The Oldie May issue 413

CASABLANCA’S 80TH BIRTHDAY HUGO VICKERS ON TINA BROWN

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen May 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 413

I’m free!

Are You Being Served? turns 50 – by Roger Lewis Bomber Harris’s recipe book – by his grandson Tom Assheton How to buy a picture – Huon Mallalieu My two dads – Allegra Huston on John Huston and John Julius Norwich

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

Bomber Harris’s Home Front page 18

Features 11 1950s school segregation Liz Hodgkinson 14 Are You Being Served? turns 50 Roger Lewis 16 Long live oldie Luddites Valerie Grove 18 The Bomber Harris recipe book Tom Assheton 21 The joy of dropping out Terence Derbyshire 22 My two dads Allegra Huston 24 Branston, king of pickles, turns 100 Sara Wheeler 26 How to buy a picture Huon Mallalieu 29 The first child star, William Betty Michael Arditti 30 The genius behind Casablanca Nick Brown 32 Never too old for netball Jenny Bardwell

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What were charity football teams? John Harding 12 Modern Life: What is ethical non-monogamy?

Richard Godwin

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The art of buying art page 26

35 Media Matters Stephen Glover 36 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 37 Country Mouse Giles Wood 38 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... trees John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Funeral Service: Nicholas Parsons James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 46 I Once Met… Ringo Starr Reverend Don Tordoff 46 Memory Lane Nicholas Hordern 47 Small World Jem Clarke 61 History David Horspool 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Rant: Theatre Brandon Robshaw 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 48 The Palace Papers, by Tina Brown Hugo Vickers Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Casablanca turns 80 page 30

51 A Village in the Third Reich,

by Julia Boyd, with Angela Patel Ivo Dawnay 51 I Used to Live Here: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys,

by Miranda Seymour Alan Judd 53 Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose, by Alison Weir David Horspool 54 English Gardening Eccentrics,

by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan David Wheeler 56 Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, by Simon Kuper Harry Mount 57 Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World, by John Walsh Charlotte Metcalf 59 Bad Relations, by Cressida Connolly Frances Wilson

Travel 80 How the British made the Alps Rachel Johnson 82 Overlooked Britain: Park Lane’s Animals in War Memorial Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Maurice Gran Louise Flind 87 Taking a Walk: Blean Woods, Kent Patrick Barkham 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 you have any queries, 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 64 Film: Downton Abbey: A New Era Harry Mount 65 Theatre: Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 71 Gardening David Wheeler 71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Sport Jim White 74 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 79 Bird of the Month: Common Sandpiper John McEwen 92 Getting Dressed: William Dalrymple and Olivia Fraser Brigid Keenan

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The Oldie May 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes With the Platinum Jubilee upon us, it’s time to look forward to the 70th anniversary of the Young Elizabethan, too.

Founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, it was renamed the Young Elizabethan to celebrate the Queen’s Coronation. In 1958, it changed its name again, to the Elizabethan – also the name of Westminster School’s magazine, named in honour of its founder, Elizabeth I. Interested oldies should seek out an old copy, for proof of quite how dramatic a transformation our Queen’s reign has seen in the young.

The magazine epitomised the aspirations of 1950s childhood. It was called ‘the magazine to grow up with’.

‘I think you should make the puzzles harder,’ wrote one pious boy to the letters page. ‘I can do them much too easily.’

Readers of the Young Elizabethan (owned by John Grigg, the jovial Tory monarchist, who later wrote an incendiary article about Her Majesty, was thumped in the street and renounced his

title of Lord Altrincham) were curious by nature. They collected fossils, and requested articles on Mozart, astronomy or ‘old ruins and caves and the legends connected with them’. They loved books. They pleaded for pen friends and a club they could join.

And, however studious, they found Molesworth and St Custard’s – created by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – absolutely hilarious.

They entered daunting competitions – ‘Design a science lab’ or ‘Devise a way of keeping flies off a horse with a docked tail’. Prizes included a visit to the zoo, or to Peter

Scott’s bird sanctuary. A challenge to ‘Write a poem in the manner of William Blake’s Tyger’ was won by young Jonathan Fenby, later to edit the Observer, with a poem about cricket: ‘Batsman, batsman, full of gall / As you face the bouncing ball.’

Another winning poet was budding playwright Alan Ayckbourn, 15, from Haileybury. William Feaver, future biographer of Lucian Freud, was writing book reviews for the magazine at 12.

Young Elizabethans ended up doing rather well. But, sadly, there was no market for the magazine after 1973.

Among this month’s contributors Allegra Huston (p22) wrote Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and A Stolen Summer, a novel. She is codirector of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Huon Mallalieu (p26) is The Oldie’s exhibitions correspondent and Country Life’s art-market correspondent. He is author of How to Buy Pictures and The Illustrated History of Antiques.

Michael Arditti (p29) has written 12 acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His novel Easter won the Waterstones Mardi Gras Award. He was the theatre critic of the Sunday Express.

Molesworth the Elizabethan

Jenny Bardwell (p32) is semi-retired from the BBC. She volunteers at a bookshop and at Somerset House. She runs a City Lit volunteering course for retirees and is involved with amateur dramatics.

Slap-up feed at the Beano

RASP! TWANG! WALLOP! Iain McLaughlin has just written a real chortlefest, The Unofficial History of the Beano (White Owl, £19.99).

One of the many joys of the great comic is its exclamations.

McLaughlin writes, ‘A comic isn’t complete without the funny sound effects that drag you into that crazy cartoon world. D C Thomson’s hand lettering was the best in the business at making the effects fit perfectly with the artwork.

‘The artists were called on to draw anything and everything for spot illustrations: slap-up feeds were very popular in post-Second World War austerity Britain.’

And what could be a better feed than bangers and mash (pictured), the staple diet of all great comic characters?

Prince Philip’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey was a grand do, but one disappointment was the absence, even with numerous politicians there, of hobgoblins.

The Oldie May 2022 5

Important stories you may have missed Scaffolder says he does not usually hit people Manx Independent Man found hiding behind tree East Kent Mercury

Esther the dog sleeps under man’s desk Great Titchfield Tittle-Tattle £15 for published contributions

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6 The Oldie May 2022

‘This weekend, we’re staying in and binge-watching the whole wall’

The service included Bunyan’s hymn To Be a Pilgrim. It used a modern version of the words, which omitted not only the lions (‘no lion shall him fright, he’ll with a giant fight’) but also ‘hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit’.

Go-ahead types in the Church have for decades been twitchy about hobgoblins, and the Abbey substituted the lines with ‘since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy spirit’. Boring!

The bias against hobgoblins is based on a belief that they are an old-fashioned concept and will mean nothing to ‘young people’. As in much else, the C of E is out of date. With fantasy fiction in vogue and the likes of Tolkien and Harry Potter in the bestseller lists, millennials are perfectly au fait with hobgoblins and their ilk.

The Warhammer Fantasy series has numerous hobgoblins. J K Rowling’s Potter books feature a creature called Dobby (dobby being a northernEnglish synonym for hobgoblin). Shakespeare’s Puck is a hobgoblin.

The noun has also had a revival in recent years thanks to that disputatious elf John Bercow, the former Commons Speaker who was often called a hobgoblin on social media

and in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph.

Prince Philip liked colourful language and had little time for political trimmers. What a pity the Abbey’s order of service did not stick with Bunyan’s original words.

The Old Un was sorry about the death at 86 of the witty writer Susanna Johnston, older sister of our much missed former editor, Alexander Chancellor.

But it was almost cheering to hear that, just five days later, her adored husband, Nicky, an architect who restored country houses for clients including Paul Getty and Mick Jagger, had also died, at 93. The coincidence of

their deaths, in the same hospital, was just what the Johnstons had always hoped for: a fitting end to their 64-year marriage.

Among her many books, Susanna published in 2005 an upbeat anthology called Late Youth: An Anthology Celebrating the Joys of Being Over 50. In a preface, she said she’d like the organist at her funeral to play Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye, to be sung ‘very loudly’ by her four daughters and howevermany grandchildren (ten, in fact.)

‘I would like it even better,’ she added, ‘if my husband Nicholas and I were to die simultaneously and that they sing “Wish us luck…” instead of just “me”.’

The song duly rang out at Shellingford church, Oxfordshire, where the four lovely daughters told hilarious tales of their parents’ adventures in Italy and elsewhere. The pleasure of such a double funeral is in the absence of the usual sorrow for the one left behind.

‘Midtown uniform’ is the new watchword for professional young men in London. You can see it in the picture (below) taken in St James’s, London, by Terence Derbyshire, who writes about the joy of dropping out on page 21.

The demise of the suit and tie continues apace, given a shove by successive lockdowns. Now, when hedge-fund types do deign to come into the office, they’re invariably clad in midtown uniform, a smart-casual import from New York’s financial district.

Stray into the smarter parts of London on a weekday at lunchtime and you’ll spot hordes of them: fitted chinos (beige or dark blue), a dress shirt (white or pale blue) and – the signature item – a padded gilet, aka ‘finance vest’. Navy only, unless you’re over 60 and a zillionaire, in which case maroon is the rakish option. But the stitching must be sideways, if you please.

This import even boasts its own Instagram account: @ midtownuniform. The feed’s anonymous editor exults when two or three gilet jocks are gathered together.

Terence Derbyshire was delighted to catch these four

Midtown uniform, St James’s

specimens heading into Fortnum & Mason as the spring weather warmed up.

Like so much modern gilt-edged clothing, midtown uniform has a long British heritage.

Readers of the Times will recall that the late, great Philip Howard (1933-2014), a writer on the paper for half a century, pioneered this guise.

His take on the bodywarmer was rural green, combined with cords and a pullover – warm in winter and easily adaptable for spring and summer temperatures.

Midtown uniform must not be reclaimed exclusively by urban types, either. The look has long been favoured by country types, too. Long live mid-market-town uniform.

One silver lining to the horrors of the pandemic was that people read a lot more.

Everyman’s Library, which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its revival, has seen an increase in sales of over 50 per cent over the last three years.

Everyman, which produces fine editions of classic writers, has now published 24 million copies of over 700 titles.

The books appearing this spring include a timely edition of Ukrainian author Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, about the Battle of Stalingrad in the Second World War. It was first published in 1980, after a hidden manuscript had been smuggled out of the USSR. Other Everyman gems published this spring are Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.

Perfect reading for these lengthening spring evenings.

This year marks the 110th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Guardsman Who Dropped It’ (1st December 1922), the first cartoon in the famous ‘The Man Who…’ series of social gaffes drawn for the Tatler by

‘Guardsman Who Dropped It’

one of Britain’s greatest cartoonists, H M Bateman (1887-1970).

Born in Australia, Bateman moved to England when he was 18 months old. After studying at art school, he quickly established himself as the chronicler of that perennial everyman figure ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’. Bateman lived in Clapham and a blue plaque was erected in 1997 on his house in the district. George Melly would later call him ‘the reluctant poet of Metroland, the Cassandra of Clapham’.

In the Victorian period, Clapham was acknowledged as ‘the capital of Suburbia’ – that commuter district ‘outside the four-mile radius’ of central London. Bateman even produced a book entitled Suburbia (1921).

He was also the first to call for a National Gallery of

Humorous Art, in a lecture given in 1949 at the Royal Society of Arts. In his introduction to the talk, Osbert Lancaster referred to himself as being one ‘whose whole youth was tortured and haunted by the fearful fate of the boy who breathed on the glass in the British Museum’ (another famous Bateman cartoon).

In 1988, the Cartoon Art Trust, one of whose leading lights was Bateman’s daughter, Diana Willis, was launched to fulfil his dream.

Today, in Wells Street near Oxford Circus (and Oldie Towers), the Cartoon Museum has found a permanent home at last.

‘You look happy, dear – has something awful happened?’

The Oldie May 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Just a minute? I can talk for 12 hours

I gave the world’s longest after-dinner speech with no comfort break Forty years ago this month – absurdly, because it was against the backdrop of the Falklands conflict – I made my way into the Guinness Book of World Records by making the world’s longest-ever after-dinner speech.

While our gallant forces were retrieving the Falkland Islands from the invading Argentinians in the South Atlantic, in a west London hotel, at a fundraising dinner sponsored by Cockburn’s Special Reserve Port (‘ideal for everyday drinking’), in aid of the National Playing Fields Association (President: HRH The Duke of Edinburgh), in a white tuxedo (generously provided by Aquascutum), I got to my feet at 9.30pm and talked non-stop – without hesitation or repetition, but with a good deal of deviation – for 12½ hours.

The challenge wasn’t the talking, to be honest: it was the fact that the Guinness Book of World Records people said that no comfort breaks would be allowed.

Even 40 years ago, I was needing a middle-of-the-night wee. On the advice of my doctor, I visited John Bell & Croyden, medical suppliers of Wigmore Street, and got myself kitted out with a special appliance – a device, I was told, easy to wear and much favoured by elderly generals required to spend long hours taking the salute on cold parade grounds.

Unfortunately, at around 3.30 in the morning, when I was not halfway through my marathon but very much ready for a discreet pee (desperate, actually), I glanced down and realised that my special apparatus had slipped its moorings. I watched in horror as a hideous, shrivelled sheath of pink tubing appeared at the bottom of my trouser leg.

What did I do? I thought of our real heroes in the South Atlantic and carried on regardless. I overcame the need to pee by sheer willpower. And, intriguingly, when I’d broken the record and achieved my goal, I went to the loo – and found I

Marathon man: Gyles by Antony Williams

couldn’t go. It was 48 hours before I was able to pass water freely again.

Another record was broken at the Hyde Park Hotel that night. My friend Andrew Festing, former Green Jacket and son of Field Marshal Sir Frankie Festing, was then the Head of British Pictures at Sotheby’s and thinking of becoming a professional artist. For the fun of it, and to see if he could, he decided to join me at the hotel with his easel and to paint non-stop for 12½ hours while I talked non-stop.

There and then, through the night, he created a large composite portrait in oils of me and the diners at the fundraising dinner and, because the Duke of Edinburgh was President of the charity, the painting was unveiled at Buckingham Palace – with Prince Philip declaring that Andrew’s painting was certainly more original and interesting than my speech.

Andrew went on to paint more composite pictures – notably of members of both Houses of Parliament and of The Queen at Guildhall when she gave her memorable ‘annus horribilis’ speech – and became a portrait artist much favoured by senior royalty.

Forty years and 750 pictures later, Andrew Festing is 80 now and still going strong. He is a former President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and I am hoping to catch up with him when I help open their summer show at the Mall Galleries on 4th May. Disappointingly, they don’t want me to speak for 12½ hours.

‘Just a minute will do nicely,’ said their current President, Richard Foster.

I think I have been asked because there are two paintings of me in the show, both by the same artist, Antony Williams, who works in egg tempera, and is probably best known for his controversial portrait of the Queen – controversial because he gave her fingers that some said looked like sausages.

When you are painting someone, where do you start? I asked him.

‘Usually with a nostril,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter which.’

There is much sadness in the Brandreth household today. We have just heard of the death of a lovely lady called Gloria Thompson. She was 92 and had been bedridden for a while, but remained resolutely cheerful.

We met her first about 50 years ago when she came to be our cleaning lady.

She soon became our friend and we loved her for her goodness as a person and for her unstoppable positivity.

Thinking of her has reminded me of this poem, a new poem, written by another friend, David Walser, ceramicist, painter and poet, in the week his lifelong partner, fellow artist Jan Pieńkowski, died back in February.

Flowers come. They bloom and go We loved them and we miss them so The same with friends: they come, they grow And then one day they up and go We loved them and we miss them so Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, is published by Penguin The Oldie May 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

What’s under Michael Fabricant’s wig?

In his desperate defence of the PM, the MP is completely brainless matthew norman

It by no means comes naturally to devote this space to the celebration of anyone, let alone a member of the governing party.

In the case of Michael Fabricant, however, decency demands that the bile be displaced by the hero worship this fine parliamentarian is revered for inspiring.

For anyone trapped in ignorance, Mr Fabricant is the Hon Mem for Lichfield in the Conservative interest. Or so at least it seems, because a small caveat is indicated.

Even now, decades into their partnership, it isn’t wholly clear whether it is Mr Fabricant or The Creature That Lives on His Head (henceforth, for brevity, TC) that rules this richly engaging hybrid.

While it is Fabricant whose name appears on the ballot papers, one school of thought posits that he is merely the host for an alien life form.

Other scholars insist that TC is no more than a wig, or a weave, or possibly a mop head that detached itself from its handle after a bucket-related hydrogenperoxide mishap, and in its death throes clung immovably to the Fabricant skull in the fashion of the John Hurt ‘facehugger’ in Alien.

This question must await the autopsy (which may the Lord postpone for aeons). In the meanwhile, we accord Mr Fabricant the benefit of the doubt by accepting that, of the duo, it is he who qualifies, however narrowly, as the sentient being.

If so, his eagerness to sport a device that makes him resemble Boris Johnson’s Dorian Gray portrait, as reflected by an unusually mischievous fairground mirror, is not the only emblem of his ungodly courage.

His eagerness to defend his leader on the airwaves establishes Mr Fabricant as the bravest politician of the age. Of course, there are others who let 10 The Oldie May 2022

Yellow peril: Michael Fabricant

themselves be wheeled on to TV and radio to parrot whichever No 10 partyrelated line-to-take some 12-year-old genius in Downing Street has forced them to memorise. Some, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, are even permitted to invent their own fantasies.

Yet, with the arguable exception of Nadine Dorries (into whose public appearances we cannot go for fear of intruding on private grief), no one plays the role with Mr Fabricant’s distinction.

Unlike almost all the other praetorians, he is not a minister.

Ms Dorries and Mr Rees-Mogg degrade themselves in the knowledge that no other PM in history – past, present or future; anywhere on this or any other planet – would tolerate their presence at, or within a 700-yard radius of, the Cabinet table. Neither would have a hope of being appointed Under-Secretary of State for Roast Potatoes (Crispy Yet Fluffy Within) in the government of Camberwick Green.

Mr Fabricant has no job to protect, even if sceptics assume that, pushing 72, he is looking towards serene retirement and that untaxed daily £323 ‘allowance’ for attending the House of Lords.

Mr Fabricant may well be ennobled.

He may demand that a tiny ermine robe also be fashioned for TC. Yet to impute

brazen self-interest to such a selfless public servant demeans not their target, but the cynics and sneerers themselves.

When Mr Fabricant tells us that at no time did Johnson think he was breaking the law – that ‘he just thought like many teachers and nurses, who after a very long shift would tend to go back to the staff room and have a quiet drink’ – he speaks from the heart.

At the time of writing, the PM is en route to New Delhi to meet Mr Modi, and this passage to India puts us in mind of E M Forster’s famous dictum ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’

Passing over the fact that Johnson has no friends (and that if he did, Mr Fabricant would not be among them), his guts are magnificent. To have a Restoration Comedy surname hinting at mendacity, and still be willing to spout gloriously misguided drivel in defence of a man who wouldn’t void his bladder over his head were TC spontaneously to combust … sorry, allow me a moment.

Self-sacrificial heroism on this epic scale tends to have me choking up.

Those who believe that TC is a life form from a distant galaxy suspect that she (genital-free aliens favour ‘she’ for their pronoun) is a first cousin of ET. If this is correct, it seems certain that she will eventually phone home, and that one day her people will come to rescue her.

In that event, they will gaze on the newly bald member for Lichfield, shiver in awe at the might of British democracy, and leave this corner of the cosmos in peace.

Saving Boris Johnson is a noble ambition for any hero. No one would argue with that. But Michael Fabricant is a superhero – and, just like Iron Man, Black Widow and his other confrères from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, his true business is saving the Earth.

At school in the 1950s, boys and girls barely met, recalls Liz Hodgkinson

Growing apart

N

ow that some schools are introducing gender-neutral toilets, I wonder what today’s generation would make of the strict segregation in coeducational grammar schools in the 1950s and ’60s.

For us, it started on the school bus for pupils who had to travel to the place. Girls and boys were not allowed to sit next to each other. Any contravention of this strict rule would be reported by the bus prefects and result in a stern warning.

Once we got off the bus, the segregation intensified. Girls and boys had separate entrances and separate staircases. If a pupil was caught using the ‘wrong’ staircase, it meant instant detention. In the classroom, boys sat on one side, girls on the other. Boys were known by surname only. For most of my time at the school, I never even knew the boys’ first names.

We even filed out of separate entrances after morning assembly – boys sitting on one side of the hall and girls on the other.

In the dining hall, there were certain tables designated for boys and others for girls, as far apart from each other as possible.

Even the teachers were segregated, with different staffrooms for the male and female members of staff. No teacher would ever use the wrong-sex staircase.

The only time boys and girls were allowed to mix was at the Christmas party, where boys were encouraged to ask a girl to dance. Mostly we refused, giggling and confiding to one another: ‘You’ll never believe this, but Jackson asked me to dance!’ In our early-teenage years, we regarded the boys as definitely of a lower order and almost beneath contempt, compared with the clever, lively girls.

Our school had extensive playing fields and tennis courts, but although both boys and girls played tennis, it was never with the other gender. There were no such things as mixed doubles; perish the thought.

In many ways, the school acted as a single-sex establishment, with boys and girls somewhat uncomfortably sharing a building. We even had gendered lessons, with girls doing needlework and cookery, boys woodwork and technical drawing.

Still, as it was a co-ed school of adolescents milling together, attractions between the sexes could not be entirely stamped out. But any romantic liaisons were confined to out-of-school hours only. When I was 14, I had a boyfriend a couple of years above me, who lived in the same town. We would meet at the church youth club and play table tennis together. At school we became complete strangers, ignoring each other if by chance we passed in the corridor.

Because the boys and girls were strongly discouraged from even speaking to one another, we remained stiff, formal and ill at ease in one another’s company. If the headmaster caught a boy and girl canoodling or holding hands when wandering around the grounds, they were in serious trouble and could even be expelled.

There was a major scandal when our 36-year-old history master fell in love with a sixth-form girl – something that was never supposed to happen. He honourably waited for her to finish her teacher-training course and the moment she graduated, they married. But the gossip did not die down for years.

The rigid restrictions lower down the school were moderated slightly in the sixth form. Yet still it would have been unthinkable to sit next to a member of the opposite sex in the classroom or on the bus. We did manage to drop our guard to some extent, though, and, finally, we became people to one another, rather than creatures to be shunned and avoided. But no easy friendships between the sexes were ever established. I never had a pal at school who was a boy.

Now, when I see groups of school girls and boys laughing and chatting together, walking along in mixed groups and being supremely relaxed in one another’s company – something that could never have happened in my day – I wonder what we missed as a result of being kept so far apart.

Some of those boys on the other side of the classroom might have been quite decent chaps. I never got to find out. But I still wouldn’t want to share a genderneutral toilet with them.

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McDevitt. Another of what were them, Tommy Steele, charity football teams? claimed Alf Ramsey In the late ’50s, charity football teams were all the rage.

They were started in 1957 by DJ and song-plugger Jimmy Henney and his Show Biz XI. By 1959, there were three serious outfits based in London: the Show Biz team, Mike and Bernie Winters’ TV All Stars and Brad Ashton’s Comedy Writers.

They all played weekly at venues up and down the country against film stars, jockeys, ex-boxers, speedway stars, servicemen and old famous footballers.

They also took on factory and works teams, local village XIs and miners’ teams. They drew crowds of up to 50,000. They raised tens of thousands of pounds for a variety of charities.

Henney’s team was the more serious outfit, including players who had performed semi-professionally – such as Des O’Connor and ‘Skiffle King’ Chas

what is

ethical non-monogamy?

Ethical non-monogamy (ENM) is when you have intimate relationships with more than one person – but in a noncheaty way.

It’s all completely consensual, non-exploitative and above-board – and everyone involved has a really nice time.

At least in theory.

What it doesn’t mean is lobbing all your keys in a bowl after dessert; or meeting the Featherstones behind the pampas grass for nipple clamps and fondue – but, then again, it doesn’t not mean that.

ENM is an umbrella term, taking in polyamory, pansexualism, open relationships and all such deviations from the monogamous norm. As long as you and the person(s) with whom you decide to be ethically non-monogamous are fully aware of what you’re signing up to, it can mean whatever you want it to mean.

ENM has become quite fashionable among straight people in recent years; chic in a way that swinging and dogging aren’t. Gay people may point out they’ve been doing ENM for years. Just as you 12 The Oldie May 2022

once offered him the chance to train with Ipswich Town reserves.

Then there was Sean Connery, who’d once been offered terms by Matt Busby. The team boasted a trainer, a coach and a masseur, as well as recently retired Billy Wright, a former England captain.

The Comedy Writers XI was a far less ambitious enterprise. ‘When Sean Connery gave away an own goal against us, he cried,’ a bemused Brad Ashton recalled.

In 1958, the Winters brothers, aspiring comedians, were keen to gain exposure via the Show Biz XI’s television slots.

Having travelled to a game, expecting to play for Henney’s team, Bernie was asked to step aside for ‘a bigger name’.

The brothers departed, much aggrieved, vowing to form their own team. They soon gathered together stars including Bernard

may now choose from a whole patchwork of gender and sexual identities (lesbian, transgender, asexual, pansexual, aromantic, genderqueer etc), so you can now choose from drop-down menus of commitment levels, predilections and participants. Quite literally so on the ENM dating app Feeld, which caters for every conceivable sex-positive preference, from heteroflexible polycules to a pansexual BDSM (look it up).

But it’s not all free love and wild abandon. ENM is particularly popular in Silicon Valley, where a Californian love of personal liberation combines with a geeky love of systems and rules. It is, in some ways, the opposite of the don’t-askdon’t-tell French approach to

‘We’re going on a long car journey. You’ve got your iPads to entertain you and Daddy’s got Candi’

Bernie Winters of the TV All Stars at Ninian Park, in aid of the Aberfan Disaster Fund, 1966

Bresslaw, Ronnie Corbett, Roy Castle and Jess Conrad.

In 1962, the Mike and Bernie Winters’ TV All Stars took on the Showbiz XI at Croydon Airport.

Instead of their usual silly antics, the Winters brothers took the game very seriously.

The violence continued after halftime. Record executive Ziggy Jackson, playing for the Showbiz XI, even broke his leg in a tackle.

Ex-pro Malcolm Allison scored the only goal – Winters’ TV All Stars won 1-0.

Mike Winters said, ‘For Bernie and me, it was one of the most exhilarating moments of our lives – more so even than the thrill of opening for the first time at the London Palladium, at the top of the bill.’

John Harding

extramarital affairs. A polyamorous acquaintance of mine warns that ENM actually involves far more deeply involved conversations about power dynamics than it does actual sex.

How liberating to cast off centuries of hang-ups and inequalities, to move beyond the one-size-fits-all marriage template! A female friend has recently come out as polyamorous and seems to be having a wonderful time. ‘It’s like a hobby,’ she says.

Still, it is no safeguard against the vagaries of the human heart. My friend dated an ethical non-monogamous guy for a while. He was happily married with young children and spoke lovingly about his wife (who also had a boyfriend). But my friend got the ‘ick’ when he told her that she and his wife both liked the sexual position they were engaging in at that moment. ‘Like … I felt totally fine to chat about her … but not during sex.’

She suspected the wife was more invested in ENM than the husband: ‘It has to be a truly mutual decision – otherwise someone is getting hurt.’

Which would, of course, be deeply unethical.

Richard Godwin

As Are You Being Served? reaches its half-century, Roger Lewis salutes Grace Brothers – and Mrs Slocombe’s legendary pussy

Service with 50 years of smiles

BBC

A

nthony Powell made fun of the sort of credulous reader who, if a novelist mentions in a novel something left behind in a Brighton hotel room, will try to visit that hotel room in Brighton and look for it.

I am just that sort of person, my disbelief totally suspended. Applying Powell’s dictum to my behaviour as a telly-viewer, I’d give anything to stay at Crossroads, dine at Fawlty Towers, travel on Reg Varney’s bus.

The settings are always enchanted for me – Walmington-on-Sea is exactly like St Leonards-on-Sea, and perhaps I live in the vicinity for that very reason. I’m always on the lookout for Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly.

I’d work in a factory if it had a canteen like the one in Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, where people can ask the staff, ‘Are you as good at sex as you are at chips?’, and where to the question ‘What would happen if I asked for camomile tea?’ the answer is an unimprovable ‘Nothing. We haven’t got any.’

The department store in Are You Being Served? is another magical spot – the malfunctioning lift, the glass display cabinets, the brownish mannequins.

Everything is antiquated, more than slightly shabby.

Grace Brothers is exactly like the ones I remember in Cardiff, Howells and David Morgan, where people went to order wedding-present crockery, curtains for the front room, rolls of carpet and fancy goods. There were tea rooms with doilies. The atmosphere was genteel – and everything was being swiftly swept away by supermarkets and out-of-town shopping malls. Debenhams was the last of the behemoths, and that chain has quite gone.

The forlorn mood is what David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd (one of Dame Lumley’s earlier husbands) captured in their classic comedy series. There is a distinct sense the department store is the Last 14 The Oldie May 2022

Stand for a certain sort of Dunkirk-spirit Britishness, found also in the Carry Ons, Arkwright’s corner shop, anything involving Richard Wattis and, latterly, Peter Kay’s Phoenix Club.

There were 69 episodes of Are You Being Served?, stretching from September 1972 until April 1985. That’s to say, the programme covered the entirety of my later childhood and early adulthood, and 22 million people tuned in every week.

If it’s a shop, there were never many customers. There was plenty of time, therefore, for the cast to mess about.

And, as with the Home Guard platoon in

Dad’s Army, or the National Servicemen in Malaya in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, or the duff holiday-camp stalwarts in Hi-de-Hi!, what we had was a fine ensemble of pantomime ghouls.

My favourite was Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe, in the ladies’ department, her bouffant hair in mad shades of purple or bright red. The sheer ribaldry of the gynaecology jokes, ie feline references, makes me wonder even now whether the seventies was either very innocent or very sophisticated: ‘Ooh, what about this fog? My pussy’s been gasping all night.’

Mrs Slocombe’s legendary pussy, firmly remaining offscreen, was always

From left: Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden), Miss Brahms (Wendy Richard), Mr Lucas (Trevor Bannister), Mr Rumbold (Nicholas Smith), Mr Mash (Larry Martyn), Mr Grainger (Arthur Brough), Mr Humphries (John Inman) and Captain Peacock (Frank Thornton)

wet, frozen, in need of an airing, a stroke or a session with its clockwork mouse.

Mrs Slocombe didn’t like to stay on late because, ‘At seven o’clock, my pussy’s expecting to see a friendly face.’

I still find this hysterical. What has definitely dated – in the sense that comedy, given time, turns into something tragic – is John Inman’s Mr Humphries.

It is a brilliant, poignant performance, of the mid-century nelly, limp-wristed, his walk a clenched mince. His fluting catchphrase, ‘I’m free!’, was taken up by the nation – but it did rather ingrain the notion that homosexuals were effeminate, absurd, there to be derided.

Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey had been there before, and Larry Grayson (‘Shut that door!’) was on our screens concurrently. But Mr Humphries, ‘a mother’s boy’ in Croft’s description, belongs to the era when gaiety meant, beyond the jokes, sickness and perversion.

That everyone was rather torn by their guilty reactions and emotions, and wished to atone, is suggested by the fact that Inman was in 1976 voted both Funniest Man on Television and BBC Personality of the Year. In my opinion, he deserved the Nobel Prize for telling us with a straight face, ‘My trousers are too tight and my potatoes are boiling over.’

When he died in 2007, he left £2.8 million – the residuals added up.

Not that sex is plain sailing in any direction in British comedy. Are You Being Served? contained ‘Young’ Mr Grace, owner of the store, an elderly and miserly lecher surrounded by dolly birds – bosomy and curvaceous secretaries and nurses. Harold Bennett, who played the old creep, was born in 1898. Beyond his haughty façade, Frank Thornton’s Captain Peacock, the dapper floor-manager, a ‘nit-picking old busybody’, was also easily discombobulated by thoughts of Miss Brahms, the young assistant over at the brassière counter.

When, ostensibly referring to improved sales in men’s fashions, Peacock mentioned ‘movements in the trouser department’, not even the studio audience dared laugh – there’s a momentary awkwardness, especially from Frank Thornton.

