there is no point to it.

Those with educated backgrounds can bleat as much as we like about how the children could take this opportunity to read – but will they? The majority will not. I fear for so many of these children, cast back on their own devices. We have no idea when this will end and the longer it lasts, the harder it will be to re-engage children with the structure of a school day and the willingness to learn.

Meanwhile, we look after the children of key workers as best we can. And this may sound goody-goody, but I do feel that at least I am doing something.

The birth of Johnny Speight’s East End git Speight, born 100 years ago on 2nd June 1920.

Raised, like Alf, in West Ham, Speight had ten years of writing for radio behind him when he created Alf in 1965. Like the rest of us, he was variously thrilled and appalled by his creation.

Speight admitted that not all viewers cared for Alf, but insisted he was true to life.

‘He just typifies what you hear not only in pubs but in

golf clubs around the country,’ said Speight, who did well out of Alf. He lived in a large Hertfordshire house with a Rolls-Royce.

Trying to break away from his comic monster, Speight wrote a 1969 sitcom, Curry and Chips. It was short-lived.

The understandably shocked reaction of some viewers to the sight of Spike Milligan playing a blacked-up character named ‘Paki

Paddy’ led to the show’s being cancelled after only six episodes. Speight again regretted that critics overlooked the satire and took the programme at face value: ‘I was mocking racists, and the Race Relations Board complained about it.’

Speight died in July 1998, aged 78. He was survived by his wife, three children – and Alf Garnett.

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

My husband’s panic-buying – for the dog I’ve often pondered on the two sides of Mr Home Front’s character.

On the one hand, there is the individual who can spend an entire evening watching old re-runs of Bullseye while studiously ignoring any attempts at conversation. A man with no practical abilities whatsoever; whom you might as well ask to design an interstellar spacecraft as change a lightbulb. Who took three weeks to notice all 16 fence panels in our back garden had blown over in the January storms.

Then there is Mr Work Front, who operates in hostile Middle Eastern environments with the cunning of a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia (albeit one who looks like Eric Morecambe). As I have never been allowed to visit him at his place of employment, where he’s a TV editor, I have no idea whether this mythical figure actually exists. Or whether he just delegates everything to capable staff while snoozing in the cleaner’s cupboard.

I once asked a female colleague what he was like at work.

‘Well, he’s staggeringly rude,’ she said, before adding uncertainly, ‘but I think in a strange way it’s a sort of compliment.’

I was granted a further delicious insight when The Oldie’s pop-music correspondent’s latest book arrived.

Rachel Johnson has written an (extremely entertaining) account of running as a candidate in last year’s European elections. And because she is a regular on The Pledge, one of Mr HF’s programmes at Sky, he gets a few mentions. He is, I learn, ‘vile and heartless’ as a boss. As well as unpleasantly impolite in conversation.

When I read bits out to him, he aped Donald Trump: ‘Fake news! I’m a beautiful boss.’

The book was useful ammunition when the coronavirus quarantine was first introduced. Whenever the atmosphere got too Lord of the Flies at No. 33, his daughter and I fired Rachel’s quotes at him with undiminished glee.

‘VILE and HEARTLESS,’ Betty chanted when he told her to ‘Turn that bloody music down!’ ‘SHREK IN SHADES!’ I exclaimed the time he made lunch just for himself.

But give Mr HF his due: he took the pandemic seriously right from the start. Terrified lest I contract the virus

– I’m a hopeless asthmatic – he extended his draconian enforcement even to daily, Stasi-style interceptions of my post.

We never succumbed to selfish bulk-buying, though Mr HF may have stepped over the line with Destry the dog when he emptied the shelves at Pets Corner of luxury Canagan – ‘The food of their ancestors’. For days after, I hung my head in shame at the sight of the vast Warholesque display of Destry’s cans in the utility room. Until I received my NHS letter giving me priority in online food shopping, I consoled myself with the desperate thought that if human supplies got too low, we could always pilfer Destry’s stock.

As we all know, being cooped up in the house for weeks on end has its challenges.

‘The woman’s so annoying,’ I overheard her father tell Betty one day.

‘She keeps bursting into song based on things I say.’

‘I SO hate it when she does that,’ agreed Betty, in a bitchy Big Brother housemate voice.

‘I got Donovan’s Sunshine Superman when I complained about the sun shining on my laptop – she just wouldn’t stop…’

Betty and I met up in her bedroom to grumble about Mr HF. ‘If he mentions starting a vegetable

patch one more time I’m going to scream,’ she said.

‘You know what will happen? He’ll spend two days digging up the lawn, get bored and leave the rest to us.’

The hardest part of this pandemic is not being able to visit the Aged P. Instead, we speak over the telephone, where the signal at her end is often so poor that I find my voice ratchets up to ever more deranged-sounding levels.

‘I said, “HOW ARE YOU?”’ ‘Shepherd’s pie. It was ghastly.’

When I suggested we FaceTime each other, using her carer’s mobile, she started talking about a trip she and my father took to Leningrad in 1960 with the writers Colin Wilson and John Braine.

‘We sailed on a ship called Bore II. John was always so drunk I called him Bore I. “You’re letting Yorkshire down, John!” I told him.’

As long as they keep delivering the Daily Mail and Freeview carries on showing true-crime documentaries, I’m sure she’ll be fine. The Aged P is the queen of self-isolation and has long mastered the art of pretending to fall asleep when she receives any unwanted attention from certain care staff.

Sometimes when I phone her, I wonder whether she can actually hear what I’m saying. Or does she think I’m Bore III? The Oldie May 2020 39

Profitable Wonders

The birds that weave magical nests

NEIL BOWMAN/ALAMY

james le fanu

We had already spent an entrancing hour birding on Tanzania’s Lake Manze – imperious, white-chested fish eagles soaring overhead; glossy, blue, wiretailed swallows flitting over the water; stately yellow-billed storks patrolling the shore.

We were enchanted by the numerous nesting black-headed herons, crowded together with their offspring on a tree-covered island, and had spied three brilliantly ultramarine malachite kingfishers glistening like jewels in the green foliage. Twitchers’ paradise!

The best was still to come. We heard it first: a twittering of excitement almost drowning out the putt-putt of the outboard motor. A tall, solitary palm tree rose out of the water, besieged, or so it seemed, by dozens of bright yellow weaverbirds busily weaving their globular-shaped nests.

It took time to take it all in as they darted to and fro, wings whirring, strips of palm leaves clutched in their beaks, swooping into the round opening on the undersurface of their nests and popping out again like an excitable swarm of oversized bees.

That gymnastic agility and purposiveness is more impressive still when one reflects on how they weave from the air these seemingly fragile nests that will yet be strong and flexible enough to sustain the combined weight of the brooding mother and her clutch of growing chicks.

Veteran naturalist Professor Nicholas Collias described the practicalities in An Experimental Study of the Mechanisms of Nest Building in the Weaverbird, published just over 50 years ago.

He (for this is an exclusively male task) starts by wrapping a long strip torn from a palm leaf around the distal branch from which the nest will be suspended.

Then, clutching it with his feet, he weaves the free end back through the spiral tightening it to create a ‘hitch knot’.

Further strips are then added to create

a ring that will become the supporting framework for the nest. From now on, clutching the ring with his feet, he threads hundreds of strips in and out, reversing the direction with each stitch and placing others at right angles.

In quick succession, he builds first an inner chamber that will prevent the eggs when laid from falling out. This is followed by an antechamber and the downward-facing, sleevelike opening, after which he switches his building technique to thatch the roof with short, wide strips to protect the eggs from wind and rain.

The nest takes just a couple of days to complete. Once his prospective female partner has approved his handiwork (if she doesn’t, he must start again) and moved in, he continues to work on it from the outside, weaving in further green strips.

This is interspersed – a touching detail here – by his looking up into the entrance and singing to his partner as she incubates their eggs within.

The weaverbird’s endeavours probably represent the acme of avian architecture.

Yet more remarkable still is the sheer diversity of methods for achieving the same end.

An analysis of nests built by just 500 of the several thousand of bird species identified 33 types of building material (plants, leaves, stones, mud, feathers and fur), six distinctive building techniques (sculpting, piling up, moulding and interlocking) and eight mutually exclusive shapes (cup, dome, mound and burrow).

The nests are then built on a similar number of mutually exclusive sites (trees, bushes, reeds on water; or precarious cliff edges and below ground).

Complementing this astonishing

Avian architect: weaverbird, Lake Mburo, Uganda

heterogeneity of architectural styles, even the most familiar and standardised cup-shape design, of the sort favoured by the blackbird, blue tit, robin and other common-or-garden visitors, is a unique construct, subtly modified to take into account local environmental conditions.

Twigs provide the supportive beams that may be anchored with spider’s silk or some other sticky substance. Dried grass stems, bent and tucked in, form the nest’s firm outer rim.

On the outside, a decorative camouflage of moss and lichen will (the bird hopes) conceal the eggs from their many potential predators, while an inner lining of feathers and plant down insulates them against the cold.

The further south the blue tit builds its nest, the warmer the springtime temperature. It’s been discovered that it reduces the depth of the insulating material appropriately, to ensure the eggs within do not overheat and hatch too early. Incredible but true.

The Oldie May 2020 41

Plagued by social anxiety?

Yes, do put lots of kisses in emails. No, you can’t visit your third home.

Mary Killen offers an A-Z guide to lockdown etiquette

ARROGANCE Stay put, no matter how good the weather gets. When Visit Cornwall made a public request to second-homers not to visit, one Trustafarian was outraged. ‘Does that apply to third homes as well?’ he griped.

BUFFERS ‘The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to carry them – and sometimes three,’ said Alexandre Dumas. Couples should host a personable (ready-quarantined) singleton third party to lighten the load of lockdown.

CLEANERS Clearly it was a mistake to pay your cleaner under the counter for all those years. Had the arrangement been legitimate, Rishi Sunak would have helped out. Now they still need your money and you must give it to them.

DOMESTIC DISTANCING Ecstasy as it can be to see your grown-up children for a decent stretch, general harmony will be enhanced if each household member can count on bursts of mental privacy. Get up four hours earlier than your most disruptive co-habitee and go to bed two hours earlier. See Country Mouse (page 31), who happens to be my husband.

EMAILS Emailed condolences are preferable during lockdown. Neurotics don’t want a potentially corona-carrying envelope which has travelled through many hands. After lockdown, revert to pen and paper.

EARPLUGS The current 24/7 exposure to your loved ones brings the realisation that you could accurately write their script for them on any day. Earplugs, worn discreetly, help cushion the impact of this Groundhog Day life.

This applies especially if your co-habitee is a male over 60 – when grumbling becomes a medical condition and not just a bad habit.

FRITZLING The inner Fritzl comes out when some men realise they have a household of captive women at their mercy. Hoards of foodstuffs are kept 42 The Oldie May 2020

under lock and key as the Fritzl claims that only he, as Quartermaster, can decree what to release. In our house, we have humoured Fritzl by not raiding his hoard (none of us wants baked beans, rollmop herrings, tinned rice puddings or tinned peaches in any case). Behind his back we order luxury muesli from Amazon’s grocery arm.

GOSSIP There isn’t much around – except how badly virus-deniers (mostly oldies) are behaving by continuing to socialise. Don’t be pressured into dipping into historic gossip capital and betraying old secrets to satisfy the frustrations of a gossip-starved telephone prober.

HISTORICAL RE-ENACTION Rejoice.

This might be your only chance to live as though it were 50 years ago.

IMAGE ISSUES Yes, you’ve had a coup de vieux because you can’t get your roots retouched. Don’t take it out on your partner. Just glaze your eyes over when passing a mirror. And dress well each day to keep standards up. Grunge or pyjamas will demoralise.

JOY Relish the lack of traffic noise, the night sky and the bliss of not being burgled because everyone’s at home.

KINDLES Backlighting means you can read your books under the cover in bed without complaints from co-sleepers chucked out of their dressing rooms by boomerang children.

LUNCH Confect a reassuring routine out of the chaos by eating at the same time each day.

MOBILES By all means – but no double screening while the family watches a box set together.

NEIGHBOURS Now the traffic noise has gone down, your neighbours can hear

‘Rejoice. This might be your only chance to live as though it were 50 years ago’

everything you’re saying in the garden.

Invent a new code – ‘Let’s watch the news’ – to remind fellow inmates that you are being eavesdropped on.

OPEN PRISONS Think of home as an open prison with comfortable beds, private lavatories and reasonable food with full internet access and a chance to catch up on your reading.

PRIVACY Arrange a rota for lavatory use if there are harassment issues. And no bossy notices about loo-roll usage.

QUEEN Keep up your resolve by rewatching HM our Queen’s moving message.

ROLLING NEWS If you like rolling news, don’t keep jack-in-the-boxing into your co-habitees’ faces to update them with the latest fear-mongering fact. Keep it to yourself.

STUCK RECORDS See earplugs.

TIPPING Put cash in a polythene food bag and date it. Hand the money to delivery people to thank them.

UNDERMINING Men! Do not undermine the ‘weaker sex’ by complaining about their housekeeping skills.

VICTIMS Ring round isolated friends.

Say you’re ringing for some light relief.

Don’t patronise.

WILLS Goughs, a Wiltshire chain of solicitors, has come up with a scheme called Wills through a Window. Instruct your solicitor online or by phone. He or she will prepare the paperwork, bring it to your home and witness your signature through the window.

XXX at the end of emails is suddenly OK for friends and family.

YELLING Keep stress levels down by walking to the room the person you want is in – rather than yelling for them up a staircase. A nautical loudhailer (£30 + £2 p&p from Amazon) is an admirable substitute for the chair-bound.

ZOOM The best socialising app. Because you make appointments to meet co-users, rather than have them suddenly invade your screen, as on Houseparty, there is a sense of occasion.

Postcards from the Edge

La dolce vita goes on in the face of death

TOBY MORISON

Italy is in agony but expats will always adore its beauty – and its songs, says Mary Kenny

‘Everyone loves Italy – isn’t that so?

During recent events, I observed a wave – many waves – of Italophilia on social media and elsewhere. Lots of postings of ‘We love Italy’, ‘We stand by Italy’ and ‘Cheers for Italy!’, along with a heartwarming illustration of a young woman lovingly cuddling a map of that boot-shaped peninsula in her arms.

This Italy fandom has deep roots in English (and northern European) culture.

Whenever a poet, writer or artist got a bit depressed in their own part of the world – Ibsen in Norway, Goethe in Germany, the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert, in England – they’d take the road to Italy.

True, there were occasional bouts of homesickness, as when Robbie Browning yearned to be in England now that April was there. Yet the romantic attachment to Italy persisted, what with Keats and Shelley, and then aesthetes such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds discovering the Italian Renaissance.

Englishwomen were named ‘Florence’ because their parents were so smitten with the place, as were Miss Nightingale’s (as Mark Bostridge explains on page 18).

Brexit has come and gone, but Italophilia endures. Sympathetic feelings have been enhanced, of course, by Italy’s bad luck during recent events, and there has been international applause for the Italian impetus to burst into song from their balconies during these trials.

Yet times haven’t changed very much when it comes to Italian life, I’m told.

Old friends of mine, Tony and Marisol Duff, decamped to Italy – by Lake Bracciano, just north-west of Rome – seven years ago, fulfilling their life’s retirement dream. They don’t regret it.

And they found life continued quite pleasantly throughout this spring. ‘Were it not for news programmes, we would be completely unaware of anything different.’ There has been an increase in documento – self-authorising certification for moving about – but

Italians love bureaucratic documentation: they say, ‘La carta canta’ (‘Paper sings’).

There have been some winning Italian songs performed from balconies over the springtime events – the Canto della Verbena (‘While Siena Sleeps’) and Abbracciame (‘Hug Me’).

But I wonder what happened to those fabulous ditties the Italian Left used to chorus? My late husband, the journalist Richard West, could sing the rousing lines of the Bandiera Rossa (‘Red Flag’): ‘Bandiera Rossa/ color di vino/ Viva Stalino, viva Stalino!’

Such a great tune that it didn’t really matter too much about the words.

In July 1921, an old Irishwoman in a shawl was seen lingering outside Number 10 Downing Street. A policeman noticed her but didn’t reckon she was up to any harm. Prime Minister Lloyd George also clocked her presence, and even asked her, ‘Can I do anything for you?’

Yes, she replied, she’d like to inspect the room where Anglo-Irish political meetings were to take place. Following a truce in the Anglo-Irish War, there was to be a series of negotiations between Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and the Irish revolutionary leaders Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins.

The PM led her into the relevant

conference room, and she took from under her shawl a corked bottle of holy water. She began sprinkling De Valera’s chair, saying, ‘May God guide him when he sits here, to set old Ireland free!’ Then she sprinkled Lloyd George’s chair, announcing, ‘That’s to keep the Devil away!’

She departed without further ado. Those in Downing Street roared with laughter.

This episode, recounted in the memoirs of the republican Ernie O’Malley, tells us much about how relaxed Downing Street security once was. Maybe it also tells us that Lloyd George was inclined to be gallant to women of whatever age and appearance.

Later in 1921, an Anglo-Irish treaty emerged, establishing the Irish Free State. That centenary will doubtless be marked in 2021, although very improbably with holy water.

It’s rather wonderful that the relics of St Eanswythe, England’s first abbess, have been uncovered at the Church of St Mary and St Eanswythe in Folkestone. DNA and carbon-dating methods have confirmed that the teeth and bones belong to the holy woman – granddaughter of St Ethelbert, King of Kent – who died c640.

My dictionary of saints (compiled by the Benedictine monks at St Augustine’s Abbey, Ramsgate) informs me that Eanswythe (sometimes written Eanswida) was foundress of a nunnery, later destroyed by those pesky Viking Danes, but revived subsequently by Benedictine monks. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was another awkward moment, but someone kept Eanswythe hidden, and here she is back with us, so to speak, in 2020.

Dr Andrew Richardson, leader of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust which carried out the dig, said that although he wasn’t a religious believer, he felt deeply moved by the find.

A thread of history comes alive somehow.

The Oldie May 2020 45

sister teresa

A hermit’s tips for self-isolation As an enclosed Carmelite nun, I have been self-isolating for the last 37 years.

In plainer and better English, this is called living as a hermit. Carmelites have one huge advantage over the rest of the world at the moment, in that we have been rigorously trained, for five years before our final vows, in how to live in a specialised way. We have been continuously in existence, despite war, revolution and pestilence, since before the Rule of St Albert was written for us in 1226.

We should therefore have something to offer to the present world in its terrifying state. Carmelites do of course pray for the world, for four and half hours every day.

We keep to a very strict timetable.

Admittedly this makes for monotony but it has enormous advantages: time flashes by and, even if one has to do something tedious for half an hour (polishing the floor?), one does at least know that it is going to come to an end. It may well be followed by something delightful, like going for a walk to pick daffodils.

One is fun: an illuminating manuscript

The timetable is also designed to take us from solitude to community and back again, which makes for balance.

We keep silent, unless speech is necessary to our work. Many things that people say are not only superfluous but also downright boring. ‘I am going upstairs’ is not something that, on the whole, needs to be expressed. ‘I am going upstairs to fetch my coat’ is worse, because longer.

Carmelites are urged to keep silence

because ‘sin is not wanting where there is much talk’ (the Rule of St Albert, paraphrasing Proverbs 10:19).

We speak to one another for an hour a day at recreation, when we’re encouraged to try and be a delight to our sisters. This is not always as easy as it sounds.

Enclosure forces us to lower our sights. There’s no point in hankering after rarity. The Chelsea Flower Show (sadly cancelled) is out of reach. But the markings on spring onions are exquisite and, like zebras, no two are the same.

We have an hour’s compulsory serious reading every day: a source of envy to many. I taught myself to draw from scratch: totally absorbing and maddening when it ends. The snag is that there are only 24 hours in a day.

A huge amount of energy, forethought and time goes into understanding the nature of love. If one is living at close quarters with others, it is essential always to put into practice the Gospel values of patience, unselfishness and kindness.

And we never watch television.

Memorial Service

Sir Malcolm Ross, GCVO (1943-2019) As Comptroller of the Royal Household 1991-2006 and later Master of the Prince of Wales’s household, Sir Malcolm Ross had huge experience of organising ceremonial events. So it was unfortunate that his thanksgiving service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, clashed with the annual Commonwealth Day Service in Westminster Abbey on 9th March.

Most senior royals were in the Abbey.

The most prominent available were the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of York – currently residing in the doghouse.

