The Oldie magazine - November 2020 issue

AN WILSON AT 70 – FRANCES WILSON 40-PAGE CHRISTMAS GIFT GUIDE

November 2020 | £4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 393

Love from Victoria Wood Jasper Rees on her brilliant letters

Darling Lilibet – Nicky Haslam on the Queen Naughty Uncle Kingers – Jenny Bardwell on Kingsley Amis Diana Rigg in the pulpit – Rev Peter Mullen

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My Arctic role – Lewis Pugh page 16

Features 13 The Gospel according to Diana Rigg Rev Peter Mullen 14 Victoria Wood’s lovely letters Jasper Rees 16 I swam across the North Pole Lewis Pugh 18 Secret family words Ysenda Maxtone Graham 20 Whodunnit? Dick Francis or his wife? William Cook 22 My friend, a grumpy war hero P D Duffaud 25 Back to university – at 62 Nicola Walker 26 Lucky Jim and my unlucky grandpa Jenny Bardwell 28 My dad built the Mayflower Randal Charlton 30 A N Wilson – the man who knows so much Frances Wilson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What were detachable shirt collars?

William Freeman

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

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ABC circulation figure Jan-Jun 2020: 47,170

Kingsley Amis, my wicked uncle page 26

A N Wilson’s wit and wisdom page 30

63 History 12 Modern Life: What is the David Horspool Human Library?

89 Crossword Sonia Zhuravylova 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 32 Town Mouse 91 Competition Tom Hodgkinson Tessa Castro 33 Country Mouse 98 Ask Virginia Ironside Giles Wood 35 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 49 The Windsor Diaries: 36 Letter from America A Childhood with the Philip Delves Broughton Princesses, by Alathea 38 Profitable Wonders Fitzalan Howard James Le Fanu Nicky Haslam 40 School Days 51 Diary of an MP’s Wife, by Sophia Waugh Sasha Swire Sarah Sands 40 Happy 200th birthday, Engels! Christopher Sandford 53 Agent Sonya, by Ben Macintyre John Preston 41 Home Front 53 Tom Stoppard: A Life, Alice Pitman

by Hermione Lee 42 God Sister Teresa Michael Billington 42 James Humes OBE 55 Let’s Do It: The Authorised James Hughes-Onslow Biography of Victoria Wood, 43 The Doctor’s Surgery

by Jasper Rees Tanya Gold Theodore Dalrymple 57 The Haunting of Alma 44 Readers’ Letters 47 I Once Met… Graham Greene Fielding, by Kate Summerscale Kate Hubbard Gavin Henderson 59 Inside Story: A Novel/How 47 Memory Lane to Write, by Martin Amis 61 Media Matters A S H Smyth Stephen Glover 62 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 78 Barbados revisited 62 Rant: Stadium names James Pembroke Fergus Kelly

Books

Travel

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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80 Overlooked Britain: the Duke of Clarence Memorial, Windsor Lucinda Lambton 82 Taking a Walk: North Norfolk’s dog-friendly coast path Patrick Barkham

Arts 65 Film: The Duke Harry Mount 66 Theatre: The Mousetrap is back! Madeline Smith 66 Radio Valerie Grove 67 Television Roger Lewis 68 Music Richard Osborne 69 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 70 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 73 Gardening David Wheeler 73 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 80 Getting Dressed: John Crace 77 Bird of the Month: Wigeon John McEwen Advertising For display, contact Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 Literary Lunch bookings Call Helen on 01225 427311 Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm reservations@theoldie.co.uk News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover BBC/Brian Moody

The Oldie November 2020 3

JILLIAN EDELSTEIN

The Old Un’s Notes How to buy The Oldie during the lockdown Thanks to the lockdown, buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be quite as easy as usual at the moment. There are three simple ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for £4.95 (free p & p within the

UK) at: www.magsdirect.co.uk.

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

3. Give a 12-issue print subscription for just £20 and also receive three free books. See page 11.

Sign up for The Oldie e-newsletter and Barry Cryer’s jokes During the lockdown, the Old Un is producing extra pieces every day on The Oldie website, including Barry Cryer’s jokes.

Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best of our

The Old Un was sad to hear of the death of Fleet Street titan and former Times editor Harry Evans at the age of 92.

His mother-in-law, mother of Fleet Street queen Tina Brown, was the vivacious Bettina, wife of film producer George H Brown. A witty journalist, she wrote gossipy stories of the rich and starry for glossy expat magazines on the Costa del Sol. In the early 1980s, when young Tina brought Harry, 25 years her senior, to Marbella, Bettina said, ‘Tina’s boyfriends these days are so old, George sometimes wonders if he should call them “sir”.’

White cloth-covered pith helmets were first used by British troops during the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1845-49.

They were made of shola pith, a milky-white, spongy material extracted from a species of swamp bean. When dried, the pith was light, comfortable and resistant to humidity. The

explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904, pictured) was particularly keen on pith helmets.

They had their drawbacks, though. They weren’t so good for fighting in, being (a) highly conspicuous on the battlefield and (b) not very effective against bullets.

All oldie hat-wearers will like The Hats That Made Britain – A History of the Nation through Its Headwear, a new book by David Long. They’re all here, from the tam-o’-shanter to the deerstalker.

Most of the hats are long gone, not least the Old Un’s favourite, the pith helmet – a hat that no living person can wear for anything other than comic reasons, surely?

blogs, with a Talking Pictures recommendation.

To access it, go to www.theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box, above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.

Among this month’s contributors Madeline Smith (p66) was a Bond Girl in Live and Let Die (1973). She starred in the Hammer Horror film Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969). She’s acted with Frankie Howerd, Vincent Price and Ava Gardner.

Lewis Pugh (p16) was the first person to swim across the North Pole. He’s swum in Antarctica, on Mount Everest, down the Thames and along the English Channel.

He’s the UN Patron of the Oceans.

Sarah Sands (p51) edited the Today programme until September. She has edited the Sunday Telegraph, the Evening Standard and Reader’s Digest and was deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Jasper Rees (p14) is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood. His previous books include I Found My Horn, Bred Of Heaven and a biography of Florence Foster Jenkins.

Stanley, I presume? The explorer in his pith helmet

Sasha Swire’s explosive political diary is reviewed on page 51 by Sarah Sands.

Lady Swire’s mother, 85-year-old Lady Nott, Sasha assures me, is ‘greatly enjoying my book and the hoo-ha around it’.

For Sasha is not the first wife in her family to make a dramatic political intervention. Readers may recall the night in 1992 when Miloška Nott – whose fair hair and fine Slavic cheekbones her daughter inherited – erupted into the nation’s consciousness, for rather different reasons.

The Oldie November 2020 5

Important stories you may have missed ‘I’m an idiot,’ man tells police Oban Times

Napier police hunt chicken and chips tosser Hawke’s Bay Today Friction on family road trip Henley Standard

Miaow! Hugh Hefner, two Bunnies and a cheetah

Lady Nott had until then been a traditional political wife, unobtrusive and self-effacing, who stayed in Cornwall with the three children, growing daffodils and opening occasional fêtes.