I met Frank often at the Garrick. He had the same sort of unflappable dourness. He said his proudest moment was being cast, in 1969, as a one-armed Diogenes Club porter by Billy Wilder for the Sherlock Holmes flop.

Miss Brahms – played by Wendy Richard, who’d been Private Walker’s girlfriend, and who was decidedly attractive in those days, before she went on to become an old drab in EastEnders – is also the object of lust for Mr Lucas, the flustered and somewhat elderly junior member of men’s drapery, played

by Trevor Bannister.

‘If your brains was dynamite,’ Miss Brahms tells him in broad Cockney, ‘you still wouldn’t have enough to blow your ears off.’

Mr Lucas’s boss is the cranky, gnomelike Mr Grainger, played by Arthur Brough, who used to run the end-of-thepier theatre in Folkestone.

Nothing much happens – the original cast (all dead, incidentally) bicker, dress up at every opportunity for parties or a dance class; they fall out and sulk, reconcile and embrace.

Are You Being Served? was a vehicle, really, for a lot of broad camp gags about knickers, knockers, inside-leg measurements and what’s worn under a kilt. Every episode had misunderstandings about drawers, chests and boilers.

If it is cold, somebody will say, ‘Do you know, I can’t feel any of my extremities? It’s unusual for me.’

When Mrs Slocombe is having trouble with her television reception, she says, ‘Twiddle his knob, somebody. He’s out of focus.’

When somebody else again mentions his wife’s ghastly cuisine, Mr Lucas fondly recalls a girlfriend who’s ‘had a lot of experience in the kitchen – only very little of it is to do with cooking’.

Such was the success of the show there was a feature-film spin-off, where they all went to Costa Plonka. It’s entirely predictable – the unfinished hotel, shortage of rooms, unlocked lavatories, filthy foreign food, leering locals, Mexican bandits. Andrew Sachs, pre-incarnating Manuel, is the hotel manager, who falls for Mrs Slocombe’s ‘boobidoos’, to her annoyance.

There’s a funny sequence where Mrs Slocombe gets her passport photos done and is upended in the booth. John Inman parades through the airport in a pink trouser suit with matching fedora – he was never far away from being a panto dame, a role he played in the provinces for years.

As Inman says in one episode, ‘Oh, my word, doesn’t the year fly quickly? One minute, it’s O Come All Ye Faithful; the next minute, you’re flat on your back in the sand.’ Indeed.

Are You Being Served? is part of the archaeology of British light entertainment, which seems now to have been taking place in a Never Never Land, where there were no immigrants, climate-change concerns, mass illiteracy of social media, transgender anxieties – though I’d argue John Inman was a pioneer, in holding or implying that we all participate in both genders.

It’s about Britain as a conglomeration of misfits and sad soaks, keeping up appearances, getting through the working week, battling against hierarchies.

Somewhere in the world, Are You Being Served? is still being repeated, every single day.

The Oldie May 2022 15

Long live oldie Luddites Valerie Grove salutes Joanna Lumley, Eileen Atkins and other old-fashioned heroes who avoid the horrors of the internet

H

ow do modern Luddites survive? Now that 96 per cent of us are on the internet, and 80 per cent are on social media, who can survive without tweets and Facebook and the risk of succumbing to nomophobia*?

Very few. The worldwide web ensnares almost everyone. Thus the increasing inability to concentrate and a dwindling attention span, as covered in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention.

The internet now makes itself so necessary. David Wiggins, former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, wanted to become a National Gallery member but couldn’t without an email address.

It takes real determination to resist.

Bravo, Edward Thorpe, former Evening Standard ballet critic, who doesn’t have email or a smartphone. He zips about London in his sports car, sees the latest movies, goes on cruises and swims daily.

At 95, he still writes postcards and letters in an exquisite copperplate hand, taught at his Dorset school in the 1930s.

Paying his bills online is left to his daughters. He gets cash from a human being at Barclays in Muswell Hill, to pay his cleaning lady.

With masses of time for reading – lately Joyce and Proust – Thorpe constantly returns to Shakespeare: ‘I’m self-indulgent. I like to enjoy the things I know I shall enjoy.’

His ‘limited’ horizons embrace Radio 3 concerts, opera streamed from the Met, and Poirot and Rumpole on TV. When he sees his grandchildren glued to their screens, and his poor daughters rushed off their feet by their pinging iPhones, he feels sorry for them.

Dame Eileen Atkins has no online presence either. She loves paying bills by cheque, buying stamps and posting them: ‘Something about writing a cheque reminds me what I’m spending.’ She does own a computer but never opens the lid.

16 The Oldie May 2022

Only her cat-sitter uses it. Atkins would rather watch herons on the river from her Chiswick window, and curl up with a book in the evening, than sit buying unnecessary things online. ‘I resigned from BAFTA,’ she says, ‘when they made us vote online.’

Then there are the wise ones who use email but shun social media. Dame Joanna Lumley calls social media ‘that terrible disease’. She says it makes her feel like a below-stairs servant, jumping to attention when summoned by bells: ‘Being old-fashioned keeps me sane. I don’t want to be in touch with people all the time, leaving no room for one’s own thoughts.

I like emptiness and daydreaming.’

Julian Barnes, who once told me (when Twitter was created, in 2006) that he still didn’t have a mobile phone, has now succumbed to a smartphone ‘because you need it to get a COVID pass’.

But he has never signed up to social media. Other people’s publishers insist on it, but not his.

And what about cartoonist and writer Posy Simmonds, seated calmly at her drawing board, capturing contemporary life in her graphic novels? She says, ‘I spend as little time as possible looking at a screen. I do not love my laptop or mobile. Sending postcards, on the other hand, is enjoyable. It involves (i) trips to the letterbox; (ii) exercise; (iii) fresh air.

Plus post offices often have highly interesting queues.’

This happy breed, including me, who don’t use social media, are not antisocial.

We love email penfriendships. But we share information only with those we know. Who wants to be thrust among hypercritical, subliterate strangers, who shriek ‘OMG – awesome!’ and illustrate their banalities with emojis?

We scorn their infantile punctuation: exclamation marks, random comma

splices and the notion that a full stop is ‘cold and intimidating’. We deplore their devaluation of useful words such as ‘friend’ and ‘like’. None of my real friends is a Facebook ‘friend’. And to like is such an important verb, involving emotional intelligence. We pity our grandchildren, confronting such fatuities and grotesque ‘influencers’.

Journalists lament the intrusion of Twittersphere spats into newspapers, which we still buy and read. ‘So lazy, so sloppy: call this reportage?’ says The Oldie’s agony aunt, Virginia Ironside. She escaped from social media after getting pilloried for an honest but controversial remark on a radio programme. She was ‘worse than Hitler’, the trollers chorused.

Maureen Lipman’s children warned her long ago that she’d be trolled if she ever went on Twitter. So she didn’t – and now she knows her kids were right. Carmen Callil, the publisher and Virago founder, has a WhatsApp group – but only for playing bridge.

Of course we are cheats. We can sneakily enjoy the online postings of HM the Queen and His Holiness Pope Francis (@Pontifex), Stephen Fry, Gyles Brandreth and Caitlin Moran, joining their millions of followers without joining in. ‘We are voyeurs, eavesdroppers,’ says journalist Liz Forgan, who does this too.

But here’s a chastening fact. Ignoring social media may not necessarily offer time for profitable pursuits. Famous people, tweeting several times a day, can still write books, make movies, appear on stage and TV. How does Brandreth do it?

‘Gyles is a one-off,’ says Joanna Lumley. ‘I know of no one who does more, is kinder or more thoughtful and prolific and sane, and he’s literally on social media all the time. He is a highperforming addict.’ *Terror of losing smartphone contact

The wartime head of Bomber Command was a dab hand in the kitchen, remembers his grandson Tom Assheton

The Bomber Harris recipe book

T

he Namib desert, south-west Africa: a young Arthur Harris, a former farmer and now a bugler in the 1st Rhodesia Regiment, tips liquefied bully beef from his ration tin on to the sand in disgust.

He vows to apply his practical mind to the problem of eating well in the military, once they have booted the Germans out of southern Africa. Victory duly came on 9th July 1915 at Khorab, after a gruelling desert trek. The campaign over, he decided to continue the fight in Europe, if he could achieve this from a seated position. There was no place for him in the cavalry – so he joined the fledgling Royal Flying Corps.

Eighty years ago this year, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris assumed his post as Commander-in-Chief at Bomber Command. For the next three years, he prosecuted, with the American 8th Airforce, the only direct action against the Nazi fatherland, until the Allies crossed the Rhine in March 1945.

More than 57,200 of his 125,000 men were killed. The Germans lost a great deal more.

How does a man take his mind off such matters, even for a few brief moments? Harris cooked. He chopped carrots, he constructed complicated sauces, he collected up his visitors’ ration books and co-opted the local butchers for the best ingredients. There were many famous visitors to Bomber Command throughout this period, from King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to politicians and military commanders (British, American and even Charles de Gaulle – although that didn’t go so well).

Harris would show his guests the Blue Books, photographic evidence of the damage being inflicted on German cities 18 The Oldie May 2022

Bomber’s surprise: pages from the recipe book, recently rebound

and industrial sites. Many of them also dined at his table. Of course, Harris was too busy to cook himself, but his chefs were familiar with his interventions and direct action in the kitchen. He was at heart a practical man.

Harris’s daughter, my mother, Jackie, also experienced his ‘direct action’ at Winkfield Place in the late ’50s, under the stern eye of Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume. Harris would turn up early at the college to collect Jackie, so that he could make a round of the kitchens where the girls were learning to cook. Spry and Hume adored him, and his interventions were enjoyed by all, except for my poor, embarrassed mother.

They eventually awarded him his own Cordon Bleu certificate – after he posted them a cooked sausage.

Harris’s recipe book, with additions from my grandmother and mother, has recently been rebound. This encouraged me to take a closer look.

It is leather-bound, indexed and almost pocket-sized. Harris hated to

write and so most of his recipes are in his wife’s hand. He spent time between the wars in Africa, India and Palestine, which gave him a love for spicy dishes.

He enjoyed messing about with complicated recipes. I have some of his cookbooks, too, and his margin notes are funny and sometimes quite rude. ‘Muck’ is a favoured term (as pictured above).

My sisters and I knew him when he lived at Goring-on-Thames, from the ’60s to his death in 1984, aged 91. He was known to us as Pappy and we to him as ‘the Monkeys’. He liked snacks (although he loathed that word). On one occasion, he sent my sister and me on the train to buy all the Frazzles in Reading. He was a big man, with the same neck-collar size as his bull terrier. We would weigh him on the scales at the train station.

There are far greater experts than me on the strategic bombing offensive of Germany in the Second World War. Listen to episode 28 from my podcast, Bloody Violent History, if you want it from the horse’s mouth. We knew Harris as

NEIL SPENCE

Left: Jackie Assheton with son, Tom. Above: with parents, Arthur & Jilly Harris, 1944

our large and entertaining grandfather.

Tough, funny, practical and kind.

And there were many examples of the last of these. My mother’s godfather, Squadron Leader Peter Tomlinson, crash-landed his Spitfire in Holland in 1941, while on a photo reconnaissance mission for Bomber Command. He spent more than three years as a PoW in Stalag Luft III (his brother, the actor David Tomlinson, played a main part in the 1950 escape movie The Wooden Horse, set in this camp). The final act of his internment was a gruelling deathmarch west, forced by the retreating Germans, to avoid the Soviet advance.

By the time he was repatriated to England, Tomlinson was starving and ragged. He phoned his old station at High Wycombe, the headquarters of Bomber Command, and asked to be put through to his boss. Harris took the call and told him he had had a plane standing by to collect him from Europe but that he was now to wait at the station.

Harris sped off in his Bentley, having first left instructions for a welcome-home feast to be prepared for the returning hero. Harris knew Tomlinson would be in bad shape, his stomach shrunk from three years of virtual starvation in the camps. The ‘feast’ prepared was two boiled eggs with toast soldiers. Harris was both practical and kind.

Before lunch, Harris would sometimes tell us stories of animal adventures in India and Africa. Part of his ability to cook had developed from collecting ingredients for the pot with a rifle.

But his stories were more entertaining than tales of hunting lion. He had a lion cub as a pet. When it got too big, he gave it to the not-so-great King Fuad I of Egypt, who put it in the zoo in Cairo, and later had it shot.

He once sent my sister and me on the train to buy all the Frazzles in Reading

Lunch from the Bomber Harris recipe book Our first course: Swedish curry soup Sour apples, white onions, ‘heavy’ cream and curry powder. Lauren Clement, the chef, gave it a tweak by adding a delicious sourdough crouton topped with caramelised baby onion, pickled green apple and edible parsley lace Entrée: monkfish and prawns in a red chilli sauce Very unusual and delicious sauce for an Englishman to make and enjoy 70 years ago Veal cutlets ‘Old Bossy’ It turns out Old Bossy refers to my grandmother, who was sweet, very beautiful and more than 20 years younger than her husband. A rich, theatrical dish with a flambé finale Navarin of Lamb An unctuous classic: use the best end of neck – important And, for pudding, a little lemon pot from my mother’s repertoire

In India in the early ’20s, Harris had a ragged squadron of Bristol F2 fighters to chase the tribesmen up and down the North-West Frontier. He also had a pet Himalayan bear called Baloo. It’s a long story – that’s how we liked it (my poor grandmother). It ends atop the High Commissioner’s best apricot tree with the bear at the summit, Harris in pursuit in his now ruined cricket whites and the Commissioner’s sweeper boy with a bite on his bare bottom – cue weak bear puns.

Lunch would be heralded not by a dinner gong, but by the romantic twang from a six-foot-tall music box in the hall, playing the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana. It’s something of a Pavlov’s bell in our family to this day.

The Harris recipe notebook is kept in my mother’s kitchen. Recently rebound, it has stirred an interest throughout the family. Harris was never one-dimensional. The variety of recipes is a clear demonstration: Canadian yellow-pea soup, tripes à la Dauvillaire, coupe Caprice, coulibiac and bobotie.

We took a dip into the rich choice of recipes with a lunch at my home in Stockwell. The glistening faces of Harry Mount (The Oldie’s editor), James Pembroke (The Oldie’s publisher), my mother and James Jackson, the copresenter of our military podcasts, did the great man’s hearty appetite justice.

Plates were wiped clean; I was surrounded by ‘good doers’. Harris approved of a ‘good doer’.

And from my seat I could see, on a kitchen shelf, the rusty remains of one of those tins of bully beef from the Namib desert. The catalyst to Bomber’s lifelong pursuit of eating well.

For copies of recipes, email Tom on talk@bloodyviolenthistory.com The Oldie May 2022 19

Art of dropping out Aged 21, Terence Derbyshire walked out of the Slade Art School after his first year. Twenty-five years later, he’s proud to be a dropout

I

dropped out of the Slade School of Fine Art in 1995 after just a year there. I knew I would on my first day.

It wasn’t my first time dropping out.

The previous year, I’d turned down ‘normal’ subjects to study art.

My anxious parents had desperately tried to persuade me not to, spending long hours detailing the difficulties of life as an artist – money, essentially. They cared about me and thought it was a mistake. And it was. But I was adamant and, in the end, I did it just the same.

My strongest memory of that first day was signing the daily ledger by the entrance and feeling a thrilling connection to the artists who’d signed before me: Stanley Spencer, Augustus John, Paul Nash…

My favourite Slade moments seemed to revolve around that door. Every afternoon, we had our cigarette breaks on the benches just outside. Perched over the lightwell, a little raised up, we could see everyone who came and went.

Students and tutors on the way in or out lingered and joined us.

We slouched, tried to blow smoke rings, picked away at Styrofoam coffee cups and surveyed the savanna of ‘normal’ University College London students on the quad.

Occasionally, one would venture over and cautiously enquire what department we were from. Haughty, unhelpful, forever striving to be enigmatic, we gave the one-syllable answer ‘Art’, and felt proud to be different.

But for me, once I was inside that door, nothing ever quite fitted. Any artistic activity felt awkward and empty.

The spark lit the previous year on my Chelsea foundation course would not reignite. I sometimes think that if the studios had been less cavernous, the walls less white, the lights less bright – if everything had been on a smaller scale,

more intimate, with more crevices and corners – then I might have found my niche. Sometimes creativity can be stifled by the details.

And, sometimes, you’re just not an artist. My interests – so changeable in my twenties – had changed again. By that first day, I was already reading more and looking less. Maybe I needed the era of art collectives to be in full flow, to join a group of art activists.

Maybe lots of things. Anyway, I could feel it was over before it began.

But I was too cowardly to back out. So I stayed a year.

Is there, for everyone, a certain emptiness to time at art school? After all, it doesn’t really get you anywhere. But isn’t that the whole point? If you’re trying to get somewhere, you shouldn’t be at art school.

I would guess a majority of alumni don’t become practising artists. What do they become?

When you look at lists of notable alumni, you notice that a few are writers.

G K Chesterton, for example, and my favourite, A A Gill, who said of his time at the Slade, ‘If ever there were a right place to make art, we were probably in it but, then again, just as probably, there isn’t a right place to make art, and if you think you’re in it, you’re not.’

I wasn’t. But I did feel at home. And happy. Just not making art.

I’d love to attend a dropouts’ reunion, to see what became of us all. The stereotype of the dropout is someone who doesn’t care enough. But I bet, just as commonly, they cared too much and

Derbyshire revisited: Terence’s ID card at the Slade

knew that whatever they needed to become could not happen there.

Did they perhaps become artists, despite having dropped out? Or because of it? And, if they did not become artists at all, what did they retain from that time?

I think I pieced together a subtler sensibility – better taste – though I’m not sure quite where from. Not from the two muffled weeks in the life room. Maybe from the crits of Bruce McLean, our first-year tutor. Maybe from the time we caught him pressing the down button on the elevator, despite wanting to go up, because he wanted it to come down to him. Or from the performance-art teacher, when he told me he loved Monet.

Wherever it came from, I can still feel it and carry it like buried treasure discovered in a cul-de-sac of my career.

An inner glow gained in nine short months when I brushed close to a sacred light.

Terence Derbyshire is now a management consultant for the BBC The Oldie May 2022 21

When Allegra Huston discovered who her blood father was, she also acquired a dashing, seductive MP as an ancestor

A tale of two dads and a great-grandad

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

I

n the house of my sister, the writer Artemis Cooper, hangs a delicately beautiful pencil portrait of Harry Cust (pictured), an absurdly handsome man with light eyes: our greatgrandfather. The portrait was drawn by Violet, the Duchess of Rutland. Her fifth child was our grandmother, the actress Lady Diana Cooper.

When Diana was 19, she was offered condolences on the death of her father.

But the Duke of Rutland, her supposed father, was in the pink of health!

After the shock subsided, she decided this was good news: her father was not the dull duke but Harry Cust, an MP, magazine editor and the most dazzling man of his era – who bequeathed her those mesmerising blue eyes.

I was given similar news, more gently, when I was 12. ‘John isn’t really your father,’ said my stepmother, hoping it would come as good news. ‘Your real father is an English lord – and he’s coming to visit tomorrow.’

The English lord was the late writer John Julius Norwich, Diana’s only son, whose father really was her husband, Duff Cooper. But I didn’t give a damn who he was. My dad, the film director John Huston, was the sun around whom everyone I knew revolved. He took me on after my mother was killed in a car crash when I was four.

If I wasn’t his daughter, did I belong in this solar system at all? And if I didn’t belong there, where did I belong?

Over the years, that 12-year-old’s terror became deep gratitude for my two brilliant, generous fathers, and the various brothers and sisters they gave me. John Julius gave me Artemis and our uproarious brother, Jason.

Reading Jane Dismore’s new book Tangled Souls – about Harry Cust – I realised that if you combined Jason and John Julius, added a dash of some inchoate haunted darkness and ran the

22 The Oldie May 2022

Harry Cust MP (1861-1917) by his lover, the Duchess of Rutland

mixture through a turbocharger, you might have an approximation of Harry.

I’d always imagined Cust as just another good-looking aristocratic layabout, but Tangled Souls showed me that I was right only in a sense I didn’t intend. Harry Cust lay about, widely, and that’s what destroyed his political career.

But he worked hard and cared deeply – about politics, literature and his friends.

Cust was at the heart of a group of arty, aristocratic bohemians, known as the Souls to everyone but themselves.

They disliked the name, as they disliked ostentation, pretence and posturing.

They included two prime ministers, Asquith and Balfour, the glamorous Tennant and Wyndham families and, on the fringes, Edward Burne-Jones, Oscar Wilde and H G Wells. They stood for friendship above the political divide, though many of them were politicians.

And they stood for the possibility of friendships between men and women, along with artistic equality, in an era when Victorian prudishness reigned.

Despite their love of wit and cleverness, they prized emotional ties over intellectual convictions: heart over mind, with the mind running a very close second.

NEIL SPENCE

My two dads: John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) and John Huston (1906-87), filming The African Queen in 1951

Cust was a fountain of energy, imagination, deep literary knowledge and intellectual brilliance. At school, he was predicted to become Prime Minister.

But, in the end, his most prominent role was as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

He was, in the words of Margot Asquith, ‘the rarest and most brilliant of them all’: the most magnetic man in every room, a serial seducer of very willing women, the constant ringleader of high jinks and horseplay. He sounds overwhelming, and it seems he overwhelmed himself, as he sometimes fled to a Parisian garret to spend weeks in recuperative solitude.

John Julius, too, was the most charming man in every room, constantly curious and enthusiastic, widely read and widely travelled. But, unlike his grandfather, he was equable.

A desperation underlay Cust’s firework personality. I wonder what demons he battled. Perhaps the chronic bad health which led to fits of fainting.

Perhaps the terror of not belonging that I know so well, driving him obsessively to be at the centre so that he wouldn’t find himself alone in the outer darkness. Like me, Cust lost his mother young.

Cust was brought down by a stunningly unscandalous scandal. Nina Welby-Gregory, a young woman who was in love with him, thought she was pregnant. His friends, including Asquith, pressured him to marry her. He did. She turned out not to be pregnant after all.

On this basis, the suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett declared him unfit for public office. Introducing an unmarried woman to sex was held to be a heinous act. Though at least one other

high-ranking MP was a serial abuser of both boys and girls, Fawcett trained her guns on Cust, pursuing him from one constituency to the next until he was beaten.

John Julius mentioned Harry Cust only once that I remember. He recounted with delight the possibility that Margaret Thatcher’s mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, might have been another of his left-side-of-the-blanket offspring.

Those striking blue eyes! He was hoping Carol Thatcher would persuade her mother to take a DNA test. Sadly, but predictably, it never materialised.

I’ve never been one of those people who care much about ancestry. The straight lines and squared angles of family trees feel unnatural to me, as if they’re regimenting all those people into a relentless march of (supposed) DNA. But, as I know very well, outside the laboratory and the cell, the trails of DNA are far more tangled than its tidy double helix. I’m much more interested in the zigzags and curlicues, the wandering lines that result from wandering eyes, the victory of heart and adventure over convention and etiquette.

Those family trees exist on my father’s side – a high-born bunch. On my mother’s side, there’s nothing beyond the US immigration record saying, ‘Angelo

Soma, waiter’. That’s my grandpa, who glorified in the fantasy that Napoleon, on his journey of conquest through some hardscrabble village at the foot of the Alps, had knocked up his great-greatgrandmother. In reality, as we discovered when my sister, Anjelica Huston, did the television show Finding Your Roots, the interloper was an Ashkenazi Jew, who has bequeathed us 3.7 per cent in good Jewish blood. I’m telling you this because, via that connection, we’re related to Bernie Sanders.

Thank you, Harry Cust, for this fabulous connection, which is too good to sacrifice even if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: my son unites, in one body, the DNAs of Margaret Thatcher and Bernie Sanders.

I’ve always told my son that it’s the job of the living to keep the dead alive, by remembering, talking about and honouring them.

In his tribute to the dead of the First World War – many of them the sons of his friends – Harry Cust describes ‘a fellowship of presences, some dim, some shining, but presences never to be wholly put away’, plucking at the hearts of the living, ‘flooding sometimes their memories, seeming sometimes to touch their hands, masterful sometimes to govern and to save their souls’.

Harry Cust is to me no longer simply that picture on the wall. He is one of those presences, dim and shining, whose traces I see in people I love.

The most magnetic man in every room, Cust was a seducer of Jane Dismore’s Tangled Souls: Love and Among the Victorian Aristocracy very willing women Scandal is out now (The History Press, £20)

The Oldie May 2022 23

Bring out the Branston!

A hundred years since the first jars rolled off the production line, Sara Wheeler salutes the king of the chunky pickles

T

his is a sparkling year for centenaries.

The BBC, Ulysses, The Waste Land, the Austin 7, Modernism itself, Doris Day… But they all fade under the dazzling spotlight of one of mankind’s ultimate triumphs. Conceived 100 years ago in a Staffordshire cottage, pride of Britain and a national treasure, literal food of the gods: bring out the Branston!

The nation’s favourite pickle originated in the Staffordshire village of Branston on the River Trent. There a Mrs Graham and her daughters Evelyn and Ermentrude sought to bottle winter vegetables from their cottage garden.

Evelyn was professionally involved in biological research and had access to exotic ingredients previously unknown in Staffs, such as Indian gherkins and dates from Iran. The three women experimented, macerated and spiced. In 1922, Crosse & Blackwell bought the recipe and put Branston Pickle into production.

Consumers currently munch their way through over 21 million pounds of Branston annually.

It all rolls out of Bury St Edmunds, in a factory employing over 350 Suffolkers.

The Grahams’ recipe remains a secret.

We know that vegetables, including swede, carrots, cauliflower and onions, are marinaded in a treacly sauce (apple pulp appears on the ingredients label).

Both supermarket own brands and niche gourmet products have fought hard to depose the king of pickles.

In my opinion, and apparently that of greedy Britons in general, no condiment has ever rivalled the unique piquant-andsweet Branston combo.

Crosse & Blackwell was a family firm with an attentive involvement in the

24 The Oldie May 2022

Staffordshire community when Branston came into being. The year before Mrs and the Misses Graham conjured their recipe, C & B bought Branston farmhouse and turned it into a hostel for single women employed at their factory on Burton Road. Later in the 1920s, pickle production shifted south to Bermondsey in London, where it remained for four decades.

Recently, a developer turned the former factory into luxury flats – sadly not called Branston Towers.

The village-named pickle changed ownership many times in its first 100 years. The current proprietors, the Japanese Mizkan Group, acquired Branston from Premier Foods in 2013 for £92.5 million. The Crosse & Blackwell name went separately to the Princes Group food business.

Remarkably, though, the Branston brand has remained intact throughout.

America and Australia are the pickle’s largest overseas market. I recently saw jars in a Walmart Supercenter in Fairbanks, Alaska – not a state normally associated with Burton-on-Trent.

High-fructose corn syrup is used in American exports, but Britain battles on with good old refined sugar.

Turks are keen consumers of the product, as are the citizens of Singapore.

The supply chain has its limits, however – even in Europe. A website called Expats in Portugal recently dedicated a whole thread to ‘Substitutes for Branston’ when it looked as if supplies were low. One contributor suggested his own pickle recipe, saying that a desperate friend, suffering withdrawal symptoms, had asked him, after lunch, ‘where I got my Branston’.

Only 43 per cent of the 20 million units produced annually are of the Original type. Small Chunk represents a

whopping 52 per cent of Branston sales.

I remain deeply suspicious of Smooth, the third strand, which accounts for four per cent of units. I spotted a 370g jar of Smooth in a boyfriend’s kitchen cupboard. That was the end of him.

The pickle company has sought to distance itself from its near-namesake Richard Branson. The youth of today associate Beardy with Branston on social media.

‘For years now,’ went a Twitter post from Mizkan, the Branston owners, ‘every time a certain ginger billionaire does something bonkers, we, an innocent pickle, bear the brunt of abuse online.’

Last year, a public-service announcement, deploying the hashtag #branstonnotbranson, ran, ‘We don’t want to go to space. We want to stay here on Earth. Where the sandwiches are.’

The cheese-to-pickle ratio crops up frequently among Branston fans. John Wheeler, 90, complained that cheeseand-pickle sandwiches regularly contain too little condiment. My own preference remains the snapped-off lump of Cheddar dipped directly in the jar.

When it comes to the case of the ploughman’s lunch, Branston fans have been distracted by the case of a Devon pub, The Tors, which got into a woke pickle in March by advertising a dish it dubbed a ‘ploughperson’s lunch’.

The fabled ‘Bring out the Branston’ slogan first appeared on British television 50 years ago, in 1972. Every boomer knows it. ‘When I’m speaking with consumers and mention Branston,’ the Mizkan marketing director, Vanni Cataldi, told The Oldie, ‘they all immediately sing spontaneously the song.’

Not singing, actually, but chanting – still, Cataldi got the gist.

In 1999, Britons voted the relish one of the top-50 brands of the twentieth century.

Happy 100th birthday, Branston!

Long may your cubed legumes macerate!

Want to buy or sell a painting but aren’t sure how to do it? The Oldie’s exhibitions correspondent, Huon Mallalieu, has the answer

What a picture!

Sold! L S Lowry’s The Auction at Sotheby’s, London, 19th October 2021. It sold for £2.1m (£2.6m with buyer’s premium and fees)

IAN WEST

H

ow much time have you got?

Picture-buying can take a minute – or a lifetime.

Nearly 40 years ago, I wrote a book on this subject. Not a great book but, when I look at it now, it seems rather better than I expected. One of the more sensible tips for a tyro buyer was ‘The first person to turn to for advice when you are offered a picture is yourself.

If you like it so much that questions of exact authorship, subject, price, condition and provenance are irrelevant, then no more need be said; go ahead and buy it. If not, you owe it to yourself to find out as much as possible before parting with your money.’

26 The Oldie May 2022

There are almost as many reasons for buying any kind of art as there are buyers. Some need a painting for a particular space, others have a liking for a particular artist and still others more generally want to start a collection. Then there are those who think it might be an easy way to make money.

After 60 years in the art trade, my old friend Julian Hartnoll has just produced what he supposes might be his last two catalogues. In an introduction, he responds to the question a dealer is so frequently asked: ‘What should I buy?’ – shorthand for ‘Will it go up in price?’

This annoys him because ‘It implies the questioner is looking on art as an

investment. My reply is consistent and must have bored my family sick: houses should be bought to be lived in and pictures should be bought to hang on the wall – neither should be bought as a form of investment. Buy what you yourself like and can afford. Art is not an asset; it is a source of pleasure and intellectual stimulation.’

Those who try to apply the methods of the stock market to making money from paintings rarely flourish. A small venture among the larger ways in which the late investor, asset-stripper and City dealmaker Jim Slater came unstuck in the mid-1970s was an attempt to create a market for the work of a Constable

TRISTAN FEWINGS FOR SOTHEBY’S

follower called F W Watts. He didn’t take into account that paintings are not identical like share certificates; they vary in quality. Few people have ever regretted paying as much as, or more than, they could afford for quality.

After that first painting, or work of art of any kind, people often want more, and become collectors. Then they are wise to educate themselves as much as possible.

The eye, like any muscle, needs training – so look at as much as possible.

In my art-world youth, there were weekly specialist and general auctions to be viewed at the main London houses, as well as around the country. It was an invaluable way of acquiring an eye for quality. We junior cataloguers had a further benefit, since we also saw all the things that had been rejected, and so learned to compare good with bad.

Similarly, anyone wishing to begin a collection of works on paper should spend time looking and comparing in museum print rooms.

Saleroom columns in newspapers are rare now, and generally concern themselves only with sensational prices rather than with analysis. But, for a working knowledge of the market, the Antiques Trade Gazette is reliable, as is the Art Newspaper, although that is strongest in top-level contemporary coverage.

At the same time, get to know the dealers and learn from them – don’t be afraid to ask questions. It is in their interest to encourage you to come back when you know what you want. Once they know your taste and reliability, they may give you early sight of new stock. If you wish, they will also act for you.

Auctions have changed over the last few decades. Even in Bond Street and St James’s, it used to be fairly easy for newcomers to walk in and bid.