Most observers thought Andrew, who looked sheepish, would have been wiser to stay away. It was humiliating for him and for his mother that she could not nominate him as her official representative to pay her respects to her senior courtier.

46 The Oldie May 2020

Instead the Queen sent Sir Andrew Ford as her representative and the Duke of York’s attendance wasn’t even acknowledged in the service sheet or the Court Circular.

In his eulogy, Viscount Brookeborough paid tribute to Sir Malcolm’s skill in avoiding embarrassing howlers. ‘He had a wonderful team and he organised over 30 state visits, the state openings of Parliament, hundreds of investitures, garden parties and the marriages and funerals of many members of the Royal Family.

‘Perhaps Princess Diana’s funeral was the most challenging for many reasons – not least that it was totally unexpected...

An example of Malcolm’s coolness under fire was that he was told the ex-King of Greece was just arriving when he had said he was not coming.

‘Malcolm’s response was, “Walk him very slowly down the aisle.” By the time King Constantine reached the front, Malcolm reorganised the seating of the European royalty by seniority and the King had his rightful place.

‘His two daughters, Tabitha and Flora, tested him when they planned their weddings six weeks apart in 2002, the year of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and the Queen Mother’s and Princess Margaret’s funerals. The Golden Jubilee, two weddings and two funerals were quite an achievement – even for Malcolm.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

Should you take statins?

The jury’s out A close friend of mine, a distinguished professor of clinical pharmacology, takes his statins only to please his general practitioner, who (he says) would be very upset if he refused to do so.

But, apart from wanting to please your doctor, is there any reason to take them?

My friend has changed his opinion on this difficult question several times in the last 20 years.

If you already have angina, or have had a heart attack, a stroke or a transient ischaemic attack (a short-lived, strokelike episode, often a precursor to a stroke), the answer is pretty clear and universally agreed: take them.

But what if you do not suffer from angina, or have not had any of the aforementioned events? Here the question grows difficult and perhaps even unanswerable in the present state of knowledge.

There are two types of prevention – primary and secondary. The first is intended to prevent people contracting a disease in the first place; the second is to prevent the progression or repetition of a disease once contracted. They are not the same. Statins are good for secondary prevention, but their role in primary prevention is unclear. Of course, there is a much larger market in primary than in secondary prevention.

The matter is immensely complicated.

People who do not have angina or who have not had a heart attack or stroke are not all the same. Some are fat, some are thin, some have a family history of cardiovascular disease, some do not etc.

‘I’d say it’s athlete’s foot’

Such studies of the question as have been performed are few and not entirely satisfactory. The answer is still unclear: the best doctors lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Statins are not free from side-effects which are rarely, but not never, serious.

They have a number of minor inconveniences – more common after the age of 65. The risk of side-effects has to be set against the potential benefits, but there is no common unit of measurement to compare personal cost and benefit, and in any case, people vary in what they consider worth putting up with.

Beware also the difference between relative and absolute risk. A drug may reduce the risk of a disease considerably compared with the incidence in people who do not take it, and therefore sounds a good bet; but if the chances of getting the disease in the first place are slight, a reduction of the relative risk by taking a drug means very little.

Nowadays the official recommendations for taking statins are so stringent that 61 per cent of the population over the age of 50 are recommended to take them.

Thirty years ago, the official recommendations meant that eight per cent of the population were recommended to take them. The change in the recommendations means that an increasing proportion of the population now takes statins without any benefit to itself (though much to the shareholders of pharmaceutical companies).

According to statistics, I have roughly a 20 per cent chance of suffering a heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years – as I write this, sometime between April 2020 and April 2030. If I took statins, that risk might be reduced by a fifth; that is to say, to a 16 per cent chance. But this is not the same as a reduction in my chances of dying, since I might die of something else in the meantime.

Should I, then, take statins? Would I recommend someone else in my position to take statins? Try as I might, I cannot think of the correct answer, because there is no correct answer.

All I can say with complete assurance is that I do not take statins.

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

Giles’s one-legged uncle SIR: While under lockdown here in Sydney, I had cause to reread your March issue. I am glad that I did, because I picked up on a snippet at the end of Giles Wood’s piece, ‘Why do I bully Mary?’

Mr Wood mentioned his one-legged great-uncle Tom Scott Sutherland, a millionaire tycoon from Aberdeen. What Mr Wood did not mention was that Scott Sutherland was an architect. Not many architects become millionaire tycoons or give their names to schools of architecture. I attended the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen from 1975 until 1982. We had an annual lecture series known as the Scott Sutherland lectures.

When introducing one of the speakers, Dr James Macaulay, our lecturer in the history of architecture and a distinguished author and academic of exacting standards, quipped, ‘Scott Sutherland had only one leg, but this was more than compensated for by the large chip on his shoulder.’ To this day, I still do not know what his gripe was.

Hamish Clark, Sydney SIR: I enjoyed this vignette.

Unfortunately, having a chip on your shoulder seems to be a prerequisite for being a tycoon. I myself, with no chip on my shoulder, am living proof of the old Lancastrian adage ‘from clogs to clogs in three generations’.

Giles Wood, Wiltshire

Viagra not required SIR: The letters page in the April issue included a potentially libellous accusation by Mary Baker that ‘men can’t do it at 75’.

I don’t wish to seem boastful, but I am 84 and still can.

Rod Prodmore, Uppingham, Rutland

Latin joke No. 7 SIR: Our neighbour’s rather wild farm cat brought a litter of kittens and hid them under the corner of our patio. She was not really used to home comforts!

The first of the litter boldly presented 48 The Oldie May 2020

‘Don’t look now, but those awful bores the Johnsons are waving at us’

itself; so, being the most adventurous, it was named Venture. A couple of days later, two little fluffy balls, rolling playfully over each other, emerged. They were named Rough and Ready. A few more days later, a very timid little thing hesitatingly appeared; so I decided the name was Hesitata. I was telling a friend of mine the story, adding, ‘Of course when I take them to be neutered, I might find that it is Hesitatus.’ To which he replied, ‘By the time they finish, it will be Hesitatum.’

Yours sincerely, Bridget Wood, Downe, Bromley

nowadays who can’t even be trusted to produce literate English and, in some cases, can’t even be bothered to get the playwright’s name right – a recent theatre review referred to Look Back in Anger by Josh Osborne!

Yes, there is a dearth of intelligent criticism and, as ‘oldies’ like Michael Billington retire, there seem to be few to take their place. I wonder how many ‘modern’ critics (or bloggers as they are called now!) have read (or even heard of) critics such as Charles Spencer, Irving Wardle, Kenneth Tynan or Harold Hobson.

I won’t even mention the great

Shakespeare nods SIR: I was delighted to read Geoffrey Palmer’s letter (February issue), lamenting the retirement of theatre critic Paul Bailey, as I also used to turn to Paul’s theatre reviews first in order to assess if I should go to see a certain play or not.

The Oldie, it seems to me, gives the most honest and reliable opinions on theatre, film, television and radio, rather as Barry Norman used to do on his weekly Film… programme on BBC1. You could trust Barry Norman’s assessment of films, unlike those of most critics

‘I dunno – we don’t know where he’s been’

names of criticism, going back to Hazlitt, Coleridge, James Agate and Professor A C Bradley.

I am reminded of an oft-quoted verse referring to Professor Bradley: I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post.

The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.

Yours sincerely, Michael Theodorou, Bungay, Suffolk

IOU, IOU not SIR: The Old Un might be lamenting too soon the Garrick’s refusal to handle cash (Spring issue). As I understand it, when cash is offered in payment and refused, the debt is legally cancelled. This is the principle of Legal Tender.

Am I right there, or is it just an urban myth?

John Boulton, Norwich, Norfolk

Old before my time SIR: We had never felt our ages quite so much as when the dreaded coronavirus raised its nasty little head. Suddenly my partner, who is over 70, finds herself in the ‘vulnerable’ category. This came as a shock to her but was verified when neighbours, with undue haste, began to phone to offer help with any shopping!

As I am a mere 65, I thought that task still fell to me. When I did venture out to Waitrose and joined their priority queue for oldies, I thought they would surely point out that I was far too young to be there and ask me if I would kindly come back later. Not a bit of it – I sailed through.

(I had even brought our passports with me just in case they were needed!)

John Rattigan, Doveridge, Derbyshire

Secrets of the stars SIR: I have for many decades been a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; motto, Quicquid nitet notandum.

In the early 1960s, an entry in the Observing Book of the Cambridge University Astronomical Society quoted this motto, helpfully (as Latin had ceased to be an entry requirement for Cambridge) with a translation: ‘That which shines shall be observed.’

Below which some wag had added, ‘That which does not must be washed up.’

David Purchase, Stoke Bishop, Bristol

Otherwise, a silent, ominous spring.

All best, Ed Kosner, Florida

Oscar meets Osama

‘When he said he had commissioned a statue of his one true love, I thought he meant me’

Church halls vs village halls SIR: I feel that we need to correct the information in your article ‘Liberty hall’ (Spring issue).

In the village of Husbands Bosworth, we have a very nice village hall, run, as your writer stated, by the Parish Council and volunteers, who do a very good job.

We also until recently had a very nice church hall, which we have had to close owing to lack of funds to repair the roof and update the facilities. When open this is also run by volunteers, the PCC of the parish church. We do not get any funding from the so-called big organisation (C of E). We have to raise the money for the hall as well as the church.

All parish churches are self-funding, and rural churches struggle to make enough funds so that they are open for services, weddings, baptisms and funerals.

Please remember to support your church, church hall and village hall.

My husband and I love your magazine.

Diana Jones, Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire

SIR: Further to Mary Kenny’s introduction to her butcher, Lizzy Douglas (Spring issue): while Lizzy’s being a descendant of Bosie is notable, Mary should ask Lizzy about her aunt (or perhaps she’s one of her sisters?), who has been married to no fewer than two of Osama Bin Laden’s brothers. Mary should go back and get Lizzy to draw her family tree – one of the most fascinating and extraordinary in Great Britain!

Queensberry seeds have been sown far and wide. There is also a family tradition that all, or most, of the next generation of children have names ending in ‘o’; hence Cato, Juno and lots more.

Yours faithfully, Jeremy D Rowe, Stratford, East London

Blanket instructions SIR: William Cook and his need for a comfort blanket when young (April issue) reminded me of the blanket we were all instructed to bring when sent away to school. Along with the customary tuck box, the other link with home was my very

Letter from Florida SIR: The idyllic Florida beach town I described in Letter from America in the April issue, has, like everything else in the country, been transformed by the COVID-19 plague. The beaches are closed, along with the restaurants, tennis courts and the rest. People walk warily on the paths under the canopy of trees, singly or in hushed couples, more wearing masks every day, waving or nodding in greeting to their fellow social-distancers. The local papers record the daily toll – mercifully low, as I write, but sure to grow in coming weeks.

Contact with loved ones is strictly by email, phone or FaceTime on the computer.

‘Thank you for confessing. Your confession is important to us but, owing to the present situation, all lines are currently engaged’

rough tartan wool example. It was always there, whether to wrap myself in at siesta time or to snuggle under after ‘lights out’ when we could weep quietly as we slowly became accustomed to the strange new environment, dreaming perhaps of the end of term and happier times to come.

Yours sincerely, Lucien Watkins, Skärplinge, Sweden More letters on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie May 2020 49

I Once Met

Jimmy Hoffa In The Irishman, the latest Martin Scorsese film (still available on Netflix), Al Pacino plays Jimmy Hoffa, the notorious leader of America’s largest trade union. Scorsese’s film is a fictionalised account of Hoffa’s disappearance, from the point of view of Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran.

I happened to get one of the last interviews with Hoffa before he went missing in 1975. I was producing films in California for the BBC with the reporter Vincent Hanna. Hanna knew someone who knew someone, who occasionally shared a steam bath with the Teamsters organiser in Los Angeles. He agreed to introduce us to Hoffa’s minders.

Hoffa had just been released from prison, having served four and a half years. He’d been inside for bribery, jury-tampering, fraud and misusing the funds of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Hoffa had built the union – of truckers, cab drivers and warehousemen – into a two-million-strong army, with assets of over $1 billion.

We piled into Hoffa’s green stretch Cadillac to drive south on Pacific Highway 101. Hanna’s portly frame was

sandwiched between the dapper Hoffa and his striking wife, Josephine.

The cameraman was wedged in the front seat between two cigar-smoking bodyguards and I was at Hoffa’s feet with a boom mike. We were travelling to Santa Clara University, where Hoffa was to talk to students about prison reform.

Hanna said British trade-union leaders live modestly. ‘American labourers who belong to unions don’t want a bum representing them,’ Hoffa answered.

While in jail, Hoffa consolidated his pension fund and drew £1.5m (£7m today) from the union. Did Hoffa make a lot of money in business? ‘Sure.’ How much? ‘I don’t care to tell you or the internal revenue.’ Has he made several million? ‘Well, I live comfortable.’ And his elegant wife was on the union payroll as political adviser.

Hoffa told us how employers hired strike-breakers.

‘They blow your car up, blow your house up and shoot you’ –

anything to break a strike. So what does he do? ‘We take preventative treatment necessary to make the employer realise that it’s a two-way street.’ Did he use hoodlums? ‘We don’t need hoodlums – we hire our own people.’

Inside the Teamsters, Hoffa’s enemies saw his campaign for prison reform as making a bid to get ‘his’ union back. Was he worried about his own safety? ‘Not at all. The only time I really got into trouble was in a Federal Court. A man came in with a gun, shooting at me. I came up with a left and knocked him out, took the gun away from him and that’s the closest I came to getting killed. Right in the courtroom. You’re not safe anywhere.’

He was right. Hoffa was reported missing on 30th July 1975, when he was 62. His body was never found. James P Hoffa, only son of Jimmy and Josephine Hoffa, is now President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, his father’s old union.

Clive Syddall Jimmy’s riddle: where is Hoffa’s body?

The debris of broken China

Thirty-eight years ago, I first went to China, travelling with business executives hoping to bring foreign investment to the newly opened economic zones south of Shanghai.

The first thing that struck me at Shanghai Airport was the yellow light – then the grime. The gloom was enhanced by the almost total absence of colour. Men and women wore dark blue Mao suits, often with matching caps pulled well down.

It was six years since Chairman Mao had died and

the reformist Deng Xiaoping was changing the course of history. The people of Zhejiang province had suffered particularly harshly under Communism.

Capitalism had been ruthlessly stamped out. Even water was rationed. In Ningbo port, there were no ships in the abandoned docks. The factories were medieval, with equipment lying about and broken parts abandoned in pools of water.

We drove south to Wenzhou, passing through agricultural land covered with pungent night soil, the only available fertiliser. In a hamlet, we had the best meal we had all week: fresh vegetables cooked in the family wok. Boiled eggs had

been our staple diet. We ate on a small table on an earthen floor under a dangling light bulb. As darkness fell, our driver turned his headlights on and off, as did oncoming trucks, because the drivers sought to save petrol.

In Wenzhou, foreigners’ rooms were on the eighth floor of the Russian-built hotel. If you stretched your hand from the tiny bed, you could touch the window.

Cigarette butts lay everywhere.

We chanced on a dance hall full of young people, the first in the city since dancing was banned in 1950. The youngsters danced to Strauss waltzes belted out from a loudspeaker. They looked at us strangely – the

first foreigners they’d seen.

Leaving Wenzhou, our van rattled up through the hills in the rain. Suddenly the sun pierced the mist, revealing an extraordinarily beautiful countryside with delicately tended terraces of rice edged with sunflower plants. The light was a curious green blue, the colour of the sky after rain.

I was stunned at the sight.

Tessa Keswick, author of The Colour of the Sky after Rain (Apollo), receives £50.

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

More Memory Lanes on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie May 2020 51

Books Nazi marriage portrait RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES The Ratline: Loves, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive

By Philippe Sands

GARY WING

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 Philippe Sands is the QC specialising in war atrocities and human rights who wrote the acclaimed study East West Street about the Nuremberg prosecutors who identified genocide as a crime and defined crimes against humanity.

The Ratline has all the brains, power and passion of its predecessor. It combines ingenious historical detection and haunting meditations on memory and guilt with a touching account of Sands’s delicate conflicts of opinion with Horst von Wächter.

Horst is a gentle, scrupulous octogenarian, living in a vast, magnificent but empty and dilapidated baroque castle in Austria. Sequestered there, he defends, indeed venerates, the memory of his father Otto von Wächter, who is the central figure of The Ratline.

Horst is depicted as a vulnerable, mistaken but admirably consistent man. He provides Sands with an abundance of his parents’ letters, diaries and photographs: as a result, The Ratline might be subtitled ‘portrait of a Nazi marriage’.

Otto von Wächter, who held the rank of Freiherr (baron), was born in Vienna in 1901. He was a handsome, energetic and clever boy, who always loathed Jews.

He joined Austria’s National Socialist party as early as 1923, and subsequently enlisted in the paramilitary SS. He was indicted for high treason in 1934 for his complicity in a failed coup d’état by Austrian Nazis, during which the Austrian chancellor was left to bleed to death.

Wächter fled to Germany, where he became a naturalised citizen and rose

through the SS ranks. He was joined there by his wife, Charlotte, whom he had hurriedly married in 1932 when she fell pregnant. The Wächters were rapturous when, in 1938, Nazi troops occupied Austria, which was incorporated into the Reich as the province of Ostmark.

During the Anschluss celebrations, their fourth child was conceived. Born in 1939, he was named Horst Arthur von Wächter in commemoration of the ‘martyred’ Berlin stormtrooper Horst Wessel, after whom the Nazi marching song was named, and his godfather Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands in 1940, hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

During 1938, Otto von Wächter purged the Austrian civil service of Jews.

After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, he was appointed governor of Krákow, where he built the ghetto for Jews from which they were taken to be liquidated.

Sands includes a short, restrained and trenchant chapter about his meeting with Bronisława Horowitz, the last surviving

member of the Krákow Jews on Schindler’s famous list.

In 1942, Wächter was promoted to the governorship of Lemberg (Lvov), a medieval city with a roughly equal population of Ukrainians, Poles and Jews.

He pursued a strenuous policy of Jewish extermination and showed a special animus against professors and the intelligentsia.

Under his rule in the territories more than a million people perished.

After the Nazi defeat in 1945, Wächter went underground. He eventually reached Rome, where he was protected by a Vatican official, Bishop Hudal, an Austrian who felt he was fulfilling his duties on the Pontifical Commission for assisting war refugees by helping such men as Treblinka’s Franz Stangl and Auschwitz’s Josef Mengele to escape to South America.

After the collapse of Hitler’s regime, Charlotte cheerfully avowed to American military questioners that she was a Nazi.

‘I told them, as I say to this day, that it was a great, wonderful time, but

The Oldie May 2020 53

unfortunately Hitler had the madness of the Caesars and went beyond what was reasonable.’ Of her American interrogation, she recalled, ‘They were so easily pleased, like children. They really took to me. I had a lovely time.’

In Rome, using an alias, Wächter kept his faith with German ‘race politics’, worked as a film extra, and died of a mysterious illness in 1949. The last third of the book recounts Sands’s investigations into Horst’s suspicion that his father was poisoned by Soviet or even American secret agents. Sands’s quest for the truth of Otto’s death is truly gripping. It involves some memorably reported interviews and extraordinary discoveries which it would be a spoiler to reveal in a review.

The Ratline is tragic and unforgettable.

Its chapters have a barrister’s concision and exactitude. Sands has the artfulness of a born storyteller, as well as deadly forensic skills and formidable patience at reaching his ends. He unwraps his evidence in spare, clear, convincing prose with a taut control that keeps one on tenterhooks. The aching sorrow of his story is sometimes lightened by gallows humour. Sands’s intellectual passion, his crusading zeal and his compassion for the dead and wounded make this a great book.

Gentleman’s London MATTHEW STURGIS My Town

By David Gentleman Particular Books £25 For over 60 years, the artist David Gentleman has lived and worked in Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town.

In that time, the area has changed from decidedly run down to predominantly gentrified. But the Crescent still makes its undulating curve – poised between the enduring shabbiness of the Inverness Street market and Camden High Street, and the grandeur of Nash’s Regents Park terraces; almost within sight of Primrose Hill, sometimes within earshot of the Regent’s Canal.

The street’s bowed form seems apposite. Certainly David Gentleman’s art abounds in curves – in sprightly arcs and flexions. In My Town – which celebrates Gentleman’s seven-decadelong artistic engagement with London Town in general and Camden Town in particular, from his student sketches, to his public commissions, to his private visual diary – they are everywhere: light, bold, dancing.