People used to wonder what John Nott’s wife looked like.

Then came the ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo. Lady Nott, born in the former Yugoslavia, could no longer remain silent.

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‘I’m not hunter-gathering today – I’m working from home’

In a Newsnight discussion among Tory pundits and diplomats (Professor John Casey, Sir Nico Henderson and Sir Anthony Parsons) about sanctions, arms embargoes and peace talks, she sprang from her seat in the studio audience.

She had actually just been to Sarajevo, she said with passion – ‘I am Slovene. I speak Serbo-Croat’ – and vividly described the slaughter of the innocents she had witnessed. She elaborated further to the Oldie’s Valerie Grove next day, for the Times – at 6am, before catching another flight.

‘She had never made a political speech in her life

before,’ Valerie recalls. ‘But she’d always felt deeply affected by events. When her husband was Defence Secretary during the Falklands War in 1982, her hair turned white overnight on the night HMS Sheffield went down.’

Sasha Swire is immensely proud of her mother, who devoted her energy to sending charitable aid to Slovenia: ‘As a foreigner in this country, she was always battling Establishment attitudes towards her and her ilk. And she did come into her own when my father left the political stage. Yes, she was the perfect MP’s wife – much better behaved than me!’

At 80, photographer and writer Marion Kaplan has published a new book of a lifetime of photographs – Marble and Mud: Around the World in 80 Years.

Over the years, many of them spent in Africa, she’s worked for the Times, the Observer and the New York Times.

Pictured (left) is Hugh Hefner, of Playboy fame, posing in Kenya with two of his Bunny Girls and Schniff, a cheetah from the Nairobi Animal Orphanage.

Schniff looks rather bemused – is it the Bunny Girls’ hairstyles or their safari gear that disturb him more?

In his postscript to the book, Michael Palin says the embarrassed Schniff is ‘clearly dying to tear them all apart’.

Have you ever dreamt of binding a book in your own skin?

‘125 is the new 100’

That practice is one of the more disgusting finds in a new book, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History by Edward Brooke-Hitching.

William Burke – as in Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh murderers – was hanged in 1829. His skin was then made into a wallet for ‘the doorkeeper of an anatomical classroom in

Wooden art: the 18th-century xylothek (a wooden library) at Lilienfeld Abbey, Austria

Edinburgh’. Another bit of his skin was used to make ‘Burke’s Skin Pocket Book’, which even came with its own handy pencil and pencil-holder.

Jollier books that are featured include those in the 18th-century xylothek (a wooden library) at Lilienfeld Abbey, Austria.

Each volume is made from a different type of tree and contains samples of its bark, leaves and seeds. The perfect Christmas present for tree-loving readers.

‘Is it my back hair?’

The National Gallery in London is being naughty. From 7th October until 3rd January, it’s staging the first exhibition in Britain dedicated to sin.

Called simply Sin, it begins with the apple being plucked from the forbidden tree and traces all our trespasses through to the violent transgressions of today.

Pictures include Brueghel’s The Garden of Eden and Cranach’s Adam and Eve, next to Ron Mueck’s disturbing, near-life-size statue of a stabbed boy. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth are all represented in a Hogarth painting, too.

‘Most people at some point in their life will do something they regret,’ the National says.

But there is a glimmer of hope. The Mass of Saint Giles shows the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne kneeling; his prayers of intercession led to his being granted absolution. Andy Warhol’s Repent, and Sin No More! cries out for us to confess our shortcomings.

God forgive me, it sounds

so naughty that I might just have to visit.

It’s hard to be funny about gardening, but Sam Llewellyn manages it in his new book, Digging Deeper with the Duchess.

‘The Duchess’ is his name for his wife, a formidable ginguzzler who could have gone ten rounds with any of Bertie Wooster’s gorgon aunts.

When it comes to their garden at The Hope, a medieval house in the Welsh Marches (pictured), he is the effete botanist, she the no-nonsense gardener: ‘That thing,’ she said.

‘What thing?’

‘White flowers. Smells.

Glossy green leaves.’

‘Trachelospermum jasminoides?’

‘It is not getting enough water… Why people have to give plants these damn silly names is absolutely beyond me. If there is anyone in the universe as pompous as you I have yet to meet him.’

It’s the ideal book for any couple separated by a common love for gardening.

And you’ll learn that Trachelospermum comes from the Greek for neck (trachelos) and the Latin for seed (spermum).

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Chopped-egg double-decker: hard-boiled eggs, pastrami, gherkins and mustard mayo on seeded sourdough

this enchanting anthology.

‘My aim is to take the fear out of poetry,’ she says.

‘The fear that it will make you feel stupid and the

fear that you’ll be bored.’

The book includes Yeats, Shelley and Betjeman’s ideal lockdown poem, Indoor Games near Newbury.

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Looking for a book to help you through the long hours of lockdown?

The answer is The Magic Hour: 100 Poems from the Tuesday Afternoon Poetry Club by Charlotte Moore.

Moore, Oldie contributor and former English teacher at Westminster School, started holding poetry readings at her Sussex house and so produced

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The Oldie November 2020 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

RIP Ronnie, king of theatrical anecdotes From Gielgud to Pinter, playwright Ronald Harwood knew them all

The playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood died in September and I went to his funeral, both as a friend and representing HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. In a woke-aware, gender-fluid way, that would have much amused Ronnie, The Prince of Wales was represented by Dame Maggie Smith.

Ronnie arrived in Britain from South Africa in 1951 as Ronald Horwitz, aged 17, knowing almost no one. Seventy years on, as Sir Ronald Harwood, CBE, FRSL, garlanded with every kind of honour, he knew everybody and everybody who knew him loved him. To me, he was both a hero and a role model.

I learnt so much from him, observing his humour, humanity, high intelligence (worn so lightly), work ethic (eight novels, ten biographies and books about the theatre and 46 plays and screenplays), loyalty to friends when times were tough (he stuck with Roman Polanski to the end) and his resilience when times were tough for him.

He was famously gregarious and fun to be with because he didn’t burden others with his worries. He put his worries into his plays. And when a play of his flopped, he didn’t sit around moping.

He started immediately on another one.

In 1985, Maggie Smith appeared alongside Edward Fox in one of Harwood’s less successful efforts, a drama called Interpreters, about a pair of old lovers rekindling their romance at an international summit conference. It was not a success. One night, early in the short run, Harwood made the mistake of putting his head round Smith’s dressingroom door. ‘Hello Ronnie,’ she said coldly, ‘and what are you up to now?’

‘Struggling with a new play, darling,’ said Harwood.

‘Aren’t we all?’ was Smith’s devastating retort.

company for several years, an experience that inspired his most successful play, The Dresser. Ronnie never tired of telling stories about the great actor manager and kindly gave me several to include in The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.

One of his favourites was told to him

by Dinsdale Landen, who was a walk-on at Worthing in the early 1950s when Wolfit was there as guest star, playing Othello. Dinsdale was not told what to do until the dress rehearsal, at which Wolfit announced that it would be a good idea for Othello to have a page who followed him everywhere. He handed young Dinsdale a loincloth and told him to black up.