Despite urban mythology, no one was likely to find that they had been bidding unawares.

Then came the buyers’ premium, followed by VAT on it – now combining to perhaps 30 per cent of the hammer price – and the requirement for bidders to register and have paddle numbers.

On top of that may be artists’ resale rights: royalties to living or recently deceased artists.

Sotheby’s now charge what they call an ‘overhead premium’, payable by all buyers in salerooms or online, charged at one per cent of the hammer price. This is ‘an allocation of the overhead costs relating to our facilities, property-handling and other administrative expenses’.

Over the past two years online

Magritte’s L’empire des lumières, London. It sold for a record £59.4m in March

auctions have become much more common, and catalogues are disappearing at the grander establishments, to the impoverishment not just of the market but also of scholarship. However, online auctions have also become much more efficient and bidder-friendly. Some show the backs of pictures, as well as the fronts, since there may be history there including important provenance.

If you’re bidding without actually viewing, it is vital to be careful about such things as size.

Currently in Britain, sellers mostly pay between 10 and 15 per cent commission on individual lots worth under £60,000.

Above this, commission is a percentage of the final hammer price, sliding from two to eight per cent up to £3m, at which point the commission is officially ‘as agreed’.

The Christie’s riposte to the ‘overhead premium’ at Sotheby’s is a new levy on vendors: two per cent of the hammer price on lots that match or exceed their high estimate.

‘The purpose is to incentivise and reward high performance that exceeds consignors’ expectations,’ says Christie’s head of communications, but this is

Buy what you yourself like and can afford. Art is not an asset

disingenuous. The auctioneer’s own conditions of sale define an estimate as ‘the price range within which we believe a lot may sell’.

I am embarrassed by a recent omission in my advice to a friend. I saw something online in a dealer’s annual cut-price sale from stock I thought the inexperienced picture-buyer would like and should have.

He looked, liked and called the dealer.

He didn’t want to spend money without seeing the real thing – so he said he would drop in to the gallery a week later.

When I next saw him, he was cross because by the time he got there it had been sold. My fault, really, as I hadn’t thought to tell him to have it reserved.

That doesn’t commit you but, without it, the dealer will be quite justified in accepting another offer.

Nowadays I generally advise would-be buyers and sellers both to try a good dealer in preference to auction.

The grander auctioneers are interested in little beyond the most expensive contemporary art, headline Old Masters and luxury goods. Secondrank salerooms offer a wider service and, with the internet, their reach is as wide, but they have pruned away much expertise at lower levels.

Contrary to popular belief, dealers may be the cheaper option. They may also know more, since they have to put their own money where their mouths are.

Obviously there will be exceptions, and dealers need to make money, but it is much more in their interest to cultivate you than to rip you off.

The Oldie May 2022 27

The first child star As a boy, William Betty was the greatest actor of the age. When he was 15, though, his novelty value began to wear off. By Michael Arditti

W

hen Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, Jack Wild, who had known similar instant, international celebrity as the Artful Dodger in Carol Reed’s film of Oliver!

(1968), wrote him a heartfelt letter: ‘Steer clear of temptations. Keep your feet on the ground. Don’t believe the hype. And, above all, enjoy fame and fortune while they last, for they can be fickle. I know; I learned the hard way.’

A child actor who learned an even harder way was William Betty (1791-1874), known as the Young Roscius. The original Roscius (died 62 BC) was a celebrated Roman actor.

In 1804, aged 13, he played a range of adult roles, including Romeo and Hamlet, at both London’s Theatre Royals of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to unprecedented acclaim. Also in 1804, he was Young Norval in Douglas (pictured).

Over the next two years, he eclipsed all other actors on the British stage. John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons – the Ian McKellen and Judi Dench of their day – retired for 18 months rather than compete with him.

Then the bubble burst and he sank into obscurity, where he has languished for 200 years.

My new novel, The Young Pretender, set at the time of Betty’s attempted comeback at the age of 20, seeks to give this unjustly forgotten figure his due. It explores the nature of his youthful success, the roots of his appeal and the toll that such immoderate adulation and its abrupt withdrawal had on his psyche.

Betty was, in many ways, the first modern celebrity. He combined the allure of a pop star with the credibility of a great classical actor. As he made his triumphant progress from his native Ireland, through Scotland and the English provinces, to London, Bettymania swept the country.

Crowds lined the roads to watch his

carriage pass; Lady Hamilton perform her troops were called celebrated ‘Attitudes’, after to control audiences which he is reputed to have inside and outside remarked, ‘I’m too old to be theatres. He was kissed, Ma’am.’ ruthlessly He was befriended by the merchandised: men actress Mrs Jordan, and her had their Master royal lover, the Duke of Betty snuffboxes; Clarence. After one of his women their Master performances, he was invited to Betty fans; girls a supper party by the Duke, their Master Betty which occasioned adverse Betty in Douglas, 1804 cut-out dolls. comment in the press.

His arrival in Yet even Mrs Jordan was not London provoked a deluge of press immune to professional jealousy. In the coverage. The Daily Advertiser’s Drury Lane green room, she is said to headline ‘ARRIVED YESTERDAY – have exclaimed, ‘Oh, for the days of Young Roscius – The Wonder of the Age’ King Herod!’ was typical. The frenzy that greeted his Those days came soon enough: Betty’s first visit to Covent Garden was as fate was sealed shortly before his nothing to what greeted his first 15th birthday. In time, his novelty value appearance on its stage. wore off. By engaging a host of infant The Prince of Wales led fashionable prodigies, including a Young Roscia, a society in lionising him. Prime Minister Young Orpheus and an Infant Vestris, William Pitt adjourned the House of venal managers exposed the original Commons early so that members could to ridicule. attend his debut as Hamlet.

Kemble himself delivered the coup de There was, however, a more sinister grâce by hiring the eight-year-old Miss ingredient to both Master Betty’s Mudie (who was so short that the actor promotion and appeal. He achieved his playing her lover had to go down on all greatest success in roles such as Young fours to embrace her) to play the title Norval, Romeo and Hamlet, in which his role of The Country Girl at Covent youth and innocence were a virtue.

Garden. And, of course, puberty Indeed, Charles James Fox held his destroyed Betty’s appeal for a significant Hamlet to be superior to Garrick’s. (and powerful) section of the audience.

But, quite apart from the element of Betty gave his last youthful credibility (which was patently lacking performance in July 1808 and then when he was later encouraged to play matriculated at Christ’s College, Richard III and Macbeth), the youthful Cambridge, where he remained for two roles enabled him to wear costumes and and a half years, leaving without taking make-up that emphasised his beauty. his degree. He retired to the family estate His father further traded on this by in Shropshire. But a country life failed to allowing select men of fashion into his satisfy him. In 1812, he returned to the dressing room to watch him change. A boards in Bath, determined to regain his scurrilous advertisement for his tutor reputation. It is there that The Young ended, ‘For I’ve a wondrous rod in Pretender begins. pickle/Your pretty little Bum to tickle.’

For two years, Master Betty was The Young Pretender by Michael Arditti fashion’s favourite. He was taken to see is out now (Arcadia, £12.99) The Oldie May 2022 29

Eighty years ago, Michael Curtiz directed Casablanca. We should remember his other marvellous films, too, says Nick Brown

Here’s looking at you, kid

PICTURE LUX / THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE / ALAMY

S

ixty years ago, on 10th April 1962, one of the most famous and influential film-makers of all time died, aged 75.

Budapest-born Michael Curtiz was a major player in getting his country’s film industry under way. When he moved to America, he worked with Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Boris Karloff, Errol Flynn and Elvis. Nine of his films were Oscar-nominated.

And yet he is still widely remembered only for one masterpiece, Casablanca (1942). There is, though, so much more to Michael Curtiz than one brilliant film.

Following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the military dictatorship ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was born in 1867. In the economic boom that followed, the Hungarian film industry started to take shape.

The first films – documentaries and newsreels – proved to be extremely popular with the viewing public. It was against this backdrop that a young man named Mihály Kertész arrived on the scene.

Born in 1886 to parents Ignácz and Aranka, Kertész studied at the Royal Academy of Theatre And Art in Budapest. In 1912, he started work at the National Hungarian Theatre as an actor and director.

Released on 14th October 1912, his film Ma és holnap (Today and Tomorrow) was the first full-length Hungarian feature film. The lead roles were played by Artúr Somlay and Ilona Aczél, actors who were known to Kertész from the National Theatre. The film’s première is considered to be the moment the Hungarian film industry was born.

Three years later, there were over 250 cinemas in Hungary. By 1918, over 100 films had been produced.

Kertész travelled round European cities in 1913 to check out the tricks of the trade, securing a regular appointment in

30 The Oldie May 2022

Michael Curtiz in 1942

Denmark at the Nordisk studio working as an assistant director.

His career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he was wounded fighting on the Russian Front. Kertész later wrote of the war years, ‘The intoxicating joy of life was interrupted, the world had gone mad … destruction, thousands for ever silenced, crippled or sent to anonymous graves. Then came the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Fate had spared me.’

He was assigned to make fundraising films for the Red Cross and was appointed director of production at Phoenix Films, the leading studio in Budapest.

When the war ended, Kertész moved to Austria to continue his trade there. He worked alongside Alexander ‘Sascha’ Kolowrat on over 20 films. He would later write that, in his time in Austria, he ‘learned the basic laws of film art, which, in those days, had progressed further in Vienna than anywhere else’.

In Austria, he directed the film that would eventually win him his big break.

The Moon of Israel (1924) was a Biblical tale about the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt, with the extra ingredient of an Israelite maiden’s love for an Egyptian prince.

The film, bought by Paramount Pictures, caught the eyes of Jack and Harry Warner – two of the famous Warner Brothers. They were impressed by the visual style Kertész developed – and the fact that he wasn’t frightened to weave the melodrama of romance into historically important events.

A contract with Warner Brothers followed, along with a name change to Michael Curtiz. History was about to be made.

After arriving in America in 1926, that year Michael Curtiz directed The Third Degree starring Dolores Costello, with whom he would work frequently throughout the silent era. The film was about a circus artist, Alicia, who deserts her husband and child to run off with another man. It showed off Curtiz’s expressionistic style, and even included a sequence shot from the perspective of a fired bullet.

Another successful partnership was forged with Errol Flynn. The swashbuckling Captain Blood (1935) won Curtiz an Academy Award nomination as Best Director and the film a nomination for Best Picture. A swashbuckling pirate adventure, the film propelled Flynn to stardom.

Further Best Director nominations followed, for the gangster film Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) – both James Cagney movies. Although known for being a tough taskmaster, in the latter film Curtiz gave the actors more freedom to express themselves, allowing ad-libs and improvised lines.

His evolution as a director led to his finally getting his hands on the famous little statue in 1943: Casablanca won Curtiz

EVERETT COLLECTION / WARNER BROS / ALBUM / ALAMY

Clockwise from top left: Curtiz filming Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca (1942); with Bette Davis on the set of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939); (seated, legs crossed) on the Captain Blood set with Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn (1935)

Best Director and it also won Best Picture.

What was Curtiz like to work with? By all accounts, all that mattered to him was the final result – a great film. The actors were there to act and it was his job to get the best from them.

James Cagney, who won an Academy Award for Yankee Doodle Dandy, is quoted in A Life in Film, Alan K Rode’s biography of the director: ‘Mike was a pompous ******* who didn’t know how to treat actors, but he sure as hell knew how to treat a camera.’

Humphrey Bogart apparently threatened to walk off the set of

Casablanca, saying, ‘He can be a real son of a bitch to the bit players.’ Olivia de Havilland said of her director, ‘I guess he can be a villain but he was pretty good.’

‘Pretty good’ is an understatement.

His films received 19 Academy Award nominations in all categories, winning five of them. Curtiz was a perfectionist who would micromanage anything he felt needed micromanaging.

His style was distinctive, with unusual camera angles, high crane shots and evocative lighting. Casablanca is a masterclass in film-making. He keeps the viewer involved in what is happening – often giving us more information than the characters we are watching.

At the start of the film, the police confront some suspicious characters and confiscate their papers. One policeman hands the papers to another one, nearer the camera. He isn’t particularly interested but we, the viewers, can see what’s written on them.

Many of Curtiz’s more intimate scenes

– as where the actors speak in hushed tones in an alleyway, so as not to be discovered; or the leading male and female are sorting out past differences – are shot so that the audience feels they are watching something they really shouldn’t be. You feel as if the actors will discover this interloping and tell the audience to clear off before returning to their business. This technique of Curtiz’s, often copied but very rarely matched, was a particularly impressive forte.

Casablanca really was the film where it all came together – superb direction and great performances by the whole cast. And it has all those classic lines: ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’, ‘We’ll always have Paris’, ‘This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’, ‘You played it for her; you can play it for me.’

Mihály Kertész, we salute you. You may have been hard to work with sometimes, but you were a master of your art. Here’s looking at you, kid.

The Oldie May 2022 31

Never too old for netball Fifty years after leaving school, Jenny Bardwell fell in love with the game again – even if the net now seems a lot higher

DOMINIC JOYEUX

‘W

e had a new lady last week, but she fell over three times and then went home.’

These were the words that greeted me at my Thursday-afternoon netball on Hayling Island.

Between 1971 and 1976, at Thomas More High School in Purley, I detested gymnastics and felt sick as my turn to vault over the huge, suede horse crept ever closer. I hated straggling and puffing with the other losers during cross-country running and I got hit over the head with a bat in rounders.

I do remember that I quite enjoyed netball. I liked the feel of the heavy ball in my arms, and the joshing with teammates, and I could always rely on Jacqui Perkins to pick me for some fun position such as wing attack.

Before the pandemic, participation in netball was increasing at a faster rate than in any other team sport. A 2019 Sport England survey showed that nearly 320,000 adults were playing every fortnight.

The Back to Netball and Walking Netball movements have inspired organisations such as the WI to encourage hundreds of women to return to a game they probably abandoned in the 1970s. For some, netball is linked to painful memories of being picked last for a school team but if you can banish such demons, you could be in for an exciting time.

My group was set up by Anne Hollis, a volunteer with the University of the Third Age (U3A). Although it’s advertised as ‘walking netball’, I’m afraid we often break into a trot or canter – we just can’t help ourselves! We are breaking the game’s most basic rule, but if the whistle doesn’t blow, we carry on.

Some of us even run backwards, quickly, in a desperate attempt to be spotted by the person passing the ball.

We range in age from early 50s to late 70s – and there has been only one 32 The Oldie May 2022

The Hayling Island U3A walking-netball team (in red); Jenny Bardwell, far right

admission to A & E in the past four years.

Eva, 77, has arthritis and is recovering from a cataract operation but still loves to play and says it helps to keep her weight down. Table tennis or badminton would be less hazardous – your opponent is a safe distance away. Netball is meant to be a non-contact sport but it’s still in your face, literally, with a lot of jostling, waving of arms and shouting. We are a highly competitive bunch and social distancing is thrown out of the window.

Deanne Cushion, our coach, has been a devotee of the game since joining a junior team in 1956. She stopped playing in her sixties after some serious competing. ‘Dad thought I was crackers even playing when I was 40. When I reached 73, walking netball came along and I simply couldn’t resist.’

‘How are we all today?’ Deanne says, as she begins our warm-up. She asks us to look over our shoulders, ‘but I won’t look over mine because of my dizziness’.

She explains that, as an experiment, we will change positions after six minutes of play.

‘Well, I won’t be very good at shooting today, because of my neck,’ protests Mary.

Mary, 64, is 4 foot 11. We all dread having her as an opponent because she is an absolute terrier – a whirlwind, who careers about the court dodging and outwitting us all.

The seven positions are the same, but in walking netball you are not allowed to jump and at least one foot must maintain contact with the ground.

If you catch the ball, you can walk one or two steps with it. A defender is meant to stay three feet away from their opponent.

In regular netball, you must throw the ball after holding it for three seconds; in walking netball, we have the luxury of a whole extra second.

And, after 20 minutes of intense play, we let our heart rates settle over chilled slices of orange.

Only two of our group, Marlene and Gina, can be relied on to get the ball into the net virtually every time – so they must always be on opposing sides. The rest of us get a few minutes to practise shooting before we start a match. I don’t remember the net being so high and out of reach in my school days.

I am not sure if we will ever improve but when we get it in, even if it’s a fluke, we are triumphant.

Media Matters

Very disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

The digital world has brought out the worst in Telegraph readers stephen glover What word would you apply to Daily Telegraph readers?

Respectable? That is certainly what its journalists would have said when I worked on the paper 40 years ago.

There are now many fewer retired colonels in Cheltenham, and almost no former District Commissioners in Harrogate. But I don’t suppose the Telegraph’s readership is much rougher than it used to be, even if we probably all have sharper elbows these days.

Yet there is one sphere in which a social revolution has taken place that would have been inconceivable four decades ago.

As a subscriber to the really excellent digital version of the Telegraph, I sometimes look at readers’ comments beneath articles. Shield your eyes and block your ears! Even a retired colonel who has heard bad language in the mess might be appalled by the often abusive and unpleasant tone of some of these aerated ‘posters’. An infelicitous word, but I don’t know a better one.

Below a recent article about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry was described by one reader as a ‘ginger whinger’. Another opined that he was as ‘deluded as his loopy wife’, while a third suggested that he was ‘verging on mental illness’. A Telegraph columnist unfriendly to the Sussexes wouldn’t dare to employ such crude language.

Any mention of Boris Johnson invariably stirs up a hornets’ nest. One recent poster described him as a ‘buffoon’ and a ‘clown’ in the same line. Some readers love him, of course.

Sulphurous squabbles often erupt between opposing factions. ‘The Left are poisonous idiots,’ declares one reader.

‘The Conservatives are racists, liars and thieves,’ counters another. Such exchanges do not convey any indication of intelligence, discrimination or balance.

If one were seated next to one of these

angry posters at a dinner party, would one be subjected to a tirade of abuse? I doubt it. The person concerned would probably be charming, well-mannered and restrained.

Somehow the digital world brings out the worst in us. As people resort to name-calling and vilification on social media, so posters spout comments they would never dream of saying or writing in their daily dealings.

I used to believe it was anonymity that encouraged readers to be so rude.

In some online newspapers, you can describe yourself as Fred567 or Spearman and let rip without fear of ever being identified. But the Telegraph’s posters, being subscribers, use what appear to be their real names. The possibility of their being recognised seems not to restrain them.

Moreover, these are bona fide readers of the Telegraph. I sometimes look at comments on Mail Online or the Guardian Online, both of which are free. As a result, they attract posters who are not only pseudonymous but also politically at odds with the newspaper which has offered them a soapbox. By contrast, those who write stupid and coarse comments in the Telegraph are paid-up members of the Telegraph family.

One word of advice to any hardcore poster in any newspaper who may be reading this. If your speciality lies in insulting columnists, I shouldn’t bother.

The Oldie wisely doesn’t allow posts.

I don’t know of any columnists who read posts about the pieces they have

Why does the Telegraph (like the Times) enable its readers to sound off?

written. Even shallow invective can wound journalists, and so they avoid it.

Why does the Telegraph (like the Times) enable its readers to sound off? I suppose they think it’s good for trade and doesn’t do anyone much harm. I wonder how commercially advantageous it really is, though. Do people subscribe to a digital newspaper to post comments?

As to the question of causing harm, it surely isn’t kind to encourage normally respectable types to become digital monsters, and turn so many Dr Jekylls into Mr or Mrs Hydes.

Rupert Murdoch is investing an enormous amount of money in Piers Morgan, who will be the star of Murdoch’s TalkTV channel, due to launch on 25th April.

An immense studio has been constructed in Ealing for the irrepressible and bumptious Morgan, from which he will introduce his nightly 8 o’clock show.

Murdoch is said to be paying him £50 million over three years, though extra work is expected, including a column in the Sun and the New York Post.

Still, TalkTV will be his main gig. Is Morgan worth so much dosh? He has eight million Twitter followers, and is a fluent and engaging television performer.

He is opinionated, clever, well informed and slightly annoying. If anyone can attract viewers to a new channel in a pretty crowded market, it’s probably him.

But maybe Murdoch is putting too many golden eggs in one basket. At the time of writing, he can’t be said to have attracted anyone else to TalkTV who is one-quarter as well-known as Piers Morgan, or such a powerful attraction, though former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton has climbed aboard.

The danger for the new channel is that too many hopes hang on the performance of one man. Can he keep it up, night in, night out, or will his audience tire of his act?

The Oldie May 2022 35

Town Mouse

Top tips from a party animal tom hodgkinson

I recently interviewed the brilliant and esteemed novelist Margaret Drabble.

I was struck and somewhat surprised when she told me that she panics before parties. Social situations make her nervous.

You wouldn’t have thought she had any reason to feel timid. After all, Drabble is a dame, recipient of many prestigious awards, the author of 30 books, and one of the most successful literary people of the last 50 years.

Surely she would stride into a cocktail party with all the self-confidence of Roger Federer striding on to Wimbledon’s Centre Court?

It’s something we’re all thinking about following the end of COVID-related restrictions and the return of socialising.

In contrast to Drabble, Town Mouse has greatly enjoyed putting on his frock coat, trimming his whiskers and setting out to a book launch in Marylebone or a dinner in Soho. There’s something fun about the 36 The Oldie May 2022

novelty of it all, the freedom and the pent-up excitement released after a period of involuntary incarceration.

I’m sure it’s the same for Russian oligarchs when they are released from a Siberian prison camp after ten years.

But how long will the fun last? Already I am hearing reports from friends that – after a period of social positivity, where the bores seemed less, well, boring than before – they’re starting to weary of the same people they wearied of prelockdowns. Are we drifting back to the old normal? And are we going to get an attack of the Drabbles?

The brilliant Mary Killen, wife of my country cousin on the opposite page, has excellent advice for those of us who get jittery when they’re on their way to a do (which means practically everybody).

First of all, Killen reassures us the other guests are too busy dealing with their own internal psycho-dramas to start making judgements about other

people: ‘Realise that no one is thinking about you and how inadequate you are.

They are all thinking about themselves and what you think of them.’

Wise Mary has two more tips for the fearful: listen and flatter. ‘Listening,’ she says, ‘is an even greater skill than talking.

You can perform a great service to another person by listening at length while they think things through.’

And as for flattery, think about the other person. They are likely to be lacking in confidence, like you. So give them a compliment. Mary says, ‘Everyone loves reassurance. There is no need to be insincere. Think of things you genuinely do admire about the other person and express your admiration.’

Finally, she says, stand near the door, so you can make a quick escape if necessary. I’d add one more tip: arrive early, or on time. You know that awful period, when you’re the host, at the beginning of a party, when no one has yet arrived? Show up then, because your host will be grateful to see someone.

So yes, I suppose we will go back to slightly dreading social occasions. But there’s one new trend that will stay put: the outdoorsification of social life. Like many mice, when visiting my Parisian cousins I used to marvel at the street life as I smoked cigarettes with my espresso in Les Deux Magots. I felt faintly depressed by the bland and empty streets of London on my return. Why couldn’t we become more French, I thought?

Well, we have. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, London has done the Continental. The cafés have extended themselves into the street. Everywhere I go on my bicycle, I see tables arranged on the street and covered with a temporary shelter. Over the two years of lockdowns, hundreds of pop-up terraces appeared as a way for business to continue during restrictions.

Now Kensington and Chelsea Council are going to grant over 500 five-year licences for outdoor seating to central London eateries. Johnny Thalassites, of Kensington and Chelsea Council, told the Evening Standard: ‘It’s a no-brainer to keep outdoor licensing on the menu when it’s proved so popular.’

The result is a lovely, civilised vibe – and increased income for the cafés and pubs. I’m certainly looking forward to loafing a lot this summer outside Soho’s Coach and Horses, still a great pub after all these years, and furnished with plenty of outdoor seating.

Just make sure you don’t strew the streets with bits of food or my opportunistic enemies, the Town Rats, will take advantage of alfresco London.

Country Mouse

Weep for Ukraine – and my endangered Cornish pasty giles wood

While other men are becoming addicted to rolling news of Russia’s advances and setbacks in Ukraine, I have been scanning the footage for background signs of agricultural activity.

Any tractor action? Cultivators?

Crop-sprayers? Unless the fields are sown with spring corn soon, there will be no harvest this year.

Although we can see tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks out of the fields, there has been no sign of them ploughing or scattering the good seed on Ukrainian land.

Once I would have been unable to point to the position of Ukraine on the map. Now I am a font of knowledge on Black Sea ports, and their strategic importance to Vladimir Putin. As for Odessa, it’s clear to anyone’s naked eye that it is vital for the Ukrainians to retain it for the global export of their wheat.

And I’m already wailing over the cultural importance of that port, with its unique architectural heritage and its artistic, allegedly bohemian ‘community’.

All of this in spite of my never having been there. But at least it looks as though I can put worries about the potential gentrification of Odessa on the back boiler.

Thanks to last night’s World Service, this armchair agronomist knows for the first time that Africa relies just as heavily on Ukraine’s wheat exports as we do. I hadn’t given much thought to the subject of African diets, but now am reminded that the Arab Spring started with food riots triggered by shortages of staple crops. Will shortages from the breadbasket of the world lead to a global relapse into barbarism?

It’s not just wheat. Oil seeds are an equally important export for Ukraine.

Most of our sunflower seeds come from there, as did – until Brexit – most of our seasonal agricultural workers. At a

charity pop concert in aid of the humanitarian effort in the war zone, images of vast and enviable swathes of Ukrainian sunflowers were projected behind the stage.

From the top of the downs above my cottage, I can look down on a view not so very different from what a typical Ukrainian wheat prairie must resemble.

The fact I have chosen to live in fields once cultivated by the first Neolithic farmers on these isles gives me a feeling of solidarity with the arable land workers of Ukraine, although also a sense of shame induced by their evident superiority to their English counterparts – particularly in the form of me. They are certainly slimmer, physically stronger and more resilient, patriotic and godly.

My doom-mongering spiral leads me to recall that the turning point when man advanced to civilisation was the moment that he learned to control his food supply.

‘Funny, really – I never imagined Tarzan getting old’

Bone-and-antler sickles with flint teeth showing the silica gloss acquired through cutting cereal grasses have been found on a mesolithic site in Palestine dating from about 8,000 BC. Within the next two thousand years, the cultivation of grasses and the domestication of animals became well established in the Middle East. These practices spread from there during the Neolithic phases of culture, reaching Britain in about 3500 BC. The change from a nomadic and hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming has underpinned all civilisations.

Neolithic farming methods served humans for millennia – but then came the profit motive, which meant mechanisation, artificial fertilisers and pesticides.

No doubt Ukraine is as guilty as every other country. Why should it not be?

Those fertile plains are unlikely to be presided over by the organic Ukrainian equivalents of Lady Bamford, the Prince of Wales or Henry Dimbleby.

Meanwhile, back on the Wiltshire prairies, the fertiliser, spread with abandon and resembling dishwasher salt, is ammonium nitrate. According to Farmer Clarkson, the commodity price has gone from £264 a tonne a year ago to £1,000 in recent weeks. It is manufactured by mixing nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas.

The war means the gas they need to make this fertiliser, loathed by environmentalists, is in short supply.

Could this be a good thing? An opportunity disguised as a crisis?

Regenesis by George Monbiot, now hitting the bookshelves, aims to show the world that the end need not necessarily be nigh – as long as we switch from oil-based farming to a sustainable, regenerative method. Rather than farming at the expense of nature, we should take nature with us. Perhaps the one positive of this war will be to force this issue.

Look on the bright side. An absence of bread in the short term may not be a bad thing. Many Britons have already gone wheat-free owing to real or imagined gluten intolerance. I must confess the wife and I never looked or felt better than when we shunned wheat and dairy on the advice of a Swedish nutritionist.

Yes, bread was once the staff of life, but bread produced by modern farming methods is a very different kettle of fish to the bread available in Biblical times.

Nevertheless, it is a hard habit to break and I must head to our local bakery, Marshalls in Pewsey, for one of their famed Cornish pasties before the flour runs out.

The Oldie May 2022 37

Postcards from the Edge

I’m the Quentin Crisp of Deal

Mary Kenny would host Ukrainians – if they could stand the dust

TOBY MORISON

Young people like to embrace the mantra ‘Be kind’. We’ve seen a great display of kindness in the many, many offers to host Ukrainian refugees in the middle of the tormenting war they have experienced.

I wished I could invite a refugee into my abode in Deal but, quite honestly, they could do an awful lot better anywhere other than chez moi.

I live in circumstances of barely controlled chaos. I’m a dreadful clutterbug. My bedroom is organised according to Quentin Crisp rules – after five years, the dust hasn’t got any worse.

The converted loft room – the only space for visitors – has plaster falling down on an inside wall, damaged by a storm. It also has uneven, narrow stairs on which anyone could break a leg. As there is no en suite, a Victorian chamberpot has been provided (at the request of one long-ago visitor).

I have a kindly monthly cleaner, who says she derives real job satisfaction from helping me. Every other kitchen she enters is already immaculate, whereas mine is in such a mess that she knows she’s made a difference.

I hate the TV dramas that show utterly perfect, state-of-the-art kitchens. Why is mine a 1970s design where several of the cupboard doors have irreparably fallen off?

But then I call to mind the tragic scenes from Ukraine in which people have lost their homes altogether – as well as, so often, suffering human loss. Am I not fortunate to have a kitchen, a bedroom and a home, however dishevelled?

The Treasury wants a ‘cashless society’ – so we’re being nudged away from the cash habit. It’s said this will disenfranchise 11 million people, who like to use real spondulicks rather than paying for a pint of milk with a bank card.

There’s an interesting divide in European practice.

38 The Oldie May 2022

nervously at the strip of bright colours, some including the transgender flag.

Mrs Pat’s witty remark was prophetic.

The horses have been frightened – not by anyone’s public conduct, but by the contemporary addiction to display.

Born Beatrice Rose Tanner, Mrs Patrick Campbell was making the civilised point that consenting adults could do as they liked in private, so long as they didn’t harm others. But that was before everything became showbusiness!

Northern Europeans have steadily moved towards cashlessness – in Sweden, card payments are expected, and in the Netherlands, it’s often difficult to use real money at all.

Friends in Italy, on the other hand, tell me that there cash remains as popular as ever, and most workmen ask to be paid in readies.

The old Italian habit of keeping two sets of accounts – one for the government’s tax inspectors, and one for private use – may yet keep the cash habit flowing. That’s a win for those of us who still like to use the folding stuff.

Mrs Patrick Campbell, the spirited Edwardian thespian, famously remarked, of the sexual proclivities of others, ‘I don’t mind where people make love, so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.’

That’s the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attribution. A variation is ‘I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t it in the street and frighten the horses.’

How amusing that the horses working for London traffic police are being trained not to be alarmed by the LGBT+ rainbow colours painted on the streets as pedestrian crossings. Horses, highlystrung creatures, have been spooked by this innovation. They have reared up

The practice of changing the denotation of historical time from ‘BC’ (Before Christ) to ‘BCE’ (Before the Common Era) is spreading. And ‘AD’ is being superseded by ‘CE’ – the Common Era. Some Irish secularists are unhappy that this change isn’t occurring fast enough, on the grounds that ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ are surely discriminatory against non-Christians.

But an Emeritus Science Professor from Cork University, William Reville, writes, in correspondence to the Irish Times, that, whatever we call the passage of time, the universal dating system remains the same. 2022 still means about 2022 years from Christ’s birth.

Anyway, some people take ‘BCE’ to mean ‘Before the Christian Era’ and ‘CE’ to mean ‘Christian era’.

Should those of us who don’t worship the Nordic gods of old object to ‘Thursday’, honouring Thor, or reject ‘August’, named after a Roman emperor?

In the Jewish calendar we are now in the year 5782, and in 1443 in the Islamic one. But Jews and Muslims have continuously used ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ without feeling too offended.

I’d like to keep ‘AD’ – Anno Domini – because of the connection with once-universal Latin. When my 90-yearold uncle was asked what caused his aches and pains, he’d reply, ‘Anno Domini.’ An elegant way of referring to the mileage on the biological clock.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Have I taught my last lesson?

For the first time in all my years of teaching, I finished the spring term asking myself, ‘Am I broken? Have I come to the end of this particular road?’