‘Oh, all right ... could you mime exactly what happened on the night in question?’

His line sweeps round the graceful contours of old gasometers, cast-iron footbridges, canal footpaths, willow trees, railway arches, tube signs and the hunched backs of pigeon-feeding pensioners. It conjures the dome of St Paul’s, the belly of the Roundhouse, the façade of the Floral Hall, the silhouette of Primrose Hill, the arabesque of Chalcot Crescent, the snail-like whorl of the ramp at the old Horse Hospital in Camden Lock Market and the fanning cross-hatched vaults of the new King’s Cross booking hall.

Turning the pleasingly matt pages of this nicely got-up, not over-large volume is a vivifying experience. Curves are fun, unexpected, human, vital and – well – very London.

For all their lightness, though, these gracile arcs are braced by other currents: a clear and ordered sense of design and a meticulous craftsmanship that spans drawing, wood-engraving and lithography. The craftsmanship is most evident in his early, densely-worked woodengravings, done for postage-stamp designs, newspaper advertisements, book covers (such as the memorable New Penguin Shakespeare paperbacks of the early 1970s) and – more enduringly – for the brilliant mural at Charing Cross Underground Station. Blown up to almost life-size scale, the mural shows, in panorama, medieval craftsmen and -women creating the original stone cross carved in memory of Edward I’s ‘chère reine’. And, while we are all banished from the Tube (and the phrase ‘Mind the gap’ has taken on new social-distancing connotations), it is a happy thing to be able to look at the frieze, in toto, here.

Gentleman was born not in London but just outside, in rural Hertford. The son of artistic parents (his mother was a weaver, his father a graphic designer who

commuted into town each day to design posters for Shell), he trained as an illustrator at the RCA. Francis Bacon had a studio there at the time, where he worked on his ‘screaming popes’ series.

Gentleman was more indebted to the teaching, example and friendship of Edward Bawden. Another visiting tutor, John Minton, encouraged him ‘to get out of the college and draw more in the real world outside’.

Despite a commitment to drawing the city around him (evidenced by some lovely early sketches of early-’50s London street corners), Gentleman began his career as a graphic designer. One of his first jobs was to design a ‘Visitor’s London’ poster for London Transport. Others followed. The fascination with London remained a constant thread. It crops up in his commissioned works (the wonderful image of the Princes in the Tower, on the cover of the Penguin New Shakespeare Richard III) and as a private passion.

Seen over the span of time, Gentleman’s work embraces both the architectural and the human aspects of the ever-changing city. It is a vision of places and people, leisure and work.

Cranes punctuate the skylines of many of these pictures, from the early studies of post-war recovery to the latest images of rampant development. The sense of London’s constant change – and unchanging essence – is one of the strongest notes that emerge from this delightful book.

Gentleman may lament some of the newest turns – the destruction already wrought by HS2, for instance. And he does not flinch from depicting the social ills and injustices that are part of the modern urban realm. But his pictures have a sort of joy in them. My Town is the record of a great and enduring love: The Oldie May 2020 55

of careful looking, and feeling, selecting and ordering.

On one of his first childhood excursions to London, he visited Primrose Hill and was surprised to find there were no primroses on it. In his art, though, he has made it – and all London – bloom.

Love among the ruins LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War

By Eileen Alexander, edited by David McGowan and David Crane William Collins £20 Eileen Alexander, a writer and translator (best known for translating some of the Maigret novels), died in 1986, and the letters were sold as part of a house clearance following the death of her widower, Gershon Ellenbogen, in 2003.

David McGowan found himself in possession of a vast cache of correspondence, from 1939 to 1948, from Eileen to Gershon.

She was in London and he was serving in the RAF in Cairo. McGowan wrote to the classical scholar Oswyn Murray, who appeared in the letters as a toddler in 1943, riding a camel made of cushions at the Murray family home. Here is Eileen’s characteristic description of the encounter: ‘Rudolph Valentino never Streaked across the Desert more Wildly & Gloriously.’

Murray (who has provided a vivid foreword) took up the baton enthusiastically. Eileen had worked for his father, Sir James Murray, at the Air Ministry during the war. Daunted when McGowan sent him nearly 2,000 letters, Murray suggested a substantial weeding of what the historian David Crane describes in his introduction as ‘an unstoppable flow of words’. But the letters form a discernible arc of experience.

In 1939, Eileen, the daughter of wealthy, cosmopolitan, intellectually ambitious Jewish parents, had just graduated from Girton with a First in English, and was determined to continue her researches in Arthurian romance. It was a sheltered life – as the war progressed, she encountered little material hardship, while lunches at the Ritz continued unabated – but it also brought Eileen into contact with some of the more interesting figures of wartime London, in particular the leading lights of the Zionist movement.

The Alexander family stayed in St John’s Wood throughout the Blitz – by which time Eileen had secured a job

working for her father’s friend Lord Nathan at the War Office’s new welfare department. She also worked for Leslie Hore-Belisha. She seems startlingly naïve although, quite understandably, extremely preoccupied with sex. She was a romantic; her favourite book was C S Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and she watched with rather touching superiority more pragmatic manoeuvres into prosperous marriages made by her friends Joan and Joyce.

Other people’s love letters are mostly for other people – so the best bits are when Eileen emerges from her raptures and looks outwards. I enjoyed her sharp vignettes of Jewish life. A rabbi came to direct her mother how to mourn correctly for her brother. ‘When he got home, he remembered yet another [rule] & he telephoned to tell my mother that she must on no account wear leather on her feet.’

I enjoyed her account of the Nathans, each with their butter ration marked with a flag. She met Michael Foot, then working at the Evening Standard: ‘I wasn’t impressed.’ F R Leavis ‘in the flesh drains his pupils dry as hay’. Another letter admiringly recounts a conversation in the blackout with Orde Wingate, who had fervently taken up the Zionist cause.

He said that sexual love was all about ‘pressure’; he shared her interest in medieval courtly love traditions, and ‘We argued and danced round one another and side-stepped.’

Murray calls Eileen ‘a supreme writer of modern literary prose’, which seems to me to be over-egging it. Highly selfconscious, she is forever batting her fan at Gershon, smothering her prose in lover-like euphemism. Which is great if you’re the lover but not all that gripping if you’re the gooseberry. She also has a taste for arch capitalisations that Got On My Nerves: ‘I forgot to tell you that the Great Bond between Captain Wingate & me was that all his Great Thoughts came in the bath as well. He says it’s a Heritage from [a] Man Who Found his Own Level

– and rushed out into the street to Tell Everybody All.’ The editorial dramatis personae include only a few of the enormous cast of characters – so the reader may be bewildered by the gang who come and go without explanation. The notes tell us who Chekhov is, but what about Hamish, Charlotte, Nurse, Sheila and all the rest?

Gershon and Eileen married in 1944, in St John’s Wood synagogue – and, miraculously, her capital letters almost completely disappeared, releasing the mature prose writer she went on to become from the clever but mannered ingénue of the war years.

Nature cure

LAURA BEATTY Losing Eden – Why Our Minds Need the Wild

By Lucy Jones Allen Lane £20 Everything is different after the virus. In this new, suspended and anxious state, it is difficult to read and impossible to read in the way that we did before.

With my old mindset, I can see that Losing Eden is an important book, passionately written and carefully researched – and if, as Jones points out, we’ve known since the time of the Sumerians that the natural world is healing, it’s a message that bears repeating.

Why, she asks, does the natural world soothe us? How far does it go? If you are suicidal, will it pull you back from the brink? How does it work for inequality, education, recovery from accident or illness? And why, given the overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness, aren’t we prescribed Nature in our moments of crisis?

In young adulthood, Lucy Jones, a respected journalist and the prizewinning author of Foxes Unearthed, suffered from addiction. Four things mended her. Three were conventional medicine, psychiatric help and the support of friends and family. The fourth was harder to quantify and provided the stimulus for this book. First, she noticed a dependence on a pear tree outside her window. Then she started walking on Walthamstow Common. Through ten heavily footnoted chapters, she tries to understand why these had such an effect.

She interviews professionals and researchers into mental health. She visits growing projects, both residential and communal. She talks to scientists, looks at data from medical and psychiatric reports, and worries about environmental decline.

The Oldie May 2020 57

What the book doesn’t quite do, given its subtitle, is differentiate between involvement in making things grow, which is not ‘wild’ but domesticated nature, and the luminous, spiritual experiences that Jones recounts so well – swimming in rivers or losing herself in the night sky. These are two different things and require different solutions in terms of built-environment planning, or therapeutic prescribing.

Jones observes the growing divide that mechanisation and technology have opened up between us and the natural world – what she calls our ‘cosmic and social exile’. The book is excellent at documenting the way language has developed to reflect this. New words are flung out like mooring lines – ‘biophilia’, ‘psychoterratic’, ‘solastalgia’ and ‘ecocide’ – as if by naming we could regain control.

The words themselves are symptomatic of our problem, which is one of hierarchy. We still believe that we were put here to order, to organise, to guard, guide and use. At the head of her final chapter, Jones quotes Ruth Hopkins, a member of the Lakota Sioux: ‘We are no more important than the wind, sky, grandfather rock, grandmother earth, plants that grow, water that flows or any of the winged, two-legged or four-legged beasts. We are all stardust.’

Writing passionately and insistently across the divide we have opened, Jones tries to bed us back where we belong.

Nature is weak but we have power; we must rescue it before it dies. The book ends on a hopeful note. All is not yet lost.

We just need to ‘fall in love with nature again’ and all will be well.

Then came COVID-19 and everything looks different. The world has turned backwards and upside down. Reading this now is to be aware that we, the selfstyled controllers, are sick, or we imagine we are. All our towers are tumbling.

‘We find the “naughty roof’” more effective than the “naughty step” ’

Meanwhile the natural world looks well and very separate. Never has the hawthorn seemed more fresh or green. It doesn’t care whether we love it or not.

Probably it never did. Along the roadside, like the chestnut in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, each of the trees seems to be singing as it regenerates, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’ Crawling, pale-faced, along pavements to buy ‘essential’ goods, locked in our species, we pass by in envy.

Spring is leaving us out. It is happening vigorously, unstoppably and everywhere, quite without our help. Maybe the boot is on the other foot at last.

Memento mori MARGARET MACMILLAN Prisoners of History: What Monuments to the Second World War Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves

By Keith Lowe William Collins £20 ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ said the eponymous campaign — and his statue vanished from the University of Cape Town.

Dozens of statues of Lenin and Stalin have disappeared across eastern Europe.

In Canada, the name of the country’s first prime minister, Sir John A Macdonald, is no longer deemed suitable for that of a pub or an annual history lecture.

While such mementos vanish into Trotsky’s ‘dustbin of history’, the present often governs our view of history. In India, the ruling BJP party erected a colossal statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a key figure in shaping independent India, conveniently from the same state as Prime Minister Modi.

To Keith Lowe, this demonstrates ‘an incredible level of self-confidence’. I wonder. Might it not equally betray apprehension at being ridiculed or a crude attempt to recover past glories?

Prisoners of History repeatedly asserts, without offering much in the way of evidence, that we are all equally in thrall to the past. But it is unusual to be overly bothered by history, while most memorials simply become part of the landscape. Who knows or cares who all those equestrian generals in London are?

Yet the Second World War endures, even as it recedes into the past. Perhaps the turbulence of our world (even without the current crisis) casts it as a comforting morality play where good defeats evil. Fresh memorials appear every year. Lowe argues the impetus is often person- or country-specific. In

Russia, it is stimulated by nostalgia for military greatness and manipulated by Putin to validate his leadership.

Viktor Orban makes political capital out of the suffering of the Hungarian people, whom he defines as united by history and their Christian heritage. In 2014, his government erected a Monument for the Victims of the German Occupation that ignored Hungary’s previous alliance with Nazi Germany and skated over the fact that most of the victims were Jews. Democracies are not immune.

Without the campaigning of the Bomber Command Association, the belated London memorial to the men of Bomber Command would never have been built.

How we see our memorials depends very much on the context. In Warsaw, the Monument to the Brotherhood in Arms, nicknamed the Four Sleepers, was intended to show Soviet and Polish soldiers as brothers in arms – then and always. The Poles later thought it a symbol of their subordination to the Soviet empire. Yet after 1989 many gibbed at tearing it down: it was a landmark; it commemorated ordinary soldiers; Polish artists had made it. Its fate was to form part of a larger debate between liberals and conservative nationalists over what sort of country Poland should be.

Lowe provides an engaging and eclectic series of snapshots of the upsurge of interest in the war. He distinguishes five types of memorial: to heroes, monsters, victims, the horrors of war and hopes for a better world. Grūtas Park in Lithuania, built by a wrestler turned entrepreneur, is a theme park modelled on a Soviet gulag. It has watchtowers with Soviet soldiers overlooking a children’s playground, a zoo and a large collection of statues of Soviet heroes sent to the junkyard after Lithuania regained its independence. Lowe suggests making fun of the past can be an effective way of dealing with it.

The Marine Corps memorial in Arlington, Virginia, conventionally glorifies the Marines raising the American flag after the gruelling battle for Iwo Jima in the Pacific War. But how do you portray Hitler’s evil without making it banal? Some of the most thought-provoking memorials use absence. Oradour-sur-Glane, where the SS killed 642 innocent victims, has been left empty, with its destroyed buildings gradually crumbling. Throughout Germany, plaques set in pavements outside houses where Jews once lived record their names and what happened to them. In Seoul, the Peace Statue represents a seated young woman The Oldie May 2020 59

with a bird on her shoulder representing peace and freedom. She is one of the thousands of Korean ‘comfort women’ whom the Japanese forced into sexual slavery, and she faces the Japanese Embassy. Japan is yet to admit full legal responsibility.

Memorials acquire new political meanings when they are used to whitewash the past. Critics suggest that, by memorialising the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagaski, the Japanese have attempted to upstage their own war crimes. The Yakusuni shrine in Tokyo lists all the names of those who died fighting in modern Japan’s wars, including those of convicted war criminals. An adjacent war museum blames China for its invasion by Japan.

The book concludes with a more hopeful message in the new Liberation Route Europe, which follows the Allied advance from the west and expresses the liberation of all Europe, including the Germans, from Nazism. I can’t help wondering when the iconoclasts will have a go at that as well. Getting rid of monuments rather than using them as a basis for discussion seems to be the flavour of our times.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Goddess of small things CRESSIDA CONNOLLY Redhead by the Side of the Road

By Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus £14.99 Nothing much happens in Anne Tyler’s books.

Generally set in and around Baltimore, they are concerned with families and their discontents. Often they centre around a long marriage, its grumbles and small joys: children and grandchildren come and go; gardening and the preparation of food, so seldom attended to in fiction, are much described. Driving to the store to pick up provisions may be the furthest anyone goes in the course of a day, or even a fortnight. Yet no one alive writes with more accuracy or truth. Anne Tyler takes the reader to the very heart of a life.

Her genius is to capture, among the humdrum, those secret moments of regret or revelation by which people define themselves. The particular is, of course, the universal: to read her work is to feel less alone in the world. People who love her books love them better than any others.

When this author presents a male character who is very particular and unvarying about things, you know she’s

going to introduce some gentle chaos into his life. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (her own favourite), Saint Maybe and now Redhead by the Side of the Road all feature a certain type of man.

He is slightly wounded, meticulous, probably self-employed in some fairly menial capacity, and likely to have a clamour of siblings whom he generally avoids. He could be unaware of his own loneliness or he might think he doesn’t mind it. Other people are messy and complicated. By himself, he can guard himself from the unexpected. Or so he likes to imagine.

Thus it is with the hero of this book, Micah Mortimer. In his early forties, he lives alone in a basement. Money and the trappings of status hold no interest for him. In return for performing odd jobs in the building’s apartments, he pays no rent.

He works as an on-call computer mender: the sentence he most often utters is ‘Have you tried switching it off, then switching it on again?’ He is fastidious. Each evening of the week is designated to a distinct chore: one for mopping; one for laundry; one for the kitchen countertops. He prides himself on the carefulness of his driving.

He has a girlfriend, Cass, a primaryschool teacher whom he sees two or three times a week. Everything is under control.

Having established Micah in the reader’s mind as a still pool, Tyler begins to throw pebbles into the water. Cass is threatened with eviction when her landlady discovers she’s keeping a forbidden cat in her apartment. Then a preppy college student appears at Micah’s door and announces that he may be his long-lost son. Then Cass comes over. Then the boy’s mother, Lorna – his first love – turns up, looking for the boy.

(None of this will spoil the story.)

As always with Tyler, there are moments of quiet comedy and deep pathos. Often they are embedded in conversation:

‘ “She said you were the love of her life.”

“She said that?” Micah asked.

“Well, or she’d thought so at the time.”

“Oh.” ’ The ghastly disappointment of meeting up with an old flame in later life is one of Anne Tyler’s recurring themes.

Sometimes they’re boring; sometimes they’re slightly creepy– time always drags in their company. In an earlier novel, there is a memorably dire scene in which a former boyfriend suggests dinner to a newly single old girlfriend.

He doesn’t ask her a single question, but spends the evening describing all the meals he prepares with frozen mince. Here, Lorna’s visit to Micah induces ‘a kind of stabbing sensation … he looked across at the pant-suited city lawyer and very nearly asked, “Lorna? Is that you in there?”

What he didn’t expect was how sad it made him. He no longer felt the same pull toward her; he was amazed to think that he had once spent hours wracked with lustful daydreams about her.’

This episode, however, is only a side plot. The book takes its title from a fire hydrant that Micah sees in the distance on his daily morning run and, without his glasses, always mistakes for a small, redheaded person. By the end of this story, the way in which he sees many things will have been called into question. It may be that he’s been looking at everything in the wrong way.

For all their nattery detail – the leaf-raking, laundry-folding and suppermaking – and quaint idiom, huge questions haunt Tyler’s fiction. Is the life that someone has led the right life? Could they have been happier?

This is why her readership is so devoted: because, in these pages, hiding in plain sight, there’s an interrogation of everything that matters.

‘It’s called “Dinner” and it was painted just after his marriage break-up’ The Oldie May 2020 61

LU FU N LL CH R IS EF CA UN N DI CE F LL A ED

Literary Lunches

Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/lunches for more details

In association with

London lunches hosted by Barry Cryer

TUESDAY 16TH JUNE AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND – £75 Owen Matthews William Martin Bell on War on An Impeccable Spy: and Peacekeeping Dalrymple on The

Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company In 1765, the East India Company had defeated the Mughal Emperor and held sway in his richest provinces, with an army twice the size of Britain’s run from a small office in London.

Experienced war correspondent Martin Bell reflects on 60 years of visiting war zones – which he has done as soldier, reporter and UNICEF ambassador.

He looks at the international order and what we can learn from past failures.

Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent Richard Sorge was at the heart of the Third Reich’s diplomatic corps. He was both German and Russian. Deluded by his experience of the First World War, he became a committed communist.

TUESDAY 14TH JULY AT SIMPSON’S IN THE STRAND– £75 Rachel Johnson on Rake’s Progress: Anne Glenconner on Lady in Waiting:

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

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

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

TO BOOK TICKETS, please go to www.theoldie.co.uk/lunches

or email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). Three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm

FREE Oldie memoir-writing course

Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/blog-the-oldie-memoir-writing-course-free For the last 15 years, The Oldie has held memoir-writing courses led by Rebecca de Saintonge of LifeLines Press (www.lifelinespress.co.uk).

Seeking to alleviate your boredom during these isolating times, we have asked Rebecca to set out a full course to help you write your Rebecca de memoir – something for your Saintonge children and grandchildren to cherish. What better opportunity? Such face-to-face courses normally cost £195 a day. Although Rebecca will not be able to offer you a personal consultation, she will be able to help you if you subsequently decide to use her excellent publishing services, at LifeLines Press.

As an added bonus, you can enter an 800-word extract into the Jeremy Lewis Memorial Prize and be in 62 The Oldie May 2020

with a chance to win £1,000. Simply email your extract to publisher@theoldie.co.uk by 1st November, and please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE. Course structure There are three questions to ask yourself before you settle down to write in earnest. What sort of memoir are you hoping to write? Who are you writing it for?

Why? The lessons are set out on the website as follows: l The Blank Page – a sense of who you are, a sense of time and a sense of place l Releasing hidden memories l Remembering people: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly l Write as if nobody’s watching l How not to use adjectives l No, I tell a lie… – the art of dialogue l Cut, cut, cut – the necessary art of editing

Media Matters

The end of the press as we know it?