Dinsdale did not know the play. So he just went wherever Wolfit went, the dutiful page, one step behind, always in attendance. But, at one point, he found himself in a scene in which he felt strangely ill at ease. Suddenly, he heard the great man’s voice booming, ‘Not in Desdemona’s bedroom, you c--t.’

Ronnie Harwood started out as an actor, famously serving in Sir Donald Wolfit’s

‘Everything all right with the photo of your meal, sir?’

Tom Courtenay, who played the title role in The Dresser on stage and screen, was among the mourners at Ronnie’s funeral.

So was the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, the widow of Ronnie’s fellow playwright and friend Harold Pinter. The day after

the funeral, when I was filming a TV series with my friend Sheila Hancock, Sheila told me about the time, years ago, when she and Peter Bull had appeared together in a Pinter play in Oldham. On the Saturday night, Peter Bull was frantic to catch the last train back to London, but was frustrated because the train was due to leave at 9.50pm and the play didn’t finish until ten o’clock.

‘It can’t be done,’ said Sheila.

‘Oh, yes, it can,’ said Peter Bull, ‘This is Pinter. We’ll just cut the pauses.’

They did and caught the train with ease.

Ronnie Harwood could do a wicked impression of Harold Pinter. He was a naturally funny man. A committed smoker, he was 85 when he died. While those of us who loved him were heartbroken to see him go, we sensed he would have been happy because he was with the love of his life again, his wife, Natasha, who died seven years ago.

They met when he was still an actor and she was a young and beautiful ASM – the only scion of Russian nobility working in provincial rep at the time.

They married in 1959 and were inseparable. At the funeral, Ronnie’s son, Anthony, conjured up the picture of the pair of them at breakfast working together on the Times crossword.

And that reminded me of another of Ronnie’s favourite theatrical anecdotes – the one about Sir John Gielgud, who also loved the Times crossword and famously completed it in remarkably short order. One day, a fellow actor peered over Gielgud’s shoulder as he was finishing the puzzle and said, ‘Sir John, 7 across – what on earth is DIDDYBUMS?’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered Gielgud, ‘but it does fit frightfully well.’

The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes

by Gyles Brandreth is published by OUP (£20) The Oldie November 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

How to make America great again My son has the answer – move Californians to Florida matthew norman

If that terracotta kraken wins or, more likely, steals it, thanks to the indulgence of the Supreme Court, I asked my son Louis as we drove through a biblical rainstorm on the M3, what the hell are we going to do?

A long, anguished pause ensued. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally murmured, projecting a kind of cosmic Weltschmerz that struck me as impressively precocious for one of 23. ‘Another four years of this … I simply do not know.’

The two of us had shared enough unutterably dismal nights in front of the telly to have kidded ourselves that we’d become hardened to the horror.

First came the 2015 general election.

Having turned 18 a few days earlier, he just made the cut.

After I’d tearily watched him cast his first vote, for Labour, we went to the pub.

I reassured him that the dead heat predicted by all the pools would at least prevent a solo Tory government, and might lead to Ed Miliband’s cobbling together one of his own. That touching fantasy was slain a few seconds after 10pm by the exit poll.

The next year ratcheted up the horror twice – first with Brexit in June, and then in November, with the selection to lead the free world of President Doolally J Bonespurs.

We watched the cataclysm unfold through whisky-bleared eyes in my son’s Edinburgh student flat. At 5am, he summoned the courage to wake his flatmate, a lovely young woman from New Jersey, with the result.

Without uttering a word, she spoke eloquently for the planet as she stumbled into the sitting room, pressed her face against the condensation-sodden window and silently sobbed for two hours as she gazed unseeingly out over the Meadows.

And now here we are, almost four years on, having added Boris Johnson’s 10 The Oldie November 2020

landslide to the honours board, on the cusp of the mescaline-fuelled nightmare to end them all.

Inured to the misery, it transpires, we most certainly aren’t. ‘I simply…’ he reiterated, before yielding the power of speech.

This sub-sub-sub-sub-Pinterian exchange came hours after the latest politically themed all-nighter, shared with his mother and four dogs in Dorset.

This one involved the eruption of infantile spite, formally styled ‘the first Presidential debate’.

If words occasionally failed Joe Biden, bless his doughty old heart, there he aped Louis’s American flatmate by speaking tacitly for us all.

There are no words left for the tangerine grifter. The lexicon of revulsion was thoroughly exhausted long before he made his barely coded appeal to his white-supremacist fan club, to use semi-automatics to intimidate black people into not casting their votes.

And yet still he has a genuine chance.

Now I understand how hard this must be for you to imagine.

For loyal subjects of Her Britannic Maj, it is inconceivable that power could be entrusted to a gibberish-spouting sexual incontinent with legendarily demented fair hair who has visibly proven his eagerness to set his country ablaze to sate his narcissist-toddler craving for attention.

Yet imagine it we morosely must. At the time of writing, the betting markets make the abomination a six-to-four shot to return to the Oval Office. And although

‘A modest level of gerrymandering seemed entirely feasible to me’

Nate Silver, the genius statistician behind the electoral analysis website 538.com, calculates his chances at a more reassuring one in five, even that represents a grievous threat.

‘The thing is,’ said my son as we aquaplaned along the M25, ‘even if Biden wins well, and even if Trump concedes without going for the military coup, more than 40 per cent of Americans will have voted for him. This problem isn’t about to vanish, is it?’

Of course it isn’t. There’ll be another demi-fascist, Russian asset along next time or the one after, with or without any juicy kompromat in the Kremlin safe, looking to profit from the inbuilt Republican advantage in the electoral college.

‘What we need to do,’ said Louis thoughtfully, ‘and I hope this doesn’t seem wildly outlandish, is to move a couple of million Democrat voters out of California, and strategically relocate them in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other swing states.’

I said that such a modest level of gerrymandering seemed entirely feasible to me, and enquired after the funding.

‘Well, if we gave each of them a $500,000 resettlement grant, it would cost only a trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos could foot the bill himself. Do you have a number for Jeff Bezos?’

‘I have a number for Amazon customer services,’ I said. ‘Might the call centre put me through?’

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘even if it did, and Bezos agreed to foot the bill, it’d probably be too late for 3rd November. So what the hell will we do if Trump wins?’

A weedy shaft of sunlight unexpectedly pierced the dirt-grey raincloud as we hit Chiswick. I glanced up in search of a rainbow. Predictably enough, there was none.

‘I don’t know what we’ll do,’ I muttered. ‘I simply do not know.’

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TheThe The Oldie Oldie Oldie November October Month 2020 2016 11

what were detachable shirt collars?

Look closely and you’ll still spot them at formal occasions.

Starched, crisp and almost glowing an incandescent white, these collars were held in place by specifically designed collar studs. Oldies of my vintage will remember the day of their first shaving razor and the day they were given a set of collar studs (and probably cufflinks too).

Without collars, shirts had round open necks, just like the grandad-style collarless shirts today.