I am 60 this summer and could retire with my dignity intact. I would receive my teaching pension, but not a state pension. Because I did not go into teaching until my late thirties, my teaching pension is not that much, but it would be something. I have just begun a PhD (part time) and could spend all day reading 19th-century novels. I could reclaim my dog, who has been kidnapped by my daughters and taken to London. I could do more grandmothering – my third grandchild is due any day.

I would lose the crippling anxiety about some of my students who are in a genuinely bad way. I would lose my panic about my current Year 11s, who are not panicking enough. I would lose the persistent interruptions by the aggressive few who roam around, effing and blinding. I would not feel so very tired all the time. I would stop chomping biscuits I don’t like or want for the brief sugar hit.

It is not too late. I have until May half-term. I have already put in to go down to four days a week for my PhD work.

I toy with the idea as I fall asleep, and when I wake up, and particularly at the end of a long day.

But…

Three days into the Easter holiday and my energy levels are on the up. I feel more confident that I can get my Year 11s (or most of them) over the line. How could I dream of abandoning my tutor group, a large proportion of whom have already shown a need for and trust in me? Of course someone else would slip into my place and they’d forget me soon enough, but admitting that is admitting defeat. Or accepting the fact that I am pointless.

More than all that, I remind myself

that it is only really now, after all these years, that I finally believe I am a good teacher. I may not always do it the way They want, but I get the results (so far) and – even better – the children say so.

A girl wrote me a card saying she was sorry she was ‘not a natural’ but she’d really loved English since she’d been in my class. Parents and past parents bother to get in touch to thank me.

The clincher is my Year 10 class.

They’re the top set: hard-working, humorous and engaged, they are any teacher’s dream. I went shopping for them (on behalf of the Glorious Benefactor) and their book choices were, on the whole, astounding. Modern and 19th-century classics; some philosophy.

One boy chose Moby-Dick and would not be dissuaded.

For those who chose more disposable books, I threw something in that was of the same genre but of a higher calibre.

Their genuine joy and pleasure on receiving the books was magnificent to behold. I want to be with them next year.

I want to push them and see them triumph. I want to send them off to do English Literature at A level.

So I won’t be handing in my notice after all. Next year, I’ll have another Year 10 I won’t be willing to leave in anyone else’s hands. I’m not broken after all. I will return to fight another battle.

Quite Interesting Things about … trees Some biologists believe trees speak a language human beings can learn.

American trees are steadily moving west, and no one knows why.

All the 77,000 trees in Melbourne, Australia, have their own email addresses, so people can write love notes to them.

In January 2018, it was so hot in Sydney,

Australia, that boiled bats fell out of the trees.

In January 2018, it was so cold in Florida that frozen iguanas fell out of the trees.

A New York man has carved a bar stool from a tree using only his teeth and nails.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge liked to eat fruit while it was still attached to the tree.

If every US household replaced one virgin-pulp loo roll with a recycled-paper one, it would save over 400,000 trees.

It’s very hard to tell the age of a palm tree because they don’t have rings. The best way is to ask a local how old it is.

Woodpeckers bang their heads into trees at a speed of 15mph, 12,000 times a day.

Trees never die of old age.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree,

the great Victorian actor/ manager, once hailed a taxi, got in and began reading a script. After a while, the driver asked, ‘Where to, guv?’ Tree looked up from his work and said, ‘Do you really think I’d give my address to the likes of you?’

JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia The Oldie May 2022 41

sister teresa

RIP the nun who escaped the Nazis On the ninth day of the war in Ukraine, we had a spring funeral.

The cleanness and orderliness of our chapel, with its bare white walls, its silence and the presence of a small, plain coffin encircled by four tall candles struck me as making it the perfect place to be at the very end of life. The calm and tranquillity, at the close of decades of goodness and righteousness, were in marked contrast to the unacceptable face of death, evident in the obscene violence taking place in Ukraine. The only colour in the chapel was a vase of daffodils – Lenten lilies and a sign of hope.

The beginning of Sister Katrin’s life was the stuff of which over-sensational biographies are made. She was no stranger to aggression and war, having been born of Jewish parents in Germany in 1929. Her father, a lawyer, was murdered by the Nazis for expressing his enlightened views when his daughters were only five and four.

Their mother consulted a lawyer with a view to getting her children onto the Kindertransport train to England. The lawyer told her she had no hope of doing so unless she married him. She did. This

incredible marriage of convenience became a love match.

The little girls went to England, and were subsequently brought home to live with their mother and stepfather. They moved to Holland, hoping for greater safety. There they would bicycle for miles for the chance of finding discarded tulip bulbs to take home to eat.

This brutal start in life did nothing to impair the sweetness of Sister Katrin’s character. This was no cloying sweetness.

She was one of nature’s comedians, with a wonderful turn of phrase, ever ready to laugh, either at her own jokes or at those of others.

Above all, she was real, never afraid to face the truth, deploring the pious sentimentality that can so easily and so detrimentally creep into religious life.

Her great love was people. She spent some years in Iceland and learnt Icelandic, a difficult and primitive language, in double-quick time, for the fun of talking to Icelanders.

Her intellect was formidable but, owing to her parents’ poverty, she was unable to go to university. Had she done so, she

Frank Meisler’s Kindertransport – The Arrival at Liverpool Street Station

might well have become a distinguished scientist. Instead, immediately after leaving school, she went to work as a laboratory assistant – a dull job.

At 25, she felt called to become a Carmelite. There was never a hint of regret or resentment at missed opportunities.

On the contrary, the sheer pleasure she took in her vocation must have done far more to convince people of the existence of God than many a learned discourse.

Funeral Service

Nicholas Parsons CBE (1923-2020) A cat crept up the aisle in the middle of Nicholas Parsons’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

It appeared just as the actress Sheila Hancock was reading from The Owl and the Pussy Cat by Edward Lear.

‘Oh Pussy, my love, what a beautiful pussy you are,’ read Dame Sheila.

Parsons, host of the radio show Just a Minute for nearly 52 years, was a lifelong fan of Lear. He celebrated his work on TV and in a touring one-man show.

‘It’s Mrs Higgins,’ said the Rev Simon Grigg, vicar of the Actors’ Church, of the church cat.

Esther Rantzen, paying tribute to 42 The Oldie May 2022

Parsons’s tireless work for charities, asked where the owl and the piggy-wig were.

Gyles Brandreth said he first met Nicholas in 1969 at a Christmas party for Fanny Cradock – ‘that unique cross between Mary Berry and Jeremy Clarkson’.

‘Everyone who was anyone was at the party,’ said Brandreth.

‘Lionel Blair was there. It gave rise to the joke of the evening, seeing Fanny and Lionel together. “Look, it’s Butch Casserole and the One Dance Kid.” At 11pm, Nicholas performed this brilliant impromptu cabaret, a routine in which he satirised European cinema, acting in cod French, German and Italian.’

Brandreth recalled Parsons’s time in the Windmill Theatre, Soho, and his spell as straight man to Arthur Haynes and Benny Hill.

Paul Merton remembered his first appearance on Just A Minute in 1988.

‘Nicholas was very encouraging,’ said Merton. ‘He was the only one who was, in those very early days, and I later learned it was his firm belief that the programme needed to attract new blood to survive…

Nicholas was always kind, generous and supportive to new players of the game.’

Hymns included Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven, and William Blake’s Jerusalem. The vicar called for a standing ovation for Parsons, followed by the Just a Minute theme, Chopin’s Minute Waltz.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Is Vitamin D good for you?

Not always – and avoid the Vitamin A in polar-bear livers, too theodore dalrymple What stands to reason depends critically on the reasoner, of course.

For many people – probably most of them – if a deficiency of x in the blood is associated with an increased death rate, then correcting that deficiency will reduce the death rate. After all, it stands to reason that it should.

Such reasoning has in the past led to runs on products in supermarkets.

I remember a run on Brazil nuts subsequent to a report that low levels of selenium were associated with high rates of heart attack. Brazil nuts had also been reported to contain high levels of selenium.

Nature, however, is not always reasonable; at least not by our – sometimes not very high – standards.

She fails to co-operate as she should.

By now it is tolerably certain that people with a relatively low level of Vitamin D in their blood have higher rates of mortality from practically everything from cancer to heart diseases, as well as an increased risk of developing non-fatal auto-immune diseases.

A recent study found, not for the first time, that those with the lowest levels of Vitamin D and who were either diabetic or pre-diabetic (a category that has recently come under sceptical examination) were considerably more likely to suffer from what are sometimes elliptically called ‘events’ – heart attacks or strokes – than those with the highest level.

The authors of the study concluded, ‘These findings highlight the importance of monitoring and correcting Vitamin D deficiency in the prevention of CVD and mortality among adults with pre-diabetes and diabetes.’

This conclusion, which stands to a certain kind of reason, would in fact be reasonable if the deficiency were causative rather than merely a statistical association. Various biological causative explanations for the association have been put forward, but people rarely differ

only in their levels of Vitamin D in the blood. For example, those with low levels tend to have poorer lifestyles (according to the current conceptions of good – which is to say healthy – lifestyles) than those with higher levels.

The proof of the pudding, or hypothesis, is in the experimentation.

Does Vitamin D supplementation reduce death rates from the various diseases with which low levels are associated; and, if so, is it by an amount that makes taking Vitamin D supplementation for a long time worthwhile? Any bad effects of such supplementation, apart from the bother of taking it, must be weighed in the balance.

Fortunately, there do not seem to be any bad effects of supplementation when taken in the prescribed quantities – though there are always people to be found who think that if x is good for you, then 2x must be twice as good (after all, it stands to reason). Vitamins in excess can be dangerous, however, as those who have eaten polar-bear liver, exceptionally high in Vitamin A, have discovered to their cost. Do not eat it if offered.

Unfortunately, the many trials in and

publications on Vitamin D supplementation give different results.

One complication is that Vitamin D is not a single or simple compound, and different forms of it give different results.

On the whole, Vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, derived from animal sources, is superior to Vitamin D2, ergocalciferol, derived from vegetable sources.

Moreover, some very large metaanalyses (the amalgamation of the results of many trials) have failed to show any effect of supplementation on all-cause mortality – all-cause mortality being a reliable endpoint of an experiment, as we doctors call death.

On the other hand, other controlled trials have shown a reduction in death from cancer and heart disease, especially with D3. I confess that all this leaves me a little muddled. In summary, some trials have shown benefit and none harm.

Whether a reduction of 15 per cent in cancer death over five years, when the risk of such death is, say, 5 per cent, makes it worthwhile taking pills every day is for the patient to decide.

My advice is to do what you think is right – for you.

‘The Emperor bought his new clothes with non-fungible tokens’

The Oldie May 2022 43

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

Which side do you dress?

SIR: I write in respect of the article ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ by Mark Palmer (Spring issue).

I too was brought up in Reading in the 1950s, though not, as I suspect in Mr Palmer’s case, as a scion of the excellent company that manufactured biscuits right next to Reading Gaol.

However, I have to question Mr Palmer’s memories of a bespoke tailor asking the question ‘And which way do you hang, sir?’ Any respectable bespoke tailor or gentleman’s outfitter of the time would have asked, ‘Which side do you dress, sir?’

An issue never addressed by Levi Strauss, I imagine.

Ian R A Brown, Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Black Country blues SIR: Jonathan Meades’s article (April issue), headed ‘Lucky Brummies’, is excellent all round – particularly in bringing attention to the new Pevsner.

But it is wrong to elide Birmingham and the Black Country (my country). They are mutually exclusive. The Black Country is defined by the coalfield on which it is set.

Birmingham stands outside.

The elision was particularly unfortunate given the juxtaposition of the article heading and the first paragraph which suggests that, at least when the coalfield was operational, those who lived outside it were the lucky ones.

Those of us from the Black Country have always been happy as well as proud of the fact, ta muchly aer kid.

Gary Hickinbottom, Walsall (but, alas, currently London SW10)

was older even than his own commanding officer, Lt Col Lord Lovat. However, he was about to take part in what is regarded as the only truly successful action in that misguided operation.

No 4 Commando was tasked with scaling the cliffs at Varengeville, three miles to the west of the town, and silencing a large German coastal battery that posed a serious threat to the invaders. This it did, in what has been described many times since as a text-book assault. One of his colleagues, Capt Pat Porteous, was awarded the VC for his part in the action.

Sadly, in the midst of very hard hand-to-hand fighting, Capt Pettiward was shot and killed by the defending forces. In his memoirs, Lord Lovat described his death as one of his own saddest personal losses of the war.

Capt Pettiward is commemorated on the Brookwood 1939-1945 Memorial in Surrey, having no known grave.

John Martin, Holt, Norfolk

Spectator, led to Pettiward’s joining Fleming for an expedition to Brazil. Their purpose was to determine the fate of the explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had disappeared in the Mato Grosso seven years earlier. No trace of Fawcett was found, but Fleming’s first book, Brazilian Adventure, was published the following year.

Simon Courtauld, All Cannings, Wiltshire

Peter Fleming in Brazil

SIR: Thank you to Gyles Brandreth for his moving tribute to Peter Bowles (Spring issue), an actor I have long admired.

Peter shared my five minutes of fame way back in 1964. I was 12 years old when we appeared in an episode of the police series No Hiding Place. As a young fan, I was at the ground of Crystal Palace Football Club watching the players train when a film crew turned up to shoot some establishing shots around a story about the murder of the club manager, as I recall. Peter was playing one of the footballers (Joe Bask).

When most of the young fans were ushered out, I hung back and was asked by the director to walk up and get an autograph from Peter’s character as he sat on a bench talking to another ‘player’.

We had it in the can in about three takes, I remember, and I was given a pound note, with thanks.

We had no recording facilities in those days, of course, so the whole family was around the telly a few weeks later to see it go out – the only time I have ever seen it.

It was a thrilling moment for me and I’ve bored people with this story over the years, many of them too young even to know what No Hiding Place is. Peter, of

SIR: Not only was Roger Pettiward a well-known cartoonist, under the pseudonym Paul Crum (The Old Un’s Notes, Spring issue); in 1932 he became an intrepid explorer.

A chance encounter with his Etonian and Oxford contemporary Peter Fleming, outside the London offices of the

RIP Captain Pettiward SIR: The Old Un’s Notes (Spring issue) made reference to the sad death of the cartoonist Roger Pettiward, almost 80 years ago, at the age of 35. May I add a footnote?

On 19th August 1942, Capt Pettiward was leading F Troop, No 4 Commando during the attempt to capture the occupied port of Dieppe. At that point in his life, he

44 The Oldie May 2022

‘So, would this be a journey you’re going on, or a “journey”?’

Split opinion SIR: If James Crawshaw (Spring issue) is going to be picky about grammar, perhaps he should correct the following: ‘Why don’t people try to not start sentences…’

Gosh, the mind boggles at what my English teacher would have said!

I cannot help you if you are unclear about the errors.

John Elder, Angus, Scotland

Bowles on the ball

alligator handbag exempt her from any possible charge of frumpiness.

Yours, Hugh Raffam, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

course, deservedly went on to much greater things.

RIP to an actor of real class.

Tony Peters, East Grinstead, West Sussex

Engineering the future

Facing the Grim Reaper SIR: In Gyles Brandreth’s Diary (Spring issue) he discusses the end of life and how well actors deal with it. It is not only actors who have this ability.

I am just an ordinary citizen, but on hearing the cancer had reappeared I decided not to have further treatment and to spend my remaining time enjoying every day. I have also planned my funeral. I was given months and not years to survive, but have succeeded in passing the anniversary of this announcement. Positive thinking is the answer to the end of life.

No, Mr Brandreth, it is not just actors who handle these things well.

Heather Rodrick, East Bridgford, Nottingham

In praise of libraries SIR: As a lifelong (73 soon) supporter and user of public libraries on three continents, I was appalled and distressed to read of Sophia Waugh’s school having no library (Spring issue).

Without my high-school library (USA), no homework would ever have been done (I both did it and read fiction copiously). Neither would I have had the delights of being introduced to many authors – some even now, in the 21st century, having films and TV series made/remade from their works.

A favourite vignette from my career as a children and families social worker in Norfolk dates from the 1980s, when one of our teenage young women said she never went anywhere without a book that she was reading (perhaps she is now a writer).

Surely public and school libraries are a mark of true civilisation, democracy and community?

Not surprisingly, the Big Issue magazine for the homeless includes strong support for public libraries and literacy.

We need them! Long live books and reading for all!

Yours faithfully, Mike Macartney-Filgate, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Cruel Virginia SIR: I hope I’m not the only reader who was dismayed, not to say appalled, by

‘Well, I suppose we could start with his listening skills’

Virginia Ironside’s advice to the hapless woman who had gained weight during lockdown and whose partner no longer found her sexually attractive (‘I’m too fat for him’, Spring issue).

Virginia’s suggestion that she lose weight and think of it as ‘an act of kindness’ beggars belief and borders on cruelty.

There are good reasons for someone who is overweight to lose some weight, but pleasing someone else, whether it’s a sexual partner, an adult child or an interfering parent, isn’t one of them.

May I suggest that your reader take her problem to Mumsnet, where she will undoubtedly receive a more sympathetic and robust response, probably along the lines of ‘LTB’. That’s ‘Leave the bastard’ for those unfamiliar with Mumsnet parlance.

Kind regards, Jane Ainsworth, Ponteland, Northumberland

Easter music SIR: I would like to thank Sister Teresa for her explanation of George Herbert’s poem Easter.

I was aware of it only through singing many years ago as a member of a Choral Society. The work is a setting of five poems by Ralph Vaughan Williams entitled Five Mystical Songs. I will now hear it with new ears! If anyone has never heard this music, give it a whirl. Sublime.

Yours, Helen Pitt, Elmsett, Suffolk

Sharp Miss Marple SIR: As played by Joan Hickson, Miss Marple was no frump (‘Farewell to frumps’, Spring issue). She was never a ‘nice’ old lady, with her all-seeing cold blue eyes and mind like a bacon slicer, and those well-cut (if old) tweed suits and

SIR: Thank you, Alan Mordey, for ‘Engineer abuse’ (Rant, Spring issue).

One attribute that separates us from ‘the rest’ is a passion for truth – because you cannot create anything of worth with a lie.

I never belonged to any institution because institutions corrupt and fossilise; my current work in tidal energy transcends the knowledge of institutions, who are of ‘yesterday’, whereas I am far ahead in ‘tomorrow’ – which is what creative innovation is.

Yours faithfully, M R Burn (80), HND Mech Eng, Leek, Staffordshire

Holy cow!

SIR: Re John Lloyd’s ‘Quite Interesting Things about … cows’ (Spring issue): the final item in the list (‘The Vatican uses milk from the Pope’s cows to paint its buildings’) reminded me of the following gem, from a list of ‘schoolboy howlers’ or ‘daffy definitions’ I must have found in some humorous publication in the 1960s or earlier: ‘Papal Bull: an animal kept to provide milk for the Pope’s children.’

Yours, George Walker, Worthing, West Sussex

Ladies’ personal services SIR: I love browsing the classified section of The Oldie, and chuckle at the ads for ‘discerning gentlemen’ from slim/ attractive/understanding ladies offering particular services. I wonder about us ‘discerning’ ladies, and where the ads are that might enable us to benefit from these similar ‘services’. Or maybe we just go on long walks!

Judith Bretherton, Bromley, Kent

Ingrams’s artists SIR: In your 30th-anniversary (March) issue, I was disappointed that in the tribute to Richard Ingrams there was no mention of his choice of artists to design headings for articles.

They were Philip Thompson and wood-engraver John O’Connor. How about giving us an article in praise of their work in a future Oldie?

Yours faithfully, Shirley Page, Caxton, Cambridgeshire The Oldie May 2022 45

I Once Met

Ringo Starr In August 1962, my mate Frank and I playing a summer season. Their headed for Butlin’s in Skegness. We were drummer had a fine Premier kit, which both 16. would be just the job, if we could only Frank was fearless. He had been an borrow it. It never occurred to Frank or angelic choirboy but was also a rebel to me that we would have to take it apart against all authority. The week at Butlin’s and carry it bit by bit to the hall where was his idea. He reeled me in with the the competition would be held. prospect of girls galore, pop music and a At the end of the band’s set, we certain amount of under-age headed for the bandstand and I asked consumption of alcohol. the drummer for his autograph. With Frank played piano. His current party my pencil on a scrappy bit of paper, he piece was Nut Rocker drew a star and – the Number One hit added his name – Tchaikovsky mash-up by Ringo Starr. Then I B Bumble and the explained what Frank Stingers. I played the and I planned to do. drums. Frank reckoned How about it? Could I that together we could borrow his kit? make a killing in the His reply was polite holiday camp’s talent but firm: ‘No chance.’ competition.

It had been worth a But where to get a try. We nearly missed set of drums? My even that chance, as suitcase certainly didn’t it turned out. The contain one. very next week – on The answer came to us 15th August – John when we were in the Lennon and Paul ballroom listening to Rory McCartney drove from Storm and the Hurricanes Liverpool to Skegness – a Liverpool group Starr before he was a star, 1962 to ask Ringo to join the

Beatles, and that was the end of his spell with Rory Storm and the start of his road to stardom.

Frank and I didn’t enter the talent competition, but we found lots of other things to enjoy for the rest of the week.

We certainly worked our way through Frank’s list with enthusiasm.

And I had Ringo’s autograph. I took it home and left it in my bedroom by my drum kit as a memento. At least I did until my mother tidied up one day and threw out that scrap of paper, thinking it was just something I had left lying around. How much would that have been worth now? Hundreds? Maybe even thousands, with the ‘provenance’ I could supply.

After leaving school, Frank and I went our separate ways and lost touch. I ended up being ordained as a priest in the Church of England, occasionally being called ‘the rocking vicar’ when I got behind a set of drums.

The story that goes ‘I once asked Ringo Starr if I could borrow his drum kit’ has entertained folk at more than one party over the years. Being a vicar, I couldn’t possibly be telling a lie, could I. Reverend Don Tordoff

I was a real Mad Man

In the ’60s, I really was a ‘Mad Man’ in New York advertising, when America produced half the globe’s wealth and Madison Avenue was the ad world’s epicentre.

I was working for BBDO, the American ad agency that inspired the megahit TV series Mad Men. The picture in the series – of top-level execs as privileged Wasps with fast-paced, alcoholfuelled, sybaritic lives – bore little resemblance to reality at 383 Madison.

After my ad jobs in London, Lausanne and 46 The Oldie May 2022

Paris, my NY BBDO boss, Fritz ‘R’, steered me from account executive/ supervisor to international department manager.

Some 90 per cent of people in advertising do not write the ads. Copywriters were often thought too ‘bohemian’ to risk direct client access. It was ‘point men’ like me who hogged the glamour, lunches at the smart 21 restaurant and the arrogance that went with it all.

On 5th June 1968, I was in San Francisco. I took a cable car down to Fisherman’s Wharf, where I ran into Bobby

Kennedy. He was a hero, an inspiration to those of us who, like me, campaigned for civil rights. The next day, he was assassinated. When I hired Barbara Connor, she was the only AfricanAmerican I saw at BBDO. Though women were often ‘glass-ceilinged’, BBDO has now had female CEOs. In my day in the ’60s, secretaries sat mute in Dickensian, serried ranks, flanking open doorways of the execs’ plush window offices. My colleague expected his PA to mix Martinis in a thermos, so that he could arrive half-cut at Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

Greenwich, Connecticut.

Only on summer Fridays was she spared when, aboard the 4pm Cannonball Express, a black-liveried Pullman Car waiter did the honours, en route to a beach pad in Easthampton, Long Island.

In 1995, I was in New York, reporting for BBC World Service’s Outlook on British women taking magazine editorships from Americans. I stood outside 383 Madison. It was about to be demolished, like all dreams.

By Nicholas Hordern, Hove, East Sussex, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Small World

Love story – in a Cleethorpes urinal

Our eyes met as she saved me from an awkward bathroom incident jem clarke

STEVE WAY

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

Freud said we subconsciously seek partners who remind us of our mothers.

As a result, in my subliminal quest for someone uncaring, indifferent and slightly frosty, I have always had a soft spot for receptionists.

I love the sight of surly Amadia manning the receptionist desk at my work. She is a human lighthouse, with the shoulders of a scrum-half.

Wearily, with a literal snort, she dismisses most reasonable means of identification offered by new arrivals at her work station. The ones who’ve failed to identify themselves sit on ‘the naughty couch’ – until a boss from many floors up arrives to collect the department’s lost staff member.

Today my interaction with Amadia is less fraught. I happily show her my official, laminated photo-ID badge.

‘Very handsome,’ she says, sliding my ID badge back to me with absolutely zero level of flirtation and her frown unwavering. ‘Now what do you want showing that to me for?’

Looking left and right, twiddling my tie and leaning closer to Amadia in my best conspiratorial Leslie Phillips fashion, I say, ‘Well, the truth is, I’m rather envious of everyone else’s lanyards. As a newish member of staff, I thought someone as influential as you could fix me up with one.’

‘Nine lanyards left last Thursday. Now none left. You go, thank you.’

The state-of-the-art office toilet was my next port of call. Although I don’t put it on my CV, my favourite part of any working day is road-testing the office facilities before I arrive at the desk.

I opened the door of the gents, to be confronted with the world’s longest, deepest urinal. So high was the trough that, as an extremely short man, even on tiptoes I couldn’t get this little man’s ‘little man’ over the top.

Determined not to be defeated, I noticed that, on top of the sink units, they

had an unopened pack of ‘urinal cakes’ – those deodorisers that look like futuristic pineapple rings. Ingeniously, I realised that silicon gel gives the rings an adhesive quality that would make them stick to my soles. I attached three to each shoe, returned to the urinal and – lo! – the extra inch meant I could pee like a free man, comfortably clearing the height of the trough.

That is, pee freely for three or so seconds.

I lost my balance and, tipping forward, saved my blushes by resting my palms against the wall – at the expense of my photo-ID badge, which shot straight out of my shirt pocket and into the urinal stream.

As I was mid-wee, I could do nothing but watch the photo ID sail further away from me like a paper boat propelled on a yellow wave of my own making.

Worse still, post-wee, I realised that my arms were too short to reach said stream over that damned marine trench of a trough, to secure the safe return of the ID. Defeated and harassed, I returned to the lobby, marching purposefully towards Amadia. Well, half-purposefully: the urinal cakes were slowly slipping from my soles. I adopted a sideways stagger, maintaining my balance only by stretching my arms out on either side.

Even the unflinching face of Amadia softened at such a bizarre and quick return. ‘What happened? You red and twitchy,’ she said.

I blurted it all out. ‘I’ve had a mishap in the toilet, and accidentally weed on my own face.’

Amadia rushed out from behind the desk and set upon me. Gently holding my cheek, she wiped my face with a series of her own wet wipes. Later, I discovered they were spectacle-lens wipes – but any port in a storm.

For a second, I thought, ‘This is like the epiphany in a French film: a delicate point of physical intimacy, as two disparate individuals in a moment of crisis find a connection…’

Then she spoiled everything by saying matter-of-factly, ‘Pee-free now. Piss off, thank you.’

Zipping her handbag shut, pinging off her blue rubber gloves, she glanced at me like a prison warder who’d just removed a smuggled Samsung from some anatomical hidey-hole.

I spent much of the rest of my working day casually hanging round the urinal, looking longingly at my floating photo ID – until finally someone came in. I stood next to him, trying not to appear sinister, and asked the most sinister question known to man: ‘When you’ve finished, could you reach down here and do me a quick favour?’

The upshot is that the fourth floor have nicknamed me ‘wee man’. Amadia does now smile when I walk past. But the jury’s out on whether it’s a romantic smile.

I’ve just got an email, asking me to complete a survey called ‘How comfortable have you found the return to the office?’

I ticked the box marked ‘Would rather not say’.

The Oldie May 2022 47

Books Right royal writers Tina Brown is the latest in a long line of royal biographers.

Hugo Vickers picks his favourites

I

hope I live long enough to see an explanatory note at the end of reviews – ‘This author ran off with my wife’; ‘I wanted to write this book but my publisher cancelled my contract.’

So I think it is only fair to declare my hand. I have known Tina Brown since 1979, and she was kind enough to give me a sumptuous dinner on my recent visit to New York, the table filled with fascinating movers and shakers.

In 1981, I detect that the unctuous Kenneth Rose, the journalist and diarist, was faced with a similar dilemma when asked to review a life of the Queen Mother by Elizabeth Longford – for he lunched from time to time with the Longfords in the House of Lords.

‘It would be agreeable to record that such a perceptive biographer and steadfast friend had written an altogether exceptional work on so well-worn a theme,’ he wrote, ‘here a fresh anecdote, there a penetrating turn of phrase. The illustrations, too, are admirable.’

Tina Brown is an inspired editor, for which she received the CBE in 2000. Her network of friends and contacts is extensive. I have to confess – and I am sure that, as a professional editor, Tina will know what I mean by this – that I am not her target readership. I believe she sold over a million copies of her book The

48 The Oldie May 2022

Diana Chronicles. Had she aimed this book at me, she would have sold only one.

In The Palace Papers, she certainly fulfils the book’s blurb, in presenting a ‘tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last 25 years’.

My problem is that I lived through all that, have read a lot about it, and find it hard to do so again. In many ways, the inner core of the Royal Family has settled into something rather positive – the households acting in unity, all of them protective and supportive of the Queen in her Platinum Jubilee year.

When I watched the Cambridges arriving at Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip’s memorial service in March, I envisioned a more positive future than Tina predicts at the end of her book.

‘Will historians of the future,’ she asks, ‘consider the length of [the Queen’s] reign a fatal impediment to dynastic evolution, a pile-up of heirs and unresolved problems of minor royals who became casualties and roadkill?’

Her style emulates Jilly Cooper (who once gave us a line ‘He who pays the Piper-Heidsieck calls the tune’), or perhaps a breathless Joanna Lumley with an occasional sting in the tail.

I came to enjoy her exaggerated

adjectives and to look out for them – Prince Charles wanted to make ‘an honest kedgeree’ of his mistress; Andrew Parker Bowles is ‘a walking pink gin’; Diana is ‘a sainted sylph’; Prince Andrew has a ‘boob-ogling pickup style’ and Robert Maxwell had ‘huge car-washbrush eyebrows.’ She must have had fun thinking those up.

Where I found the book especially interesting was in her assessment of the Sussexes. Tina was also a first-hand witness to the Jeffrey Epstein saga – she was even menaced by him in her office. On that ongoing saga, she strikes me as spot-on.

Had I been asked to proofread this book, I could have corrected many mistakes in styles and titles – including ‘Lady Anne Glenconner’ and ‘Lord Bernard Donoughue’ – but I guess this is written for those who do not care about such niceties. However, ‘The Dowager Duchess of Gloucestershire’ never existed (I know who she means).

She needs to be careful with some.

There is a Lady Rose Cholmondeley and there is a Marchioness of Cholmondeley.

They are both called ‘Rose’. They are very different people: one a mature lady who loves the piano and another a young wife in a magnificent stately home.

So what would be my choices for the best royal biographies?

GARY WING

Among recent ones, I relished Jane Ridley’s admirably researched George V: Never a Dull Moment. Ridley brought into play unusual sources such as Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and obscure ones such as Sir Richard Molyneux and Sir Bryan Godley-Fawcett, to good advantage.

I find Robert Hardman’s latest Queen suitably upbeat. He relies to a large extent, though not entirely, on personal interviews with distinguished sources, and he too sometimes delves into an unusual source. He makes me keen to explore the diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn. The published ones were good – so I bet the unpublished ones would be a feast.

Among earlier ones, my favourite remains James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary (1959), in which he proves that an authorised biography does not have to be a dull and plodding volume. His subtle turn of phrase and his judicious quotes paint a superb portrait of the Queen’s grandmother. It was a considerable joy to look behind the scenes and see how he created it when editing The Quest for Queen Mary (2018).

My favourite line from the biography is Lord Clarendon’s comment on the marriage prospects of the enormously fat Princess Mary Adelaide (Queen Mary’s

mother): ‘No German prince will venture on so vast an undertaking.’

The impoverished Duke of Teck rose to the challenge.