A collapse in sales and adverts will destroy some papers and magazines stephen glover

T

here are so many awful things happening at the moment that even readers of a media column may think that the tribulations of the newspaper industry pale by comparison. No doubt they do.

But they are nonetheless very grave, and for some titles will be terminal.

Newspapers generally rely on two sources of income – sales and advertising.

Both have slumped since coronavirus gripped the country in March. Fewer people – especially older people, who make up the majority of buyers of print titles – are venturing to newsagents and supermarkets to pick up their usual paper.

Home deliveries are probably holding up since the expert view (endorsed by the World Health Organisation) is that they are unlikely to carry the virus. Some titles are offering free home delivery.

The most up-to-date official sales figures covering the period 2nd to 22nd March show only a slight decline, but it is certain that, following the lockdown on 23rd March, there has been a nearcatastrophic collapse in circulation across the board, for some papers possibly by as much as a quarter.

Meanwhile, as the British economy has shut down, and most companies are producing less than usual or in some cases nothing at all, advertising is slowing to a trickle. One publishing executive tells me that if it weren’t for the Government and supermarkets, which are still buying space to get their message across, there would be practically no newspaper advertising at all.

Very few businesses can survive for long when their two main sources of income are so dramatically reduced.

Especially vulnerable are those freesheets that have no circulation revenue to fall back on, and find that advertising has all but disappeared. City AM has stopped printing during the crisis and put its digital edition on ice.

The giveaway London Evening Standard, which even before the contagion was losing stupendous sums of money, has been left reeling. Its weekly magazine supplement has been suspended. Will the paper’s editor, George Osborne, still have a job when the crisis is over?

Even newspapers that can still rely on some sales revenue are in trouble. The low-circulation Jewish Chronicle has closed and may not reopen. Most titles have furloughed staff under the Government’s scheme, or cut salaries by as much as a quarter – or done both.

Local papers, nearly all of which were struggling with declining sales and falling advertising when COVID-19 was still confined to Chinese bats, are especially vulnerable. A number of them will close.

Some print-readers who don’t want to go out to the shops are migrating to newspaper websites. The question is whether, having got into a new habit, they will ever return to the old. You might think that the sharp increase in online readership reported by publishers such as Mail Online and Guardian Online would be a boon. The trouble is that their readers don’t pay – and such free sites are, like everyone else, struggling to attract lucrative advertising; the more so as advertisers are not keen for their wares to be promoted alongside doomand-gloom stories about coronavirus.

If new readers stick when the crisis is

over, and if advertising recovers, these websites may be in clover. But no one can know whether these things will happen.

I can think of only two sorts of publishers who have anything to be even remotely grateful for. Magazines such as the Spectator and The Oldie, which broadly rely on subscription copies delivered to people’s homes for their sales revenue, should largely be insulated, though they are likely to be adversely affected by plummeting advertising revenue.

Websites that charge readers are also in a happier position than most publishers. For example, the Financial Times reports greatly increased online traffic, and its new paying readers provide an instant boost to the bottom line. The Daily Mail is successfully building up Mail Plus – a paid-for digital version of the paper distinct from Mail Online – which should partly compensate for lost print sales.

But, all in all, the situation is grim. It would be a mug’s game, as well as rather unseemly, to predict which titles will go under. The outcome depends on how long the lockdown lasts, and the time it takes for the economy – and therefore advertising – to recover.

Can anything else be done to save papers from closing? Mega-rich Google has launched a global emergency-relief fund for local publishers, and we’ll have to wait and see what, if any, good this does. Others are placing their faith in Government financial help for the industry, though for many journalists the idea of accepting a bailout from politicians will go against the grain. It does for me. Like everyone else, and for all sorts of reasons that go beyond the survival of a free press, I am hoping that the lockdown ends as soon as possible.

If it drags on, among the countless casualties of life as we have known it will be many familiar newspapers.

The Oldie May 2020 63

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

When language goes viral

OLANDSFOKUS/ALAMY

Let’s start with ‘coronavirus’. If we’re going to succumb to this wily poison, it may be a comfort to some to think it’s a royal killer.

No matter that it originated in a People’s Republic (Donald Trump calls it the ‘Chinese’ virus); it bears a crown – lots of them, actually; hence its name.

Yet the Latin word corona meant not so much a ‘crown’ as a ‘wreath’, or sometimes a ‘chaplet’, a garland put on the heads of captives sold as slaves. A ‘circle of men’, bystanders or besiegers, was also a corona. So, occasionally, was a ‘crown’. The small constellation now known as Corona Borealis was called Ariadne’s Crown by Virgil, thus associating corona with royalty. But Ariadne’s father, King Minos, was a mythical royal – a bit like Harry and Meghan, I suppose. Though monarchs have ‘coronations’, and ‘coronets’ are worn by the nobility, if a corona is classy, it’s probably a cigar – a Double Corona if it’s fat, a Gran Corona if it’s long.

Coronaviruses abound, and few are new: four give us the common cold. The proper name for the one we’re up against is ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2’ – SARS-CoV-2 for short. It brings a disease known as COVID-19. The number at the end of such names refers to the year when the virus was first reported: 2002 for SARS, 2019 for COVID. Plagues used to have simpler names.

The ‘Black Death’ said it all, really, and ‘bubonic’ plague was straightforward if

Ageshaming Coronavirus has many terrible aspects, most obviously the fear that friends may die of it, and that so many people are losing their livelihoods.

Yet I can’t help resenting that I’m being propelled into premature old age by the very advice that is supposed to 64 The Oldie May 2020

you knew the English word ‘bubo’ meant a ‘swelling in the groin’, as did the same word, with an ‘n’ on the end, in Greek. The worldwide decimation of 1918 was caused by ‘Spanish’ flu. ‘Asian’ flu erupted in the 1950s, to be followed, in 2012, by ‘Middle East’ respiratory syndrome. But now geographical names smack of stigma, so the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which does the naming, instead goes for scientific mouthfuls that have to be reduced to acronyms.

Next come ‘epidemics’ and ‘pandemics’.

To the ancient Greeks, these described things that were ‘popular’ and ‘public’ respectively. Epi means ‘on’ in Greek, demos means ‘people’ and pan means ‘all’. But the meanings have changed in English, so that ‘epidemic’ means a ‘widely prevalent outbreak’ and ‘pandemic’ a ‘general or universal’ one (it can also mean ‘pertaining to vulgar or sensual love’).

‘Quarantine’ is another word nicked from the ancients. Its forebear, quadraginta, means ‘forty’ in Latin, which was the

help me live to what I myself would regard as old age.

The worst aspect is that I am categorised as elderly. I am 73 but I do not feel old. I still ride my horse, go for long dog walks and lead children round a Riding for the Disabled school. Yet, for the purposes of coronavirus controls, I am categorised as ‘elderly’ and vulnerable.

‘Elderly’ conjures up wrinkled hands, shuffling gaits and pull-on, washable skirts. Not how I see myself at all.

It’s not the restrictions I am finding difficult to adjust to but the fact that I’m on the receiving end of help, rather than giving it. The younger people in my village are being

number of days for which ships were once obliged to lie in complete confinement to prevent the spread of disease. The new term is ‘self-isolation’ – the ‘self’ being unnecessary but this is, after all, the age of self-obsession and now also, for sequestered singletons, self-partnering.

‘Triage’, too, has been on something of a journey before it arrived in A&E. In my French dictionary it appears only in gare de triage, a ‘marshalling yard’. The OED is not much more forthcoming, calling it ‘the action of assorting according to quality’.

Nowadays that means treating the sickest fastest. But on the battlefield, I’ve been told, ‘triage’ used to mean finding the least badly wounded and getting them nursed back to fighting fitness, since tending the worst was futile. It may come to that again.

Yet fashions change. Out goes ‘disrupter’, a term once worn with pride by Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s adviser.

In again is ‘experts’, reviled by Michael Gove in palmier days but now invoked daily in Downing Street. ‘Contain, suppress, delay’ is recited like the conjugation of an irregular verb. ‘Furlough’, imported from the Dutch 400 years ago and since largely forgotten by non-Americans, is back.

Profiteering is called ‘retail arbitrage’.

‘Helicopter money’, meaning cash scattered freely by the government to keep the economy going, may be on its way.

Inevitably, the clichés thrive. Every task is a ‘challenge’, every outbreak an ‘epicentre’, every valediction a ‘stay well’. Stay well.

wonderful, organising food deliveries and making sure that we elderly are not too lonely. But even as I was receiving a lovely bouquet of daffodils (arms stretched out on both sides to keep two

SMALL DELIGHTS The first time in the year you get your sheets dry on the line, and can put them back on the bed that night.

ELLA HATFIELD, SKIPTON, NORTH YORKSHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

metres’ distance), I was thinking I should be going round doing this. I felt a fraud as I don’t have any underlying health problems.

So I’m trying make the best of my new status. I arrived at Waitrose at 7.30 for the hour reserved for oldies. Women who have spent their adult lives trying to look younger tried to convince the store manager they were over 70.

Inside, the shelves had been freshly topped up. So there was plenteous loo paper and liquid soap. But, as this was Marlborough, there was no balsamic vinegar left. The benefits of old age have their limits.

ELINOR GOODMAN

History

Vikings raped, pillaged – and traded

The bloodthirsty businessmen roved from Baghdad to Rome david horspool We think we know the Vikings pretty well.

There’s one looking uncharacteristically nervous above the headline on this page.

If you reckon he’s supposed to be a Norman, you may be right. The Normani, after all, were what the Franks called the Vikings. William the Conqueror and co were descended from the Norse raider Rollo (whose people would have called him Hrolf) and his mostly Danish followers, after they came to an accommodation with Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks in 911.

Though more recent TV versions have done their best to displace him, the model of a modern Viking for me remains the late Kirk Douglas, oar-running or appealing to Odin in The Vikings (1958). Naturally, it can’t all have been like that, but historians don’t get anywhere by ignoring popular versions of their subject, which have the great advantage of creating a ready market.

In Britain, our northern towns with names ending in -by and -thorpe betray Viking origins. In Scandinavia, most of the population is descended from Viking forebears. But it’s a striking thought that even more recent immigrants to Europe, say from the Middle East, may have ancestors who made contact with Scandinavians in the distant past.

Vikings turned up as far afield as Baghdad. There are Viking runes on the columns of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – perhaps carved by members of the imperial Byzantine bodyguard – and there is evidence of Viking visitors to Uzbekistan, which is why you can see a silver dirham from Samarkand in the Yorkshire Museum.

Even during the Viking age itself, this was not all one-way traffic. There were Arab travellers to Denmark, and a woman thought to be of Persian descent was laid to rest in a lavish ship burial in Oseberg in Sweden. That same burial contains the Buddha-bøtte – the ‘Buddha bucket’, a brass pail decorated with a seated

statuette in the lotus position, inlaid with swastikas (the Buddhist, not Nazi, kind).

It wouldn’t look out of place, you feel, in Gwyneth Paltrow’s meditation room.

Another reason we may think we know the Vikings is that they seem to have been undergoing some sort of revival, revision or re-revision for at least the last 100 years.

The Victorians may have given us the winged, horned helmets (adopted from Wagnerian opera directors, and with no basis in history). But they also took up Norse poetry enthusiastically, none more so than the ‘Varangian guard of his own Metropolitan District’, William Morris.

Once this enthusiasm had been perverted into the Nordic blood fantasies of Hitler, it was inevitable that historians and popularisers would start another campaign of reclamation. This they have done ever since, helped by the regular appearance every decade after 1980 of a major exhibition. The most recent one at the British Museum in 2014 had a reconstructed Viking longship.

If scholars in the ’80s overdid the Vikings-as-traders argument, more recent portrayals have put the violence back in. Despite the Buddhist trinkets or the willingness of Alfred the Great’s adversary Guthrum to convert to Christianity and take the name Aethelstan, this was a civilisation that hacked out power at axe-edge and sword-point.

‘I hear she’s started burlesque classes’

The Northmen could be ruthlessly and creatively bloodthirsty, and had no compunction about attacking the defenceless (practical sorts, they preferred it that way). But this wasn’t a one-sided business. One of the more chilling exhibits at the BM was taken from a discovery of a mass grave in Weymouth, where 50 Viking corpses were found, stripped and decapitated, very likely the victims of Anglo-Saxon vengeance around the late-tenth century.

The exhibitions draw on a neverending stream of publications, the latest of which is the The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Professor Neil Price of Uppsala University. Whereas most British accounts focus on the British contact with the Vikings, from the first raids on Dorset around 787 and, more terrifyingly, on Lindisfarne in 793, Price gives a Scandinavian perspective, from the vantage point of his adopted home. He begins earlier – with a creation myth, when Odin and his siblings fashioned the first humans from ‘stumps of driftwood’.

Price ranges further in both time and space than most of his predecessors, and fills his book with the latest archaeology, as well as more literary sources.

We learn not only about great Viking warriors and traders, but also of Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, a woman who accompanied her husband to Vinland – North America – having travelled from Norway via Greenland. On her return, she made a pilgrimage to Rome, became a nun and ended her days in Iceland.

Stories like these make it easy to see why Professor Price’s book, for all its ambition, will certainly not be the last about these mysterious, terrifying but captivating people.

The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Penguin) by Neil Price will be published in January The Oldie May 2020 65

Arts

NETFLIX

NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT TIGER KING I hope my columnar neighbour Roger Lewis will forgive my stepping on his toes by reviewing something on the small screen.

Tiger King, an eight-part documentary, is on Netflix and so doesn’t qualify as a film. But, given that we’re all watching everything at home now, differences between original screen size don’t matter much.

All that matters is quality. And Tiger King is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on stage or screen, however big or small.

If a Martian landed on Earth and said, ‘Take me to your most extreme American,’ I would lead him to Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, the star of Tiger King.

You’d have thought that name was pretty extraordinary. In fact, the 57-yearold was christened Joseph Schreibvogel – quite a mouthful in the first place – and took that double-barrelled surname from two of his three husbands, the second of whom, a meth addict, shot himself, in a horrific scene captured on screen.

To make things even more outlandish, Joe renamed himself Joe Exotic to publicise his ramshackle Oklahoma zoo, the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park.

Joe Exotic is perhaps the greatest self-publicist in a country not famed for its shrinking violets. In 66 The Oldie May 2020

2016, he ran for President. In 2018, he ran for Governor of Oklahoma. Both times, he failed – but garnered yearnedfor publicity in the process.

As the picture below shows, Joe sports one of the worst-dyed mullets on the planet and wears outfits Torvill and Dean would have rejected as OTT. He uses the revolver at his hip to scare off his tigers when they get too rambunctious. Joe once claimed to be the most prolific breeder of tigers in America. It’s wise to take most things Joe says with a pinch of salt.

Oh, and he croons country and western songs with outlandish, chintzy videos – which, it turns out, he doesn’t sing at all but has dubbed by professional singers.

All this would just be showing off on a grand scale if it weren’t for two things, which turn this programme from sensationalist schlock into TV platinum.

First, for all his monstrosity, Joe is bright, funny and charming, talking in the engaging Southern accent of one born in Kansas and brought up in Texas.

If there’s such a thing as a gay, good ol’ boy, Joe’s your man – as if one of the Dukes of Joe Exotic, king of wild Americans

Hazzard suddenly discovered a taste for marrying much younger men.

Joe plays up to the camera like nobody’s business but, at the same time, there’s a self-aware, self-mocking aspect to his ocean-going vulgarity.

And the second thing the programmemakers must have gone down on their knees and thanked the Lord for?

Joe Exotic had been TV fare before, not least for Louis Theroux. But Theroux didn’t have the lucky moment in 2019 when Joe Exotic was convicted on 17 federal charges of animal abuse. Exotic had been making money by charging people to pet tiger cubs – before he killed the cubs when they got too big.

That same year, he was also convicted of hiring a hitman to kill his nemesis, animal-rights activist Carole Baskin.

When Baskin protested against his treatment of tiger cubs, an enraged Joe ripped off her Big Cat Rescue trademark and used it to market his zoo. Baskin won a $1m settlement against him for trademark infringement.

An incensed Joe composed a song, Here Kitty Kitty, suggesting Carole Baskin had killed her rich husband and fed him to her tigers. Then Joe hired a hitman to kill her. Like most things in Joe’s disastrous career, the hit failed. An undercover FBI agent was on Joe’s trail.

Exotic is now in jail for 22 years.

He’s currently seeking a pardon from President Trump, whose son Donald Junior is a fan of the show – so who knows?

The latest news is that Joe has possibly contracted coronavirus. He doesn’t mind that. What he does mind, he’s said from his cell, is missing out on all the publicity that comes from starring in a huge Netflix show.

Whew! What a story. And what an insight into small-town America at its criminally self-publicising worst and its wildly entertaining guns-and-glitz best.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD WISE CHILDREN BBC iPlayer ‘Like most family histories, mine and Nora’s is a complicated affair,’ says 75-year-old Dora Chance (Gareth Snook) near the beginning of Wise Children, ‘and, if you doze off now, it’ll be a very long evening.’

Dora and her twin sister, Nora (Etta Murfitt), have been given an invitation to their father’s 100th birthday; the vast bulk of the play is the telling of this family history. So, technically speaking, if you doze off during the explanation, it will actually seem like a very short evening.

And I hate to say it, but honesty compels me: if you count the time between my starting to watch this show and its end, it was, by some margin, the longest evening of my life.

This was for two reasons: it is being broadcast on the BBC iPlayer, so you can pause it – which you can’t do in a real theatre. So to recreate the theatre experience, I sat down at 7.30, having charged myself £7.50 for a glass of nasty red wine. And at the interval, I paused it, emptied the rest of the bottle into myself and didn’t start watching again until lunchtime the next day. The reason for this was the same reason you don’t visit the dentist 20 minutes after your previous visit.

I knew I was going to be in for a long evening at the very beginning, when Dora asks us, as if telling a joke, what the similarity is between London and Budapest. The answer, which is not funny, is that they are two cities separated by a river. I’m not complaining about that. I’m complaining about the troupe of thesps standing behind her.

They all wear shorts, T-shirts with a single star on the chest and berets in various pastel hues. And I’m not complaining about them, really. What I am complaining about is that as Snook delivers his non-punchline, the rest of the cast behind him do jazz hands. You know, that gesture suggesting a dim memory of Al Jolson singing Mammy.

Oh Lord, I thought – it’s going to be that kind of show. I had seen one of the twins in an earlier incarnation (either Bettrys Jones or Mirabelle Gremaud) enter the stage by cartwheeling onto it; if you saw my review of My Brilliant Friend a few months ago, you’ll know I take a very dim view of cartwheels in the theatre, for they are a harbinger of enforced fun. ‘If you do not like our exuberance,’ says the

Seeing double: Etta Murfitt, Gareth Snook, Omari Douglas and Melissa James

cartwheel, ‘you are a miserable, internally withered human being.’

This is an adaptation of Angela Carter’s final novel, written when she was dying, but the novel itself is full of life, spanning nearly a century in the life of a theatrical family. It is directed by Emma Rice, who liked the book so much she has also named her theatre company after it.

It is an allusion to the saying that it’s a wise child who knows his own father, and the theme of paternity gives both novel and play their driving force.

The problem is that it has been adapted at all. For now we have the problem not only of how to represent a huge cast and historical sweep on the stage, but also of how to direct a play about actors and dancers without its disappearing up its own backside with self-love. This is a production that revels in itself, and in every convention and cliché of the modern theatre.

Gender roles are non-rigid, which of course is very venerable in the theatre (there’s a lot of Shakespeare, or nods to him, in both play and novel), but it demands a certain indulgence on the audience’s part to believe that a slightlybuilt lady with a deliberately ludicrous stick-on moustache is a manly lover, especially when Dora and Nora (at this point in their history played by Melissa James and Omari Douglas) tower over her. (A word about Melissa James. She is probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and her legs are … well, let’s just say that it wasn’t only professional duty that dragged me back to Act 2.)

This is theatre as childish spectacle.

You can see why it was done this way, as a

homage to music hall, but it’s a tooknowing raid of the dressing-up box; most spectacularly, the grotesque naked bodysuit worn by Grandma Chance (Katy Owen), the gorblimey Cockney from Brixton who adopts the abandoned baby twins. There are dolls; there are cast members waving bits of tissue paper on sticks to represent fire; there is juggling; there is drag; and other horrors I do not wish to recall. It is a production that blows a party streamer in your ear for two-anda-quarter hours, and begs for the kind of notices that say ‘an evening of joyous fun’, along with the word ‘delightful’.