City men in suits were wearing detachable collars when I started work in the mid-1960s, although fewer do so today as fashion becomes more informal.

Allegedly, it all started in 1927 in New York, when a lady named Hannah Montague cut the collar from her Lofty detachment: Alain Delon in detachable wing collar

what is the Human Library?

At the Human Library in Copenhagen, you don’t borrow books; you borrow real people.

It all started on a sunny June day in 2000. On a small patch of grass at a local music festival, participants were invited to borrow a person as an ‘open book’. More than 50 people – among them a journalist, fans of rival football clubs Brøndby and FC Copenhagen, a policeman, a parking officer and Bente Moren, a woman from Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen – were ‘published’.

The Danish idea was – and still is – to challenge prejudice and stereotypes.

Volunteers sign up to be a ‘human book’ and offer topics that they are happy to 12 The Oldie November 2020

husband’s shirt to wash it separately, thereby starting a trend for detachable collars.

Historically very formal, all styles became available –

talk about with honesty. People can then borrow a human book from the library for half an hour or more. The human book tells its story, presents its points of view and answers questions.

The Human Library has grown from presenting ‘books’ at local Danish events to appearances all over the world. Ronni Abergel, the founder of the library, has seen how it has evolved from a pop-up to a movement in more than 80 countries.

‘The idea is fairly simple. We arrange for people to meet and talk in a safe and secure environment. That has proven to be a useful and effective method for allowing people to get to know about each other through conversation,’ he says.

And the range of titles has also grown.

The Human Library now includes topics such as ethnicity, mental health, disabilities, social status, occupation and religion. Human Library events take

including the wing-collar fashion followed by the legal professionals and City workers of the day.

In the 1960s, we weren’t as hygieneconscious as we are today. Many men, me included, would wear a shirt for the full five working days, adding a fresh collar each day. City gents were invariably smart from a distance but occasionally a bit aromatic close up – especially towards the end of the week. It’s no coincidence that aftershave lotions were very popular at that time.

I still have my father’s round leather ‘collar box’, but all sorts of bits and pieces have replaced the white collars.

Cleaning and starching were a bit of a chore (and an expense) – so many of us wore a collar for as long as we could get away with. I remember a colleague discovering that Tipp-Ex would whiten over dirty marks.

The great breakthrough that resolved the laundry and starching problem was the arrival of paper collars. These were realistic, wax-like items intended to be used once and then thrown away – although, as many of us were delighted to discover, paper collars were very Tipp-Ex-friendly.

William Freeman

place in schools, universities, libraries, community centres and workplaces, too.

‘All people judge, and we are not here to change your mind or to tell you not to judge,’ says Ronni. ‘We are here to make information available in a safe setting so you can make your own decisions, but hopefully better-informed decisions. Based not on a quick judgement, but after more careful consideration and after meeting someone who knows about it. It gives you a chance to unjudge someone.’

The Human Library recently celebrated its 20th birthday. ‘Sharing stories is what binds people together, and you can see the effect straight away.

People walk away with a broader perspective and a more open mind,’ says Rianneke Tijsse Klasen, who has gone on loan to talk about often stigmatised issues, such as abortion and polyamory.

‘The Human Library attracts really incredible people, people with big hearts and a drive to make the world a better place,’ says Ben Caron, who manages the Human Library outpost in Los Angeles. ‘I believe that what the world needs most now are compassion and empathy, and this seems to me one of the most effective projects to help build those.’

Bente from Christiania – a bohemian commune in Copenhagen – has met many different people through the Human Library over the years. She recalls schoolchildren who visited shortly after the library first got going. ‘Some of the children saw people from Christiania as thieves and addicts, and I realised, “Wow, what a difference we could make as books.”’

Twenty years later, she still occasionally takes part. ‘It is still as important now as ever to challenge

prejudice, to demystify and to talk to one another.’

Sonia Zhuravlyova

The Gospel according to Diana Rigg in the pulpit and read the poem.

‘Oh no,’ she reproved me. ‘I can’t read it. I must get it off by heart!’

That is, she proposed to learn all 434 lines of it – and in a little over four weeks, while already doing a thousand and one other things. And how should it be spoken? So many of its readers affect a drowsy, serious tone, by which they hope to convey some of the poem’s expressionistic mysticism – and with the emphases all in the wrong places.

Take the opening and this, in a sanctimonious drone, is how it so often proceeds: ‘April is the CRUELLEST month, breeding lilacs out of the dead LAND…’ Diana said she would not begin like that, with the misplaced stresses. So

STUDIO CANAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

As Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, I made a thing about getting some T S Eliot read every year in Lent.

His poem Ash Wednesday was an obvious choice but, one year, in 2009, I thought we might go for his 1922 modernist masterpiece The Waste Land.

Who to read it, then? I asked Diana Rigg (who's sadly just died, aged 82) and she replied immediately, ‘Yes, please. But I’ll have to have a good look at it first. I really don’t know the poem very well.’

Such was her commitment that she took herself off for several tutorials with an Oxford professor of English. We met up at the Jamaica Inn in St Michael’s Alley. To say Diana impressed me would be a floundering understatement. I had naturally expected that she would stand

Altar girl: Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers

I waited, puzzled as to what she would deliver.

On the day, I was walking towards St Michael’s in good time for the service when I caught sight of Diana in a coffee bar across the road, swotting up her lines. I rescued her and settled her in the vestry.

The parish clerk asked, ‘Will you want the sound system?’

The resonance of her articulation – along with the look she gave him – showed at once that she would need no such artificial aids.

And so she ascended the pulpit.

‘APRIL is the cruellest month, BREEDING lilacs out of the DEAD land…’

From the first line there was that stamp of indubitability. Eliot – a hopeless reader of his own poetry – would have loved it. Eliot, after Dickens, had thought of calling the poem, He Do the Police in Different Voices. Diana herself did all the voices from Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, and the drowned Phoenician sailor to ‘Hurry up please, it’s time…’

The whole congregation was enraptured.

Afterwards, Diana was anxious to be off to the West End where her daughter was making her debut in a new play. It’s the very devil to get a taxi around 7pm in the City. The parish clerk flagged down a cab with two passengers inside, opened the door and asked, ‘Would you chaps mind sharing your cab with Diana Rigg?’

Of course the passengers were delighted to help.

Rev Peter Mullen The Oldie November 2020 13

Victoria Wood’s letters reveal a shy, perfectionist, affectionate genius, shadowed by a lonely childhood, says her biographer, Jasper Rees

Love, Vicki I

n December 1990, after three gruelling months performing stand-up in the West End, Victoria Wood set off by car for her home in Morecambe Bay. When traffic ground to a halt on the M1, the question of how to relieve herself had to be confronted.

‘While I will bob down anywhere at the drop of a hat,’ she wrote, ‘the middle of a stationary, three-lane traffic jam with not a tree in sight was a mite daunting, especially when one had a familiar face to the great British public (I didn’t want any other parts to become familiar, particularly).’

In the car with her were her two-yearold daughter, Grace, and a nanny.