It is interesting that well-researched unauthorised biographies often overtake the official ones. Kenneth Rose was more informative on George V than Sir Harold Nicolson and John Gore put together.

Sarah Bradford was very much better on George VI than Sir John Wheeler-Bennett.

Access is of course important. The Royal Archives are fabulous, but they are not the only place where the stories lie hidden.

It is impossible to write a boring book on Queen Victoria, and there is a good shelf to choose from. Hard to make a choice but, for a good impression of her life at court, Ask Sir James (1987) – based on the diaries of her doctor, Sir James Reid (Richard Ingrams’s grandfather) – is unputdownable.

Back at school, I got my hands on Sir Frederick Ponsonby’s Recollections of Three Reigns (1957). It was full of stories about Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V. And, sticking my neck out, I believe that Patrick Jephson (her private secretary, much criticised for bursting into print) gave us the best portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales in Shadows of a

Princess (2000). He has an enjoyable style. A bit like Alan Clark with Mrs Thatcher, there is a sense that when she falls, he falls too. In Jephson’s case, he bailed out after the Martin Bashir interview on Panorama.

Then there are the many books that arguably should not have been written.

The horrors are those that have been cobbled together from secondary sources, and those that aim to destroy reputations. I would urge considerable caution in reading Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King, in which he throws in every hostile source to blacken the Duke of Windsor’s name.

In a recent television documentary, he even suggested that the Duke wanted the Nazis to bomb Buckingham Palace and by implication kill his brother, King George VI, so that he could return to Britain as a Nazi king.

Since there is a mass of evidence that, from his days as Prince of Wales, the Duke longed to escape the throne, this is ludicrous.

Hugo Vickers is the author of biographies of Queen Mary, the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is published by Century (£20) The Oldie May 2022 49

Small-town Nazis IVO DAWNAY A Village in the Third Reich

By Julia Boyd, with Angela Patel Elliott & Thompson £25 Take a small English country town – Sherborne, say, or Kendal – picturepostcard cute and surrounded by beautiful landscape. Then imagine it after a defeat in war, a sixth of its men dead, chaos in the capital, hyper-inflation and political riots in all the major conurbations and a reparations bill of a quarter of its total income, payable for 50 years.

What would become of it and its inhabitants? Or, perhaps more pertinently, take Russia’s rural villages today: why would they doubt for a minute the Kremlin’s explanation for the ‘special operations’ in Ukraine?

Those are the unasked – but implicit – questions posed by Julia Boyd’s gripping new dive into the minutiae of the German experience from 1918 to the end of the Second World War. A leading historian of human responses in political extremis, Boyd wrote the critically acclaimed Travellers in the Third Reich. It shows, among many other things, the positive impressions many (no, most) foreign visitors had of the pre-war Nazi regime.

This time, she takes as her Petri dish Oberstdorf, Germany’s southernmost community, surrounded by the soaring Allgäu mountains. It is as close to a cliché of German gemütlich charm as one can imagine – a large, traditional and conservative village of Catholic farmers and artisans. No doubt, many of them were clad in lederhosen and dirndls.

Through letters, diaries and the archives of the local newspaper, she pieces together the lives of several dozen villagers as they tiptoe through the increasingly terrifying obstacle course of the Nazi years.

There is no question that the village welcomed the election result on 5th March 1933, when Hitler took power.

Yet Boyd points out that no more than ten per cent of the population ever actually joined the party, and many of those did so more for personal advancement than out of ideological choice.

When, in the 1920s, the first Nazis emerged – just 20-strong and led by a chimney-sweep – they were roundly disapproved of as rowdy, vulgar and yobbish, their anti-Semitism deemed bad for business in a respectable village trying to earn a living through tourism.

Healthy scepticism was widespread.

‘If you like his hunting paintings, you’ll love his work about gathering’

On 6th March, the swastika flag celebrating the Nazi victory was quietly taken down and left, neatly folded, by the flagpole. Yet within two months, all choices were removed: elections were abolished and Hitler’s Dachau terror apparatus was up and running.

Boyd’s account now dives deeper into the personal lives of Oberstdorf’s villagers – and, as the catastrophe unfurls, there are some surprises. There are the Alpinists, for example, who joined the mountain division for Barbarossa – travelling out through the, alas, now to us familiar towns of Lviv, Dnipro and Donetsk. Born in patriotic idealism, the regiment went on to slaughter surrendered Italian troops along with women and children in Cephalonia.

Another Oberstdorfer, 28-year-old Heinz Schubert – a scion of the composer – became an SS lieutenant who helped supervise the murder of over 90,000 people, the vast majority civilians.

‘We did not set out to kill,’ he told the Nuremberg judges, ‘but to defend Western civilisation.’ His death sentence was later commuted to six years.

By contrast, there are some genuine minor heroes. Georg Joas, a pilot, refused to take part in killings, risking his own life. And then there was the Nazi mayor, Ludwig Fink, who also took big risks to protect local Jews and Catholic nuns doing charitable work in the village.

Beyond protection was a happy, musical, blind boy, Theodor Weissenberger, whose hotelier parents strove to keep him safe. He was gassed to death under the ‘racial hygiene’ programme, the bureaucracy covering up the crime by claiming he died of meningitis.

Only as the war drew to a close did a small band of Oberstdorfers organise some resistance, aimed at assisting the Allies to take the town without bloodshed.

So could it happen here? One hopes that British bloody-mindedness would be enough protection. But Boyd’s masterly

and coolly objective account is a record only. It refuses to judge whether there is something deep in the German psyche – conformism, discipline and a love of order – that made the nightmare possible.

That said, she shares with the historian Richard J Evans the view that it was the ‘little people’ who above all facilitated the horrors. Rather as with the curtain-twitchers and ‘dobbers-in’ of our own recent COVID era, authoritarian fanaticism seems to take hold most easily among the jobsworths and the usually powerless.

As Primo Levi wrote, ‘Monsters exist but they are too few in number to be really dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.’

This important and gripping book reveals that the greatest threat to our freedoms is the insidious power of state propaganda. That and an officious desire to conform that seems deeply buried in human DNA – at least of some.

Caribbean queen ALAN JUDD I Used to Live Here: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

By Miranda Seymour Collins £22 Jean Rhys (1890-1979) was born in Dominica to a white Creole mother who was, by her daughter’s account, hard and cruel.

‘I’ve done my best,’ her mother told her after yet another whipping. ‘You’ll never be like other people.’ Her father, a Welsh doctor, was generous, sympathetic and loving.

From early childhood, she manifested an extreme self-consciousness which perhaps contributed to her lifelong sense of not belonging – ‘I’m a person at a masked ball,’ she wrote, ‘without a mask.’

Despite being taunted on the streets and at school as a ‘white cockroach’, she loved Dominica. She did not love cold, dirty London or the Perse School at Cambridge, where she was sent to continue her education, and was mocked for her Caribbean lilt. A natural actress, she got into RADA but couldn’t afford to stay. Refusing to return to Dominica, she became a chorus girl with a touring company, where she was spotted by a wealthy banker who became her first lover and, for a while, her keeper. ‘He had money. I had none,’ she wrote.

The Oldie May 2022 51

There was no question of marriage but they remained on good, if infrequent, terms for the rest of his life; in times of great need, he helped her out. He also warned her against marrying a Dutch charmer, fraudster, would-be writer and (unbeknownst to her) bigamist called Lenglet. They settled in Paris, where she had a son, who died at three weeks of pneumonia – possibly owing to neglect – and later a daughter, who lived.

Lenglet, by then wanted for embezzlement, fled Paris. She tried unsuccessfully to sell his short stories and was introduced to Ford Madox Ford, editor of the influential Transatlantic Review. But Ford was much more interested in Rhys’s own unpublished stories and draft novel. He had an unerring eye for good writing, and swiftly got her into print.

Although a generation older, he got her into bed too – or maybe she got him.

This was 1920s Paris, and Ford was living with the Australian artist Stella Bowen and their daughter. Rhys’s intervention broke up that relationship, though Seymour suggests there may have been a bit of a threesome going on.

It’s not clear. Ford never kissed and told in any of his relationships. Bowen gives a plausibly straight account in her memoir, Drawn from Life, while Rhys’s perspective has to be reconstructed from her novels and stories, especially the latter. Whatever the full story, the one clear result was that Ford’s belief in her set her on the path to literary greatness.

One of the many strengths of this biography is that Seymour is aware of the danger of the too-easy read-across from fiction to life, while being alive to the hidden truths of literary archaeology.

Rhys was – and too often still is – ‘judged by the fictitious alter egos whom she created, but only in part resembled’.

She mined elements of herself and her life for her vulnerable women characters – ever alone, ever adrift, failing to find refuge – but they were neither selfportraits nor history. ‘I wasn’t always the abandoned one, you know,’ she wrote.

In fact, Seymour’s relationship with her subject is partly what makes this a gem of literary biography. She maintains the taut, necessary balance between empathy and detachment. On the one hand, her subject was a sensitive, vulnerable soul, generous, charming, irresistibly flirtatious, wryly funny and hugely gifted; on the other, she was endlessly self-absorbed and wholly inconsiderate of others.

Her promising literary career faltered in the 1930s and it was 30 years before she submitted another novel for

‘Our prices have to be high because our chef doesn’t have his own TV show’

publication – by which time she was thought to be dead. During those years, she led a pretty rackety existence, fuelled by alcohol and marked by two more marriages (not bad ones), a couple of spells in mental asylums, a brief sojourn in prison and intermittent public rages, in which she kicked, spat, cursed and bit.

The law was lenient, as were a surprising number of friends and neighbours. But not all: a rural vicar’s wife, confronted by a foul-mouthed, hysterical Rhys in the rectory garden, ‘acting with imaginable satisfaction, gave the unapologetically contrary guest a hard slap across the face’. It worked.

Rhys spent the last 19 years of her life in a tiny bungalow in a Devonshire village, years sweetened and enriched in every sense by literary lionising following her best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Encouraged and indulged by, among many others, Wyndham Lewis and Diana Athill, she basked in the recognition her writing deserved.

As Seymour acutely points out, she had a genius for creating a ‘world that is both uniquely alien and recognisably mundane’. However, her ‘unforgiving solipsism’ was at once the strength and the limitation of her writing. As she said of herself, ‘With this eye, I see and no other.

I cannot see with other people’s eyes.’

Hers were good enough.

Richard III’s crush DAVID HORSPOOL Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose

By Alison Weir Headline £20 In February 1485, Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Elizabeth had, along

with her brothers and her mother, been dispossessed and dishonoured by her uncle, Richard. He had declared his brother’s offspring illegitimate and marriage false as a preface to – or a pretext for – seizing the throne himself.

Nobody had seen Elizabeth’s younger brothers for months. Many assumed Richard had done away with them, as he had with Elizabeth’s maternal uncle Rivers, her half-brother Richard Grey and her father’s right-hand man Lord Hastings. Now Richard III’s wife, Anne, was sick, and it was rumoured that Richard was planning to marry his niece Elizabeth after her death.

Given that background, you might assume Elizabeth’s letter to her ally Norfolk would say something like ‘Help, my murderous creep of an uncle has his eye on me. Please warn him off.’

What Elizabeth actually wrote was a request that Norfolk act, in the words of a 17th-century historian, as a ‘mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the King, who … was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and thoughts, in body, and in all’.

Later historians have treated the letter with caution. The only record of it is the version quoted above. Richard publicly denied he ever had plans to marry his niece, and was in fact seeking a match for her elsewhere. But, in any case, the idea of Elizabeth welcoming such a relationship seems abhorrent.

Alison Weir, the author of popular histories of the Tudor period as well as 12 historical novels, knows all this. While the historian might find reasons this peculiar letter can’t be genuine, it’s too juicy a piece of evidence for a novelist to pass up.

Her task, then, is to make the bizarre seem plausible, to convince us that a flesh-and-blood Elizabeth really wrote such a letter. How does Weir do it? Like this: Elizabeth thought ‘it was a far leap from just coming to court to marrying the man who, until recently, she had seen as a wicked child-murderer… But her old love for him, long suppressed and then replaced by hatred, still bubbled beneath the surface.’

Perhaps it was like that. Perhaps a young woman who had known her uncle as a child (though not very well, as he was mostly away in the north) really made this simple calculus of rationalism and emotion to contemplate her withered affection transforming into sexual love.

Weir deals with that, too: ‘So what if he had a twisted back? It was not evident through his clothes and, anyway, it was the man who counted, not the body.’

The Oldie May 2022 53

But if one purpose of historical fiction is to fill in the gaps, Weir falls short.

Much of her novel, despite the dramatic events it describes – war, conspiracy, murder, premature death – is flat, as if the historian is perched on the novelist’s shoulder.

‘Forced loans?’ Richard’s queen asks when the king talks about raising money from his rich subjects. ‘Did you not condemn the practice in Parliament?’

Well, yes, he did, but it’s less the sort of thing a queen would say to her king at a court feast than the sort of thing a historian would put in. Richard’s revenue-raising – and comparisons with his brother’s – have often been discussed by historians.

The Tudors and their immediate forebears have had a lot of fictional attention, led by Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy – against which most historical novelists entering similar territory are doomed to be measured.

Weir’s novel is better history than Mantel’s, who takes an almost perverse pleasure in flipping the available evidence to convince us that, say, Thomas Cromwell was good and Thomas More wicked. But, for the duration of the novels, Mantel does convince us.

Weir, despite cleaving to a much more plausible version of earlier events, does not. Partly this is a matter of style. She has a weakness for putting clichés in her subject’s mouths, though admittedly some were not clichés then. ‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ says Richard.

More than that, the book, broken up into chapters covering slices of time, seems breathless – an attempt to cram in as much of this teeming period as possible. Nor is Weir free from that curse of the historical novelist, the nudge.

Prince Arthur, Henry and Elizabeth’s doomed eldest son, is sickly and frail from the beginning, while his younger brother, ‘Harry’, ‘looked as if he had been born to greatness’. Ouch.

Only when the pace slackens does Weir breathe more life into her principals. This happens whenever, as was grimly frequent in the age, a child dies unexpectedly. Historians often hurry past these deaths, concentrating on those who lived to influence the world around them. But Weir shows us these were absences that even the most exalted endured.

In grief, at least, we glimpse a shared humanity.

David Horspool is author of Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation (Bloomsbury) 54 The Oldie May 2022

‘Let’s see ... we’ve taken you off smoking, drinking and rich food. What else do you enjoy?’

Odd garden varieties DAVID WHEELER English Gardening Eccentrics

By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Yale University Press £30 The supposedly sedate world of horticulture is full of eccentrics.

If gnome-filled flower-beds, a claustrophobia of capricious topiary or a Disney-like display of dubiously cute, oversized mutants are your idea of outdoor eccentricity, then, to quote the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (tell me, is that an eccentric name?) is a fellow ‘inexorably drawn towards eccentric personalities’. Compared with his, my own acquaintance with this peculiar and life-enhancing clan is mild indeed.

I recall the ‘eccentric’ – though thoroughly understandable – habit of a Somerset grande dame who gardened all day, every day, festooned in precious jewellery. It was, in theory, understandable because while she was beavering away outdoors, her house had previously been burgled on two occasions. And there’s the late Ian Pollard, dubbed the ‘naked gardener’ of Malmesbury, owing to his penchant for working his flower-beds in the buff.

The controversial and impossible-tododge question of taste arises. Would you say Clough Williams-Ellis’s 1925-onwards Italianate ‘fantasy’ village of Portmeirion in north Wales – a supreme example of individual expression – was in good or bad taste? Of course not.

What, then, of a neighbouring but lesser-known later model village of Italian landmarks, struggling to survive in overgrown woodland? According to the Mail Online, its ‘stunning collection of over 30 iconic buildings and structures featur[ing] a 6ft Rialto Bridge from Venice, a pint-size Duomo from Florence and a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa’ was sympathetically built over 25 years by poultry farmer Mark Bourne. He used chicken wire and mortar and an old washing boiler to fashion the dome of his Tempietto.

In his portly and absorbing new book, Longstaffe-Gowan (TLG) – gardener, landscape architect, lecturer, writer, editor – rescues from obscurity the dramatis personae of a long-lost, almost unimaginable world. Subtitled Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries, the book reaches back to June 1663, evoking a by then ‘desolate and melancholy estate’ in Oxfordshire. It comes to a full stop in a ‘modern garden of Eden’ created by Mabel Barltrop (‘the messenger and daughter of God’) in the early-20th century. It’s quite a haul.

Each of the characters whom TLG considers has ‘approached gardening as a dynamic process. Their gardens lack finitude; each one is a work in progress, and the product of sustained, sometimes obsessive and frequently piecemeal activity.’ And they were built or animated, he says, ‘by a range of diverse materials, from bones to fossils, mummies to marsupials, minerals to fragments of the Rock of Gibraltarand the Matterhorn’.

Ah, the Matterhorn. ‘Eccentric lawyer’ Sir Frank Crisp, creator of the

David Wheeler is The Oldie’s gardening correspondent and editor of Hortus magazine

56 The Oldie May 2022

REUTERS

Victorian neo-Gothic Friar Park at Henley-on-Thames (home of Beatle George Harrison from 1970 until his death in 2001), built, at the far end of his four-acre Alpine garden, a miniature replica of the real Matterhorn. It was made from ‘thousands of tons of York gritstone. The peak “came from the top of the real Matterhorn”, and the slopes were mantled with “snow”, produced by pulverised Derbyshire spar.’

Not all of TLG’s eccentrics were so comfortably bankrolled or, indeed, intellectually inclined. Obscure yeoman Thomas Bland (1798-1865), described by one contemporary as being a ‘short & somewhat insignificant figure … [with] a great contempt for anything mean or upstart or pretentious’, caring ‘nothing for fame’, nonetheless became a local celebrity in his native Lake District.

His half-acre, so-called Italian Garden ‘was like no other in the county … richly adorned with sculpture, paintings and other works of art, primarily the “products of his [own] brush & chisel”.’

Bland stands in delightful contrast to Londoner Dr John Phené (1824-1912 – his name commemorated in the Phene Arms pub in Chelsea), a fellow connoisseur of statuary, who was rich enough to buy them.

Longstaffe-Gowan’s 21 eccentrics have been my unlikely companions these last few weeks. I’ve not bidden them farewell yet. Nor will I in a hurry – so rich are their details, so compelling their stories, that each and every one must be revisited to glean missed snippets of sometimes ridiculous but always enthralling yarns.

Beautifully designed and with an array of unfamiliar images which mightily augment these short biographies, English Garden Eccentrics is simply unputdownable. It also revealed me – book in one hand, trowel in the other – as someone displaying his own new and somewhat worrying eccentricity.

Boris Johnson and Melina Mercouri at the Oxford Union, 1986

Oxford revisited HARRY MOUNT Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK

By Simon Kuper Profile Books £16.99 It is extraordinary that of the 15 postwar Prime Ministers, 11 went to Oxford. The other four didn’t go to university at all (Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and John Major) or went to Edinburgh (Gordon Brown).

A gripping book would explain this phenomenon. Chums, by Oxford graduate and FT columnist Simon Kuper, is not that book.

Instead, it’s a sloppily argued, unconvincing polemic about how Oxford shapes modern Britain through its prominent politician graduates.

They include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak. From Labour, they include Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and the Miliband brothers.

Of the many contradictions in this book, the fundamental one is that hardly any of this group were actual chums at Oxford.

They were rarely in the same year. At Oxford, Boris Johnson barely knew David Cameron, two years his junior. Neither of them overlapped with George Osborne, five years younger than Cameron.

So the idea that a network of friends plotted world domination at Oxford University just doesn’t hold true. Nor did the infamous Bullingdon Club play any part in any putative political plot, even though its blue bow tie dominates the book’s front cover. Of those politicians listed above, only three of them were in the club: Johnson, Cameron and Osborne.

Kuper claims that Oxford ‘is an independent variable, shaping British

power’ – because this group of politicians supposedly debated with one other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections and attended the same balls and black-tie dinners.

With a few exceptions – Michael Gove did overlap with Boris Johnson at the Oxford Union, but he’s three years younger – this just isn’t true. What happened was that they all met later on when working together in politics at the same time, despite having been at Oxford at different times.

Kuper reverse engineers the political success of a few prominent Oxford graduates and tries to trace it back to some sort of shady combination of the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group, formed in their youth.

To make this false connection, Kuper has to play around with dates. He claims Jacob Rees-Mogg was a contemporary of the journalist Owen Matthews when they were at prep school together. In fact, they were two years apart – a yawning gulf at that age.

Kuper gives an elaborate description of the rituals of the Oxford Union debating society, which consciously apes Parliament.

He argues that membership of the Union gave Oxford graduates a dress rehearsal for power. Yes, Boris Johnson was President of the Union, but Cameron and Osborne barely went near the place. Kuper wrongly calls Osborne an ‘ambitious student Tory’ – which he wasn’t (I was a contemporary of his at Magdalen College). Again, one of Kuper’s theories collapses.

Kuper correctly attacks the limited work demands for arts undergraduates at Oxford – an essay or two a week for 24 weeks a year, for only three or four years. (Still, that’s more than at most British universities.) But he then goes on to say this sparse handful of essays constitutes a brilliant training in the art of bluffing your way through politics without knowing very much.

Book of books CHARLOTTE METCALF Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World

By John Walsh Constable £25

INTERFOTO / PETER JORDAN / HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP / LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS / ALAMY

‘One day, son, all this will have to be sold to pay my care-home fees’

And then, in his final contradiction, Kuper says these lightweight politicians have been produced by a lethal, competitive system which produces great pressure on Oxford candidates and leads to a tiny elite getting into the university. He can’t have it both ways: suggest all these prominent figures are useless and lazy – and yet at the same time say they are sifted into an intellectually exclusive group.

In a crazy conclusion, Kuper recommends that Oxford get rid of its rigorous entry requirements to prevent this elite from forming.

In all these clashing arguments, one line in the book does stand out as spot-on. It’s said by Daniel Hannan, the former MEP who was instrumental in the Brexit campaign (and, I must admit, is a chum of mine). Kuper asked him why so many of today’s politicians had been at Oxford.

Hannan said, ‘It’s been true for ever, right? I guess people who were very interested in politics were more likely to apply to Oxford, because they think there’s more going on here.’

That explains, too, why Cambridge hasn’t produced a Prime Minister since Stanley Baldwin almost a century ago.

But it has produced many more great mathematicians and scientists for decades for the same self-fulfilling reason – Cambridge has a reputation for science in the way Oxford has a reputation for arts (as well as budding politicians).

Nor does Kuper address the tens of thousands of Oxford graduates who live blameless professional lives without running – or ruining – the country. Or indeed those Oxford graduates who go off the rails, hit the drink and drugs and die tragically early.

The fact that a handful of graduates go on to high office seems a strange basis for attacking a great university.

Reading John Walsh’s adventures in the literary world of the 1980s is like donning a pair of spectacles that bring blurred memories into sudden, sharp focus.

Circus of Dreams describes the towering tsunami of creative energy and talent that engulfed and transformed the fusty literary world for ever.

In his role as aspiring and then actual literary editor, Walsh worked for publishers and newspapermen who became household names, such as Lord Weidenfeld, Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil. There is hardly a literary giant he did not meet, from Martin and Kingsley Amis to Anthony Burgess and Seamus Heaney.

My own first post-university job was as a happy dogsbody for Virago Press under Carmen Callil, whom Walsh describes as a ‘menacing nanny’. Back then, the literary world was small enough for us all to brush shoulders with people who went on to have glittering careers, such as Tina Brown, Nigella Lawson and Tim Waterstone of his eponymous bookshops.

Like Walsh, many of us devoured Money, The Comfort of Strangers, Restoration, The Buddha of Suburbia, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The World According to Garp. We remember being shocked by the sex and violence in The White Hotel and can still quote the first line of Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali

announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’

Walsh describes people, events and places with such accuracy that he will transport oldies back to the era, allowing them to reappraise and appreciate it afresh. His memory – even if dependent on a diary – is prodigious, and his anecdotes polished till they sparkle.

Standing together at a party, Sebastian Faulks and Walsh watch the ‘regal dominatrix’ agent Pat Kavanagh upbraid her husband, Julian Barnes, for ‘lingering too long in the hall’ with the ‘serial bewitcher of men’ Polly Samson.

Sebastian turns to Walsh and says, ‘Flaubert’s Polly…’, referring to Barnes’s best-selling novel Flaubert’s Parrot.

Another time, Walsh gleefully recounts the story of Arthur Miller’s being invited by Peter Florence to attend his new festival at Hay, whereupon the great American playwright replies, ‘Hay-on-Wye? What is that – some kinda sandwich?’

With a successful literary career of his own under his belt, Walsh demonstrates a reckless disregard for polite or flattering characterisation, in favour of visual and deliciously mischievous satire, sometimes worthy of a contemporary Hogarth. He likens the agent Ed Victor to an ‘Old Testament squash player’ and describes Kingsley Amis (whom he found to be a ‘charming and beguiling chap’) as ‘the pop-eyed, misogynistic, cryptofascist of legend’.

Meeting Rupert Murdoch, Walsh finds him ‘an unprepossessing little figure for a global media Titan. His face was always moving: making little grimaces, awkward little smiles, little moues of concern, eye-narrowings, eyebrow-raisings.’

I savoured this book for its swashbuckling name-dropping.

Clockwise from top left: Anthony Burgess in 1986, Kingsley Amis in 1989, Douglas Adams in 1987, Arthur Miller in 1980

The Oldie May 2022 57

But if the reader finds Walsh to be a bit of a show-off, the relish and humour with which Walsh directs his ruthless gaze on his own shortcomings and social gaffes will make you chuckle and like him simultaneously.

Early in his career, while on probation at Gollancz, he is summoned for a dressing-down by his chairman, who says, ‘The point is, Mr Walsh, this is a sleeves-rolled-up working environment.

You are here not to socialise but to get work done. There is plenty of time after work for informality.’

Another time, when he mentions to Sally Emerson, editor of Books and Bookmen, ‘in a callow, braggartish way’ that he’s recently had dinner with Douglas Adams, Sally merely nods sweetly at Walsh. With disarming, self-deprecating irony, Walsh writes, ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to steal my thunder by mentioning that she’d been having a raging affair with Douglas for some months.’

Far beyond being a vehicle for delightful gossip and anecdotes, this book is a thought-provoking account of a decade of exuberance in which the English novel found new confidence and noisily asserted itself on the international stage.

‘In the fiction of the 1980s, the English language was cleansed of indolence, fog and banality,’ Walsh writes. ‘In their place came hyperactivity, attack, clarity, surging narrative’ – qualities to be found in this enormously enjoyable book.

Circus of Dreams made me happy to be an oldie. We were lucky enough to experience all the messy, noisy, spontaneous, jostling, raucous fun of office life. That was before the joyless practice of communicating via screen and electronic media drove us apart into today’s blander, drearier, lonelier working world.

‘So tell me a little bit about yourself.

A very little bit’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Russia invades again FRANCES WILSON Bad Relations

By Cressida Connolly Viking £14.99 There are many remarkable things about Cressida Connolly’s third novel, whose subject is historical recurrence, and the most striking is the timing of its publication.

How could Connolly have known, as she imagined the impact of the Crimean War on several generations of the same family, that the book would appear just as the Russians were hellbent on destroying Ukraine?

Bad Relations, which divides into three parts, begins on the battlefields of Sevastopol where, in the spring of 1855, William Gale is cutting locks of auburn hair from the head of his brother, Algernon, whose dead body is still warm.

Their mother and sister, and Algie’s fiancée, can wear the hair close to their hearts, behind a brooch or in a locket.

While Algernon, a dreamy, slow and serious boy who had liked drawing, was not equipped for military life, when William returns to his wife, Alice, he will be one of the first recipients of the Victoria Cross. By then, however, he will be a changed man – because war does that to people. The distinguished hero proves himself to be a singularly undistinguished husband.

At home with the Gales, Connolly catches the weight of relationships in which men cannot access their emotions and women cannot air their views on anything. ‘Since her husband had been away at war, Alice had often found herself obliged to listen to men’s opinions about the Russian campaign; it was not the exception but the general rule that they knew less about it than herself; yet decorum had it that she should not say so.’

After the age of 40, Alice realises, men would talk to her as if she ‘were a wall’.

Unsettled by his wife’s opinions, William is doing so already and, after their marriage unravels like a row of knitting, he takes advantage of the Matrimonial Causes Act to get himself divorced. Alice and her young son start again in Australia, and William marries a poisonous war widow called Sarah.

Following his two lines of descendants, Connolly explores what is passed down a family line, along with DNA, medals and mourning brooches.

Bad blood, we can be sure, will out.

In Connolly’s fiction, families are rarely safe places to be. There is a peculiar savagery in the 20th-century progeny of William and Sarah Gale, whom we meet in the novel’s second part. The setting is now Cornwall in the summer of 1977, where Stephen, an art-school dropout from Melbourne, comes to stay with his cousins, Celia and Nick Clarke, on their idyllic farm.

Celia, current custodian of the treasured VC, hails from Sarah, while Stephen is descended from Alice.

Stephen is also the incarnation of Algernon: auburn, art-loving, illequipped for what comes his way.

Out of his depth in upper-crust Englishness, Stephen falls in love with one of the Clarke daughters and sleeps with the other. When a fox gets into the hen coop, he has a foreboding. What happens to him that summer is hellish and hard to bear: it’s a long time since I cried over a character in a book.

The book’s final section begins in 2015 and moves between Cornwall, where the Clarke sisters are dividing the spoils after their mother’s death, and Melbourne, where Hazel, Stephen’s sister, becomes interested in the family tree and tries to piece together the threads of the last two centuries.

The fate of the VC, which has found its way to Australia, determines the narrative: the medal measures the nobility of everyone who handles it.

The plot is neat, tight and unexpected but the novel’s deep satisfaction comes from Connolly’s total immersion in historical atmosphere and profound understanding of human pain.

Her previous novel, After the Party, is about 1930s fascism infiltrating, unawares, a family of sisters. In Bad Relations, Connolly weighs up the cruelty of a Victorian marriage against the barbarism of seventies Bohemia.

By resting her eye on what is not seen by the characters, and drawing our attention to the things they do not hear, she describes domestic worlds whose inhabitants are sleepwalkers.

We similarly sleepwalk through history, Connolly suggests. In the final pages, Stephen’s younger sister, Hazel, visits her Cornish cousins and reflects on the ironies of the Crimean War. ‘It’s funny to think that all these men went out to fight the Russian invasion.

Gave their lives, a lot of them. And now the Russians have got it, after all. There didn’t seem to be a whisper from the international community when they invaded, this time.’

The Oldie May 2022 59

History

Why isn’t there a Historian Laureate?

How Alfred the Great got the best out of his court chronicler david horspool

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has been greeted with a steady thud of books by familiar names: Robert Hardman; Andrew Morton; Joanna Lumley.

Historians have already published interim reports on the Queen – the volume of the Penguin Monarchs series on Elizabeth II has been out for seven years. Doubtless others are readying final verdicts for the dreaded end of the longest reign in British history.

Naturally, we have no idea what the Queen thinks about any of these published opinions, any more than we know what she thinks about her prime ministers (well, you can’t imagine she’s a great fan of Andrew Morton, but we don’t know).

If, as is often reported, the recipients of the Order of Merit are the nearest we can get to a sign of personal royal preferences, then historians as a breed aren’t particularly high on her list. Since the death of the military historian Sir Michael Howard, only Neil MacGregor, formerly of the British Museum, remains as a representative of the profession.

When the Queen came to the throne, the venerable G M Trevelyan was still a member of the Order, along with H A L Fisher. Her first award to a historian went to the now rarely remembered G P Gooch, an authority on the First World War and former Liberal politician. One can’t imagine Her Majesty curling up with his Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy.

There is more of a hint of personal input in the 1960s selections of Veronica Wedgwood, gripping chronicler of the English Civil War and Cromwell; and the great New Zealand biographer of Captain Cook, John Beaglehole.