Well, here you go. Joyous. Delightful.

Evening. Long.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘Radio is king now, of course,’ said Barry Cryer on Radio 4.

‘At times of crisis, everyone turns to the wireless,’ Evan Davis echoed. On Radio 2, Dermot O’Leary said ‘the togetherness radio inspires has never been more important’. When Dame Vera Lynn, blissfully writing in this issue, chipped in, it seemed undeniable that we were all glued to a single radio set, with Hilversum on the dial. And, as in 1940, this invoked Aristotelian levels of pity and terror.

But during lockdown, aka Groundhog Day, I must remind broadcasters that speculation is pointless. Don’t ask an MP when will this end – none of them knows; they cannot tell. This is ‘uncharted territory’. Anyway, any statistic will be ‘ramped up’ – which makes Tim The Oldie May 2020 67

Harford’s More or Less essential listening, with Professor Spiegelhalter debunking the figures.

As Evan Davis put it, ‘It was a shock last night to hear that Boris was in hospital, but we’re not going to spend the rest of this programme speculating about how the PM may be coping with his COVID-19.’ The amiable Davis coped admirably when PM’s airtime was increased by a third.

The words ‘public service’ go well with ‘broadcasting’. It is a fine public service to distract us with Eng Lit: Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens, read by Penelope Wilton; Ian McKellen reciting Wordsworth’s The Prelude; and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

When Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time guests couldn’t gather in the studio, the BBC began playing selections from the archive of the show, the most downloaded on BBC Sounds: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Gin Craze, Marie Antoinette...

Cultural slots of varying quality were shoehorned in between the tragic stories to divert us, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 read by Simon Russell Beale on Today.

Prince Charles read Tintern Abbey and Dame Vanessa Redgrave read Housman’s Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now – loveliest but cruellest, blossoming through the window. Twice we heard Here Comes the Sun, a Boris favourite: another taunt, mixing memory and desire.

Anne Atkins’s Thought for the Day was unforgettable. She’d read her script as usual to her headmaster father, David Briggs, aged 102, who’d been the boy chorister picked to sing the opening line in the first ever Carols from King’s. That night, she heard that Dr Briggs had died.

Yet she delivered her Thought, holding back tears. She spoke later of how the family had scaled back her dad’s planned funeral with massed choir. Instead, the anthem Anne wrote for her parents was sung in single recordings on a YouTube video which went viral in that good old way.

Every day threw up moving stories, as doctors and nurses began to die. And sobering thoughts: ‘This is changing our view of what is important’; ‘When this is over we shall be very different people.’

Seeking wisdom were Mary Ann Sieghart’s Fallout, David Aaronovitch’s Briefing Room, and Dame Margaret Macmillan pointing out that we now see it’s possible ‘to do a lot of public good’.

While dog-walking, I’ve heard some radio marvels on my earphones: Anton Lesser reading Hilary Mantel, Beethoven’s Appassionata played and explained by pianist Jonathan Biss, and Kerry Shale’s play about working for the 68 The Oldie May 2020

tyrannical genius Stanley Kubrick, with Henry Goodman as Kubrick.

Readers who missed these – plus Rachel Hurdley’s The Hidden History of the Mantelpiece; the Lent series The Passion in Plants; Madeleine Bunting’s series on the home; Clarke Peters’s three-parter on black music in Europe; and Paul Robeson’s life told through his songs – can seek on BBC Sounds. And be thankful for pre-Covidian studio sound.

For the Easter retreat, Max Richter’s eight-hour Sleep: Lullaby for a Frenetic World (2015) was globally reprised. The one thing radio can’t do is lift our spirits with comedy programmes. All except The Now Show are complete turn-offs.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Welcome to my world. I never go out, avoid parties and groups, hardly see anyone and for years have stayed indoors reading and loafing. I invented self-isolation.

On the other hand, even I’m going a bit mad. There are only so many times a chap can watch North-West Frontier, the one with Kenneth More calling the steam train ‘My old beauty’, slapping the boiler fondly, and quite preferring his locomotive to Betty Bacall. I now discover it was made nowhere near India, but outside Granada, in Spain. Nothing ever is as real as one has imagined.

There’s nothing imaginary about my intense hatred of Anita Manning from Bargain Hunt, however – my rage another example of my going off my onion. When she starts speaking ever so slowly in her patronising Scottish accent, my face darkens and I start muttering distractedly. I’d honestly like to track her down and push her down a wishing well; at least then we can see whether they work.

These programmes belong to another era entirely, don’t they? It is startling how on Antiques Road Trip everybody embraces, hugs, link arms, shake hands, kisses and probably pinches bottoms.

Still, if in future Anita can be bound, gagged and made to wear a mask over her entire head, in strict accordance with government regulations, it will be a step in the right direction.

There was a lot of rage in Liar, which was both a sequel to and an amplification of the first series. Though dead in a ditch, Ioan Gruffudd was back as the rapist, creeping about bedrooms, hiding in a boat and twirling an invisible villain’s moustache. Joanne Froggatt was one of his victims, who’d received so much sympathy that the police kept arresting her for murder, harassment, traffic offences, withholding evidence and no doubt omitting to buy a valid dog licence.

The more I watched, the less sense it made. There were too many suspects – rival rapists, multicultural ships’ chandlers, pregnant lesbians, bent coppers and chubby boyfriends with beards. Joanne was unflatteringly made up, her forehead looming larger than a satellite dish. I liked the actress who played her sister, however – Zoe Tapper.

She looks like the kind of woman who could please a man.

The conclusion was hopeless. Despite Joanne’s protesting her innocence week after week – and I for one believed her – she it was who’d slashed Ioan with a convenient dagger, when they had a highly implausible kung-fu scrap in a peat bog. The series was also marred by a panto villainess of a detective. DI Renton even possessed a Sir Robert Helpmann’s Child-Catcher upturned nose.

Much to my surprise, I was transfixed and delighted by The Repair Shop. It ought to have been as wearisome as watching paint dry, because it is about watching paint dry, glue set and cement solidify. Nevertheless, it is very soothing, seeing the craftsmen and experts mend these broken music boxes, put smashed stained glass back together and clean oil portraits, removing the brown varnish painstakingly with a cotton bud. A leather armchair that had once survived a Nazi bomb was reupholstered.

The joy of watching paint dry: Jay Blades and Will Kirk

Ed McLachlan

‘As you can see, folks, there was once a strong English influence here on Easter Island’

The public, shown their renovated heirlooms, reliably burst into tears.

‘These objects release emotions and hidden stories,’ we were told in the voice-over. The workshop is very neat, like the kitchen of a television chef – obviously a set. My quibble is that we never know how much any of this lavish specialised treatment costs, or how many hours are involved. I’d love to see faces drop when people are presented with a bill.

An unintended consequence of the lockdown, and no new programmes being made, is the screening of old programmes. I have been watching Rooms, made in the seventies, when the stucco villas of Notting Hill were still chopped up into squalid flatlets – cardboard partitions, shared lavatories, a gas ring, unwashed half-pint milk bottles and damp raincoats. Each episode was a sad little drama, with the likes of Annette Crosbie playing a lonely spinster, begging

to wash a neighbour’s socks. Lewis Collins was a lothario, with two dolly birds on the go. Dinsdale Landen did a terrible drunk act, crashing into doors.

Everybody smoked. Everything is covered with brown paint.

On the other hand, if the world is currently in the process of ending, with utilities about to be cut off, the dwellings in Rooms will look like luxury when we are subsisting off boiled twigs in caves.

he wrote, ‘it matters less which piece you choose, than which executant.’

No need, then, to neglect the pair of youthfully extravagant piano concertos Chopin composed around the time of his 20th birthday, in 1830 – provided, that is, you can find the ideal player. Names to bear in mind, favourites of the young Benjamin Grosvenor, would include Alfred Cortot and Shura Cherkassky, both of whom left recordings of one or other of the concertos, and Vladimir Horowitz, who sadly didn’t. But why mourn such scarcities when Grosvenor himself has just given us a marvellous recording of the concertos (Decca 485 0365), not as a simulacrum of the playing of older masters, but with a wizardry that might be valued in any age?

As James Huneker explained in his mesmerising Chopin: The Man and His Music, which Scribner & Co published in 1900, the concerto form sat uneasily with Chopin’s emergent art and craft. ‘Chopin was composing at a time when acrobats were kings, when the Bach Fugue and the Beethoven Sonata lurked neglected and dusty in the memories of the few. Little wonder, then, that we find this youthful Pole, not timidly treading the path of popular composition, but bravely carrying his banner, spangled, glittering and fanciful, and outstripping at their own game all the virtuosi of Europe.’

Both concertos were in Chopin’s luggage when he left Warsaw in the autumn of 1830. And what a journey that proved to be! With revolution sweeping Europe, and Warsaw about to be encircled by the Russians after the November Uprising of 1830, Chopin found himself trapped in Habsburg Vienna. Vienna, too, had gone into lockdown: first to keep the revolutionaries out (being a Pole, even the frail and peaceable Chopin

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE BENJAMIN GROSVENOR’S CHOPIN Where Chopin is concerned, I often recall advice given by that most discriminating of Chopin admirers, Edward SackvilleWest, whose former residence in the gatehouse tower at Knole I wrote about in the April Oldie.

‘For anyone coming anew to Chopin,’

Pole position: Benjamin Grosvenor, the young master of Chopin The Oldie May 2020 69

DPA ARCHIVE/ALAMY

was suspect); then to curtail a serious cholera outbreak.

Close confinement breeds anxiety, which in Chopin’s case took the form of nightmare visions of his sisters being raped, and the love of his life, the young opera singer Konstancja Gladkowska, being strangled by Muscovite soldiery loose on Warsaw’s streets. He eventually reached Paris, newly freed from the Bourbon-Habsburg hegemony; though it, too, was struck by cholera in 1832.

Hummel, Moscheles and the Irishman John Field created the piano-led culture Chopin inherited. You can hear this in Stephen Hough’s dazzling 1986 Chandos recording of Hummel’s two best piano concertos, a CD that’s never been out of the catalogues. Yet, as Hough remarks in his recent collection of essays Rough Ideas (Faber, 2019), Hummel was merely the caterpillar to Chopin’s butterfly.

The art of the great Chopin players has generally been lodged in the upper reaches of the keyboard, where they hold in check and transform the piano’s naturally percussive qualities. There were also those who were privy to the older ways of doing things. ‘The piano is seldom used nowadays to express anything as incalculable as mood,’ wrote Neville Cardus in 1935. He had heard Moriz Rosenthal, a famous Liszt pupil whose Chopin, freely rendered, was by many thought incomparable. ‘Rosenthal,’ Cardus wrote, ‘seemed to play to a distant echo, like a man listening to music contained in a shell thrown onto the shores of our day by the tide of another and sadly receding century.’

Cardus liked to tell the story of Artur Schnabel, a great Beethoven pianist but a non-starter in Chopin, telling Rosenthal that his aim was to ‘bring out the thinking in Chopin, you might even say his philosophy’. ‘I see,’ retorted Rosenthal. ‘Chopinhauer.’

There’s no philosophising in Grosvenor’s Chopin, nor any hint of that chromium-plated streamlining we’ve often had to live with since the days when the needle could be lowered into the grooves of Cortot’s 1935 recording of the F minor Concerto, the young John Barbirolli conducting. There the slow movement’s opening bars are merely wafted aloft like thistledown on a summer breeze.

It’s the slow movements, of course, that are the principal lure in these concertos. The earlier of the two was inspired by Chopin’s beloved Konstancja.

‘Six months have elapsed, and I have not yet exchanged a syllable with her of whom I dream every night.’ As for the slow movement of the E minor Concerto, 70 The Oldie May 2020

that, wrote Chopin, ‘should give the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories’.

Looking over a spring garden, with the forsythia in full bloom and Grosvenor’s new record playing on the gramophone, has already laid down just such a memory.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON SONGS OF JOY AND CONSOLATION The soundtrack to all our lives is the news. We wake to the Today programme as we home-alone it with our other halves, fantasising about the past and hoping to fast-forward to our old lives.

Until then, we have days like these.

Days and days and days like these.

There are consolations, of course: primroses and daffodils, sunlight on bright spring lambs gambolling in the fields, oblivious of COVID-19, which sounds like a niche, Midwestern suicide cult but changed the face of the country – the world – around the Ides of March. The moment the sun goes over the yard arm…

Time to read, time to watch box sets. I say that more in hope, as the broadband in ‘the country’ – ie anywhere outside metropolitan areas – is weaker than old British Rail coffee. I can’t even send an attachment from Exmoor most days.

And then there’s music. Herewith my recommended playlist for the Covidian Age of quarantine.

Quarantunes are ideally gentle, melodious and flowing, to keep up the mood without scaring the cat or annoying the neighbours.

Anything Latin American, especially

Chico Buarque, Mercedes Sosa (Gracias a la Vida) and Caetano Veloso, to waft you to Rio (as celebrities have been inanely pointing out on Twitter, ‘you can go anywhere in your mind’) and caress you like The Girl from Ipanema.

Simon and Garfunkel, Nina Simone, the Beatles (and, while we’re on the subject, you can read Craig Brown’s new book about them at the same time). Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the whole Woodstock generation work well at a time when Nature is having its revenge on Man’s inhumanity to Gaia, and the planet is being sent back to the garden without any supper, as in the Joni Mitchell song, and the helpful slogan, allegedly from Extinction Rebellion: ‘Corona is the cure. Humans are the disease!’

I can’t do the playlist without suggesting ‘artists’ to avoid. Leonard Cohen. Punk (too nihilist). Anything atonal – too suicidal. Any funeral favourites like My Way, Angels or Born to Be Wild, which means Frank Sinatra, Robbie Williams and Steppenwolf are out. Too end-times.

Before the curfew, some singalong COVID-19 bangers must be permitted.

Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, the late great Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton would be on my coronavirus playlist – everyone’s made one. On the bad-taste front, there’s Toxic by Britney Spears, Fever by Carly Rae Jepsen, No Time to Die by Billie Eilish, Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees, Contagious by Avril Lavigne, and Don’t Stand So Close to Me by the Police. There are also hundreds of new tracks about corona (check out Sounds of the Virus on Spotify) and parody remakes of My Sharona.

Let’s hope and pray music gets back to sex, love and heartache soon.

Now wash your hands.

She will survive: Gloria Gaynor on stage in Berlin

Clockwise from top left: Otranto Cathedral 12th-century mosaic detail; Hackert landscape, c1797; Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, c1650; Veronese fresco, 1560s; Giorgione’s The Tempest, 1506-8; Simone Martini’s The Dream of St Ambrose, c1320

ITALIAN ART HUON MALLALIEU SIX OF THE BEST In recent years, I have paid frequent visits to Italy, more often than not for work (or perhaps ‘work’) associated with The Oldie.

In the absence of ‘real’ shows to preview, the Editor kindly suggested that I create an imaginary tour of favourite paintings in Italy as a gesture of fellow feeling to that country during its present travails. There is room only for a few, so here are some that I have most enjoyed in the company of readers.

The first Italian treasure that I would revisit isn’t actually a painting, but the mosaic floor of Otranto Cathedral. One of the most fascinating European works of art, it is surprisingly little known, and I’m unaware of a serious study for general readers in English.

Over 54 feet long, it is an encyclopedia of 12th-century knowledge, from Heaven and Hell, the Old Testament and pagan antiquity, to the Arabs, Africa and even China. Alexander the Great, Noah, Samson, Satan, King Arthur, fabulous creatures and real animals, the months and zodiac all crowd among the branches

of three Trees of Life. On the Tower of Babel, there is surely the first depiction of builder’s bum.

All this was created between 1163 and 1165 by Pantaleone, a Byzantine master mosaicist, for an Italian archbishop in a Norman kingdom. The style marries Byzantium to the Bayeux Tapestry.

Moving north, we come to Caserta, the gigantic 18th-century palace of the Bourbon Kings of Naples. Here few paintings are masterpieces, but those by

‘I clapped between movements at a symphony’

Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737-1807) are well worth discovering. There are two series: the ports of the Kingdom (including Otranto), and views around the palace itself. Hackert was a key figure among the international artists working in Italy during the great days of Grand Tourism.

In Rome, I choose Velázquez’s Innocent X, in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, perhaps the greatest of all portraits of power. Spend time in its company and Bacon’s 45 ‘screaming popes’ seem fripperies compared with their inspiration.

I am torn between Simone Martini’s great fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, and those in the Chapel of St Martin at Assisi, but plump for The Dream of St Ambrose among the latter because the faces (surrounded by Klimt-like gold), from c1320, could be met today.

For Venice, I’ll go for Giorgione’s enigmatic The Tempest in the Accademia – what does it mean? I could spend many happy hours wondering. Then for the Veneto, Veronese’s fresci at the Villa Barbaro, so vividly peopled with servants and dogs. The interplay of painted and real Arcadias, on the walls and seen through the windows, is entrancing.

The Oldie May 2020 71

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER EDIBLE BEAUTY The ne’er-do-wells are locked up. The rest of us (I write at the beginning of April) are locked down. It’s eerie.

Birdsong dominates the garden soundtrack, further animated by the roar of occasional tractors along the lane, toing and froing in farmyard and field – the nation must eat. Aircraft are absent and with them their contrails – ‘sky litter’, according to the late Roger Deakin.

Yes, we must eat, but it isn’t quite Dig for Victory here at Bryan’s Ground on the Herefordshire/Radnorshire border. I’m reluctant – so far – to trash longestablished shrub and flower beds for the sake of vegetable-only cultivation during these weeks of supermarket shelf-raiding.

However, there’s room among decorative plants for some destined for the table.

There are edible peas instead of sweet peas (or, rather, intermingled with them). Dwarf bean plants, tucked in around hardy annuals and perennials, will deliver plenty of much-needed fresh food as the season progresses, and fruitladen tomato plants make eye-catching late-summer colour combinations when jumbled up with the dahlias. And what flower bed wouldn’t be enlivened by sprays of artichoke and cardoon foliage?

By avoiding things that need forking out – potatoes, for example (digging can disturb their companions’ roots) – it’s possible to include a great variety of kitchen goodies. To my eye, all herbs are decorative – feathery fennel, glaucous or purple-leafed sage, glossy green or purple basil – each providing moments of pungent hedonism as you fiddle with the weeding.

Even a window box can keep you going with parsley and tarragon – nonessentials, admittedly, but just the job for that culinary flourish if such things

become scarce in shops. A sprinkling of chives left to produce their early, scruffy, lavender-pink flowers make a fine display above violas. Low-growing tufts of aromatic thyme amid clove-scented pinks and carnations coalesce into an irresistible, nasal cocktail.

Beetroot foliage is beautiful, and the edible roots are easily lifted without troubling nearby plants. Multicoloured midribs of some Swiss chard varieties (I recommend rainbow-stemmed Bright Lights) will augment any flower border.

Rhubarb doesn’t look out of place beside other large-leafers such as ornamental gunnera and petasites, but be aware of the latter’s creeping rhizomes, which could prove invasive, and the possible toxicity levels in certain species.

I avoid mint in the flower beds. It’ll spread like turbo-charged ground elder.

And I wouldn’t encourage rampant selfseeders such as lemon balm, as delicious as its chopped leaves are, sprinkled over raspberries and strawberries.

Ah yes – strawberries. Ours are now confined to zinc containers and the classic terracotta planters designed especially for them to distance the fragile fruit from muddy splashes during seasonal downpours. It’s surprising, too,

Bright Lights: rainbow-stemmed chard

how many other fruit and vegetable plants will adapt to containerised life. Try filigreefoliaged carrots in light, sandy soil that allows them to grow deep and straight.

Gooseberries trained as standards have much the same visual impact as boxwood topiary and, if carefully irrigated and properly pruned, black and red currants will inundate the family with fresh fruit over many midsummer weeks.

The spread of COVID-19 has changed many lives and its repercussions may well change the way we tackle our gardens. We needn’t forfeit the lawn yet and see in its place rows of brassicas and spuds, but few things are more pleasing and rewarding than home-grown fruit and veg. Their siting just needs rethinking creatively to harness the best of what a few square yards of outdoor space can offer.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD CAULIFLOWER Writing this in semi-isolation, I have been looking forward to some comfort food for the duration of this dreaded virus – and none is more comforting than cauliflower cheese. Cauliflowers from Kent are still available in our local market, though not in my kitchen garden, as I haven’t tried to grow them for years.