Darkness descended, word came that snow had closed the M6 and her mood turned sombre. ‘It was a long night,’ she went on. ‘I was scared Grace would die of cold… At 5.00, someone said an ambulance was coming down the other carriageway with HOT SOUP – so I rushed over for two lots of tomato but it was cold. Another low point.’

After 22 hours, they were allowed to turn through the barrier and return to London.

The motorway, she added, ‘must have been like Horse Guards Parade by morning’.

I first wrote about Victoria in 1999 and interviewed her many times over the next decade. At a certain point the acquaintance graduated beyond the transactional. She asked me to one of her Christmas parties. As she was a lapsed

Young Vic: top of the class at primary school; early ’70s at Birmingham University 14 The Oldie November 2020

trumpeter, I boldly invited her to sit in an audience of horn players and listen to me mangle a Mozart concerto for a book I was writing.

When I was invited by Victoria’s estate to write her authorised biography, I knew I could draw on our many interviews to place her voice at the heart of her story.

But, beyond the two boxes of business correspondence in her archive, I had no idea how many private letters Victoria had written.

Then, at my first port of call, Victoria’s sister Rosalind thrust a Jiffy bag at me, containing the earliest example of her handwriting, a postcard from 1957 when she was four. ‘LOVE, VICKI,’ she’d inscribed above a couple of crosses, one vertical as a crucifix.

The bulk of Rosalind’s letters covered the six years Victoria spent in Birmingham, first as a student, then as a struggling entertainer.

As she prepared to make her network TV debut on the talent show New Faces

in 1974, her mood in the letters swung from braggadocio to angst. At her audition, the producer ‘came in, sat down, and said, “Right, make me laugh.”

So I did.’ Then came the broadcast. ‘I bet I get hammered on New Faces – they award points for “Star Quality”. Won’t win. Never mind.’

The more I learned about the long shadow cast by her lonely youth, the more I came to recognise these mood swings as deep-rooted.

Whenever I met a new contact, I would beg for letters. To Roger McGough in 1976, she described her first stabs at sketch-writing. ‘I keep thinking I must have a serious bit here, and then a song etc which is stupid. Isn’t writing HARD? I can’t tell whether things are funny or not.’

Her university friend Robert Howie, who had the foresight to keep the franked envelopes containing Victoria’s typically undated letters, was informed of a forthcoming big break in 1980. ‘I’ve just recorded a TV show for New Year’s [Wood and Walters]. 10.20pm, if you can stick Dr Zhivago first.’

Approaching the years of her peak productivity, I worried my luck would peter out. Would she have been too busy to dash off letters?

Then the actress Jane Wymark, who’d been with her at university, mentioned she might have something in a cupboard. In her kitchen, she pointed to a shopping bag. It

ALAMY/THE VICTORIA WOOD ARCHIVE

Dinner lady of letters: with Julie Walters, her dinnerladies co-star, 1998

brimmed with letters spanning the 1980s, when Jane was living abroad and Victoria sent her long, vibrant reports about, among other triumphs, the creation of Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV. ‘Tomorrow I am being filmed Swimming the Channel which I know will be F**king Freezing and I will have to be a Jolly Good Sport about it. It’s a night shoot in the North Sea (yet again, who wrote this?)’.

When Victoria had two children, my anxiety resurfaced that she would be too preoccupied for correspondence, only for a fresh deluge to be triggered by her acquisition of a fax machine, via which she would send long, frank accounts of mothering and the labour pains of her sitcom dinnerladies. In 2001, just as she sold out the Albert Hall for the 40th time, the jokes dried up and her letters began to exude pained regret and self-blame at the imminent demise of her marriage.

Around this period, Victoria’s faxes ominously started to mention a CompuServe address. For years, biographers have made dire predictions that email would kill off their profession, as paperless communications are somehow harder to store and retrieve.

As Victoria is arguably the first major biographical subject to have lived across

the fault line between the letter and the email, I had been dreading the moment she crossed this Rubicon.

Sure enough, various interviewees confessed that the digital correspondence I sought was two crashed laptops ago or had been wiped in a hard-drive cataclysm. I’d even mislaid my own emails from her. Happily, some friends had hoarded enough gems for me to keep track of her moods and movements as she turned towards drama and directing.

What shone out in all but her most dutiful dispatches was that Victoria was determined to deliver a performance even to an audience of one. One week in 2010, she attended demoralising live performances by Julie Andrews and Debbie Reynolds, and treated the spectacle as a warning. ‘In 20 years’ time,’ she emailed to her musical collaborator Nigel Lilley, ‘please don’t let us be on the stage of some small, halfempty theatre with an audience of old gay men – you on the piano/Bontempi and me in a red-sequinned trouser suit…

I want to quit while I’m ahead.’

In truth, she had no such desire and was still full of plans when illness came to claim her in 2015. Even then, she could not suppress her instinct to entertain.

‘Left chemo at 8.45 last night,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘I was the last baldy standing – I thought they would tell me

to turn out the lights and pop the keys back through the letter box.’

It is only because of Victoria’s untimely death in 2016, at the age of 62, that any of these letters have come to light. My ultimate worry was that the estate, when they saw how many private communications I had managed to unearth, might decree that I had lifted a veil on a hinterland that Victoria would have wished to keep shrouded. No such intervention came.

When she first began writing to friends, Victoria adopted a polite sign-off that suited her Lancastrian aversion to gush: ‘Affec rgds, Vic.’ My own affectionate regard for Victoria has not blinded me to the complications of her genius. One of my favourite letters illuminates the chasm between her much-loved public persona and her crippling social awkwardness.

At a party in the Lake District in 1986, she stationed herself in the kitchen to mix cocktails and wash up. ‘Of course, the longer I stayed in there, the more difficult it became to make an entrance without looking poncey, so I stayed in there all night and didn’t have to speak to anybody, which was great.’

Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood by Jasper Rees (Trapeze, £20) is published on 15th October (and reviewed on page 55) The Oldie November 2020 15

Lewis Pugh, the first person to swim across the North Pole, admires a new Arctic exhibition at the British Museum

On top of the world

W

hen, in 2007, I became the first person to swim across the North Pole, the Arctic water was –1.7°C. Seawater freezes at –1.8°C. No one had ever swum in water that cold before. No wonder that, when I was standing on the edge of the ice in just my Speedo trunks, my swimming cap and goggles, I was scared.

With my extreme swims, I go through five stages: fear, regret, pain, desperation and relief.

I’ve swum in the Antarctic, too, and in a glacial lake on Mount Everest, as well as swimming the length of the Thames and, two years ago, the 328-mile length of the English Channel.

But the Arctic, which stars in a new British Museum exhibition, is particularly daunting. The water is completely black – the Russians call it the Black Ocean. It’s so black that when you take a stroke, you can barely see your hand when it’s fully stretched out.

When I dived into the icy waters of the North Pole to swim a kilometre, there was instantaneous regret. The moment you hit freezing water, your blood rushes straight to your core to protect your vital organs – brain, heart and lungs. So your arms and legs get extremely cold. As I started swimming, it was very difficult to breathe and I gasped for air. I counted strokes to focus on something.