Another Kiwi, Ronald Syme, was the leading ancient historian of his time and the Reverend Owen Chadwick was a great historian of Christianity, which also sounds like something the Queen might have wanted to read or talk about.

chroniclers – monks on These respectable men abbey stools, gleaning (and this woman) are not news from passing in any sense ‘court strangers occasionally, historians’. They don’t and digressing at produce equivalents of length on disputed the behind-the-scenes elections of a new revelations of former abbot or unusual presidents and prime weather patterns – isn’t ministers. Political term wholly inaccurate. limits make such an But there were some who assignment feasible. The got a bit closer to the seat of Queen spans historical periods Alfred the Great: lured power. Probably the best of – not mere decades.

Asser with incense them was the polymath The fact that there is no Matthew Paris. He ventured historian version of the Poet Laureate, Astronomer Royal or Master of from his monastery at St Albans to Westminster to witness Henry III the Queen’s History, to place alongside dedicating a vial of Holy Blood at the her Pictures and Music maestri, might shrine of Edward the Confessor. There he imply the role of court historian is records that the king noticed him in the ‘unEnglish’. Alexander the Great crowd and called out to him to write a full lamented that, unlike Achilles, he had no Homer, though he hardly made potential account of proceedings. Henry and Matthew met several times, though that candidates comfortable by having his didn’t stop Matthew from being frank own court historian, Callisthenes, about royal inadequacies. starved in prison. Such stories make the He may not have meant the long form role sound like a more classical – or of his chronicle to be disseminated, as he oriental – one: Saladin had a life written wrote little reminders in the margins of by a fellow Kurdish courtier. bits to expunge ‘quia offendiculum’ In fact, the precedent for a chronicler – ‘because it [was] a cause of offence’. at an English court is very ancient. The The arrival of the Tudors saw first secular biography (ie, not of a saint) Henry VII appoint the nearest thing we’ve in England is a Life of Alfred the Great, had to a court historian, in Bernard André, written by a Welsh bishop, Asser, whom a Frenchman who’d probably arrived Alfred invited to his court. Asser doesn’t with him when he invaded. But his Latin say Alfred commissioned the work.

Still, if the king knew he was writing it, life of the king hasn’t been translated. If anyone remembers a historian of this he must have hoped the various period, it is the Italian Polydore Vergil, appointments and ‘a quantity of incense whom Shakespeare had read. weighing as much as a stout man’ he It would be easy to argue that, later offered Asser would ensure a favourable on, historians valued their independence outcome. The result, while little short of too much to apply for the role. But there hagiography, is also peculiarly revealing – for example, about the king’s battle with isn’t an official royal appointment someone isn’t willing to fill. It’s more piles. It’s hard to cast it as an ‘official’ biography, but most later historians have likely that the monarchs decided they could do without these glorified truthbeen grateful for the light it casts on the tellers, alternately flattering and passing warrior scholar king’s world. judgement on them.

The popular picture of later medieval The Oldie May 2022 61

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Ukraine’s terms of engagement

TOM PLANT

A war that seems as illogical as it is brutal invites attempts at explanation. Perhaps some of the words and phrases associated with Vladimir Putin’s merciless belligerence in Ukraine may prove more revealing than his absurd pretexts.

The name Ukraine itself tells us something. In Russian, it means ‘on the border’, and hence also ‘territory’, usually referring to vast expanses of the Russian empire. Despite Ukraine’s long history – the name goes back to the 12th century – Russian rulers have never regarded it as an independent entity.

The rest of the world was, until recently, scarcely more obliging. It was often known as ‘the Ukraine’, which many Ukrainians resented, saying it put them in the company of ex-colonies such as the Argentine and the Sudan, which have now sloughed off the definite article.

But non-Ukrainians paid little attention.

Even when the Soviet Union broke up and Ukraine asserted its independence, outsiders failed to appreciate the strength of Ukrainian national feeling.

I was among them. The Economist, for which I worked at the time, had a policy of calling countries by the names they themselves chose, but the rule wasn’t rigid for towns or other places. From Burma to Zimbabwe, names were being changed. Should we start calling Corunna La Coruña to please Castilian Spaniards?

Or should we go for A Coruña, as Galician nationalists wanted?

Theatre Last week, I went to the theatre.

The experience was everything you’d expect: actors stomping about the stage, gesticulating wildly, assuming exaggerated facial expressions, talking in unnaturally loud voices with flecks of spittle flying from their mouths, uttering unnatural sentences all-tooobviously intended to

When emails started arriving from importunate Ukrainians asking us to change Kiev to Kyiv and Lvov to Lviv, the requests seemed to be orchestrated, possibly by a pressure group. It’s now clear they were a true reflection of public opinion. Putin’s belief that the Ukrainians were happy to be mute occupants of a Russian buffer zone was utterly wrong.

So was his belief that other countries would let him do as he wished.

Similar misapprehensions have preceded at least five other wars in less than a century, including both world wars, the Korean war, the Falklands war and the Gulf war. In that respect, the Ukrainian war is not so unusual. Nor is Putin’s liking for euphemisms: ‘special military operation’ prompts memories of the coy ‘troop deployment’ adopted by America’s Congress to describe a war in Vietnam that lasted at least 12 years and involved over half a million American soldiers.

Also familiar are some of the terms reappearing this year. ‘Divide and rule’ and ‘appeasement’ have been mentioned.

Both, along with ‘safe havens’, are now terms of shame. ‘Humanitarian’ carries only good connotations, but until fairly recently was often used contemptuously.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary cites ‘the nonsense of humanitarian sentimentalists’ (1897). Now it is admired.

‘Sanctions’, too, are constantly, and favourably, invoked. Almost always an unsatisfactory weapon of war, they are

denote internal conflict or character development, occasionally making lame jokes greeted by arch laughter from the audience.

I watched the whole embarrassing spectacle in discomfort, jammed up in a narrow seat with wooden arms. There was so little room that the entire row had to stand when anyone passed.

The ordeal was relieved by a 15-minute interval, spent in a queue for a £25 gin-andtonic. It’s already set you back a hundred quid just to be there. And, of course, the play was staged at a time when it’s too early to eat before and too late to eat afterwards.

There are some things I like

certainly an unsatisfactory word. The trouble is that ‘sanction’ can mean either ‘punish’ or the opposite – ‘authorise or allow’.

Memorable new expressions are rare.

We have learnt about ‘petal’ or ‘butterfly’ mines, ‘OSINT’ (open-source intelligence) and ‘false-flag activities’, in which the blame appears to lie with the victim, not the perpetrator. But that term dates back to the 16th century. Siloviki goes back only 30 years. It is applied to Russia’s ‘securocrats’, the sinister members of the security services who play an ever bigger role in running the country. Germany’s contribution to the vocabulary of the times is Zeitenwende, the ‘turning-point’ in its foreign policy marked by the abandonment of 75 years of pacifism.

America has provided ‘off ramp’, a term for a ‘diplomatic ladder made available to allow compromise without humiliation’.

None of this, however, explains Putin’s decision to go to war. Perhaps the answer can be found in ‘Eurasianism’, a theory that puts Russia at the centre of a continent-wide polity encompassing not only east Europeans but Turks, Slavs, Mongols and other Asians. Promoters of this idea speak of ‘ethnogenesis’, a concept in which a single ethnic group could overcome other groups and establish a world empire. Naturally, the Russians, ‘imperial people’, would be the people to run it.

Or perhaps Putin wants to conquer Ukraine just because it is there.

about the theatre. I like the sets. And the lighting. If there’s a sword fight, that’s a plus.

I can tolerate pantomimes – they don’t pretend to be anything but a frivolity.

And I can watch Shakespeare. The artificiality

SMALL DELIGHTS Discovering Angel Delight is still on sale, having thought it had been ‘retired’.

ELLIANNE MUMFORD, STEVENAGE, HERTS Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

of the language makes the artificiality of the whole performance seem less grating. Even then, though, I’d rather read Shakespeare, sitting in an armchair, enjoying the play at my own pace, looking up words in the glossary if I need to.

It’s taken decades to admit that I hate the theatre. Now I’ve admitted it, I feel a great sense of relief. I don’t mind if people think I’m a philistine.

And I don’t mind if others persist in enjoying theatregoing. If it floats your boat, fill your boots.

But, for me, every evening I spend not going to the theatre is an evening well spent.

BRANDON ROBSHAW The Oldie April 2022 63

Arts

BEN BLACKALL / FOCUS FEATURES LLC

FILM HARRY MOUNT DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA (PG) When Are You Being Served? was turned into a film in 1977, the cast decamped to the downmarket Spanish resort of Costa Plonka. As Roger Lewis points out on page 15, the comedy didn’t quite survive the journey to the big screen – as it didn’t in the films of Porridge and Morecambe and Wise.

For the second Downton Abbey film, the cast descends on the much posher Villa des Colombes on the French Riviera in the late 1920s. In one of the movie’s many mini-plots, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith, always the best actress in Downton, injecting even the tiniest gesture with knowing, comic grace) has unexpectedly inherited the villa from a French friend of her youth.

Why? Did she have a long-ago affair with him? And is Lord Grantham (a buff Hugh Bonneville) the illegitimate product of the union?

At the same time, another big plot is being swiftly constructed back at Downton. To pay for the house’s leaky roof, the Crawleys have allowed a silent movie to be filmed at the Abbey. Cue farcical scenes as the Crawleys and their servants blunder onto the set mid-shot and end up appearing in the rushes.

Julian Fellowes sets two other hares running on the silent film set. Dominic West plays Guy Dexter, a charming, ageing silent-movie star who dreads the arrival of talkies – and has been keeping his homosexuality quiet. His co-star Myrna Dalgleish (a roguish comic turn by Laura Haddock) is even more terrified by the talkies: she has the looks of an angel with the voice of an East End docker.

It’s this cobweb of mini-plots that keeps the film – like the TV series – 64 The Oldie May 2022

Downton Abbaye-sur-Riviera: the Crawleys visit the Villa des Colombes

whirring along. Despite being two hours long, it just zips by. Downton Abbey – unlike Are You Being Served? in Costa Plonka – can flourish in foreign parts, thanks to Fellowes’s constant supply of plots. And the upstairs-downstairs dynamic works happily in any country.

We are now so familiar with the cast – upstairs and downstairs – that we get the warm glow of recognition on seeing them again, wherever they are. What’s more, Fellowes doesn’t have to waste time with character explanation because we all know who they are already.

We’ve also got used to the creakier actors delivering some pretty ponderous lines. Good old Mr Carson the butler (Jim Carter) gets to huff and puff in his stagy, music-hall way.

Carson can rage about the French: ‘They better be warned: the British are coming.’ And he gets to be rude about film stars: ‘This is absurd. Actors where the King of England once sat!’

But even the ropy bits of Downton are strangely comforting, particularly the historical-plot-exposition parts. When they get to the South of France, Lord Grantham first explains that the area has been fashionable ever since Lord Brougham, Lord High Chancellor, visited in the 1830s. And now his daughter Lady

Edith (Laura Carmichael) is muscling in on the historical-exposition act, too.

She goes on to explain how people are now flooding to the South of France, not least thanks to a fashionable young American writer called F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda.

It’s easy to mock Downton Abbey. But it’s also easy to see why it’s so successful.

Fellowes sets all these plots up – and quickly resolves them, practically always happily – in a way that keeps you constantly engaged and never bored.

In 1961, Evelyn Waugh said of P G Wodehouse, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.

He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

Fellowes isn’t in Wodehouse’s league – nor would he claim to be. But he pulls off the same trick – of allowing us to escape into a more delightful world. This film makes for triple escapism: not only are you transported to Downton, but you are also taken to the South of France and the early days of Hollywood.

In a world of dark, grim, plot-free, self-indulgent films, a trip to Downton is a quickfire blast of sunny innocence under a clear blue, Mediterranean sky.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK BARRY HUMPHRIES: THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK Touring nationwide ‘What’s the audience like?’ hisses Barry Humphries, in a stage whisper, from the wings. ‘Old,’ says his unseen associate.

‘You mean mature,’ says Humphries.

The audience at the Nottingham Playhouse was indeed – how shall I put it – well seasoned, but compared with Humphries most of this crowd were positively youthful. The grand old man of Anglo-Australian stage and screen is 88, and even though he’s incredibly sprightly for such a grand old age, he’d be the last to pretend the years haven’t left their mark.

Humphries delivers much of this stand-up show sitting down (‘Getting out of a chair isn’t as easy as it used to be’) and his delivery is a lot more measured than it once was. Yet the stage presence and comic timing are still there, and so is the incisive wit. After all these years, he still knows how to work a room. ‘I’m approaching 60 – from the wrong direction,’ he says, and we all howl, relieved and delighted to learn that he’s still got it.

His new show, The Man Behind the Mask, opened this week and tours the country until June. In the programme he promises to tell his own story – how it all began. ‘I certainly talked about some of my adventures and theatrical experiences in countless interviews, but I always wore a mask,’ he writes. ‘I invented a character called “Barry Humphries” and he did those interviews. Tonight you’ll see me. Probably.’

So do we? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, this is an intimate, emotive performance, full of personal revelations.

On the other hand, there’s still a lot of greenroom gloss – gags and anecdotes that wouldn’t look out of place in an after-dinner speech or delivered from a chat-show sofa. The audience loved the broader jokes, but for me the most engrossing elements were the ones with the fewest laughs.

He begins with his bourgeois upbringing in 1940s Melbourne. His father was a successful builder, constructing smart suburban villas for Melbourne’s aspiring middle classes.

With a novelistic eye for detail, Humphries revels in the absurdities of this Antipodean Metroland, an ersatz Home Counties transported to a far-flung corner of South-East Asia.

Barry takes a bow: at 88, he is a great entertainer with a great intellect

Humphries’s portrait of his mother has a depth and candour that are missing from his showbiz stories. He calls her ‘a mistress of the vocabulary of discouragement’, but even though their relationship was strained it’s clear they loved each other, and it’s this affection that makes his reminiscences so funny.

Her ‘genteel bigotry’ was born of social insecurity, a rich source of comedy.

Although he denied it while she was alive, to save her feelings, he now admits she was the initial inspiration for Dame Edna Everage.

As in all theatrical memoirs, the early failures are far more entertaining and illuminating than the later triumphs.

As Humphries observes, to become a celebrity is to become a sort of ghost.

In the first half, the big screen is used to good effect to show snapshots and home movies from his early days Down Under. In the second half, it’s used to show clips from Dame Edna’s TV shows.

I felt this was a bit of a swizz (especially now all this stuff is just a few clicks away on YouTube) but everyone else seemed to love it.

Yet just as I was about to write off the second half as an extended curtain call, he delivered one of the best and bravest monologues I’ve ever seen. It was about his descent into alcoholism and his eventual recovery, and it was honest, heartfelt and intensely moving.

‘There is no alcoholic more grandiose than one with no money or prospects,’ he concluded. There was scarcely a laugh in it, but it got a huge round of applause.

I would have loved to see more of this kind of thing, and a bit less step-pausegag, but maybe I’m in a minority. The audience lapped up the lighter stuff, and

when the time came for him to hand out the gladioli, Dame Edna’s familiar finale (‘I used to throw thousands of these,’ he said, ‘but this show has a small profit margin’), they gave him a standing ovation. It felt like an ovation for all the shows he’d ever done.

Barry Humphries is that rare thing, a great entertainer with a great intellect, an Antipodean Peter Ustinov, and we’re lucky to have him. Just think: if he’d made a success of his early roles as a straight actor in Australia, we might have never met Dame Edna Everage or Sir Les Patterson. And The Oldie’s finest, favourite columnist might never have washed up on our chilly shores.

Until 12th June. For tour dates visit www.manbehindthemask.co.uk

RADIO VALERIE GROVE How did a nice, talented, Jewish girl from Brooklyn get two Oscars and a Tony by the age of 27, without changing her name or getting her nose fixed or her teeth capped?

The obvious person to tell this story (Archive on 4) was Maureen Lipman, who has followed Barbra Streisand since she was an ambitious schoolgirl in Hull, and read about Streisand in her brother’s Time magazine: ‘The shtick, the chutzpah… I felt her power 6,000 miles away.’

The result was To Barbra, marking the diva’s 80th birthday. ‘No woman has ever cried more in any cinema than I did at The Way We Were,’ said Maureen of the 1973 film in which Streisand lost her Wasp, Robert Redford.

The Oldie May 2022 65

NETFLIX / THA

Lipman had fun with Hollywood moguls’ voices – ‘She’s very talented but, Gahd, is she ugly!’ – and analysing the Streisand appeal: ‘Knowing instinctively how to time a line’.

Omar Sharif’s first thought, when cast with her in Funny Girl, was ‘How terribly unattractive she is … and then, day by day, I began to think, how very attractive; and I began to be a little in love with her.’

In 1985, Streisand finally got her chance to direct – Yentl. The screenplay was by Jack Rosenthal, Lipman’s husband. So, one day, Lipman met her idol (‘lovely skin, smaller than I’d expected’). What did Lipman tell Streisand, when asked how she liked her new record, Memory? Oh dear.

‘Sometimes in your life,’ said Lipman, ‘and I’ve done it often, you make a move that could lead to the guillotine.’

Lipman ended up lying on the carpet in the Berkeley Hotel corridor, groaning.

Matthew Parris’s Great Lives is such dependably good value that it never gets a mention here – like In Our Time, it’s just part of the fabric of life. But, after my second stab at a Great Life (way back in 2005, I nominated Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts; more recently, I played the expert on the Puffin Club founder Kaye Webb, as her biographer), I went along to Maggs Bros. There the Biographers’ Club was presenting Matthew with a lifetime achievement award for services to biography.

He was interviewed by another Radio 4 hero, Evan Davis of PM. Two gentle voices who soothe and disarm. It made for a demure, gentlemanly event.

Also funny and insightful.

Matthew expressed mock alarm at the ‘lifetime’ bit, being only 72. Though he’s a superb memoirist (Chance Witness, published in 2003), he also admitted guilt: ‘Real biographers are distinguished by their knowledge. My whole job on Great Lives is really not to know anything about the subject.’

This is true: he asked me if Ronald Searle was ‘the one who did the little girls on little fat ponies’. (Er, no, Matthew – that’s Thelwell.)

As he wrote in his book Fracture (2020), he has a theory that a majority of people who become ‘great’ have had to overcome childhood loss, penury, jeopardy and misery. Take ‘poor little Edward Lear: epileptic, gay, depressive, the 21st of his mother’s 22 children’.

And here’s another discovery. His producer Sarah Goodman invites an equal number of men and women to nominate subjects. And what do they find? Women choose both men and 66 The Oldie May 2022

women in equal measure, but men (surprise!) invariably choose men – with rare exceptions such as Michael Howard, who went for Elizabeth I. And, even rarer, Nick Danziger made an odd choice in 2007, of the fictional character Tintin.

Matthew could not resist pointing out that it was surely indisputable that Tintin was gay: ‘A callow, androgynous youth, with no women friends except an operatic diva, Bianca Castafiore – and he lives with an old sailor!’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON The theme of this month’s review is complicit wives, because television dramas can’t get enough of them.

What complex thoughts stir behind those geisha masks? Are these mysterious creatures martyrs or monsters, victims or villains?

There’s a Little Britain sketch where a Tory MP called Sir Norman Fry (David Walliams), wearing a canary-yellow pullover, stands at the gate of his mock-Tudor home.

In it, he explains to the assorted cameras that, at 3am, he found himself needing to use a public toilet, where he met Carlos and Eduardo, who invited him into their cubicle to discuss government policy. Unfortunately, he slipped on the floor and the three men fell into a position which the arresting officer informed him was known as a ‘spit roast’.

Throughout this fiasco, Sir Norman’s wife (Matt Lucas) is by his side, her face a study of gnomic impenetrability. We can be certain that Lady F won’t be leaving Sir Norman any time soon – why fix what’s not broken?

Anatomy of a Scandal (Netflix) is a lazy MeToo tale, in which people are forever rushing down staircases, colliding

in corridors and falling backwards in slo-mo through the air. James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), Britain’s ‘most fanciable MP’, has an affair with Olivia, his ravishing researcher (Naomi Scott).

‘It was nothing,’ James tells spouse Sophie (Sienna Miller), who’s not bad-looking herself. ‘It was just sex.’

Most of it took place in his office but their final encounter, which Olivia claims was not consensual, was in the lift. The story is appearing in the Mail and so, once Sophie has finished throwing up over her mobile phone, she needs to start looking inscrutable. This she does with aplomb, especially when listening to Olivia’s testimony in court.

We learn in a flashback that James and Sophie first locked eyes across a crowded room in Oxford during a round of ‘anal chugging’, a game involving a bare bum and a bottle. James and his best friend, Tom (now the Prime Minister), were in a dining club called the Libertines, which got them into no end of trouble.

Today, the Whitehouses’ home, which is indeed large and white with a gold plaque by the front door saying ‘Whitehouse’, has wallpaper to make Carrie Johnson swoon.

When we’re not chez Whitehouse, we’re in the Old Bailey, Oxford University, the Palace of Westminster or Lincoln’s Inn. There Olivia’s barrister (played by Michelle Dockery, aka Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary Crawley) is somehow always caught in the rain while, at the exact same time, in the selfsame city, the fragrant Sophie floats beneath a cloudless sky.

While Anatomy of a Scandal is predictable until it becomes preposterous, The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (ITV) is preposterous from the

Under siege: James (Rupert Friend) and Sophie (Sienna Miller), Anatomy of a Scandal

Ed McLachlan

start. Can this story really be true?

I kept checking the facts and, yes, this actually happened and could be happening again in a street near you.

Having run up £700,000 of debt, John Darwin, a Teesside prison officer (played by the superbly creepy Eddie Marsan), chooses to fake his own death rather than file for bankruptcy.

Leaving his empty canoe bobbing about on the North Atlantic, he sneaks home and hides for five years in the bedsit next door, which can be accessed from his wife’s wardrobe.

Life for John isn’t as hard as it might sound because he still has his internet porn and his conjugal rights at bedtime.

Oh, and his wife, Anne (Monica Dolan, who also played Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult), cooks all his meals, while keeping their two mourning sons at bay. Plus he goes for walks along the beach, hiding behind a beard and a bobble hat.

Following his instructions to the letter, Anne gets the insurance money, sells the house – a mausoleum straight out of Psycho – and joins her husband in Panama, where he’s spent another

£400,000 on land, before discovering he can’t be a resident because he is officially dead. In which case, he may as well give himself up to the police.

The mood board is composed of browns, greys and sludge – and that’s just Anne Darwin. Chris Lang, who wrote the script, has taken a punt on Anne: in his hands, this is a tale of coercion. The events are told from her point of view: ‘You can’t do this to our two beautiful boys,’ she bleats, while going along with it all the same. But watch her face: Monica Dolan is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE THE LITTLE RUSSIAN I confess I had forgotten the origin of the nickname of Tchaikovsky’s folksy and gamesome Second Symphony. It’s the shortest of his six symphonies, and the most Russian – so ‘The Little Russian’ makes sense.

It was his good friend Nikolay Kashkin who first used the name. ‘How I love your little Russian,’ he is said to have

exclaimed. ‘All those delightful Ukrainian folk tunes.’ This at a time, of course, when Ukraine was routinely referred to as ‘Little Russia’, a usage dating back to the 14th century, which gradually fell from favour after the 1917 Revolution.

Tchaikovsky loved ‘Little Russia’ but was not of it. He’d been born (in 1840) 600 miles north-east of Ukraine in the town of Votkinsk, where his father managed a large factory making cannons, bridges and ships’ anchors. Nowadays, it makes long-range ballistic missiles.

In his later years, Tchaikovsky settled in Klin on the Moscow end of the new Moscow-to-St-Petersburg railway. The last of his houses in this semi-rural retreat, the one in which he wrote the Sixth Symphony, has long been the principal Tchaikovsky archive and museum, though I guess none of us will be visiting it any time soon.

For 25 years, Tchaikovsky spent part of his summers – and parts of his winters too – on an estate, 200 miles south of Kiev, that was home to his beloved sister, Aleksandra, her wealthy landowning husband, Lev Davydov, and their seven children. He was 25 when he first visited the estate in 1865 and 50 at the time of his sister’s death in 1891 – by which time a certain Chekhovian melancholy had come to haunt both the place and the family.

Tchaikovsky was never a nationalist composer, nor a collector of folk songs.

Only in the finale of the Second Symphony does he follow Glinka and his fellow nationalists by treating a folk song – The Crane, a song much loved by the Davydov family butler – as the basis for a kaleidoscopically coloured moto perpetuo in the style of the Kamarinskaya, a famously quick-fire Russian dance.

If there’s a problem with the symphony, it’s that it’s tricky to bring off.

Ideally, you need both a Russian conductor and a Russian orchestra.

There’s a 1968 recording by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under the legendary and famously alcohol-fuelled Evgeny Svetlanov that still sounds newly minted 50 years on; or, more recent, an excellent Pentatone CD by the Russian National Orchestra conducted by Mikhail Pletnev. That includes the symphony’s first movement in its original form, as well as in Tchaikovsky’s more familiar cut-down version, which Prokofiev loved to excoriate.

Prokofiev himself was Ukrainian, born in 1891 in a village east of Donetsk, though the region held only childhood memories for him.

By the age of 13, he was a student The Oldie May 2022 67

We’re lucky to have it. As Cherkassky told The Oldie back in 1993, it was as an over-inquisitive, but happily rather short, nine-year-old in Odessa in 1917 that he’d avoided death by millimetres when a stray bullet from the street fighting below the family apartment grazed his scalp and embedded itself in the wall behind.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON WHOSE TUNE IS IT ANYWAY?

TAYFUN SALCI / ZUMA PRESS WIRE

Shura Cherkassky aged 14 with his father and mother, November 1923

at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. He left Russia in 1917 with permission to return, which he did for the first time, somewhat apprehensively, in 1927 while living in France.

During the visit, he travelled south to give concerts in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. Seeing Kiev again, he was reminded how beautiful the city was, despite the damage inflicted on it during the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath.

Kharkov and Odessa were less well favoured. Odessa’s Hotel Bristol, now the Red Hotel, was decidedly shabby. The city’s trees had been cut down for firewood. And most of the grand villas remained very much as the Bolshevik artillery had left them.

There were the human scars, too. The sister of Prokofiev’s young amanuensis György Popa-Gorchakov had tried to flee Bolshevik-controlled Moldova by swimming the River Prut to claim asylum in Romania. Seized by the Bolsheviks, she was taken to Odessa, where, now barely speaking, she was studying medicine in what Prokofiev in his diary calls a state of ‘almost feral distrustfulness’.

We can’t know what losses Odessa and its famous Jewish community suffered in those years, though we do have the names of some of the city’s more celebrated musical survivors, all children at the time. Emil Gilels, Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter and the last of the old-school conjurors of keyboard magic, Shura Cherkassky.

Quite a list.

I’ve just played a much-treasured LP which preserves a recital that Cherkassky gave in London in 1975. It ends with as heart-easingly beautiful a performance of a Schubert Piano Sonata – the A major, D664 – as you’re likely to hear.

68 The Oldie May 2022

Whenever Ed Sheeran’s name is mentioned, I feel a tug of guilt, as I’m sure anyone who describes themselves as a ‘creative/content-provider’ does.

As you will recall, the ginger-nutted goblin has just won a copyright case in the High Court over his 2017 hit Shape of You. The case was about a grime artist’s claims that the hook of Sheeran’s track was strikingly similar to the hook refrain of his 2015 song Oh Why. Why, oh why my guilt? Well, m’lud.

I’ve written probably millions of words.

Not all of them are mine.

Like many, I am a light-fingered snapper-up of unconsidered trifles I feel I can incorporate into the soufflé of my own oeuvre.

For example. I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme back in 2008 about the effects of the financial crash on Ireland, and the phrase ‘haves and have-yachts’ dropped from the lips of one of the Irishmen interviewed.

‘I’ll have that,’ I thought, as I was planning a novel written from the

perspective of a jobbing journalist who lives in trendy Notting Hill but isn’t married to a hedgie manager/oligarch/ media mogul and is poorer by many noughts than her neighbours – ie me.

My coinage was hailed as rare genius, and I never admitted I hadn’t invented it myself. Even now, I feel I should pay royalties to the man from West Cork I stole it from.

Luckily I’d heard it on the radio – so I got away with it. Ed Sheeran wasn’t the first artist – nor will he be the last – to fight a plagiarism lawsuit. They are now plaguing the industry. The locus classicus remains George Harrison, who had to stump up half a million in 1987 to the Chiffons for copyright infringement of their 1963 hit He’s So Fine, inspiration for his later ditty My Sweet Lord.

Artists are being sued all over the shop. Forensic musicologists are working eight days a week to ascertain whether one rock’n’roller has copied another.

Dua Lipa is fighting off not one but two claims that her hit Levitating is substantially similar (the test of plagiarism) to other songs.

To my mind, all these lawsuits miss the point. As a long piece about it on Slate.com points out (see how careful I am to attribute?), when it comes to music it’s all about the vibe – so hard to define or isolate. It’s almost impossible to prove whether any similarity is copying or coincidence.

I’m not prone to treacly sentiment, but surely the test of a pop song is not whether a few bars of the score look the same on the page. It’s how it makes you feel.

Ed Sheeran arrives to face the music at London’s High Court, March 2022

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU WALTER SICKERT Tate Britain, 28th April to 18th September Let me begin by getting the nonsense out of the way. Walter Sickert was interested in the Camden Town murder and claimed to have been told the identity of Jack the Ripper, but he was no more the Ripper than Patricia Cornwell, who has made a long career writing about violent death, is the Boston Strangler.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)

was the German-born son and grandson of Danish artists, and had English and Irish maternal ancestry. He was a pupil of and assistant to Whistler, protégé and champion of Degas, and lover of the grimier areas of London, as well as Venice and Dieppe where he spent much time. In effect, he was a cosmopolitan artist with a streak of Yorkshire grit in the mix.

A witty and perceptive critic, he had wide-ranging sympathies. He was not just the champion of Continental impressionists and modernists. He admired good work soundly based on draughtsmanship – ‘Line is the language of design’ – wherever he found it. He

SHEFFIELD MUSEUMS TRUST / LEEDS ART GALLERY / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES / FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE

Walter Sickert Left: The Trapeze (1920). Below: L’Hôtel Royal, Dieppe (1894).

Below right: Self-portrait (c 1896)

praised Victorian narrative painters and Birket Foster’s well-drawn peasant children as well as Van Gogh and Wyndham Lewis. For this reason, like Whistler and Degas, he revered Charles Keene as the greatest English artist of the 19th century.

Sickert’s own influence in encouraging the British to follow Continental developments was as great as that of Roger Fry (although as critics they were not invariably kind to each other). His teaching was invaluable to the following generation.

For a while, his late work, often derived from press photographs, was regarded as a decline. It is now seen as his most forward-looking, prefiguring as it does the practice of Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter.

I remember being strongly impressed by the Hayward Gallery show of late work in 1981-82, which was a manageable size. Given the Tate tendency to immenseness, this show of over 150 works – ‘the biggest London retrospective in 30 years’ – is a little worrying.

However, that is small-scale compared with the recent exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, boasting 300 paintings and drawings together with work by Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore.

The laudable aim here is to illuminate all sides of his career: paintings and etchings, theatres and music halls, portraits and nudes, and the light and atmosphere of Dieppe and Venice. It is to be hoped that the organisers live up to another Sickert dictum: ‘Nothing is wasted and nothing can be spared.’

Fittingly, it is a collaboration between the Tate and the Petit Palais, and it will go on to Paris from October until next January.

The Oldie May 2022 69

Pursuits while the rich assortment of other inhabitants (including ash, elder, holly, hawthorn, beech and – yes – brambles) fight it out among themselves for the perfect lodging – sun or shade, dry or moist. Thankfully, the primroses are all I’m a gardener – not a botanist. of a proper, uniform, ‘primrose’ colour, I can, however, identify numerous devoid of such impure mutants that wildflowers in the steep, ferny banks of regrettably yield wishy-washy pink or our long drive. Just as we altered the mauve flowers. clocks, I made a mental checklist of the It would be impossible to say whether gems I could name. our two native daffodils (the Tenby daff, Surprisingly (because they began Narcissus obvallaris, and the Lent lily, flowering in January), we still had N pseudonarcissus) have occurred snowdrops in deep shade at the end of naturally or been raised from bought March, accompanied by a galaxy of bulbs. Whichever, they are indispensable celandines (‘little suns at winter’s end’), and seed around agreeably, siting whose shiny yellow petals reflect the themselves impeccably. great orb’s rays like polished brass.