For the amateur gardener, cauliflowers are notoriously tricky. The soil should be fertile, not acidic, deeply dug, well drained and rich in garden compost to prevent the plants from drying out. Regular watering is essential in hot summers to achieve close-cropped, dome-shaped heads. When I grew a row of cauliflowers, the heads – cauli cognoscenti call them curds – looked more like white sprouting broccoli, and I have not tried again.

In theory, cauliflowers can be grown all the year round, and there is one The Oldie May 2020 73

variety actually named All the Year Round. Those that mature in summer and autumn can be sown in September and overwintered in a cold frame.

Alternatively, sow under glass from February and plant out now (April/May) for cropping in autumn. Some varieties, such as Clapton, claim to be resistant to club root, and there is one called Boris which is described as ‘Mr Versatile’.

The so-called winter cauliflowers can be sown now in a prepared seedbed; the seedlings should be thinned as soon as possible and the strongest ones transplanted in June or July, with the plants about two feet apart. The variety Triomphant should be ready by Christmas, but others may need a month or two longer. Once the heads start to form, bend a few of the surrounding leaves over them, to give protection from bright sun or frost.

Miniature cauliflowers are easier and quicker to grow, in the ground or in a pot; a sowing now should produce heads about three inches across in late summer.

If I do grow cauliflowers again I may be tempted to try these small ones, which should have the same delicious taste. The great Elizabeth David must have been nodding over her stove when she referred to the cauliflower’s ‘coarse flavour and soggy texture’.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD EMPTYING THE CUPBOARD

ELISABETH LUARD

While spring-cleaning my store cupboard in anticipation of release from oldie house arrest – at the time of writing, mid-April – I discovered a forgotten cache of goodies acquired in easier times.

Among these, a 2-litre Kilner jar of rolled oats, a battered tin of golden syrup (slightly crystallised), a packet of what used to be called desiccated coconut, a couple of half-full jars of capers in brine, four plastic bags of black and green olives of mixed provenance, a small tin of anchovies under oil and another of tuna.

Plus six miniature sachets of long-life squid ink suitable for risotto al nero. Or possibly not.

No doubt you’re facing similar challenges yourself.

Anzac biscuits Crisp coconut oatcakes were the iron rations shipped to their men by the wives of Aussie soldiers fighting in Europe in both World Wars.

To prepare, mix an equal weight of self-raising flour, granulated sugar, grated coconut and rolled oats. Work in the same weight of melted butter, a 74 The Oldie May 2020

dissolve. Meanwhile toss together in a bowl 500g rolled oats, 250g flaked or grated coconut with about 350g roughly chopped nuts (walnuts, almonds, pinenuts, pistachios) and 350g shelled seeds (pumpkin, sunflower). Stir the butter-honey mix into the dry ingredients, tossing to blend thoroughly and form sticky little lumps. Spread in a baking tray and bake in a medium oven – 170°C/Gas3 – for 25 to 30 minutes, stirring now and then, till golden. Don’t overcook – it will crisp as it cools.

spoonful of golden syrup per 100g of flour, and enough warm water to bring everything together as a softish dough.

Leave to rest and firm for ten minutes under a damp cloth. Roll out to the thickness of a pound coin on a floured board, cut into rounds or squares and bake for about 30 minutes in a very low oven till crisp and golden. Transfer to a rack to cool, wrap in greaseproof paper and store in an airtight tin.

Caper and olive tapenade Capers rather than olives, as I’m sure you know, are the nominate ingredient in this Provençal scooping paste – tapeno being caper in the old langue d’oc, language of the troubadours.

To prepare, pit your stash of olives (shrivelled is fine). Now crush or roughly process the olive flesh with the same volume of capers (pre-soaked if preserved under salt, drained if pickled in vinegar). Add a pinch of dried thyme and enough olive oil to make a soft scooping paste. Possible additions are anchovies and tuna.

Eat with crisp baguette or toasted sourdough. I presume by now you’re baking your own bread from a sourdough starter (if not, look it up on the internet).

Pack leftovers into a screw-top jar and pop it in the fridge, where it will keep almost indefinitely. Use to liven up anything that needs it – hard-boiled eggs with mayo, new potatoes, tomato sauce for pasta. And it’s positively Mediterranean in a cottage pie.

Honey-and-nut granola An alternative destination for your stock of rolled oats (porridge oats won’t do). If any of the ingredients are not in the first flush of youth, refresh them with a short spell in a low oven. The mix of nuts and seeds is flexible – use whatever you have, keeping to rough proportions.

To prepare about a kilo (it keeps well in an airtight tin), melt 100g butter with 150g honey and 100g soft brown sugar in a small pan, stirring till the sugar crystals

Elisabeth Luard’s Preserving, Potting and Pickling, illustrated with her watercolours, is to be published by Grub Street (£25) in April

RESTAURANTS – A HISTORY JAMES PEMBROKE Our lockdown is being made infinitely more endurable by the presence of my son’s Spanish friend Ignacio Urzaiz, who, unable to return Madrid, is staying with us. His only experience of British cooking is that of its boarding schools or takeaways in Edinburgh (where he’s at university), both of which have confirmed his continental prejudice that we Brits simply cannot cook.

So we have taken up the gauntlet – and tried everything on him. I even bought faggots to test his conversion. To my son’s horror, he wolfed them down, describing them as ‘England’s answer to haggis’.

In common with the Editor of The Oldie, Ignacio often asks how the English lost any ability they ever had to cook. The Editor’s theory is that we lost it because of the migration from country to town in the Industrial Revolution, becoming world champions at embalming multitudinous dishes in tins. (Charlie ‘Lupin’ Mortimer attributes his 30-year survival with AIDS to his regular consumption of Fray Bentos’s steak-and-kidney pies.)

The Editor likes to believe in a vanished ‘Olden Days’ Arcadia where recipeswapping among the jolly peasantry was second only to basket-weaving and whittling. Don’t tell him but there’s not a shred of evidence for this prelapsarian gastronomic idyll. It’s pure whimsy.

The village diet was meagre and monotonous even before the exodus. In 1795, the agricultural labourer consumed under 2,000 calories a day. With the demise of the open-field system due to various enclosure acts, A L Morton believed they went ‘from a beef, bread and ale standard of living to a potato and tea standard’. Food in the cities was a vast improvement but, in the absence of kitchens in the home, most new arrivals

could no longer cook for themselves, and so forgot the few culinary skills they had.

In the mid-19th century, Henry Mayhew estimated that there were 6,000 street sellers of food and drink in London, selling everything from baked potatoes, hot eels, pea soup, pickled whelks, pies and boiled puddings to sheep trotters and, of course, Sam Weller’s oysters. This gave rise to the expression ‘eating on the stones’.

As well as starters and main courses, one could get pudding in the shape of cakes, tarts and gingerbread for a ha’penny. And there were around 300 coffee stalls serving men at the start of their working day and some at the end of their play. The real big sellers were fish and a taste of the sea.

Mayhew believed that in 1851 the London poor were devouring 875 million herrings a year, at four for a penny. Given that the population was two and a half million, with the kitchen-less classes making up about two-thirds of that, they were eating an average of three herrings a day each.

There was also fried fish, which was sold in the Jewish quarter around Houndsditch and Aldgate at the time of Waterloo. Battering, which disguised discoloured fish, might also have been influenced by the Jewish practice of coating fish in matzo meal before frying.

In 1863, our national dish was christened when a Mr Lees of Mossley combined Jewish battered fish with its enduring partner the French invention frites. Within 25 years, there were between 10,000 and 12,000 fish-andchip shops in British towns, selling a wholly foreign dish.

And Ignacio is insistent that we find one still open.

James Pembroke is author of Growing Up in Restaurants: The Story of Eating Out in Britain from 55BC to Nowadays (Quartet)

DRINK BILL KNOTT SCREEN DRINKING COMPANIONS I had a few cocktails with Humphrey Bogart last night. Now that conviviality is in such short supply, I find myself drawn to any star of the silver screen with a penchant for liquor – and in the Golden Age of Hollywood there are plenty to choose from.

My pleasure has not been entirely vicarious. Take Casablanca (1942), for example: my cellar is, alas, devoid of the ’28 Veuve Clicquot poured at Rick’s Café Américain, but I did rustle up a French 75 (gin, lemon juice and sugar: a Tom Collins, in essence, with the ingenious substitution of champagne for soda), to be sipped patriotically as Victor Laszlo

(Paul Henreid) leads the bar’s patrons in a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise, drowning out the German officers’ Die Wacht am Rhein.

In the splendid Notorious (1946), the bottles of ’34 Pommard in the dastardly Claude Rains’s cellar are, as Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman discover, filled with uranium ore (a classic Hitchcock MacGuffin), but one can still enjoy a non-radioactive glass of burgundy as the action unfolds, even if a more recent vintage has to suffice.

Fans of Withnail and I (1987) sometimes take the idea a stage further, matching Richard E Grant’s title character drink for drink, as he and his friend Marwood leave their squalid Camden flat and go ‘on holiday by mistake’ to a rainswept Lake District. You’ll need at least two bottles of red wine (Uncle Monty kept an excellent cellar), as well as copious quantities of beer, cider, whisky, gin and sherry.

Withnail also knocks back a tin of lighter fuel, proclaiming it ‘a far superior drink to meths’: this I would not recommend (on the set, Grant apparently drank vinegar instead). The monstrous reefer rolled by Danny the dope dealer – the ‘Camberwell Carrot’ – is similarly optional.

Withnail seems a paragon of sobriety, however, when compared with Nick Charles, the socialite ex-detective hero of The Thin Man (1934), played with louche aplomb

by William Powell. His first scene sets the tone: when wife Nora (Myrna Loy) and Asta (their wire-haired fox terrier, a shameless scene-stealer) meet Nick in a bar, he has already polished off six martinis.

Based on a Dashiell Hammett novel and sparkling with wisecracks – Nora: ‘They say you were shot in the tabloids’; Nick: ‘They never got near my tabloids’ – the film is awash with booze. ‘What case are you working on?’ enquires a breathless reporter. ‘A case of Scotch,’ retorts Nora.

The couple even have a cocktail cabinet in their bedroom: The Thin Man was one of the last films released before the puritanical Hays Code came into effect – and it shows, although the five sequels it spawned are also great fun. Now that ‘all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world’ are temporarily off limits, seeking solace in the company of Nick, Nora and Asta is not such a bad way to pass the time.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines: two whites – one from Chile, one from Portugal – that eschew oak in favour of freshness, and an amphora-aged Spanish red that will suit a back-garden dinner à deux perfectly. However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Indomita, Nostros Reserva Riesling, Bio Bio, Chile 2018, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 Unoaked Riesling from low-yield vines in Yumbel, central Chile: zesty and aromatic, with refreshing citrus notes.

Quinta da Alorna, Verdelho, Tejo, Portugal 2017, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 From the banks of the Tagus, not far from Lisbon: elegant, medium-bodied Verdelho with hints of herbs and tropical fruit.

Celler del Roure, Vermell, DO Valencia, Spain 2018, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 A blend of Garnacha Tintorera (aka Alicante Bouschet) and the rare Mando grape. An upfront, juicy, exceptionally fruity red.

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The Oldie May 2020 75

SPORT JIM WHITE MY WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS The Open, Henley, Wimbledon, Ascot, the European Football Championships and the Olympics…

One by one, the grand events of this sporting summer have crumbled. One by one, appointments long etched into the diary have been erased. One by one, the markers of our season have vanished.

As they have gone, postponed in the face of an unprecedented threat to our health, so we’ve come to appreciate what a role they play in our lives.

A summer without live sport, three months bereft of the sound of cricket balls being clipped to the boundary, four months without pictures of the plucky Brit coming in seventh, a season shorn of the singular delight of sitting on the sofa mid-afternoon with the curtains closed watching a piece of wound-up rubber and cotton being thwacked across our TV screens… To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, you don’t know what you’ll miss till it’s gone.

This summer is going to be long, hard and bleak. Already, through the abrupt, enforced curtailment of the football season, we are realising how difficult it will be to cope. Marooned in lockdown, many of us have found that football’s absence has done more than merely separate us from our obsession: it has interfered with our circadian rhythms.

What’s the point of Saturday if there is no match? And without our latest Fantasy Football scores to compare, how do we even start a conversation with our son?

Broadcasters have tried their best to fill the gap. There was the virtual Grand National. Sky have been nightly rerunning old Premier League games.

The BBC is going to give us the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony in its entirety, scheduled on the very night the festivities from Tokyo were due to air.

Lovely stuff. But ultimately empty.

Because the very currency of sport is its uncertainty. Sure, watching Euro ’96 replays will be an exercise in cheerful remembering.

There will be a certain pleasure in our recalling the long-lost days of Frank Skinner and David Baddiel belting out terrace anthems and Des Lynam’s suave, urbane presentation, the perfect conductor of the sense of national upbeat.

But when, deep into extra time in the semifinal with England and Germany tied on one goal each, Alan Shearer crosses the ball, we know Paul Gascoigne will time his arrival at the far post fractionally late and the chance to send England to a first final in 30 years will be squandered.

We know when Gareth Southgate steps 76 The Oldie May 2020

up to take the critical spot kick in the penalty shoot-out he will miss.

It is not like going to see Hamlet, aware of the ending and yet being thrilled by its processes. The unexpected conclusion is sport’s unique and central contribution to our cultural existence.

Without it, what is left is mere nostalgia.

So when it does come back, when lockdown is eased and things can be resumed, sports fans will line up in droves for their shot of competitive uncertainty.

It doesn’t really matter which sport it is that emerges first (my hunch is it will be snooker); the urge will be the same.

What we have discovered during this lockdown is something we probably knew all along: when it comes to sport, such is the hopelessness of our addiction that we can’t live properly without it.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD SOCIAL-DISTANCE DRIVING OK – so we oldies are all supposedly self-isolated, no matter how robust we are.

We’re told we can walk the dog – presumably at extendable-lead distance from other walkers. But no one’s mentioned cars. You can self-isolate as effectively in your car as at home. Which model would you choose for your solitary sentence?

I guess the obvious answer is a campervan. You can go wherever you like for days or weeks at a time in splendid isolation, changing scenery as often as you wish, freed from having to stare all day at the dustbins and waste pipes of the flats opposite. You don’t even have to touch the fuel pumps with your hands – most large filling stations provide disposable plastic gloves.

But campervans are surprisingly expensive, given that they’re basically converted van platforms. The more luxurious – with air-conditioning, TV, Wi-Fi, loo, fridge, cooker, extendable roof etc – the more you pay, of course.

My landscape-photographer sister-inlaw paid £50,000 for her Fiat Auto-Trail 540 SE. The price of even basic ones can make your eyes water, especially if they’re old. Remember those split-screen VW campervans of the 1960s with asthmatic, air-cooled rear engines, so beloved by hippies? I saw a 1966 Type 2, fully restored, advertised recently for £60,000. And that at 999,999 miles (sic).

A more practical Eye-watering price: Fiat AutoTrail 540 SE

option would be their modern descendants, VW Transporters. I’ve driven a Caravelle version, kitted out as a mobile office. It was blissfully comfortable, but beware going off road – I got stuck on a flat grass verge simply because the grass was wet. I also once saw the Spice Girls disgorged from one at an M6 service station, accompanied by a wide-shouldered, no-necked minder. I mistook them for something else entirely (they weren’t so famous then). You can pick them up (the vans) for £10,000-£30,000.

There are other variants of live-in transport. My wife nearly bought me a Cornish County Council mobile library as an office – essentially a short coach with seating, washing facilities and beautiful beechwood shelving. It would have been no trouble to fit a bed or two. Or you could have a horse lorry. The larger ones often come with sleeping and cooking facilities – so you could turn the load area into your sitting room or study. Or drive a small car up into it for urban forays when you’re parked out of town.

Alternatively, get a smaller lorry from about £5,000, convert it and drive on an ordinary licence.

My choice, however, would not be a vehicle to live in. There’s a story that, in the 1960s, the wife of the Commandant of the army’s Bovington Camp in Dorset was seen spending her afternoons knitting in the back of their Bentley, parked on the drive. When someone plucked up courage to ask why, she said that the War Office furnishings and décor of their army house were so awful that she couldn’t bear to sit in it. The Bentley, on the other hand, with its sensual surround of quality wood, leather and lambswool carpet, was far more comfortable and congenial. And warmer.

I think I too would self-isolate in a Bentley. Ideally a 1950s R Type or S1, both with intoxicating period ambience and magnificent long bonnets. But they might cost £20,000-£30,000 upwards – so I’d compromise on the £8,950 Turbo R I saw: 1990, full history, blue leather, walnut, folding rear tables, cocktail cabinet, two classic mobile phones and enough power to blow any virus away.

I’d cruise the (by then deserted) high roads of the kingdom, enjoying our beautiful country while trying to decide which was more destructive: infection or cure.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Capacity crisis? What crisis?

Any national crisis presents a real test for the internet, and proves what I have long been saying. The internet is now a utility and should be regulated and supported as such, just like electricity, water and gas.

However, it’s managing itself quite well. I recently looked back at what I wrote in 2001, after 9/11. The CNN, ABC and New York Times websites were quickly overwhelmed and were switched off.

When they came back, most of the content had vanished and connecting to them was difficult as the network was clogged and often impossible to access.

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Make your own Taj Mahal https://www.papertoys.com/ Lots of designs for paper models that you can print, cut out and stick together.

Smithsonian Open Access https://www.si.edu/openaccess The Smithsonian Institution has made millions of images, both 2D and 3D, free to download and use as you wish. Great for websites, blogs and newsletters.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

This is because of the way the internet works; to see a website, you must connect directly to it. You are a visitor, not just a viewer, and all websites have a limit to the number of simultaneous visitors they can manage. Broadcast media, such as radio, will always beat the internet hands down on this score, as they can have an unlimited number of listeners.

However, in the last 20 years, the way websites and the internet are managed has grown up, and the UK is now one of the most advanced digital economies. It’s just as well; as soon as the coronavirus hit us, it was clear that the internet would be very important means of imparting information and transacting business.

Websites can now very quickly and easily increase the numbers of possible visitors if they need to. But would the network, the physical wires through which all the data flows, be up to the job?

Could it handle the many working from home? Just as the pubs were closed, BT, whose network is easily the biggest in the UK, issued some reassuring figures, which also shed an interesting spotlight on our online habits.

I had not realised it, but the network capacity required for work-related applications represents only a fraction of the demands we all place on the network at home. The real bandwidth hogs are films, live streaming (sport, for example) and, especially, online video gaming.

Online conferencing (Skype and the like), which have obviously seen such a huge increase in use recently, are much less hungry for bandwidth.

Data transmission across the internet is measured in terabytes per second (Tb/s). Before coronavirus, BT never saw usage of more than 17.5 Tb/s and that was always during the evening peak, when we all went home and watched something, or played video games. Rather to my surprise, this was more than three times the usual daytime peak of only about 5Tb/s, even with every computer in every company in the land hard at work.

Accordingly, BT built its network to accommodate that evening peak with masses of headroom in case of any extra special demand. Even after coronavirus forced so many people to start working from home (and no doubt increased the demand for Netflix during the day), the daytime traffic increased only to about 7.5Tb/s initially – still under half the evening peak in more normal times.

Plenty of spare capacity is built in because it is surprisingly cheap. Even if it proves insufficient, the engineers can very rapidly deploy extra equipment to boost it.

Ultimately, if forced to, networkproviders also have the option to slow down various activities on the internet to allow more important traffic room to move.

Before coronavirus, the highest levels of traffic that BT had ever experienced were when a new online video game called Red Dead Redemption was launched. If the worst BT ever has to do is slow down something that sounds as ghastly as that game to accommodate some public service traffic, I suspect it’s a privation we could all survive.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

British taste – from rayon to gin-in-a-tin Since our lives were upended by COVID-19, have you bought gin-in-a-tin, crumpets, gluten-free breakfast cereal or vegetable crisps? If so, you are on trend, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Vegetable crisps confirm our move towards healthier eating, and gluten-free cereal reflects how many people live with food intolerances.

If, instead, you started buying individual fruit pies, frozen imported 78 The Oldie May 2020

lamb or fresh turkey steaks, then you have overturned the Government’s notional shopping cart – but no more so than the way the coronavirus has.

Once a year, the ONS compiles a list of everyday items that we typically buy, adding and deleting products and services as they become more or less popular. By regularly checking their prices, it calculates how consumer price inflation changes. The latest shopping basket was revealed in

mid-March, just as the coronavirus really started to revolutionise our spending.