Regret can move very quickly into an extreme pain that ratchets up and up, particularly in your fingers and toes.

Then, after about 15 minutes, it gets to the stage where you’re really desperate.

Even when I got out, the pain wasn’t over. The relatively warm blood in my 16 The Oldie November 2020

core now rushed to the extremities to warm them up. Blood went from my heart to my frozen muscles in my arms and legs and it then went back, ice-cold, to my heart. So my body temperature was dropping long after I got out of the water.

Only after 50 minutes in a hot shower do you get to the final stage: exhausted relief.

When I swam in Antarctica, it was even worse. The water in the Ross Sea was the same temperature, –1.7°C, but the outside air was –37°C (compared with 0°C at the North Pole). The wind blasted over the top of the ice shelf ahead of me – it looked like the White Cliffs of Dover – straight on to the water I was about to swim through. I remember looking out of the cabin porthole before my swim and seeing my wife, Antoinette.

A wave smacked her boat, turned into slush mid-air and hit her.

When I was swimming, I was pulling my arms out of the water into –37°C air, and it felt deathly. After the first minute, the tips of my fingers were solid white.

After the fifth minute, my whole hand was solid white. That’s the only swim I’ve pulled out of. After five minutes, the pain was too great.

If I didn’t do all my preparation, and acclimatise for the swims, I’d die – as would all humans; you would go into shock, gasp for air and drown.

As well as the cold, you’ve got to think about animals. In the Arctic, polar bears are a worry. When I was training in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, I was legally obliged to carry a rifle. I’d leave it on the beach, and swim up and down in short lengths – so I was never far from my weapon.

In Antarctica, you never forget the first time you hear a leopard seal: there’s a guttural sound as it opens its mouth like a Komodo dragon to reveal razorsharp teeth. One moment, they will kill a penguin and rip it apart in front of you – and offer it to you as a gift. The next moment, it can grab your leg. These animals have a split personality! A scientist from the British Antarctic Survey tragically drowned after being dragged down by a leopard seal.

While swimming, you’re overwhelmed by the varied beauty of the Arctic. Take Spitsbergen (‘spiky mountains’) – it’s one of the most magnificent, dramatic places on the planet.

In the Northwest Passage, at

EYAL BARTOV/ALAMY

Top: diving at the North Pole. Left: polar bears are a deadly threat. Above: after the North Pole swim

Lancaster Sound, I was struck by the massive fjords. In the west, it’s very flat.

There’s the beauty of the sea: in Antarctica, the water is so turquoise that it looks like the Bahamas. You’d only know the difference because there are penguins darting among the icebergs.

And then there’s the sky. In summer, there’s 24 hours of sunlight. In winter, it’s complete darkness, with a bit of twilight, the moon and the polar lights.

I love working with the indigenous populations of the Arctic, who feature in the British Museum exhibition – the

Inuit, the Sami and the Chukchi. After nearly 30,000 years in the Arctic, they’re so well adapted to their environment.

One Inuit boat-driver in the Northwest Passage looked worried as I swam past an iceberg. He told me his friend had once caught a Greenland shark and inside it discovered a polar bear – I was easy pickings by comparison. On another occasion, his brother had died falling through sea ice.

Given all these dangers, why don’t I wear a wetsuit or a drysuit?

The rules on long-distance swimming outfits have remained much the same since Captain Matthew Webb swam across the Channel in 1875. And if I wore a wetsuit or a drysuit, that wouldn’t convey the right message. As UN Patron of the Oceans, I’m urging world leaders to dive in, be courageous and deal with the climate emergency.

In the years I’ve been swimming in the Arctic, there have already been dramatic changes. When I did my first swim in the High Arctic, in Spitsbergen, in summer 2005, the seawater was 3°C. In 2017, in the same place at the same time, it was 10°C. In about 12 years, experts say, the Arctic will be largely free of sea ice in the summer months.

The glaciers are melting, too. In 2005, I swam by the mighty Magdalenefjord glacier in Spitsbergen. I returned in 2017 and said to the captain, ‘You’ve sailed up the wrong fjord – this isn’t it.’ I was wrong – the glacier was unrecognisable because it had retreated so far.

Greenland is experiencing some of the fastest melting in the world. In some places, the ice sheet is three kilometres deep. If that all melts, there’ll be a seven-metre rise in sea levels. In Siberia, wildfires broke out last year, from burning methane in the melting tundra. People thought the rain and snow of winter would put out the fires. They didn’t.

Protecting the environment is the defining issue of our generation. I want our leaders to witness the changes first-hand. And then to address it urgently at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow next year.

You may think I’m crazy swimming in sub-zero waters. But if you see what I’ve seen, I’m sure I am the normal one – it’s our leaders who are crazy for not taking immediate action.

Arctic: Culture and Climate is at the British Museum, 22nd October 2020 to 21st February 2021 The Oldie November 2020 17

In the family way Lots of families have private words and expressions, going back generations. Ysenda Maxtone Graham picks her favourites

A

longside the official vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary, there exists a hidden parallel

vocabulary.

It consists of the invented words and phrases that live entirely within families.

Over this long summer of 2020, when we’ve been ensconced within our family bubbles, these expressions have had a chance to take deeper root than ever.

Foreign-exchange children or au pairs travelling to Britain this autumn will be bemused by mother calling to daughter, ‘Put your glubs on or I’ll spifflicate you,’ or ‘I need a borgie. I’m throstled.’

Those four family words come from four separate sources: Lucy Mangan, Edward Bradford, Julie Welch and Libby Purves. Family words stay within families and pass down through generations, but not over the garden wall. They have a remarkably bonding effect.

As photograph albums become a vanished hobby, family words – ‘Daft words and phrases evoking entire stories from family folklore’, as Lucy Mangan describes them – are taking their place as seals of a family’s character and past.

Hearing about how they came into being can feel like listening to someone’s dream: ‘My father was in a café in the early 1970s…’; ‘We were on a boat in Cornwall years ago and my mother suddenly said, à propos nothing…’; ‘We were in a restaurant and misheard the waiter…’; ‘My husband used to collect old newspaper cuttings and one of the headlines was…’

From such obscure moments in families’ histories came the words ‘emulsion’ (a word on the tip of your tongue), ‘cricket socks’ (a changed subject) and ‘ministrett (minute’s rest), and the expression ‘Anyone want Bulganin?’ (Did anyone phone for me while I was out?).

I asked 15 people to tell me some of their family words and to explain how they came about. It was generous of them 18 The Oldie November 2020

– it can be embarrassing and exposing to explain some of these weird terms that came into existence in obscure ways decades ago, some of them scatological.

A few said, ‘No, we don’t have any family words. Sorry.’ It must be dull, I thought, to live a life entirely within the rules of Scrabble. Other families seem to speak almost entirely in private family words, even more so if they have a dog for whom they and their forebears have invented a special dog language.

A major source of family words is children’s mispronunciations, so enchantingly wrong that they seem better than the real words and stay for ever, a perpetual link with lost childhood innocence. Children are natural spoonerists.