Violets (Viola riviniana – the dog My two heavyweight wildflower violet) are never more at home than in references are Geoffrey Grigson’s The deciduous woods and Englishman’s Flora of 1955 and hedgerows and unmanicured Richard Mabey’s 1996 Flora churchyards and along Britannica, both uncomfortably country lanes. Sadly heavy for the stroller’s knapsack. unscented (that’s the job of But, open on the kitchen close relative V odorata), it table, they divulge the nevertheless graces the fabulous world of horsetails, surrounding herbiage with bog-myrtles, purslanes, Seurat-like pointillist loosestrifes, fumitories, splashes of what John Clare orchids, rushes and milkworts, called ‘feeble flowers/ to name but a few.

Peeping faintly purple’. I for For the snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis), Mabey Unofficial national flower one would argue against the poet’s use of the word ‘feeble’. gives us the delightful By the way, Grigson tells us that the common or regional names Candlemas bells, Mary’s taper, snow piercer, February great herbalist Gerard (c 1545-1612) called these ‘scentless violets [found] outside fairmaids and dingle-dangle. Grigson the garden “Dog Violets, or wilde violets”, offers drooping bell, Eve’s tears, naked maidens and snowbells. Celandines (both apparently translating the botanists’ Viola canina’. Hence ‘Dog Violet is really lesser and greater) carry such vernacular monikers as butterchops, foalfoot, golden a book name, though Dog, like Horse, is a common English prefix for distinguishing guineas, witch’s flower and yellow spit (Grigson); while Mabey reminds us of the an inferior species from its superior relative.’ Think dog rose, horse chestnut… obsolete term pilewort, ‘the herb given No such demeaning term need be for haemorrhoids’ – although he doesn’t applied to our native bluebell say how it’s applied.

(Hyacinthoides non-scripta, not to be In places, our long drive has banks reaching a height of eight feet. Ferns rule, confused with the brutish Spanish

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER IT’S BLUEBELL TIME

bluebell, H hispanica). It perhaps deserves the title Our Unofficial National Flower. Who doesn’t love them? Seen in vast carpeting drifts, they come, according to Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue’. They proliferate here. Seeing this property for sale in May last year truly awash with them, we might well say they influenced our decision to buy without hesitation.

And how swell the bluebells look, contrasting with the lime-green rugs of the impressively beautiful but inelegantly-named opposite-leaved golden saxifrage (Chrysosplenium oppositifolium) – an ancient woodland indicator here in Carmarthenshire, identified for us by a visiting friend who, unlike me, is both botanist and gardener.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD PEACHES AND NECTARINES In his 17th-century poem on the joys of finding fruit in an English garden, Andrew Marvell writes of ‘the nectarine, and curious peach’. It is unsurprising that he puts these two together, but I wonder about his description of the peach as curious. It would be 300 years before a curiously shaped flat peach, sometimes likened to a doughnut, was widely grown in this country. Saturne is the variety most readily available today.

Apart from a childhood memory of peaches grown against a high wall in a large, Victorian, lean-to glasshouse, I have no experience of growing these fruit at home. Gardening expert and television personality Carol Klein – at 77 next month, she is an oldie to cherish – says that peaches and nectarines do not The Oldie May 2022 71

have to be grown in a greenhouse, nor do they require much space. But they do need sun.

Outdoors, they should be fan-trained against a south-facing wall or, if space is limited, they can be grown in pots. A free-standing bush, when mature, will produce twice as much fruit as a fantrained tree, though yields from nectarines are likely to be lower.

As peaches and nectarines are self-fertile, there is no need for a second tree for pollination. Pruning should be done not in winter but when the trees are in growth.

Two problems may occur in early spring: leaf curl and frost damage. A fungicide applied before the flowers open will help to prevent red or white blisters from forming on the leaves and infecting them. So will a protective covering to keep out the rain when the buds start to swell. Because the blossom appears early in spring, the growing plants also need to be protected against frost.

Bare root trees should not be planted any later than April, and planting is best left until late autumn. Those of us who prefer their fruit with white flesh are advised to grow a variety of peach called Peregrine or, for a nectarine, Lord Napier, which has been popular since it was first grown in this country 150 years ago.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD SUNDAY LUNCH IN PROVENCE

ELISABETH LUARD

Here’s some good news for meat-eaters who prefer quality to quantity and are happy to cook the lesser cuts.

Pioneering estate-owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree of the rewilding project at Knepp, in West Sussex, have returned 350 acres of neglected arable to traditional ways of farming. Since this includes manure-producing, pasture-grazing, woodland-wandering, free-breeding livestock, the result is an excess of surplus-to-requirements, ethically raised animals and a need to find a market.

Pot-au-feu Provençale Nothing fancy – this is the traditional Sunday lunch in rural France, particularly in the south. The desired result is enough left-over broth to serve as the basis for other meals throughout the week. Skirt is included for flavour in the broth; shin for strength; oxtail or a pig’s trotter for texture. Vary the vegetable additions (new peas or diced asparagus, perhaps) as you please.

72 The Oldie May 2022

Enough for 6 servings.

750g beef skirt (rolled and tied) 1kg bone-in shin beef (ossobuco) 2-3 large oxtail joints or a pig’s trotter, split 3-4 large carrots 2-3 large leeks, including tops 1 unblanched celery head 2-3 smallish turnips or parsnips 2 medium onions, unskinned and quartered ½ tsp peppercorns 2-3 bay leaves Salt To finish About 500g potatoes, scrubbed and chunked About 500g green cabbage or chard, roughly shredded To serve A bowl of aioli or garlicky mayo Bunched radishes, rinsed Capers dressed with vinegar Cornichons or pickled cucumbers, diced Pack the meat and bones into a large pot with enough cold water to cover – about two litres. Bring to the boil and skim off the grey foam as it rises.

Meanwhile, prepare the vegetables, saving the scrapings, trimmings and leek and celery tops. Chunk the good stuff into bitesize pieces and reserve. Add the quartered onions to the pot along with the peppercorns, bay leaves and a teaspoon of salt. Bring it all back to the boil, allow one big belch, then reduce the heat and leave to simmer for two to three hours, till the meat is perfectly tender and the broth well flavoured.

Strain the broth into a bowl, skim off the fat (save it for sauté potatoes), return broth and meat to the pot, discarding the strained-out solids. When you’re ready to serve, reheat the broth and add the reserved prepared vegetables, holding back the potatoes and greens. Bubble up again, turn down the heat and cook till the vegetables soften but are still firm.

Add the potato and cook till tender. Add the greens; bubble up for a minute or two to soften.

Ladle into bowls over toasted bread (or not, as you please) and serve with accompaniments. To drink, a sharp young red wine to cut the richness of the mayo and pour faire chabrot, a way of showing appreciation by adding a slurp of wine to the last of the hot broth and drinking it noisily from the bowl.

Recycle the left-over broth with fresh veg, pasta or whatever takes your fancy.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE SIX RULES FOR DATE NIGHT If any of you are about to embark on a date, now that spring has sprung, read on if you want to know what to do.

1. Turn up within an hour of the agreed time.

At 7.15pm, half an hour before our table was booked, Sharon (not her real name, and she’s a gossip columnist – so best keep mum) texted me to say she was en route from Notting Hill and the traffic was dire.

She must have lost her signal for the ensuing 90 minutes, because I received no further updates. After 45 minutes, in my new role as London’s premier abandonee, I thought I should finally get a plate of Trullo’s duck offal spiedini.

Ten minutes later, it arrived, as did Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo (the one he kissed ‘without breaking COVID rules’) at the table next to mine. They were just congratulating themselves on finding a discreet restaurant when the tornado that is Sharon strode in.

2. Apologise if late. Sharon forgot.

I was hoping for all our sakes that she hadn’t spotted them but, even, with the obscuring menhir of an enormous column, Sharon smelled blood. I’ll never know how she managed to pole-vault over me into Matt’s lap but she was having a crack with the disgraced one within seconds.

So, 3. Never abandon your table.

After a trouble-free dinner of ravioli and pappardelle with a treacly beef-shin ragu, which we washed down with a Fleet Street supply of vino, we headed back to the West End. Nearly there, I had started to hum, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like

a man?’ when the restaurant called to tell me Sharon had left her phone behind. So another 40 minutes was added to our journey. Clearly, 4. Keep phone in handbag.

5. Don’t tell your date he ‘dresses like a paedo’, as she did three weeks later at dinner with the editor and me after a not-unemotional day at Cheltenham races.

Mind you, she also foghorned the couple next door that their conversation was ‘BORING, BORING, BORING.’ 6. Don’t insult other diners.

Please don’t let her behaviour put you off Trullo: Matt and Gina chose one of the best Italian restaurants in London.

I have tried hard not to review The Pink Goat, which I love. I have known the owner, Benji, for 20 years; indeed, we reared pigs together at his smallholding.

As a safeguard against sentimentality, we named the pigs after sausage varieties: Toulouse etc.

It was on one of our trips to the abattoir that Benji indulged in a rare bath of immodesty by confessing nonchalantly, ‘They reckon I am one of the top-ten best-looking blokes in Bournemouth.’

I was never acquainted with the other nine but I doubt they were as lucky in love as Benji, who lured Pav from Poland to Corfe Castle.

They swapped pigs for goats and publicised their new café by tying fluorescent-pink goats to the lampposts on the approach to the village.

Pav is the John Inman of the Dorset restaurant scene. Wickedly disrespectful of his customers, especially to their faces, he – and his enormous ploughman’s lunches – are much of the draw of this café, which opens for cocktails and dinner on Fridays and Saturdays. He might just put Sharon in her place. Now, there’s a thought.

Trullo, St Paul’s Road, London N1 2LH; tel: 020 7226 2733; www. trullorestaurant.com; pasta dishes from £12 The Pink Goat, West Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset BH20 5HA; tel: 01929 480399; www.thepinkgoat.co.uk

DRINK BILL KNOTT WINE THAT LASTS FOR EVER Greg Lambrecht knows his needles.

Trained in medicine, in the 1990s he developed a smart way of delivering chemotherapy to children with leukaemia without traumatising skin

tissue. Since then, he says, ‘I got really good at making needles that didn’t damage things.’

Why should this interest the discerning oenophile? Because Lambrecht, who loves wine and has a vast cellar, had a problem: like Mr and Mrs Jack Sprat, he and his wife had different tastes in wine. A bottle of wine, however, is not a platter of meat, and he found himself with too many halffinished bottles on his hands. When she was pregnant with their first child, the problem became even worse.

And so he invented Coravin, a preservation system that sucks wine from an unopened bottle through a slim needle, replacing it with a blanket of inert gas. Launched in 2011, it immediately became popular both with home drinkers who did not want to drink a whole bottle and with those who simply wanted to sample a few different glasses from their cellar.

It was a hit, too, with wine bars and restaurants, who could now offer their clientele a range of fine wines by the glass without worrying about wastage or investing in cumbersome and expensive wine cabinets. Not that Coravin is cheap: prices start at around £200, rising to £400 for the new gizmo for preserving sparkling wines – and the argon costs about 50p a shot. Lambrecht has, however, sold more than a million of them.

But does it work? Yes, in my experience. I remember a perfect glass of Pingus in a smart Copenhagen restaurant, from a bottle broached six months before by winemaker Peter Sisseck – but I make do at home with a Vacuvin (around £10) and a few stoppers. Vacuum pumps keep even light, spritzy whites such as Vinho Verde fresh in the fridge overnight and seem to keep most reds fresh for a couple of days.

Champagne (on the rare occasions there is any left) copes very well just with a stopper: its natural blanket of carbon dioxide does the rest.

In the decade since Lambrecht’s ingenious invention took hold, myriad other systems have come on the market – the Eto wine decanter and the Wine Squirrel, for instance – and they all have their merits. Ideally, of course, a great bottle of wine should be uncorked, shared with friends and good food, savoured as it evolves (as all good wine should) and is finished, preserving just pleasant memories. But, for times when that is impossible – and there have been many over the last couple of years – wine-lovers are now spoilt for choice.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines with a distinctly Iberian theme: an organic, vegetarian white from the heart of Spain that will appeal to Sauvignon Blanc fans; a mature Portuguese red from the Dão region; and a vibrant young red from the Montsant region of Catalunya. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

White Field Blend, Te Quiero, Vino de la Tierra de Castilla, Spain 2021, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 As the name suggests, a blend of old, native varieties: gently floral, with crisp acidity.

Quinta da Mariposa, Dão, Portugal 2017, offer price £13.99, case price £167.88 Smooth and fragrant, with wild berry fruit, a lick of spice and a long, savoury finish.

Mas Donis Negre, Celler de Capçanes, Montsant, Spain 2020, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00 Medium-bodied red, made mostly from Grenache and Syrah: splendid with roast pork.

Mixed case price £137.92 – a saving of £24.95 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

Call 0117 370 9930

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price.

Free delivery to UK mainland.

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 20th June 2022.

The Oldie May 2022 73

SPORT JIM WHITE CRUSHED BY THE HURRICANE It is 50 years since the greatest player ever to hold a cue won his first World Snooker Championship.

Alex Higgins beat John Spencer 37-32 in a best-of-73 final in 1972, and in the process the Northern Irishman announced himself to the world.

In fact, it wasn’t that noisy an announcement. In those days, the competition was held in the less-thanostentatious surroundings of the Selly Park British Legion Club in Birmingham, and the final wasn’t televised. Higgins blitzed his way to glory in front of just a couple of hundred observers, his flair enveloped in a thickening fug of cigarette smoke.

Within five years, however, the World Championship had moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and had become a television staple. It is fair to say, as it travelled on its upward trajectory, it was fuelled largely by Higgins’s appeal. When he won the title at the Crucible ten years after his first triumph, more than ten million fans tuned in to the BBC coverage to watch him blub uncontrollably as he lifted the trophy, clutching his baby daughter in his arms.

Rarely in history has one man been so inextricably linked with the rise of a sport as Higgins was to the snooker boom. He may not have been the most successful player of his era, falling well behind Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O’Sullivan in the roll call of championship wins. Rather what he offered was a natural ability to command the centre of attention.

To watch him play was to see the prosaic game of the pub and club elevated to an art form. His movement round the table was balletic. He didn’t simply address the ball; he danced into position. He played with rhythm, drama and panache.

While the more cautious weighed up their options ahead of making a shot, he would just go for it. Fear of failure was anathema. His understanding of space and movement was extraordinary; he had a natural eye for physics. And playing a shot, no one has ever hit the ball with such delicacy, precision and potency, with the possible exception of O’Sullivan. Higgins was the poet of the cue.

Perhaps inevitably, his artistry came with baggage. He was enslaved by addictions. His quixotic unreliability constantly compromised his ability. But 74 The Oldie May 2022

even as he self-destructed, even as he sat in his chair in the corner nursing a tumbler of gin, his brow furrowed, his gaze lost, still we watched, hoping we might see the genius re-emerge. For nearly two decades, his will-he-won’t-he struggles provided the game with a robust narrative arc.

Thirty-eight years after his first world title, I conducted his last-ever interview. It was a few weeks before he died of cancer when we met in a snooker club in Dublin. Hollowed out by his condition, frail and wan, he looked as if a passing wind might carry him away.

Nevertheless, he suggested we play a game. And, for a moment, as he jigged round the table, swooshing and snapping at his cue, sending balls scuttling down into the pockets, it was as if time had reversed. He looked transformed, from a husk to a champion once more.

As we left the club, he grinned at me and held open his coat to reveal he had purloined one of the cues.

‘I haven’t one at home and I’ll need it for my comeback,’ he said. Sadly, to the lasting disappointment of the game he graced, his comeback never came.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD GET HER TO THE CHURCH ON TIME I’ve chauffeured brides to weddings three times. The first two were in modern Bentleys, plush and spacious. The latest was in something different.

In ancient pre-COVID times, my friend, the groom’s father, bought a 1955 Citroën Traction Avant, known here as the Light Fifteen. Made from 1934 to 1957, these low-slung, breathtakingly elegant four-door saloons featured in almost every film about the French Resistance, as well as The Sound of Music and the Maigret and Clouseau films.

Although designed by an Italian, they were archetypically French and innovative, with a chassis-free body, front-wheel drive, independent suspension and rack-and-pinion steering.

During the Second World War, they were favoured by France’s German occupiers, who deployed them from Stalingrad to Libya. After the war, tyres were an extra cost for early buyers, while right-hand drive versions for the British market – which demanded a wooden dash, leather seats and sunroofs – were made in Slough.

Hidden behind a livestock trailer in a neighbour’s barn and not started for over a year, my friend’s Citroën looked as

svelte as ever when unwrapped a few days before the wedding. After checking water, fuel, brakes and oil, we gently turned the engine with the starting handle (remember them?), cleaned plugs and points, primed the fuel pump and changed the filter. To no effect: the six-volt battery couldn’t raise a spark.

Recharged, it still couldn’t; nor would it start with the handle.

We towed the trailer out of the barn with my Land Rover, pushed the Citroën out after it, reversed the trailer back in, fixed a tow rope to the car and set off for wedding HQ, hoping to bump-start it on the way.

Not a spark. Worse still, the swooping, curvaceous bumper was now a giant V, like the bow of an icebreaker. We hadn’t been stupid enough to connect the tow rope to it, but we’d done something almost as bad. After crawling underneath and rejecting vulnerable steering and suspension arms, we’d chosen the metal struts supporting the bumper. They looked stronger than they were.

A new battery ordered, we took the bumper to a man with a shed who can do anything with metal. He restored it almost to its original shape, while making it possible to refit it to the warped struts.

It was now 48 hours until the wedding.

By the time the new battery arrived, we were down to 24 hours. But still no spark. Someone knew a man who was good with tractors. Good tractor men, in my experience, can turn their hands to almost anything mechanical. After three hours of fiddling, he did the job.

My friend slept well for the first time that week.

Mistakenly. The day dawned fine but it was preceded by unseasonal snow and the overnight cold had drained even the new battery of willpower.

Desperate measures were called for. My friend’s brother bravely connected his 12-volt battery to the Citroën’s six-volt.

He was rewarded by spurts of sulphuric acid – but also a spurt of life from the engine. Then it had to be kept going until the bride was ready for her 2pm date with destiny.

Everything worked. Beautiful bride and elegant car were perfectly matched and I managed not to stall it. But old cars are slimmer than modern and there was no room in the back for her, her father and her gorgeous, ballooning dress. One of them had to come in the front with me.

The lesson? Not wider cars or clinging dresses; nor even how to tow Light Fifteens. The lesson is, if you consign your car to hibernation, don’t neglect it.

Start it and move it once a fortnight.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Get-out-of-jail-free card for MPs When you exchange written notes with someone, over the internet or otherwise, the text has a formality that transcends the ephemeral nature of a chat in the corridor.

The corridor conversation vanishes once it’s over, but the written one does not drift away. It remains there to be read, re-read and passed around; it has some substance.

Or so I thought. According to a recent court-witness statement from Sarah Harrison, Chief Operating Officer for the Cabinet Office, when politicians engage in a written exchange of views by WhatsApp, it’s officially of no

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk Queen Elizabeth II: 1952 British Pathé newsreel https://youtu.be/M9mHL8CLOC0 The Queen arrives home after the death of her father.

Commentaries are no longer like this.

Jubilee weekend platinumjubilee.gov.uk/ royal.uk/platinum-jubilee-centralweekend Official details of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

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

consequence. It should be treated as informal chat – not as proceedings to be noted, recorded and archived in the way that the Public Records Act 1958 requires of most government business.

Of course, that Act did not envisage WhatsApp messages, and it seems that MPs are taking full advantage of this lack of a legislative crystal ball. Apparently, ministers, including the PM, routinely communicate with one another on private (that is, non-governmental) devices such as phones and laptops. On them they use networks independent of government, none of which is subject to official scrutiny. So the record-keeping that the 1958 Act requires for face-to-face meetings or physical memoranda just doesn’t happen.

Indeed, we know that many of these messages have already vanished. When it emerged in April 2021 that our Prime Minister’s phone number had been published on a website for many years, and anyone might have been able to access it, all his messages up till then were deleted. However important they were, they are lost to the public record, and to any scrutiny by, for example, the COVID-19 Inquiry.

It gets worse. Ministers and their officials are now being formally advised to ensure that their internet-based chat history is deleted. If this is legal, it shouldn’t be. It is completely at odds with the requirements of government investigations, which usually expect that emails and the likes of Zoom chats are retained.

That’s bad enough. And now consider the simple matter of security. If I run into the Foreign Secretary in a lift and have a

chat, I can be very confident that it is indeed Miss Truss that I am talking to and I can also see who else is listening.

However, if I send a message to her phone, I have no way of knowing who, or how many, might read it. Many public figures have teams who manage their social-media presence, including on WhatsApp, and what I thought was a private word may well be passed around.

If we accept that WhatsApp is a written record – and I don’t see how it can be regarded as anything else – then it should be treated as such and preserved.

Lawyers, for example, expect work devices to be used for work messages.

That ensures all communications take place within a secure environment and are retained there. It also creates a single, reliable source of records. Any discussions held outside that channel must be documented within it, perhaps by a file note.

How many MPs write file notes about their WhatsApp exchanges? Not many, if any, I’ll be bound. I really don’t see why our legislators should be held to a lower ethical standard than those who interpret the laws on their behalf.

Of course, our politicians should be able to communicate easily and quickly – that’s how government works. But they should not be doing it furtively and without transparency. The Public Records Act should be brought up to date, and MPs should use a single, secure channel to communicate on governmentrelated matters.

In the meantime, I advise MPs to save their unscrutinised words for their memoirs; at least, that way, almost nobody will read them.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

End of the landline Our familiar landline telephones are being cut off, and all home telephones will work through broadband only.

Old copper phone lines are being replaced with internet cables. Some BT customers have already been transferred to this new system. BT, which provides most landlines, calls it Digital Voice.

76 The Oldie May 2022

Campaigners have been warning BT about the dangers this will cause many older customers. Belatedly, BT has paused the switchover for customers who do not want to move to the new technology just yet.

The whole analogue phone network was due to be switched off by the end of

2025. When that happens, you won’t be able to have a landline phone without also having broadband installed in your house – though customers who do not want to use the internet won’t have to pay for it.

The problem is that the new landline phone system will be powered by

electricity. So if there is a power cut, you will not be able to make emergency calls unless you have a separate mobile phone.

And mobile phones of course require electricity to charge up. You would not be able to contact the power company to report the problem or even dial 999 for an ambulance or a fire engine. They also won’t work if your broadband connection drops out.

It has already happened. Customers on the new system were left without any communication during the power cuts caused by storms Arwen and Eunice last winter. Ordinary landlines continued working – they fail only if the overhead lines are brought down.

Even in normal weather conditions, some people live in black spots where there is poor mobile reception or an unreliable power supply. Ofcom rules say there should be protections in place for people to call emergency services at all times – but only to call 999.

This switch to broadband-only will also affect personal medical alarms and

burglar alarms connected to a landline.

Not all of them will work with the new system, and anyone who relies on them should contact the alarm-provider before moving to digital and let the landlineprovider (legally obliged to treat everyone ‘fairly’) know they are vulnerable.

BT’s official recommendation is to have a mobile phone as a backup, though it now apologises for underestimating the difficulties facing older people without broadband or mobile phones.

It will give free mobiles to some people who don’t have one and promises to provide free backup batteries for customers who are flagged as vulnerable – but the battery packs will power equipment for only about an hour.

Instead of being plugged into a socket in the wall, digital phones will plug into routers, using the same technology as Skype and WhatsApp, though you will still have to pay for your calls. Many existing phones will still work with the new system but some will need an adaptor, with

‘Hmm … maybe try my maiden name or my Twitter handle?’

the oldest phones having to be replaced. Before you are disconnected, BT will send everyone routers and new phones.

Our existing landlines, though, do have one dangerous downside: when using them during a thunderstorm you could be struck by lightning, because they are connected to outside wire.

Before mobile phones became widespread, telephones caused about a quarter of injuries to people hurt by lightning indoors.

invites you on a unique reader trip Come to the Villa Albrizzi, in the Veneto, with Robert Fox 13th-20th September 2022 In 2016, Robert Fox led an Oldie trip in the north of Italy, whose towns read like a list of Shakespearean locations: Padua, Mantua and Verona. And, this time, our small group will have the joy of staying in the wonderful Villa Albrizzi (www.villaalbrizzi.it), which is located on the edge of Este, a small town south of Padua, 30 miles from Venice Airport. The villa, set in eight acres and with its own pool, has been owned by the Albrizzi family for three centuries.

Thursday 15th September – Verona and Sirmione Morning tour of Verona, followed by lunch

by Lake Garda and a tour of the Roman love poet Catullus’s villa

Friday 16th September – Vicenza and Asolo Morning tour of Palladio’s city and the extraordinary Teatro Olimpico; lunch and tour of the pretty hillside village of Asolo

Saturday 17th September – Modena

Limited to 12 guests (3 doubles, 3 twins)

Morning tour, including the early Romanesque cathedral, followed by lunch and free afternoon at the villa

Tuesday 13th September

Sunday 18th September – day at the villa

Depart Heathrow at 1330 with BA; arrive Venice at 1645 Transfer to the villa; dinner there

Wednesday 14th September – Padua Morning and lunch in Padua, followed by free afternoon at the villa

Lunch at the villa; supper in Este

Monday 19th September – Mantua and Sabbioneta Visit the Ducal Palace, with fine frescoes

by Pisanello and Andrea Mantegna. Lunch at the spot where the villainous deeds in Verdi’s Rigoletto take place. Return to the

villa via Sabbioneta, the miniature citadel of the Gonzagas and their horses

Tuesday 20th September – Chioggia Morning and lunch at the seaside town of Chioggia in the Venice lagoon Depart Venice at 1735 with BA; arrive Heathrow at 1855 PRICES AND BOOKINGS: £2,450 per person in a double/twin room for seven nights’ full board including wine with meals, transport and excursions. You will need to buy your own flights. We will require a deposit of £750.

Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk

The Oldie May 2022 77

The Common Sandpiper by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

CARRY AKROYD

… Stranger! these gloomy boughs Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper William Wordsworth, from Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree…

The ‘glancing sandpiper’ refers to the common sandpiper (Actitis hypoleucos).

‘Glancing’ is the perfect word to describe the glimmer of its white breast (hypoleucos, white) as it skims across water so close to the surface that it could be a winning stone pitched in a game of ducks and drakes.

The common sandpiper’s breeding range encompasses the world, apart from the Americas, where its western equivalent, the spotted sandpiper, holds sway. The European contingent migrates to Africa in the winter.

In the British Isles, they can be seen anywhere but for breeding prefer the uplands. There has been a 20-per-cent contraction since 1972. The population of 13,000 is now concentrated in north-west Scotland, with lesser representation in south-west Scotland, north-west England, Wales and Ireland’s western fringes. The peak arrival is in April and May. When excited, the starling-sized bird springs off on its skimming way, often as not along the course of a fast-running burn or river. Its piping call is equally unmistakable: high-pitched to communicate above a rush of water. It’s a haunting sound when heard at night, as the bird passes on migration, sometimes in small packs.

Gerry Cambridge’s poem Actitis hypoleucos mentions the Stinchar, an Ayrshire river: Tickie-a-dee, tickie-a-dee, tickie-a-dee – then the stiff-winged glide onto river-bank, look!

– and movement unshingling it back into bird.

Diminutive wader ceaselessly, curiously gyrating,

too full of energy for its dot of highstrung sinew flown thousands of miles back to the bloodstream of Scottish rivers. Piper of the sand; dainty tripper over shingle; water-sprite of the first of the spring evenings. Surely it should be slumped by a boulder after that journey? – but no, here it is, tickie-a-dee, tickie-a-dee, tickie-a-dee: a sparse repertoire, but its own. Matt and Jim and I once photographed one, brooding its eggs, under a gorse bush on the banks of the Stinchar – the nervy sprint to the buff, mottled

clutch. Then uncharacteristic stillness, renewing this ancient tradition of pipers.

The nest is usually a lightly grassed depression screened from sight. River banks, islands and loch or reservoir edges are popular. Near rivers, the bird can choose orchards, gardens or even herbaceous borders.

The clutch is determined by the food supply. In temperate climates, it is four – the buff egg further camouflaged by brown blotches and grey speckles.

Incubation is shared, with the cock the more assiduous parent. Chicks feed on insects – also the staple adult diet.

As a shore dweller, the common sandpiper is not a digger, even though it is traditionally known as the ‘summer snipe’.

The Oldie May 2022 79

Travel How the British made the Alps Rachel Johnson hits the slopes at the birthplace of the skiing holiday

I

f pushed to choose between mountains and sea, others may go low but I go high – a preference I can trace back to my schooldays at the European School in Brussels.

Every winter, it relocated children en masse to the Alps for a fortnight. I cannot convey the excitement this tradition of classes de neige in Saas Fee roused in the breast of this stodgy, ill-favoured English girl.

Skiing in the morning, lessons in the afternoon, broken by the regular arrival of tartines – baguette stuffed with chunks of chocolate – to keep the wolf from the door.

The snow, the skiing, the sport all seemed to me the very peak of continental sophistication, glamour and excitement.

Fast-forward. Some years ago – around the turn of the millennium – we rented a simple chalet in the Swiss Alps in a charming hamlet between Lake Geneva and Gstaad.

It was owned by an English couple, and in the cosy den I found a book called How the English Made the Alps. What with self-catering duties and finding the lost gloves, goggles, ski passes and so on

80 The Oldie May 2022

Lift-off: Chamonix, home to Arnold Lunn’s first package holiday, 1897

for four dependants (five, if you include husband Ivo) in the party, I didn’t get round to finishing it, even though I said to Ivo it was ‘the best book I’ve ever read on any subject’.

Reader, I stole it. Please believe me when I say that I still fully intend to return it to Paul and Mary Langston, La Cassine, 1865 Les Diablerets. How do I

still know their names and postal address? Because they had carefully stickered every book in the house with it to guilt-trip rotters like me.

Imagine my joy when I discovered, thanks to this book by Jim Ring, that much of this spritz and volupté I had loved as a child was not Continental. It was English! (The clue, perhaps, is in the title.)

Just as the sun was setting on the British Empire, the English were taking over the Alps, climbing every mountain, driving railways, and introducing institutions such as churches, tea, baths, lawn tennis, clubs – and, above all, pioneering winter sports and inventing new and preferably lethal games such as the Cresta Run. While we can’t claim to have patented sliding on the snow on two planks attached to your feet (the Norwegians of Telemark can lay claim to that), we did invent the idea of the Alps, downhill skiing, winter sports as a holiday and ‘excursionism’ – ie package holidays – thanks to the pioneering spirit of Arnold

Left: Mr Allen left his skis at Hotel Kronenhof before dying in WWI. Above: Rachel in the vaulted cellar where the war heroes’ skis remain

Lunn, founder of the Public School Alpine Sports Club (PSASC) and the first winter-sports travel agent.

Lunn took a party of tweedy Hoorays from Eton and Harrow to Chamonix on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Lodgings were booked for exclusive use of the PSASC members, who wanted to climb or sleigh or curl or toboggan by day and dine with their peers by night, and thus a glorious tradition was born – of grand Alpine hotels in a mountain playground laid on for the almostexclusive pleasure and delight of our nation as the Victorian age was drawing to a close.

You can imagine my joy when I finally opened the attachment to the email that set out my itinerary and schedule. I had assumed I was going to St Moritz for a few days for a straightforward skiing weekend, as Prince Andrew might put it.

But the trip I had been invited on in March was to the Engadine valley, ground zero of the English conquest of the Alps, to enjoy the hospitality of not one but two grand hotels which play a central part of the story.

My first port of call was to the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in the medieval village of Pontresina, a cream-and-green Versailles château a few miles from St Moritz.