Airport parking was a new item added because it is more expensive than the existing, local, short-term car parking. In just a few weeks, driving to airports disappeared from anyone’s activities.

Gin was already included under off-licence sales, but this year on-sale gin was introduced because of the wide range of flavours now available. This pushed up

spending on specialist gins in pubs and bars – all of which are now closed.

Other changes to the basket are still relevant, though. Pre-mixed gin and tonic, one of the increasingly popular cocktails in a can, is sufficiently widely drunk at home to be added to the list.

The shopping basket contains anything we might buy, not just food and drink; this year’s introductions also included reusable bottles and self-tanning products. Out went MP4 players which have been overtaken by mobile phones.

Tracking the changes to the shopping basket over the years is fascinating.

The first basket was filled in 1947 with items familiar in post-war Britain but outmoded today: table mangles, plimsolls, rayon slips and girls’ woollen gym tunics.

Three years later, with a wider choice in the shops, in came rice, chocolate-covered biscuits, fish fingers and toilet paper (which is still included today). We lost candles, canned plums and frozen cod fillets.

In 1962, sliced white bread, sherry and girdles appeared. Out went teapots, galvanised buckets and Axminster rugs.

In 1974, we gained cod in sauce, dried mashed potato and paper handkerchiefs and lost women’s overalls, prunes and bicycle tyres.

By 1987, we were buying more frozen curry, wallpaper, duvets and indigestion tablets but spending less on lard, cheese spread and youth-club subscriptions.

By 1995 we had discovered avocados, ready-cooked meals, CDs and foreign holidays, but lost the taste for rice pudding, vinyl records and small white loaves.

In 2008, we had taken to pure-fruit smoothies, muffins and next-day delivery

flowers but were not so keen on frozen vegetarian ready-meals, washable carpets and 35mm camera film.

Last year, we gained baking trays, electric toothbrushes and peanut butter but were less likely to buy three-piece suites, washing powder and envelopes.

In the light of the coronavirus crisis, it is anybody’s guess what might appear in next year’s official shopping-basket list.

The Oldie May 2020 79

Getting Dressed

Full of eastern promise

Architect Peter Camp adores the buildings – and clothes – of India brigid keenan

KATHERINE VIRGILS

The first time I saw Peter Camp was a few years ago at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he was doing a course in photography.

Immaculately dressed in jodhpurs with an Indian waistcoat, he looked so elegant and at home in the outfit that I decided he must be Indian royalty of some sort.

He turned out to be an English architect with a passion for theatrical clothing. He is also keen on Austrian loden jackets, with Tyrolean accessories, from one of the oldest clothes shops in Vienna, Loden-Plankl – straight out of The Sound of Music. When he’s in his immaculate white shirt, waistcoat, trousers and Panama, he looks just like a dapper member of the Riviera Set in the 1930s.

Or he can look as if he’s just stepped out of a cornfield in Far from the Madding Crowd, in stout braces and tweed trousers. These last two outfits of his come from the wonderful tailors Darcy Clothing in Lewes, Sussex, who make perfect reproductions of vintage fashions – which customers, including Camp, often find more comfortable than modern cuts.

Camp’s outfit will almost always include a waistcoat: ‘Hard to beat, whether it be Indian or Western style – keeps the body warm while allowing for maximum manoeuvrability.’ He likes some sort of neck covering – ‘I always carry a scarf or cravat of some sort, whatever the occasion; it works every time.’

Some of his most exotic ones come from Joss Graham’s Aladdin’s cave of Indian textiles in London.

Camp likes clothes to make a statement, to be noticeable and to make the onlooker feel good. This could be A favourite off-duty outfit: kurta tunic from Anokhi, cotton churidars from Gov Khadi Shop, both in Jaipur; silkand-wool scarf from Assam 80 The Oldie May 2020

because he is a second son and spent his growing years wearing his older brother’s cast-offs; everything except shoes. ‘He was obviously hard on shoes because every September I got new ones.’

He is still keen on good shoes, and though he spends a lot on them – buying some of his at Tod’s – he says it is worth it: ‘A good pair of shoes can last 20 years, which in the end is more economical than buying cheaper ones that need replacing every year.’

As a student, he graduated, he says, from ‘humble jumble’ to shopping at the wonderful vintage/antique shop at 282 Portobello Road, where he bought his first dinner jacket. His family lived in Sussex, near Glyndebourne – so he actually needed one.

Camp studied architecture and met his beautiful Texan artist wife, Katherine Virgils, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, in 1986, when they lived opposite each other in the same mews in Notting Hill.

They married three years later but not before discovering India together. Camp, returning from a visit to his brother in Australia, broke his journey home in Delhi.

Virgils flew out to meet him, and India became part of their own story.

They have both since worked on many projects there.

Virgils became artist in residence in Jodhpur at the request of HH Gaj Singh, the state’s Maharaja and keen supporter of art and music.

She has exhibited paintings in India, New York and London, inspired by yogic art. She is currently working on a series of paintings in support of Rajasthani musicians.

Camp has designed and restored several buildings in India, including the romantic 14th-century desert fort of Pokaran, now a beautiful hotel.

In a waistcoat made by his wife in 1995; detail from a family portrait by Katy Nail

Camp is the only person I have ever met who has christened a street in London. In his redevelopment of an old garage site in Kennington some years ago, a small unnamed lane was left.

Camp called it Silk Mews and sited his new office there – though it took more than one uncomfortable year for the address to be registered and for services to be connected.

Kennington is also the site of one of his most dramatic projects. In 1960, Max Bygraves sang Fings Ain’t Wot They Used to Be in which the lyrics lament, ‘They’ve changed our local palais into a bowling alley…’

Peter Camp has done the exact opposite. He has turned a disused bowling alley and adjoining men’s drinking club into a palace – well, not quite, but into a family house that measures 45 yards from front to back door.

Architecture is a sedentary job and Camp plays tennis (in non-coronavirus times) and walks for exercise. He (again, in ‘normal’ times) has his hair cut by the couple’s friend and hairdresser Patricia Millbourn, in her kitchen. Other friends and customers include Maggie Smith and Michael Heseltine.

At the time our photograph was taken, he had not been able to make an appointment for some weeks!

The chaffinch

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd The RSPB Pocket Guide to British Birds has a cock chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) on its cover, a well-deserved honour.

Although predominantly rural – the goldfinch is a more likely inner-city sight – it remains joint fifth with the blackbird, at 5.05 million, in the league of 22 species with over a million seen in Britain.

It breeds from the Isles of Scilly to Shetland, but the 2018 census shows a disturbing decline of 1.5 million in the past seven years. This appears to be due to more than habitat loss or trichomonosis, a disease particularly deadly to greenfinches.

The month of May signals the climax of the dawn chorus, in which the cock chaffinch’s persistent song is invariably prominent. This can be repeated six times a minute and up to 3,000 times a day. It lasts three seconds, with a burst of repeated notes followed by a cadence: ‘tink-tink-tink-chink-chink-chink-dinkdink-dink-tiddle-you-wee-o’, according to the RSPB Pocket Guide. A sharp ‘tink, tink’ is a familiar call.

Henry Douglas-Home, BBC presenter in the pioneer days of outside broadcasting, found the chaffinch his chief bugbear. Its omnipresent song constantly interrupted or drowned recordings of rarer species.

Once he took revenge. ‘We sat in the BBC control car playing back the record while the offending chaffinch stamped furiously on the roof, under the impression that his own song was that of an aggressor.’

He witnessed chaffinches similarly deceived by their reflection in windows. ‘I have watched them battering a pane for half an hour before exhaustion has finally driven them off,’ he wrote in The Birdman.

In those pre-war days, the BBC broadcast dawn-chorus matches between selected woods in Scotland and England. The Scottish venue was Dundock at Coldstream, where Henry led the home team – and discovered other hazards. Previously laid microphones would be checked just before live transmission. ‘Darling!

Darling!’ came one response. Henry’s

desperate gallop revealed a loving couple under a rhododendron bush. Breathlessly he explained they would shortly be heard throughout Britain. As they fled, the man’s parting words echoed through Dundock: ‘This country’s worse than bloody Hitler!’

The finches are beautifully plumaged and the artist Denys Watkins-Pitchford (aka author/naturalist ‘BB’) thought the cock chaffinch the most beautiful British bird, its colours subtly restrained, with pure white wing bars the perfect ‘finishing touch’. The hen’s brown camouflage belies the beauty of the nest she builds, the cock helping to collect material. It is a moss- or lichen-clad cup

with a predominantly feathered interior, an apparently instinctive masterpiece.

John Clare, who died on 20th May 1864, aged 70, wrote his last poem, Birds Nests, in praise of the chaffinch. ’Tis Spring; warm glows the South.

Chaffinches carry the moss in his mouth To the filbert hedges all day long And charms the poet with his beautiful song.

The wind blows blea o’er the sedgy fen But warm the sun shines by the little wood Where the old Cow at her leisure chews her cud.’

The Oldie May 2020 81

Travel The real Hôtel du Lac On a Swiss pilgrimage, William Cook met Graham Greene’s daughter, visited his grave and stumbled upon a galaxy of stars

I

’m standing beside Graham Greene’s grave in Corseaux (a quiet village just outside Vevey), alongside his daughter Caroline Bourget, when I get the strangest sense of déjà vu.

It’s my first visit to this graveyard, but I feel I’ve been here before. Then I realise why it feels so familiar. It reminds me of a scene from Doctor Fischer of Geneva, Greene’s sinister novella, written 40 years ago and set beside this vast and lovely lake. The spooky finale of that story, about a bomb inside a Christmas cracker, was inspired by a Christmas Greene spent here in Vevey with Caroline.

‘I didn’t think he’d ever write anything about Switzerland,’ she chuckles. ‘It’s too calm – not enough going on.’

Yet, as Greene understood, even in Switzerland strong passions can ebb and flow beneath a placid surface, like the currents beneath the surface of Lake Geneva, Switzerland’s largest lake.

Caroline moved here in 1969 and her father became a frequent visitor.

‘I never told anybody that he was here,’ she says. ‘He came here to relax.’

He wasn’t well known around here,

82 The Oldie May 2020

which was just the way he liked it. Even people who knew who he was were happy to leave him alone.

In 1989, Graham Greene bought a modest apartment in Vevey. ‘I think he liked it,’ says Caroline, a shy but friendly woman with a kind face and a nervous laugh. ‘He had a beautiful view over the lake.’

He came here to be near Caroline, to be with Yvonne Cloetta, his long-term partner, and to receive the expert medical support he needed. ‘He was in very bad health – that’s why he came here.’ Caroline found this grave for him, and when he died (of leukemia in 1991) she arranged his burial here.

At Caroline’s pretty house, in the green hills above Vevey, where she raised her two sons, she reminisces about her father, the greatest English novelist of the 20th century, and his final years in Switzerland – a peaceful epilogue after a life full of adventure in some of the most violent countries in the world. She didn’t see much of him when she was small, but later they became closer. Yet, even in those later years, it was often hard to know what he was really thinking. ‘He was a very private person.’ She describes his temper as ‘not hot, but very cold’, yet he was loyal and generous. A man of many paradoxes – religious, moral, political – he remained elusive to the

Cuckoo about Switzerland: Chaplin; James Mason; Anita Brookner; Graham Greene

Rooms with a view: Grand Hôtel du Lac

end. We go for lunch at the Hôtellerie de Châtonneyre, one of Greene’s old haunts. With us is Pierre Smolik, a local author who wrote a fine book about Greene’s time in Switzerland, and his publisher, Patrick Moser. Over a hearty meal and a glass of Chasselas, the local wine, Caroline tells me a bit more about her father. ‘He wasn’t sentimental,’ she says. ‘He had both feet on the ground.’ She is 86, the same age her dad was when he died, but she’s still in fine fettle. She has her father’s piercing, pale blue eyes.

There are various other sites associated with Greene in and around Vevey – including the Auberge du Raisin, a cosy restaurant amid the vineyards where they make that light and fruity wine. Vevey is a place to linger in and take your time, rather than a place for sightseeing. Like Greene, it’s discreet and enigmatic. You can see why he liked it.

Greene wasn’t the first British writer to fall in love with Lake Geneva. Byron came here with Percy and Mary Shelley.

Since then, countless Britons have followed in their wake. Yet foreign

visitors often bypass Vevey and head straight for Montreux. They don’t know what they’re missing. Vevey isn’t as flashy as Montreux, but it’s far more atmospheric and authentic. Maybe that’s why so many British émigrés have ended up living here.

The most famous was Charlie Chaplin, who lived here from 1952 until his death in 1977. His home was the Manoir de Ban, a secluded mansion in lush gardens overlooking the lake. When I first went there, in 2011, to meet Charlie’s son Michael, the house was empty. When Michael told me about his plans to open it up to the public, I thought it would never happen. Eight years later, it’s a superb museum, full of fascinating artefacts from Chaplin’s professional and private life.

Chaplin is buried in the village cemetery of Corsier, about a mile away from Greene’s last resting place. Greene knew Chaplin fairly well. He visited him at the Manoir de Ban (Caroline came, too) and helped him with his autobiography. If you make it to the cemetery, look out for James Mason’s headstone, a few feet away – he lived nearby. A good friend of Greene’s, he

played the title role in the 1984 TV film of Doctor Fischer of Geneva.

I never tire of celebrity grave-hopping, but it’s not the only thing to do round here. Vevey is surrounded by ancient vineyards, built on steep stone terraces above the lake, and all the best ones welcome visitors. You can drop in, try a few glasses and buy a few bottles to take away. My favourites are Clos de la République, run by Patrick Fonjallaz, and Domaine Pascal & Cécile Dance. Patrick’s domaine is old and grand, Pascal’s is more homely and they both make superb wine. You can pick up a decent bottle for about £10.

Vevey really gets lively only in midsummer, when sightseers spill in from buzzy Lausanne and glitzy Montreux. For the rest of the year, it’s sedate and tranquil, and for me that’s what makes it special. My favourite time to visit is autumn, after the tourists have departed, when mist shrouds this immense lake and that tranquillity becomes tinged with melancholy. Anita Brookner’s 1984 novel, Hotel du Lac, encapsulates this wistful, mournful mood. When Brookner set her story here, Vevey’s Hôtel du Lac had seen better days, but it’s since been revamped and relaunched as the Grand Hôtel du Lac. It’s a great place to stay, if you can afford it – luxurious yet intimate, like the best sort of private members’ club – but today it feels a world away from the faded grandeur of Brookner’s poignant book.

On my last evening in Vevey, I met up again with Patrick Moser, the chap who published Pierre Smolik’s book about Greene’s last days in Vevey. A man of many parts, he’s also the curator of the Villa ‘Le Lac’ Le Corbusier, the lakeside home Le Corbusier built here for his parents in 1923 – now a modest museum. He drove me there and showed me round, just as the light began to fade.

The house is stunning, a modernist masterpiece, but the nicest thing about it is the view. As we looked out across the water, I remembered something Chaplin said: ‘I see no tragedy in the loneliness of old age – I go where the wind blows me.’

The wind blew Graham Greene here, like so many others blown here before him. Not such a bad place to end your days.

The Hôtel Bon Rivage (www.bonrivage.ch) is a comfortable, affordable hotel in a historic building right by the lake. Doubles from £112.50 per night, including breakfast. Swiss (www.swiss.com) fly to Geneva from London Heathrow and London City, from £89 return The Oldie May 2020 83

Overlooked Britain

Bee home and bee safe

lucinda lambton With its Doric pilasters and Gothic arches, this queen of bee houses is so precious that it’s a listed building, blessed by a bishop Three guesses as to the role of this oddly beautiful little building in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Hartpury, Gloucestershire.

A handsome prize awaits those who can give the right – and very surprising – answer: that it is a 19th-century structure for sheltering bees!

Fancied up to the nines with elaborate carving, it is eight yards long and two yards high, with two tiers of convex and concave scalloped stone zigzags adding cutting-edge brio to its joyful appearance.

These were the partitions that protected the ‘skeps’ – in this case, 28 of them, housing some 840,000 bees.

Skeps were the straw domes, of satisfyingly complex, plaited construction, that sheltered the colonies of creatures making their honey.

Doric pilasters march along the lowest tier, flanking five Gothic arches – two with moulded keystones – with sunken circles in their spandrels. A continuous line of stone diamonds against a rusticated background completes this happy, unique-in-the-world decorative picture.

The stone caps are of the pleasingly named oolite Cleeve Pea Grit and the ‘plates’ are of Purbeck stone. Such construction methods, with bees and their boles, although minus these picturesque extras, had been popular throughout the world up until the mid-19th century.

This charming flight of architectural fancy in Gloucestershire has been given two wildly different histories. One, dating from c1500, surmises that it was made from stone from the Convent of Holy Trinity at Caen in Normandy, where both honey and wax were harvested. This French connection is an intriguing one, in that a bee shelter originally stood in the grounds of the manor of Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire.

This had been granted by William the Conqueror to his daughter at the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen in Normandy.

It is thought that, with regular toing and froing across the Channel for the abbey’s dues and rent, stone quarried in Caen could well have been brought back 84 The Oldie May 2020

to England, especially after it had been seen that such shelters had been in successful use in Normandy for hundreds of years.

The other published history more precisely hails its origins somewhere between 1824 and 1852. From the look of it, every instinct told me the earlier version must be the right one.

But, trounced by the scholarship of various beekeeping associations, I find that the later date is actually correct. This little oddity was surely the creation of one Paul Tuffley, a stonemason, merchant and quarrymaster of nearby Nailsworth, whose family, if you please, had worked on the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster. It was also decreed that the tooling marks are all typically Victorian, having been applied with the late-19th-century technology of routing, fretting, chiselling, sawing and core-drilling. Somewhat scathingly, the renowned sculptor Rory Young has described the carvings as being ‘within the vocabulary of a provincial stonemason’ of the late-19th century, although ‘architecturally ungrammatical’.

Up yours! He did concede, however, that the petition brackets were ‘utterly curious and unique’.

The axe and saw work would have been applied in the dwarfingly-vast-forthe-workmen Cotswold stone quarries not far away. The original slabs would have been cut with a frig-bob saw by one man, or a cross-cut saw from square and scabbled blocks by two men.

In 1957, it was discovered by the International Bee Research Association in a ruinous state, standing in the garden of the about-to-be-demolished Nailsworth Police Station. The Chief Constable asked if it could be saved and so it was. Dismantled by the Gloucestershire Beekeeping Association, it was moved to a new site in the grounds of Hartpury Farm Institute.

Over the years, the foundations were found to be cracking and the bee shelter, by now a listed building, was considered ‘at risk’. Most unusually for a building

that had been listed, consent was given to move it again – this time to the churchyard. It was recorded in meticulous detail and rebuilt, with every stone carefully wrapped for the move.

The original stones were also used, with weatherstone from Minchinhampton, as well as limestone from the abandoned quarry underground workings at Balls Green. The little building was finally reopened in 2002, with the Bishop of Tewkesbury blessing its glory.

Hilda Ransome, in The Sacred Bee in Ancient Time and Folklore (1937), writes that in the Classical world of northern Europe, honey was thought to come from heaven, with the bee a medium for bringing it to man.

Certainly many a celestial building was created for bees’ purpose. Dr Eva Crane tells us of a giant – 50ft high by 10ft square – stone tower, built for bees in the 13th century by a Nicholas de Verdon in Clonmore, County Louth, Ireland.

She wrote of another early Irish ‘Bee Tower’ at Moira Castle, County Down. Known as ‘honey pots’, these vast buildings were not confined to the grandees; the Cistercians also built a 50-ft-high tower at Mellifont, County Louth.

The most usual way of housing bees, however, was always the skep, which was placed in a niche known as a ‘bole’ in the wall. The word ‘bole’, Scots for alcove, became synonymous with sheltering the bee skeps. In his Rural Rides, William Cobbett said you needed two bushels of ‘clean unblighted straw’ to make a skep.

‘The cost is nothing to the labourer. He must be a stupid countryman indeed who cannot make a beehive; and a lazy one indeed if he will not.’

Not all skeps were made of straw. Cobbett also recommended wicker made of privet, withy or hazel. Charles Butler, known as ‘the Father of English Beekeeping’, wrote that they were in fact a convenience rather than a luxury and were commonly used throughout the land.