So, in the writer Libby Purves’s family, a cement mixer is always a ‘mixmenter’.

In my family, we leave our car in a ‘parcark’. The Speaight family eat ‘psghetti’ and the Miers family admire ‘puzzymunkle trees’.

As a child, I named the scarf folded into a triangle and tied under the chin that my mother (along with the Queen, and most of the female population) wore in the 1960s a ‘buggan’. It is and always will be a buggan.

‘I believe this social-distancing thing is totally overblown’

Children give names to things for which there is a gap in the dictionary.

Adèle Geras’s daughter said, as a young child, ‘But Mummy, what’s the ness in the book?’ – ‘ness’ as at the end of ‘hopefulness’. She meant, ‘What’s the main plot point, the twist?’

A good word, and it stayed for ever – as, with my in-laws, did ‘pépé bit’ to describe the part of the body between the upper lip and the nose, and ‘phalanthropy’ to describe someone with a jutting-out chin.

As young children speak unashamedly about bodily fluids and wind, many family words are excrement-related. In our family, the name coined by one of our toddler sons for the pee you do first thing in the morning, that comes out a darkerthan-usual yellow, is a ‘swain pee’. For the Mierses, a fart is a ‘wacksie’; for the Welches, a poo is a ‘bobby’ (‘from when my husband was a baby’).

As meals form the hub of family life, there are lots of meal-related family words, including long-standing mispronunciations such as ‘bald egg’ and ‘tim peaches’. Do any other families, or is it just my Scottish one, use the word ‘eech-feech’ (the ‘ch’ sound as in ‘loch’) to mean ‘the detritus at the end of a picnic’?

The Bradfords have a good term (‘the blessings’) to describe ‘any cutlery, crockery and glasses that remain unused on the table at the end of the meal and (oh joy!) don’t need to be washed up’.

I like that, and am very taken with two words invented by Adèle Geras’s late husband, Norman: ‘gishbo’, meaning ‘jumble-sale fodder’ or ‘what you go and buy at 3pm on Christmas Eve to add to the Christmas presents’; and ‘schlucket’ for ‘thingummy-jig’.

Tempting though it might be, to adopt other people’s family words would be rank theft. Back they go behind the closed doors where they belong, as eccentric as families themselves are when no one is looking.

William Cook solves the ultimate mystery of the jockey, born 100 years ago. Did he write his bestsellers himself?

Whodunnit? Dick Francis or his wife?

S

ixty-six years on, it remains the biggest mystery in racing history: why did Devon Loch lie down at Aintree, 40 yards from the finish, only seconds away from winning the Grand National?

He’d jumped the final fence and was five lengths ahead when he collapsed; yet a few minutes later, he seemed fine again.

For the man who rode Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National, that strange, spectacular collapse was a life-defining moment. Dick Francis feared he’d always be remembered as the man who lost the Grand National in the most dramatic, heartbreaking fashion. Yet – 100 years since he was born in Lawrenny, Pembrokeshire, on 31st October 1920, and ten years since he died, aged 89, in the Cayman Islands – he’s renowned and revered as Britain’s greatest racingthriller writer.

If Devon Loch had won that day, Francis might never have become a writer. Like countless other jockeys, he would now be long forgotten. Yet the

Devon Loch collapses at the 1956 Grand National; the books that followed 20 The Oldie November 2020

interest in Devon Loch prompted him to write his autobiography and, when he retired from racing the following year, it was published by Michael Joseph, who owned racehorses, and for whom he’d ridden a few times.

That book, The Sport of Queens, did well, cementing his new relationship with the Sunday Express. He started writing for the paper regularly and continued to do so for 16 years. Yet the pay was a lot less than he’d been earning as a jockey.

With a wife and two children to support, he realised he needed an additional source of income to pay the bills.

In 1962, Francis published his first thriller, Dead Cert. It went down well, and led to another, and then another…

By the time he died, he’d published dozens of bestsellers, selling some 60 million copies worldwide. Yet his prolific (and lucrative) writing career has spawned another mystery – an even greater mystery than Devon Loch: did he write those books alone, or were they written with his beloved wife, Mary?

Right from the start, Dick was happy to acknowledge that Mary had a big hand in his writing. She’d encouraged him to write his autobiography (Dick doubted he could do it). When he came to write the thrillers, his publishers recognised her role as his researcher, editor and sounding-board. Yet as far as the public were concerned, the books were solely by Dick Francis. Was this the whole truth, a deception or merely clever marketing?

I’d opt for the third of these. Wives have often played a leading role in their husbands’ literary endeavours.

Historically, this leading role was often hidden from the public, by their publishers or their husbands. In the case of the Francises, the person who hid the truth wasn’t Dick so much as Mary.

In his fine (unauthorised) biography, Dick Francis: A Racing Life, Graham Lord recalls a conversation with the couple, which Mary asked him to suppress.

‘I want you to have the credit,’ Dick told Mary.

CHRIS BARHAM/DAILY MAIL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Partners in crime. Mary and Dick Francis on holiday in Paignton, 1998

‘You will give people the wrong impression,’ she replied.

Clearly, Mary realised that a racing thriller by Dick Francis, the champion jockey, was far more marketable than a racing thriller by Dick Francis and (or) his wife.

Lord makes a convincing case that Mary was the co-author of these thrillers and it’s clear that it was she, not Dick, who wanted this to remain a secret.

‘To Mary, my wife, for more than she will allow me to say,’ he writes in his autobiography’s acknowledgements.

‘Mary and I worked as a team,’ he

recalled, after her death in 2000, aged 76. ‘I would have been happy to have both our names on the cover.’

It’s easy to see how it could have happened. Dick was steeped in racing.

He’d only ever wanted to be a jockey, like his father and grandfather. He left school at 15 with no qualifications and, apart from wartime service in the RAF, all he’d ever really done was ride. Conversely, Mary had an English and French degree from London University, and an avid interest in literature.

For a sportsman to get some ‘help’ with his autobiography has always been standard practice. Why pay a ghost to do it when your wife could do a better job?

Likewise, with the thrillers, the niceties of authorship can’t have seemed so important when they were starting out.

They’d fallen in love at first sight and remained soul mates throughout their lives. What did it matter whose name went on the cover?

The reason this became a source of such interest was that the books were so damn good. I’m one of millions of readers who adore them, and I’m in very good company. Other Dick Francis fans have included Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. The best of the books are taut and powerful, with complex central characters and a wonderful sense of atmosphere.

Personally, I feel sure Dick never could have written these thrillers without Mary, but I also feel sure that Mary never could have written them without Dick. For a jockey’s wife, she was remarkably uninterested in racing. She’d hardly ever ridden, not since she was a child. The intricacies of the racing world which give these books their intense flavour feel like his, just as the literary flourishes and feminine insights feel like hers.

After Mary died, Dick wrote four novels with his younger son, Felix, with his son’s name on the covers. Since Dick’s death, Felix has written half a dozen ‘Dick Francis’ books of his own. I was sorry he wasn’t able to grant me an interview for this article. I would have loved to learn more from him about his parents’ amazing partnership.