You don’t need to be told – you may not share my ‘suite tooth’ – what a five-star sublime luxury hotel and spa with breathtaking views of mountains is like, and I will not regale you with descriptions of the bedding, cigar bar and ballroom, but you might be interested to learn that Pontresina was one of the first

‘cure stations’ along with Davos, after a doctor spotted that meat did not putrefy in the open air in the mountains, and therefore ‘nor do the lungs rot in the living man’.

But I hope you might be as moved as I was to find that, down in the vaulted cellars of the Kronenhof hotel, propped against vast casks and barrels, are dozens of dusty pairs of wooden skis with their stiff leather bindings, left by the English guests before the First World War. I studied the tags left by Mr Allen, Capt Poulton and Viscount Bridgewater.

The owners thought they would be back to ski the following year, but they died in the trenches, and the hotel had kept them in tribute.

It is a short hop from the Kronenhof in Pontresina to the Kulm in St Moritz, also built in the era of grand hotels, during which the Union Jack was planted on every summit, and simply taking the air was not enough. The British piled into the Engadine valley in even greater numbers after the railway from Chur was finished in 1904, and everyone knows what happens when the English get together and boredom sets in.

As Lunn observed, ‘Whenever the English appear, the organisation of sport begins.’

Our nation’s genius for turning

A doctor spotted that meat did not putrefy in the open air in the mountains

everything into a game and a competition was only sharpened by altitude and leisure. When the growing English colony in St Moritz got wind of a tobogganing competition between Davos and Klosters, it was game on.

The English guests at the Kulm Hotel, bored by the ‘cure’, decided to organise themselves into two committees, one for indoor and one for outdoor activities.

Aided by the Kulm’s owners, the Badrutt family (the first hoteliers to offer a money-back guarantee to guests) created the Cresta Run course.

When the 1,800m track was completed in 1885, it was really the beginning of something. The St Moritz Tobogganing Club (SMTC) lost to Davos in the first race in February of that year, but that was not the point. History had been made, a history that continues to this day.

On the ground floor of the Kulm Hotel, there is a still private club for the use of members of the SMTC, with a long, wood-panelled bar and booths, the walls crowded with trophies, cups and photographs of the many chins and Hoorays who have slid down an icy path to death or glory, and team photos of winners, all wearing their SMTC claretand-gold cricket jerseys.

In the spring, the grand hotels close as the snow melts, to reopen in winter. I will spend the time between now and then dreaming of the 1930s bowling alley in the Kronenhof, the outdoor pools with their pulsing jets, the champagne air glinting with diamond sparkles, and the blessed relief of taking my boots off at the end of a day’s piste-bashing.

Unlike the young men who left their skis in the cellars, I will be back.

Kulm Hotel St Moritz (www.kulm.com) or Grand Hotel Kronenhof (www. kronenhof.com); fly with SWISS (swiss.com); Swiss rail travel with STC (www.stc.co.uk) The Oldie May 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

They had no choice

LUCINDA LAMBTON

lucinda lambton Every time I drive past the Animals in War Memorial in Park Lane, I’m pierced by the poignancy

The heart-stirring sight of the Animals in War Memorial, in London’s Park Lane, is to be seen daily by many thousands of people driving by.

It is, though, very difficult to inspect its highly rewarding excellence and charm at close quarters. Situated between two roaring traffic-filled freeways on what was originally the elegant edge of Hyde Park, it is tricky to reach.

Reach the memorial, however, and you are home and dry. You’re quite magically immersed in a poignant peacefulness, charm and beauty that overpower all else, with a power that renders the world about you quite silent; this despite the multitude of roaring motors on either side.

The memorial is as moving as it is momentous. Gently traditional yet slicing-edge modern, it moves you to the very roots of your boots. It was Jilly Cooper, with her book Animals in War, who inspired its creation, along with her husband, the late lamented, delightful 82 The Oldie May 2022

and distinguished military historian Leo Cooper. He suggested the all-important words carved into the stone: ‘THEY HAD NO CHOICE’.

The sculptor David Backhouse was the genius behind its design. He sculpted the four bronze animals as well. Richard Holliday and Harry Day sculpted the stone animals. All the names of those who paid for it are incised into the back of the wall. It was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. The 58-foot-long, curved sweep of a stone wall was designed as the arena of war. It seems to enclose you with all the warrior creatures – carved in bas-relief – that are thundering by.

Carrier pigeons fly overhead; two million were used in the Second World War. While 17,000 were parachuted into enemy territory, only one in eight returned. An elephant – considered a ‘skilled sapper’ in Burma – leads the charge on the ground. There are horses – eight million of them perished during

the First World War – dromedaries and camels, as well as a chicken, a dolphin, a donkey, a cat and a goat. A mule at the gallop, with his head thrown back, is enjoying the last of his food in a heavy, leather nosebag. Most endearingly, there are tiny glow-worms to be seen. The little creatures provided light for the ‘boys’ to read their letters and maps in the trenches.

The wall is engraved with the ennobling words THIS MONUMENT IS DEDICATED TO ALL THE ANIMALS THAT SERVED AND DIED ALONGSIDE BRITISH AND ALLIED FORCES IN WARS AND CAMPAIGNS THROUGHOUT TIME. Bronze

mules, life-size and heavily laden, somewhat gloomily toil forth to an opening in the wall, through which you too can walk. This enables you to look back at the empty silhouettes of the animals carved on the other side, all of them wraith-like, representing ghosts of these victims of war.

On their own and leading away from the memorial are two bronze animals

KEYSTONE PICTURES USA

Opposite and left: Bronze mules march towards Hyde Park. Above centre: Simon the HMS Amethyst cat in quarantine in Surrey, November 1949. Above right: His gravestone in the PDSA’s cemetery, Ilford

walking forth to further conflicts in the future: a ten-foot-high stallion lifts his front leg to go on his way. A dog looks wistfully back over its shoulder at the field of battle behind them.

Never, ever have I gone past that dog – and I do so very often – without being pierced by the poignancy of its attitude.

Never indeed can I see this whole memorial without giving a wail of sad delight. Some of the most exhilarating hours in my life as an architectural photographer were spent recording this monument, every second of them intoxicating. The sun was out, Park Lane’s traffic was roaring past, people poured hither and thither, and in the midst of the mayhem was this great modern masterpiece, looked at and loved by all.

The stories of animals immersed in wars are weakeningly touching stories.

Take Simon, the cat who played a vital role on HMS Amethyst during the Yangtse Incident in China in 1949. He had been smuggled aboard the British ship by Ordinary Seaman George Higginbottom – what a pleasure that his name has been preserved.

Civil war had broken out, and the

opposing forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were encamped either side of the river. Despite flying the White Ensign and having Union flags hung over the side of the ship, the Amethyst was attacked at point-blank range. The cat had his eyebrows and whiskers burnt off and his body gashed through by shrapnel.

The Chinese demanded that the British admit to firing first. They would not – and so stalemate set in, with the Amethyst stranded in a rat-infested hell.

Forced out by the explosions, the rodents had become rampant, eating the fastdepleting stores, as well as, literally, the crew’s toes. Simon’s average rodent cull was at least one a day. When he killed a particularly large and vicious rat – nicknamed Mao Tse-tung by the crew – he was hailed as a hero and promoted to Able Seacat Simon.

The thieving from the ship’s stores was stayed, the spirits of the bored seamen lifted and the sick seamen soothed – all by Simon the cat.

Eventually the Amethyst escaped, in the dark, under fire. It was ‘a daring exploit’, telegraphed George VI; ‘The courage,

skill and determination shown by all on board have my highest commendation.

Splice the mainbrace.’

A special presentation was made on deck to all those who had survived the Yangste Incident and, as the officers and men stood to attention, Simon, held by a boy seaman, was read the citation, to ‘Able Seaman Simon, for distinguished and meritorious service … you did rid HMS Amethyst of pestilence and vermin, with unrelenting faithfulness’. The cat was also presented with the Amethyst campaign ribbon.

Simon was recommended for the Dickin Medal, awarded to animals for acts of bravery. So famous did Simon become throughout the world that a ‘cat officer’ had to be employed to look after his mail.

The Amethyst returned to Portsmouth to a tumultuous welcome. But, as all Simon’s old pals marched away, he was borne off to the quarantine quarters.

There is a sad newsreel of him, left alone on the ship, looking through a porthole and blinking his farewells at the departing men. Sadder still was that within a month he was dead – many said from a lonely, broken heart. He was mourned nationwide. There were flowers, cards and letters of sympathy sent by the truckload to the quarantine kennels. His death was even recorded in Time magazine and his photograph was on the cover of Picture Post.

He was posthumously awarded the Blue Cross Medal of the Dumb Friends League, as well as the Dickin Medal. The cat’s burial was at the PDSA’s cemetery in Ilford and attended by hundreds, including all the survivors from HMS Amethyst. The service was conducted by Father Henry Ross of nearby St Augustine’s Church.

Simon’s little body was wrapped in cotton wool and his coffin draped with the Union flag. He was given full naval honours.

The inscription on the gravestone reads ‘Throughout the Yangste incident his behaviour was of the highest order’.

The Oldie May 2022 83

On the Road

Alan B’Stard’s secret? His hair Scriptwriter Maurice Gran on the origins of Harvey Moon, Birds of a Feather – and the dastardly Tory MP. By Louise Flind Marks and Gran (right)

How did you meet Laurence Marks?

We grew up within about half a mile of each other and we first met at the Jewish Lads’ Brigade which we were compelled by our parents to join.

How do you work together?

Attritionally, through a dialectic of shouting and bullying…

How did you get on with Rik Mayall?

We loved him.

Did any particular MPs inspire Alan B’Stard?

He was really a compendium of Tories and I was very keen to get his hair right.

Conservatives had this crinkly hair behind their ears achieved by someone running a wet comb through it, which is presumably what Nanny used to do…

Have real politicians been worse than B’Stard?

I think that Alan B’Stard was quite loved – he was never a hypocrite and the comedy came from him saying the unsayable.

Who inspired Birds of a Feather?

Me observing two couples having lunch in a hotel at Christmas in 1987 and it struck me that they looked like gangsters and their molls.

What was it like growing up in postwar London?

There was still rationing, pig bins in the street, the milkman and the coal man had a horse, and the streetlights were gas. Women knew their place and fathers ruled the roost. We didn’t have a television and listening to Round the Horne on a Sunday lunchtime certainly influenced Laurence and me.

What inspired Harvey Moon and Goodnight Sweetheart?

Harvey Moon was sparked by Laurence seeing a picture of a man coming home from the war and running up the path

towards his family, and Laurence thought, ‘Suppose she was thinking, “Oh f**k! He survived…” ’ Then we challenged ourselves to write a comedy about a man who’d lost everything – so that was Harvey. As for Goodnight Sweetheart, we were setting a scene in the East End for another show and Laurence said, ‘There are some streets not far from here where nothing has changed since the war.’ And I said, ‘That’s a series.’

What is your favourite bit of north London?

As a kid, I used to love going to Alexandra Palace because I thought it was a real palace someone called Alexandra lived in.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Almost my first-ever memory is a holiday memory; throwing up on someone’s lap on a little plane to Jersey.

Are you a traveller?

I’m a tourist. I don’t want to go by camel to Uzbekistan; I want to go by business class to Los Angeles.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In Vietnam, in Hanoi, the sizzling prawns started walking across the hotplate.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

We’ve done the thing of exchanging phone numbers and then praying they don’t get in touch.

What’s your biggest headache?

I think if you have the wherewithal to travel, it’s a bit naff to moan about it.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

In a run-down colonial house in Galle in Sri Lanka, with an outside shower room. In the morning, something had eaten the soap…

Do you like coming home?

Yes and no. Laurence and I are doing a live tour. Some weeks, we’re doing five different dates: Scunthorpe, Macclesfield, Wigan… I can imagine I’ll be looking forward to coming home then.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We went to Jersey for four days because we had, appallingly, a child already, who was with the nanny.

What are your top travelling tips?

Don’t – like Laurence – try to go through customs with your gold Dunhill lighter and then have a terrible row because they want to confiscate it. I never take a good watch on holiday.

Hats are good, now that I’m practically bald. Try not to spend £5 on a Mars Bar on a RyanAir-type flight – buy your sweeties on the ground.

Do you go on holiday?

Every winter from 2009 to 2019 we went away in February – somewhere long-haul, to shorten the winter.

What’s your favourite destination?

I like Lyon, Lisbon and Seville and I’ve got a soft spot for Cardiff because it punches above its weight.

Do you lie on the beach?

A bit in the shade. I’m Mediterranean – I don’t see the point of lying in the sun when there’s shade.

Marks and Gran are touring nationwide in Blokes of a Feather in May. Shooting the Pilot – a collection of their six most successful TV pilot scripts – is out now

Do you work on a plane/train?

If I have to. I can’t sleep on planes. The one time I was upgraded to a flatbed, I felt as if I was falling over backwards.

The Oldie May 2022 85

Taking a Walk

If you go down to Blean Woods today… patrick barkham

GARY WING

This month must be peak woodadmiration season. Given a single moment to visit a wood, most of us would choose to stroll a carpet of purple haze beneath a canopy of lime-green, just when the birds are at their busiest, singing their hearts out.

I wandered through Blean Woods near Canterbury shortly before the shimmering beauty of bluebell season, and became convinced that actually early spring is the greatest time to be inside a wood. After several hours of ecstatic forest-bathing – as wood-wandering is known in Japan – I realised that whenever we take a forest foray, the wood sprites persuade us that very moment is the optimum time to do it.

There is no occasion when we think, oh, this is a grotty time to visit a forest.

Wood-walking remorse is not a thing.

Midsummer, when purple emperors soar through the deep green canopy, is bewitching. Autumn, when it all turns gold and the whole place smells edible, is totally romantic. The hush of midwinter, when the broadleaved trees reveal their sculptural splendour, is deeply moving.

So to a sunny spring morning in Blean, where leafless trees were a-bounce

with tits – great, coal, blue, long-tailed – playing kiss chase through the branches.

The two-and-a-half-mile red route I took from the car park began in the birches of a young wood which had naturally regenerated in place of a conifer plantation, part of the restoration of Blean, much of which is an RSPB reserve.

There is no brighter time in a wood than spring, and the birches shone magenta and silver in the sunlight.

The path twisted through a glade of heather and gorse and then entered a section of the wood dominated by middle-aged oaks. The effect was as if I was walking from a chapel into a cathedral. I was enjoying the birches but here was another dimension of majesty – a wood in three big dimensions. At the lowest level darted a wren. Then came the tits, and higher up were screeching jays and cackling woodpeckers.

Each oak possessed a yard-high base of moss before the trunk rose like a mighty column into the canopy. Up there, each oak was in aerial combat for light, its limbs crazing and mazing in an attempt to seize the middle airspace. This fight was conducted at tree speed, a pace

far too subtle for our powers of perception. Each oak also duetted with the wind and one another, making a song of rhythmic creaks in the dappled sunlight.

By now the wood had worked its magic and I had lost all sense of direction and time, wholly dependent on the red-route fingerposts to find my way back.

These posts, and an abundance of slightly bossy noticeboards, meant that this was not a wilderness walk, which isn’t really a viable expectation in a land shorn of wild wood. The RSPB like an instruction and a pun. ‘Rewetting the Blean: give a dam!’ said the notice explaining how diminutive dams of twisted hazel poles had been built by volunteers to slow the flow of water into the ditches and streams that cut through the wood’s heavy clay. A wetter wood is more biodiverse, stores more carbon and reduces flooding downstream.

I can confirm that the rewetting was a success – the paths were claggy and muddy.

Over a milky stream, up and round, this walk felt far longer than under three miles.

On the path back, I passed a stunted yew embracing a young beech that had thrust its trunk up its middle. The sprinting beech had won the race to the sky, but the yew will win the endurance race. It will still be here when the beech has rotted, tumbled and decomposed, feeding the yew’s feet.

We can’t hope to witness the 200-year denouement of this epic drama, but I’ll bet there will still be people finding succour in the wood here, whatever the state of society living alongside these trees, in 2222.

RSPB Blean Woods car park, Rough Common Rd, Port Ellen, Upper Harbledown, Canterbury CT2 9DD. A variety of trail-marked walks available, including an eight-mile loop and my more modest red route The Oldie May 2022 87

Genius crossword 413 el sereno There is one clue with no definition. The grid, when completed, has a cunningly hidden word which links to this answer. Please highlight this word

Across 8 Location of houses developed for stars? (6) 9 Lines featured in soldier’s regular letters (3) 10 Our responsibility may be a burden (4) 11/17/22 House of Lords retinue end day fighting (3,7,5,2,8) 12 Lacking the go-ahead for recess? (4) 13 Productive type investing millions in food runs (6) 16 Scheme incorporating emblem is oddly vulgar (8) 17 See 11 18 Hold back as result of smear by sailor (7) 22 See 11 25 State answer by king unfortunately takes precedence (6) 26 Draw attention to line crossed by bore (4) 27 Where pilot may be playing cards on steps (6,4) 30 Spoils what may be a short or long journey? (4) 31 Antipodean runner featuring in dance music (3) 32 Rubbish beginning to accumulate before women laugh (6)

Down 1 Ladies name for a person who’s simple-minded (4) 2 Friends tackle hills with no troubles (4) 3 Sequence of events seeing source of ignition in one’s car lost... (8) 4 ....needing this off to power? (3,4) 5 Try to sell cycle on the radio (6) 6 Christmas flower issue must include fixed first-class returns (10) 7 Ambience surrounding soldiers’ light display (6) 14 Cut increases in size, stripping borders (3) 15 A metal ring adapted as part of riding equipment (10) 19 What Paddington needs are these sort of welcomes (4,4) 20 Sepia may be rose-coloured when losing head (3) 21 Buzzer required to keep new quiz game (7) 23 I left staff depressed by love for industrial worker (6) 24 A French charge covering right in servitude (6) 28 Took food up yard as challenge (4) 29 Vehicle carrying unknown government official given powers (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries.

Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 1st June 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Thesaurus and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 413 Across 1 Authors (7) 5 Rule (5) 8 Leg joint (5) 9 Inveigh (7) 10 Con trick (7) 11 Free from dirt (5) 12 System, government (6) 14 Distant (6) 17 Eat heartily!

(3,2) 19 Remainder (7) 22 Medical examination (5-2) 23 Precise (5) 24 Ocean-going ship (5) 25 Frightfully (7)

Genius 411 solution Down 1 Enfolds (5) 2 Vague suggestion (7) 3 Make improvements (5) 4 Heavy with moisture (6) 5 Reuse (7) 6 Furious (5) 7 Candidate (7) 12 Revolutionary (7) 13 Soubriquet (7) 15 Eccentric (7) 16 Italian firewater (6) 18 Eco; common (5) 20 Ledge (5) 21 Admission (5)

T represented tree

Winner: Roc Walker, Bristol Runners-up: Dr John Yeadon BDS, Horncastle, Lincolnshire; A D Kohn, Walberswick, Suffolk

Moron 411 solution Across: 1 Frieze, 4 Peach (Free speech), 8 Realm, 9 Initial, 10 Spinach, 11 Mete, 12 Ear, 14 Know, 15 Avid, 18 End, 21 Easy, 23 Retreat, 25 Shuttle, 26 Alibi, 27 Rally, 28 Recess. Down: 1 Forest, 2 Italian, 3 Zimbabwe, 4 Pail, 5 Alike, 6 Halved, 7 Tithe, 13 Rag trade, 16 Itemise, 17 Censer, 19 Dried, 20 Ethics, 22 Skull, 24 Stay.

The Oldie May 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO Two unshaven, out-of-work men stumbled out of the bar and fell on top of each other.

That’s your clue to finding the correct line of play to make this month’s Six Clubs on West’s clever club lead.

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable North ♠ 72 ♥ 743 ♦ J 10 6 3 2 ♣ A92 East West ♠ 10 6 5 ♠ KJ94 ♥ A Q 10 8 5 2 ♥ KJ96 ♦ 974 ♦ 85 ♣7 ♣ 865 South ♠ AQ83 ♥♦ AKQ ♣ K Q J 10 4 3 The bidding South 2♣ (1) 4♣ 6♣ (4)

West Pass 4♥ end

North 2♦ (2) 5♣

East 3♥ (3) Pass

(1) Showing 23 or more points, or an upgrade for shape. Says nothing about clubs.

(2) Negative (or waiting). Says nothing about diamonds.

(3) This is a great auction in which to pre-empt. The opponents (almost certainly) have game values, but have exchanged no information about their shapes.

(4) Reasonable shot with his two-loser hand.

At the table, declarer won dummy’s ace of clubs and tried a spade to the queen. No good – West won the king and led another club. No longer able to ruff two spades in dummy, declarer won the second club in hand (East discarding) and tried unblocking the three top diamonds, hoping West (with the third club) would have to follow all the way. It was not to be – West ruffing the third diamond. One down.

Playing on spades is an illusion. You have 12 winners via six clubs, five diamonds and the ace of spades. The issue is the diamond blockage. The correct line is to win the club lead in dummy (say with the nine), then at trick two lead a heart and … discard a top diamond (key play).

East may rise with the ace of hearts and, on lead to the next trick, may switch to a spade. Spurning the finesse, you rise with the ace, cash the king of clubs, then follow with the two remaining top diamonds. With West following to both, you can cross to the ace of clubs and enjoy the jack-ten-six of diamonds, dumping your three spades.

Twelve tricks and slam made.

It was a classic loser-on-loser play, like our two unfortunate tipsy fellows who landed in an unedifying heap outside the tavern.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 279 you were invited to write a poem called Broken Bottle. Basil Ransome-Davies portrayed himself as ‘The man who dropped his wine in Marks’, by Bateman. Mike Morrison’s narrator found that the wind had knocked from the shelf ‘A novelty “Souvenir from Alum Bay”, / Late ’70s: glass phial of layered sands’. At the seaside, Max Ross remembered ‘The bite of brine upon my foot, / The rock pool where I washed.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the smashing bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Erika Fairhead.

Shouting assails me. I am bottle green.

A fight, knife glints in darkness, hot blood boils.

Mindless rage hurls me down to rocks.

I’m whole No more. I shatter, shrink, a wounded shard.

Battered and smashed, with barnacles I lie, With stinking dulse, cuttle and razor shell In murky pools. But now the grabbing tide Tugs from the deep, smothers me where I lie.

I’m rolled, I’m rubbed and smoothed, a shard no more.

I travel far. The waves are comfort now.

At last I’m beached on gentler, firmer sands.

Shouting again – and laughter, sun and warmth.

No wild and savage rage is here. I’m whole, Not broken now, for I am pale and smooth Sea-glass, pale shingle-smoothed sea-glass.

In pieces once, I shine at last in peace.

Erika Fairhead The bottle tumbles, cracks beyond repair – Spilling golden ointment, rich and rare – Pours incense on the wind, as musk as earth, Sweeter than spikenard, strong as death or birth.

The Magdalene stands, pours out her hair like wine; It tumbles down in auburn waves, so fine, So long, from shoulders to her knees it flows – (When naked, in silk garments she seems clothed).

She kneels and dips her tresses in the oil – Like seaweed in a shallow pool they coil – And with them, wipes the Stranger’s dusty feet.

With acts of sensual love she is replete And expert; but inside her untouched heart A bottle shatters, fragments fly apart, She shudders; it is like both birth and death; When she breathes out, it is with fierce new breath.

Fiona Clark

Trunks on, goggles on, locker band on wrist, Deep breath, cough once, chlorinated mist, Feet bathed, towel placed, gaze from board averted, Friends near, show no fear, intentions were asserted, Slow walk, shallow end, slide into the water, Fate awaiting, hesitating, lamb to the slaughter, Doggy paddle, up the pool, reaching halfway stair, One foot on a rung, worse than worst nightmare, Friends now egging on, declining not an option, Challenge looming large, moving in slow motion, One metre not enough, neither is the next, Now five metres up, eyes all upward fixed, Step forward, feeling cold, skin begins to mottle, Step back, climb down – a case of broken bottle.

Robert McMahon It’s often hard to choose a birthday present.

We argued over what Dad might like best.

On one hand wanting something effervescent – Reflect his bubbly character, full of zest – On the other, like a milestone on the highway, An anchor in the constant seas of change.

After the funeral, that wind-swept Friday, So many post-death things to rearrange, I wandered through the house until I found it; The glass ship in its bottle, in a drawer.

And though some old cloths had been wrapped around it I felt its limp weight, like a broken jaw.

Its wooden stand, and name in shiny brass, Steeped in his study’s leather-bound aroma, But woeful cracks betrayed the fractured glass.

Endurance, it seemed, had proved a cruel misnomer.

Con Connell COMPETITION No 281 I saw a lively watercolour, by Turner before the sunset years, of the annual fair at Wolverhampton.

Please write a poem called The Fair, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 281’, by 2nd June.

The Oldie May 2022 91

Getting Dressed

Our passage to India

DAFYDD JONES

Writer William Dalrymple and artist Olivia Fraser love Indian clothes brigid keenan Shortly after William Dalrymple posted the opening chapter of his first book to the publisher, he found a curt message on his answering machine.

‘I am assuming this is a first draft,’ it said. ‘If not, we will have to seriously reconsider your advance.’

Dalrymple, 24 at the time, began again. In Xanadu was published in 1989, winning plaudits – as all his ten books since have done.

Olivia Fraser, his girlfriend, then also 24, decided to put a cosy and secure future at risk. She abandoned her scholarship to Chelsea Art School to join him in the great adventure of making a new life in India.

Today her mystical paintings, using Indian miniature-painting techniques on a large scale, hang in galleries around the world.

Their Indian venture started badly.

The day Fraser arrived in Delhi, ‘excited and terrified’, Dalrymple (who had gone ahead to find somewhere for them to live) developed viral fever and a temperature of 1040F. Turkish Airlines had sent her luggage to Istanbul, there was nothing to eat in the fridge and she was too scared to try street food.

A lustful landlord meant that, for their first ten years in India, they pretended to be married. ‘This worked well but it made it a bit embarrassing with friends when we really did get married ten years later,’ grins Fraser.

They survived the landlord, bailiffs and swarms of attacking bees (‘I have never run so fast in my life’) and had three children. Thirty-three years later, Delhi is still home.

‘I have always assumed I will die in India,’ Dalrymple laughs. Fraser is not so sure: ‘Mmm … I have my eye on a lovely graveyard in the Highlands.’

Their lifelong love affair with the subcontinent is not surprising – both have Scottish forebears who made their mark in the country. Fraser’s kinsman James Baillie Fraser commissioned the famous Fraser Album of Company School paintings.

‘The vastness of India has given me so much,’ says Dalrymple. ‘It has made me a traveller, historian, photographer, 92 The Oldie May 2022

Left: William’s cotton kurta pyjamas, waistcoat and shawl from Afghanistan; sandals from Greece.

Olivia’s layered skirts and top from Anokhi; Dr Martens boots.

Below: in 1989 in the Lodi Gardens, Delhi, where they later got engaged

appreciator of art, feature-writer, curator … everything. I love the people, the food, the climate, the lifestyle and all the different cultures mingling together.’

Fraser agrees: ‘You can never be bored in India. It is endlessly stimulating, and endlessly challenging in a crazy way – the electricity goes off, the traffic can be appalling. You need immense patience.’

Both agree that India’s pollution and politics are worrying, and that the climate is changing. ‘Our well water ran out earlier last year and we had to order tankers.’

Both Dalrymple and Fraser are happiest in Indian clothes. Fraser buys all her hand-printed skirts and tops at Anokhi shops in India, and layers them according to the weather. Dalrymple’s favourite tunics and trousers were originally made by a tailor in Peshawar and are copied in Delhi – ‘Bespoke kurta pyjamas for the fuller figure,’ laughs Fraser. When the weather gets chilly, he adds a waistcoat and woollen shawl.

After being locked down in England, they are relieved to be back doing daily yoga classes with their teacher in their Delhi garden. In London, lack of space meant they had do them, one by one, with the teacher on a mobile phone.

Dalrymple is writing his next book, The Golden Road, out next year. His photographs and Fraser’s paintings were on view in London last year. Dalrymple continues his work for the Jaipur Literature Festival. His 1997 book, From the Holy Mountain, is to become a film.

And The Anarchy, his 2019 history of the East India Company, is being made into a TV series.

Fraser is preparing a major exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York next year. She is back painting in their house on the edge of Delhi. ‘My art brain works better there, and I have all my bits and pieces around me. I like to work with the light, starting at nine and stopping at six, at dusk – what they call cow-dust time in India.’

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The Oldie May 2022 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Rubbish cleaner

I think my elderly mum is getting ripped off by her cleaner (a very first-world problem, I know, but…).

On the few occasions I’ve been present in the house when she’s around, the cleaner regularly tells sob stories about her son/ missing her train home, and she often cuts corners, both time-wise and work-wise. My mum is very sympathetic to her plight and also generally an easy-going person, but she doesn’t seem to be getting her money’s worth, and sometimes complains about the cleaner’s work. How to proceed with this?

R Paterson, Cornwall Try to visit more often when the cleaner is there. Always look at the clock when you arrive. Make a note of the time. Say, ‘Lovely to see you!

You’re looking well! Now when did you arrive? At X? Well, you’ll be leaving at Y, then, won’t you. And I hear last time you couldn’t stay very long; so perhaps you could make up the time either this time or next time…’ Encourage your mother, too, always to check visibly with her watch or a clock when she arrives and leaves. Just this small act will put the cleaner on her toes. Subtle hints are all that matter at the moment. The cleaner will pick this up. She doesn’t want to lose her job. And you’ll manage to reach an understanding without any ultimatums or conflicts. Everyone – including me, I’m afraid – tends to do what they can get away with. If you let the cleaner know she’s being monitored, it’ll almost certainly get her to change her ways.

once he left our daughter, things would improve. But sadly the eldest grandson, who’s 25, is becoming exactly like him.

He lives at home, gambles online and is rude to his mother. When we suggest to our daughter he should get a job and leave home, she gets very upset and won’t hear anything against him. We used to see him quite a lot and have a good time, with wonderful conversations.

But now, because of COVID and so on, we haven’t seen him on his own for ages.

I think he’s embarrassed. Is there anything we can do?

Name and address supplied Very little, I’m afraid. Try to remember this boy is almost certainly frightened and vulnerable. His father has left home and he’s probably copying his ways in order, in a weird way, to feel close to him. He’s completely adrift, knowing he’s behaving badly, but terrified at having to be the adult in the family. He’s confused and grieving. Trying to get him to leave home will just push him even deeper into the hole he’s digging for himself. Get him to come over on his own if you can. Be loving. Tell him you understand and are on his side. Make him aware that when he’s feeling desperate, you are always there for him. Try to continue these visits and remain non-judgemental and calm.

Think of him as a plant without water.

Try a bit of nurturing, counterintuitive as it sounds. You never know – you might see a green shoot at some point. And then build on it. And never, ever give up. Your support will mean a lot to him, even long after you’re dead.

My gambling grandson

Too old to escape my wife?

Q

A

Q

Our son-in-law was a feckless character – gambler, addict, drunk – and we thought that

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A

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I’m fit, I’m 71 and I’ve had a good, productive life. My only problem now is my wife. To her

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friends, she’s confident, outgoing, successful – she still has a senior job. To me, she is critical, contradicting, complaining, fault-finding, cold and undermining. I find her domineering and overbearing. Sex is out of the question. Our marriage has not been happy. I don’t know whether she loves me, but she doesn’t act as if she does. We go through the motions together – we share a bed, and cook and eat and socialise (with a very small circle of friends) together, and we are polite to each other and show an interest in what each other is doing. We are doing up a house and garden we have moved to – to be near to our son and grandson – but she takes all the decisions; so I feel no interest in the project. We sit in the same room reading our respective books, and watch television programmes, usually of her choosing.

Is it too late to make a break to find a chance of happiness?

Name and address supplied Absolutely not. But, first of all, do try seeing a marriage counsellor. Just the mention of seeing one will put a little bomb under the relationship. You’ll be able to find out whether she, too, secretly wants to break up – or whether she’d be horrified.

Why spend the rest of your life in misery without giving a chance of improvement, even minor, a try? I’m certain that once you’d aired your grievances in front of a third party, you’d find a huge change in the dynamics of this sterile relationship. Be honest: it couldn’t get much worse. So be brave and risk changing it for the better.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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