A good many regional names are still

GEOGPHOTOS/WDA CACHE/ALAMY

used instead of ‘bole’, including ‘bee niches’ in Derbyshire and ‘bee keps’ or ‘shells’ in Cumbria. Butler’s rewards were great: he claimed to be able to hear bees singing – even transliterating every tone of their buzzing, which he wrote into the musical score Melissomelos or Bee’s Madrigal. Convinced that musicians would hear it as music – that ‘Musicians may see the grounds of their Art’ – he made his observations: ‘When the prime swarm is gone, the next Prince, when she perceiveth a competent number to be fledge and readie, beginnith to tune, to sing in hir treble voice, a mournfull and begging note, as if shee did pray hir Queenmother to let them goe. Unto which voice, if the Queene vouchsafe to reply, tuning hir base to the young Prince’s Treble, then does she consent.’

And on it goes, with page after page of

Bee house, Hartpury. The 28 alcoves housed 840,000 bees. Below: ‘Skeps’ were of straw, privet, withy or hazel

musical annotation, ending with the four-page ‘madrigall’. It was the first book in the English language on beekeeping, although, with his English almost as odd as his methods, I doubt it was hugely popular.

Beekeeping was revolutionised by the invention of the movable-comb beehive in 1851 by the poetically named Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, who was well-known throughout America as ‘the Father of Modern Beekeeping’. He claimed the bee was capable of being tamed. With the easy charm of such observations as ‘bees cannot under any circumstances resist the temptation to fill themselves with liquid sweets’, he also knowledgeably addressed every aspect of tending the apiary.

In 1862, the movable-comb beehive arrived in England and the old bee boles became more or less redundant.

The Oldie May 2020 85

Taking a Walk

My lockdown walk is normal for Norfolk

GARY WING

patrick barkham

It is the best of times and the worst of times for walkers.

On the bright side, the humble walk has become almost the only legal activity permitted in public, apart from foodshopping. A daily stroll is a Governmentapproved, NHS-backed undertaking, providing you maintain a strict twometre exclusion bubble around yourself.

Life on lockdown means probably more humans walking in Britain than at any point in history.

To take the spring from your step, however, if you are deemed to have driven too far to claim your walking ration, you risk being filmed by police drone, fined by officious constables and shamed by social media. And woe betide you if you pause for a rest or to admire the sunset.

Writing this down still feels like a poor attempt at a post-apocalyptic novel, but of course it is a new reality to which we have adapted with startling equanimity.

I had to cancel various far-flung British walks for fear of being arrested by the ‘non-essential’ police. So this is my local lockdown walk, which is currently an option if you are not self-isolating and live close to Wroxham in the Norfolk Broads.

86 The Oldie May 2020

I first noticed walking etiquette was changing when I jogged through the car park of the Bure Valley Railway, a narrow-gauge steam railway which shares the old railway track to Aylsham with an excellent public footpath. A pair of passing walkers jumped away from me as if I were a wolf.

I used to encounter three dog-walkers on this five-mile round.

In lockdown, there are twice as many.

There may be conflict between walkers and space-hogging, droplet-spreading joggers in overcrowded urban parks, but in the countryside there is still plenty of space. And, if anything, greetings between walkers are cheerier than before.

The old railway line is a ribbon of young oak woodland, a sunlit tunnel for peacock butterflies, chaffinches and buzzards. It hummed with spring. On either side was intensively farmed, high-grade agricultural land. Beyond the first level-crossing were fields of polytunnels, part of an enormous soft-fruit operation, which will this summer need British seasonal workers for the first time in decades to keep us in strawberries and cherries.

At the third bridge, I took the steps down the embankment to head south on a country lane through the hamlet of St James. Where the lane turned sharp left, I continued ahead on a footpath which squeezed between hedgerows and gardens and popped out opposite Coltishall’s twin riverside pubs, the Kings Head and the Rising Sun. Once a perfect half-way refuelling point, the pubs were, of course, closed. I turned left and crossed the green beside the River Bure, which was as tranquil as ever, framed by reedbeds and water meadows. Several older couples hunched furtively in their parked cars, admiring the view.

I followed the lane east past a row of fine riverside houses and on to the footpath to Belaugh. This is the most beautiful stretch of the walk, cocooned in the valley bottom, crossing green pasture bordered by handsome two-century-old oaks. A pair of kestrels nest nearby; they regularly dash from these trees. I spied them mating in a nearby garden this spring.

To the south were reedbeds, alders and the twisting river, with blue-green woods on the rise beyond. The footpath emerged in the gorgeous little riverside village of Belaugh, with tiny boatsheds, a surprisingly steep river-cliff and a scenic church.

I followed the lane climbing out of Belaugh and crossed the busy ColtishallWroxham road to follow a permissive path – of the grudging, rutted sort – on the field edge. Crossing five almost identically sized fields, I reached the railway again and the bright lights of Wroxham. When all this is over, please visit and take a walk.

All of Britain’s cafés, restaurants, pubs and holiday accommodation will be extremely thankful to see you.

This walk starts and ends at Hoveton & Wroxham railway station, which is 15 minutes on hourly trains from Norwich station. OS Map OL40, The Broads

On the Road

Her Majesty’s Humdrum Service M, James Bond’s boss, doesn’t lead a very glamorous life, Ralph Fiennes tells Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

If I’m leaving home, I have to have a book.

Do you travel light?

It’s a discipline I’m working on.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

The earliest one, I think, is of going to the south of France near the Camargue with my parents in a Volkswagen camper van. And it was raining and I remember my parents cooking things through the open door of the camper van and a slight sense that this is a whole other world.

Your favourite theatre?

Gosh. I tend to like smaller theatres, certainly – to act in. I think the Almeida Theatre is a unique space. I’ve been on stage there a couple of times and liked it very much, the proximity and connection with the audience. And I think the Hopkins theatre at Glyndebourne is stunning – it’s got scale, yet the amount of wood in there gives it that special feeling.

Favourite filming places, and worst?

The whole location experience of shooting The English Patient was quite magical – it was Tuscany and then southern Tunisia on the edge of the Sahara.

The worst: a studio called Longcross, a former Ministry of Defence place near Virginia Water – just a bleak vibe there.

Favourite place in the world?

I love India and would happily make future travelling a sort of project about getting to know it better.

Which places are closest to Shakespearean England?

In terms of the land, Warwickshire, of course. Village churches are always a real guiding light to congregations and therefore communities. On location in old houses, where the stone, panelling and flagstones are still the same, that’s when you sort of feel a touchstone to the life that people led and you’re surrounded

by the skills that made those places, and that kind of feeds the imagination.

Where were your most famous roles filmed?

Schindler’s List was shot in 1993, in Krakow, where the story took place – I remember the old Jewish quarter being very evocative. A Bigger Splash was shot on a small island between Sicily and Tunisia, called Santa Maria. Sadly, because I’m M, I get stuck in an office for the James Bond films – which is usually a set in Pinewood Studios. I’ve yet to be in a romantic, exotic location. The Harry Potter films were all studio.

What is Hollywood like?

In 1994, I did a film, Quiz Show, where we shot all night in central Los Angeles and I got to see the LA that’s not Hollywood, which I find fascinating.

Do you ever feel lonely, having grown up in such a big family?

No, no. I’m not lonely.

Do you work on a plane/ train – learn your lines?

I love working on planes – you can’t make phone calls; people can’t get to you. The best place to work, actually.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

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

Do you go on holiday?

I rent a small farmhouse in Italy in the summer.

The strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I was in the Arctic with an Inuit man, who shot a seal at the edge of the ice, cut open its head and invited me to eat the fresh seal’s brain – it tasted like very good sushi.

Best and worst experiences in restaurants when abroad?

It’s always a quest to find the place to eat that isn’t too fussy or too pretentious, serving fresh food where the local people are eating.

Do you have a go at the local language?

I can get by with basic French and a tiny bit of Russian.

What was the biggest travelling headache, before the coronavirus lockdown?

The whole immigration security thing.

I try not to get flustered by it all – computer, take off your belt. The way you’re talked to, especially in America – they tend to be incredibly brusque. You get frazzled by it.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

On the same Arctic trip, I went on a Ski-Doo with a friend and we were about 50 miles from habitation, on snowy, rocky ground, and I slept on the Ski-Doo in about -25 degrees. I was covered in blankets, but there was no windshield. I slept very well. I also once slept in an igloo.

Do you like coming home?

It depends, doesn’t it?

Sometimes you’ve been away for a long time and it’s good to come home. Other times, you kind of quite wish you were on the road still. I don’t even know where home is, but I suppose it’s in London.

Top travelling tips?

Be prepared for security and all that – it’s very annoying when you forget to empty your pockets…

Finally, is there anything you’d like to plug?

For once in my life, I don’t think there is anything.

The Oldie May 2020 87

Genius crossword 387 el sereno Three clues each contain a superfluous word. Their letters are an anagram of a little-known Greek thinker (6,2,7), much thought of by another more famous Greek philosopher. The former is the solution to 28 across, and may require some research Across 1 Language permitted during journey for such a vital game (7,8) 9 Mafia returns to accept bereavement and flourish (7) 10 Swimmer getting a little stick? (7) 11 I am to act as broker, being nearest (9) 12 Man maybe saying ‘I will’? (4) 13 Small stand, I said in French capital (6) 15 A distressed veggie welcomes right to cause upset (8) 18 Avoid what needs to be paid - that’s a strange thing in Australia (8) 19 Steep, popular feminine practice (6) 22 Jumper from a goblin’s back? (4) 23 Red tape sees equipment and morale in pieces (9) 26 Performer left of course surrounded by excited stares (7) 27 Lettuce may be a source of danger at sea (7) 28 See preamble (6,2,7) Down 1 Poor performers needing teachers to take time (7)

2 Meteorological feature most (or many) must welcome (5) 3 Work in prison for such a crime (6,3) 4 Marsupial that could be dead meat without yours truly? (6) 5 Reveal method to the audience, overcome (8) 6 Woman of refinement hits youth with yen (4) 7 Thinking originally, philosopher makes preparations for union (9) 8 Biblical scholar, say, in south coast university cut short female (7) 14 Where those on the fiddle may know the score (9) 16 Call original victim on line - sound familiar? (4,1,4) 17 A source of light and forces must change louts outside (8) 18 Challenging one worker after three consecutive letters (7) 20 Spain joins - and comes out (7) 21 European travel is beginning to manifest selfishness (6) 24 Done time? That’s public (5) 25 Surrender church doctrine vacantly (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 29th May 2020. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 387 Across 1 Impoverished (4) 3 Maintain (4) 9 States of euphoria (5) 10 Yearning for past (9) 11 Put away for future use (3-2) 12 Poop areas (anag) (4,5) 15 Join military (6) 17 Reveal (6) 19 In disguise (9) 21 Imprint (5) 23 Cornucopia (9) 24 (Dirty) money (5) 25 Ceremony (4) 26 Remit (4)

Genius 385 solution Down 1 Castigates (8) 2 Barrier (8) 4 Birds of prey (6) 5 Solid body of people (7) 6 Horrible; threatening (4) 7 Catch sight of (4) 8 Aura; nimbus (4) 13 Murder (8) 14 Famous (8) 16 Captain (7) 18 Approach; buttonhole (6) 20 Miserable (4) 21 Auction (4) 22 Curve; sly (4)

The undefined solutions are all Greek gods: Hermes, Dionysus, Poseidon, Zeus, Demeter and Artemis Winner(s): Howard and Felicity Woods Runners-up: Anthony North, Allan Gascoigne

Moron 385 solution Across: 1 Servant, 5 Tease, (Cervantes) 8 Lofty, 9 Regatta, 10 Resists, 11 Tacit, 12 Sulked, 14 Frenzy, 17 Amass, 19 Observe, 22 Memento, 23 Usage, 24 Dodge, 25 Sadness. Down: 1 Solar, 2 Refusal, 3 Abyss, 4 Thrust, 5 Tighter, 6 Attic, 7 Exactly, 12 Swarmed, 13 Essence, 15 Narrate, 16 Joyous, 18 Armed, 20 Squad, 21 Épées.

The Oldie May 2020 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO When you’re deciding how best to broach a tricky combination in the trump suit, frequently the best advice is ‘Don’t’. Take this month’s unsavoury 6♠ slam.

Dealer North North-South Vulnerable North

♠ Q3

♥AK82

♦A9764 West ♠ J842 ♥J65 ♦Q85 ♣J 9 8

♣K 3

East

♠ K6

♥Q943

♦ J 10 3 South ♠ A 10 9 7 5 ♥ 10 7 ♦K2 ♣ A Q 10 6

♣7 5 4 2

The Bidding South West North East

1 ♦ pass 1 ♠ pass 2 ♥ pass 3 ♣ (1) pass 3 ♠(2) pass 6 ♠ (3) pass pass pass (1) Fourth Suit Forcing, announcing game values and asking for more information.

Note, the bid neither shows nor denies values in the fourth suit – it is an asking bid. That said, with clubs so well held, perhaps South should simply have jumped to 3NT. (2) Close between 3 ♠ and 3NT. (3) Assumes partner is 3♠ 4♥ 5♦ 1♣; however, this need not be the case as many 2♠ 4♥ 5♦ 2♣ shapes will go back to 3♠ here.

West led ♣8 and declarer considered the merit of attacking trumps immediately. The correct percentage play of leading ♠ 5 towards ♠ Q and then (if it loses to East’s ♠ K) later finessing ♠ 10, would be successful if East held ♠ J and one or two other cards (with or without ♠ K), or if West held ♠ KJ with no more than one other card.

Declarer preferred the scrambling route.

Declarer played a low club from dummy and won ♣10; he crossed to ♣K, cashed ♥AK and trumped ♥2 with ♠ 5. He cashed ♦K, crossed to ♦A and trumped ♦6 with ♠ 7.

He then cashed ♣A and then led ♣Q. Down to just his four spades, West trumped with ♠ 4 and declarer overtrumped with dummy’s ♠ Q. With ♠ A 10 9 as his last three cards in hand, declarer led ♥8 and trumped with ♠ 9.

West overtrumped with ♠ J but declarer held ♠ A 10 sitting over East’s ♠ K6 and the slam was made.

Wow – breathless stuff. However, I imagine he’d prefer to be in 3NT next time.

ANDREW ROBSON 90 The Oldie May 2020

IN COMPETITION No 253, you were invited to take up a pattern of rhyming words in a game of bouts-rimés. The rhymes were taken from a sonnet by Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) beginning: ‘Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.’

One of you followed the geometric theme. Most explored the character of this spring with coronavirus. I found you shared some of my own feelings of fearful strangeness at odds with natural beauty in the sun. So let your poems be memorials to all that. Some broke free from the dominant theme. Technically, the geese were hardest to accommodate without a halting step. Thanks to all entrants and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the verse-and-prose bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to Jane Bower.

Self-isolation The frightened street is sunlit, oddly bare In wary silence, the wrong kind of peace, While nature, disregarding, does not cease Its social interaction as I stare.

Magnolias bloom for no one, and nowhere Are our bleak rules observed. Twin skeins of geese Oblivious, rise and lift in free release, Climbing and keening in the dry, high air, Space-sharing in their safe, familiar day Where once the frequent glint of far planes shone.

Their cries subside, and I remain alone.

Only these lives have brushed with mine, and they Are swallowed, as the sky a mile away Receives them as a lake receives a stone.

Jane Bower In spite of Spring, the trees are mostly bare, There is a sense, quite palpable, of peace.

High in the sky the silver scribbles cease, The vault of blue gives back a quiet stare.

Cars, buses, taxis, people are nowhere, Who clustered in the roads like angry geese.

‘Who the hell is Joe?’

There is a sense of loosening, of release, Of something like a blessing in the air.

The birds have flirted with their mates all day, And every hour the sun has cleanly shone.

It’s almost healing, now, to be alone To watch emerging bumble bees as they Pursue their good intents. And as I turn away, Here is a ladybird, scarlet, on a stone.

G M Southgate A youth steps forth, whose head is bare.

Some jeer: a lad! Wise hold their peace; (In time, all will, and scoffers cease.)

For now, there’s outcry; the crowd stare: No knight, this! Page – blown from nowhere!

The silly laugh like honking geese, Glad of solemnity’s release.

Once haughty, now with sullen air, The bold, who showed up proud this day To seize the prize that brightly shone, Look on: wroth; wan. The boy alone Stands to the fore. Astonished, they See fancied futures fall away: As if greased, sword slips from the stone.

Graham P King Never is life on earth completely bare Of some intrusion on our perfect peace.

Disturbances of sorts will never cease: Some eyes meet ours with glare, or glance, or stare; Some voice, some buzz, some blare, as from nowhere, Smearing the evening sky, a skein of geese Honks overhead; dandelions release Their seeding parachutes into the air.

Conspiracies of nature tease our day, But night brings memories of times we shone With joy, or sorrows that we faced alone.

Imagination feeds our fears. As they Creep in, the mind’s deep calm is whisked away Like water troubled by a skimming stone.

Christine Ractliff COMPETITION No 255 I find an increased appetite for normality.

So please write a poem with the title Sweeping, taken in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. This month we cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by email (comps@theoldie. co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 255’, by 28th May.

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Q

Granny’s lament

I’m so unhappy. When they were young, my two grandchildren absolutely loved visiting me.

They would cry when their parents came to pick them up. We had such fun together and I taught them cooking and songs and we played silly games.

Nowadays I’m aware that it’s become rather a bore to visit me. On their rare visits, they fiddle with their phones and, now they can use public transport on their own, make an excuse to leave early.

I feel so very sad. It’s as if all the time I put in when they were young means nothing now.

Deborah, by email But this is how the world works, Deborah! I doted on my grandmother when I was small and later I rather dreaded seeing her, if I’m honest. I had my own life and problems and wanted to spend all my free time with my friends. Now she has died, I spend much of my time bitterly regretting not having told her how much she meant to me and how I loved her.

This is what will happen to your grandchildren. Suddenly at around 50 or 60, they’ll remember your love and generosity, become tormented by pangs of guilt and wish they’d shown their appreciation more. But don’t worry. The time you spent with them when tiny will never go away and your love is too valuable ever to vanish from their lives.

It’ll be a continual support.

A

Q

Because I’m slightly lame and my balance isn’t great, my children keep saying I should get a stick to

98 The Oldie May 2020

A

Office bully on the loose

Stick it out

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

help me walk and keep me safe. I’m only 65 and I really don’t want to be seen to be tottering around like an old lady. Not only that – sticks are awkward and whenever I use one, I just lose it. What do you suggest?

Caroline F by email Your children are obviously concerned about you, but they don’t necessarily know what’s best for you. Long before recommending a stick, they should be begging you to do balance exercises – there are millions of them on YouTube with earnest young Americans in Lycra suits yelling instructions. Since old ladies are prone to falling and injuring themselves, it would be sensible to prevent yourself being wobbly. There are sticks that fold up to go in your bag. You’d only have to use one when negotiating rocky ground or using it to get an instant seat on a train.

But there’s a strong argument against a stick for some people. You can become reliant on it and this doesn’t do your balance or leg muscles any good. The longer you can do without one, the better.

I foolishly gave in to friends insisting I got an extra rail put on the stairs at home. Now I find myself swinging upstairs like a gibbon using my arms and, again, not using my leg muscles enough.

Remember, too, that if you were really lame and needed a stick, you wouldn’t lose it. It would be the first thing you’d look for before you rose to your feet.

Q

I work for an accountancy firm in a large office with colleagues I like very much, and I think they respect me as well. We go for

ISSN 0965-2507.

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drinks on a Friday and bring each other cakes on birthdays. I know everyone by name, including the cleaning staff and receptionists.

So you can probably understand why I was dismayed to find some very lewd and very personal graffiti on the door of a toilet stall in our shared bathrooms. I painted over it with Tippex and collected handwriting samples from every member of staff by taking pages out of notebooks or Post-it Notes from their desks.

I have finally whittled it down to three potential candidates, all of whom I would consider friends. I am fuming and tempted to out the perpetrator in a public manner, so that they feel the same humiliation I have endured. Help!

Name and address supplied Your best bet would have been to leave off the Tippex, allow the others to see it and wait for them to get angry on your behalf.

They would have hounded down the perpetrator and exerted great social pressure to ensure that he or she never did it again. As it is, you sound so righteously and justifiably furious and efficient, you can’t really paint yourself as a victim.

Next time – although let’s hope there isn’t a next time – leave the others to form a lynch mob on your behalf. In the meantime, as you’re not certain who did it, I’d let it drop.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk – I will answer every email that comes in; and let me know if you would like your dilemma to be confidential.

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