‘It was always a team effort,’ Felix told the Daily Express in 2017. ‘My father was never called Dick at home. He was always called Richard. In my view, “Dick Francis” was always my mother and father together.’

In my view, to mark his father’s centenary, it would be nice to see both his parents’ names on new editions of the books.

The Oldie November 2020 21

On Remembrance Day, P D Duffaud recalls a man who swore, snarled and served his country

My neighbour, a grumpy hero

H

MO stands for a House in Multiple Occupation – different from a house share, as tenants have their own cooking facilities.

I lived in such houses for years when I first came to London. I liked the discordant mix of people: manual workers, office workers, artists and drugdealers. Sometimes it would explode: an overdose, a vicious fight in the hall.

What happened with the war veteran was different. It all happened in the space of a year. One morning, 11th November, Remembrance Day, I came out of the bathroom and John Gower (Mr Gower to me) was standing in front of his door. A tall, fierce man in an old raincoat, he usually never spoke to me.

‘I’m going on a trip,’ he said.

‘Enjoy your holiday…’

‘It’s not a holiday!’ His voice became loud and dismissive. ‘It’s the parade!’ He pointed at his clothes.

Now I saw the uniform and medals.

‘Not a holiday – the parade!’ he shouted.

‘No need to shout!’

I went into my room, slamming the door.

I regretted it instantly. For months, he hadn’t said a word to me. Now the urge to talk about the parade had been too strong. I imagined what he lived through, and the horrors that were being commemorated.

A few weeks later, I met him outside.

‘Did you have fun at the parade?’

22 The Oldie November 2020

‘It’s not meant to be fun. It’s a parade!’

He walked away.

By spring, he was ill. One night in April, I was dragged out of sleep by an imploring voice, crying, ‘Help me…’ It was not a voice I recognised.

Then there was a knock on my door. It was the veteran, clutching his leg and asking me to call an ambulance – quick.

The ambulance took an hour and a half to arrive. The wait was excruciating.

Back in my room, I heard him moaning.

At some point, in the dawn light, we chatted. It seemed to take his mind off the pain. He told me he’d been injured in Italy in 1944, and pointed to medals on the table.

In the following days, I located him in Hammersmith Hospital. I turned up with grapes and a card. He was sitting up in his bed with a tube linked to his arm and was surprised to see me. His eyes were watchful, but he chatted in a civilised manner.

He did come back a few days later but refused any further help. He once muttered for me to ‘F**k off’ as he ascended the staircase, panting and groaning.

There came a point when he was

‘They threw everything out, including his war medals’

unable to leave the house. For a while, he got meals on wheels and he let the containers pile up. He would snarl at anyone who suggested getting rid of them; on every surface, piles of them got mouldier. A carer complained to me about it.

‘It makes it look as if I’m not doing my job,’ he said.

The carers called him by his first name, which I found patronising. Didn’t they realise that Mr Gower had lived a life unimaginable to us? He’d killed, he’d been shot at by people whose job it had been to try and kill him. But still, people would talk down to him because he was old.

We had one more proper chat; he told me he had been a gunner in the army.

After the war, he’d served in Palestine, Egypt, Singapore and Hong Kong. I could see how unused to company he was: he would often cup a hand round his mouth

POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

and shout as though he thought I was deaf or very far away. I wondered how long he had been left on his own. Perhaps 20 or 30 years – or more?

A routine went on, for months.

He would bang on the wall; I would pop across the corridor to see what he needed.

The last time I called an ambulance for him was early one October morning, at about four o’clock. Mr Gower was having trouble breathing. I phoned 999 and reported back to him.

‘Wait,’ he said. He pointed to his chest of drawers. ‘In the middle drawer,’ he said.

I opened it and saw three pairs of clean socks and a thick envelope.

‘The envelope,’ he said, as he struggled for breath. ‘Put it somewhere safe.’

The envelope contained a large bundle of money. I stuffed it into one of the socks and hid it in his wardrobe under a pile of

towels. I locked the wardrobe and gave him the key.

He stayed away for a long time. I visited him twice. The second visit was on 11th November.

He was alone in a hospital room. He kept trying to talk; coughs kept interrupting him. The way he was trying to catch his breath was alarming. He wasn’t able to get the words out and he scowled instead. His nails had grown long like claws. His beard had grown too and it spread, white and wiry, over his gaping robe. He had lost a lot of weight.

Mr Gower died that evening. It was Remembrance Day 2012, a week before he was due to turn 90.

Within hours, the letting agency emptied his room. They threw everything out, including his war medals. No one knows who took the money. I was faced with an empty white space where, for months, Mr Gower had lain, shouted and

Allied troops land at Anzio, 1944. John Gower fought in the Italian campaign

eaten chocolate and toffee. In front of the door, the dust was marked with large footprints.

On the day of the funeral, his coffin had a Union Flag draped over it. We entered the chapel. I chose to sit at the front, slightly to the left.

The vicar recited, and he read out the words I had written. I had described how abrupt Mr Gower had seemed, but how rewarding his acquaintance had become, and how thankful those helping him were to have known such a man.

I realised the vicar was delivering Mr Gower to God, and at last the ritual took on its meaning. Apparently, Mr Gower had been an Anglican believer – so this would have been important to him.

The coffin was covered up, about to vanish and be burned.

The Oldie November 2020 23

Never too old to learn Forty years after graduating, Nicola Walker, 62, is thrilled to be returning to university rather than isolating at home

F

orty years after I first graduated (Applied Maths, Warwick), I’m going back to university. This time, aged 62, I’m studying Social Policy at York.

I’m studying full time, with as much face-to-face teaching as seems safe. It was the prospect of a long, socially isolated winter that prompted me to return to education. I may fear the virus, but I have a greater fear of boredom and isolation.

It’s going to be very different second time around. I won’t be living in student accommodation, for starters. I probably wouldn’t need to leave home at all during these COVID-infested times if I didn’t want to.

I could probably stay in my own kitchen for the whole academic year and relive my younger student days: let things rot in the fridge, never wash up, drink endless coffee and smoke endless roll-ups. We were allowed to smoke in student accommodation in the ’70s.

This time around, I won’t have to worry about the impact of my grades on my getting a job. If I then do my PhD, I’ll have reached state-pension age by the time I’ve finished. I won’t have to suffer the rejection by British Airways pilot training scheme I received in 1979 – I found out later that they didn’t recruit their first female pilot until 1987. Nor will I have to endure my actuarial exams again.

I still remember picking up my first student-grant cheque, a large sum of money to be frittered away on shoes and alcohol. These days, that would be a loan, but I won’t be getting one of those. It’s not allowed, apparently, as I’m over 60.

I’m too old – so I have to self-fund. This rather reduces diversity among us oldies, restricting the intake to the solvent.

I’ve felt a need to dust off the old grey cells, but I’ve seen no evidence so far that my new university, York, is treating me any differently from the way it treats my twentysomething counterparts

Top left and above: Nicola, left, Warwick University, 1980. Top right: Nicola today

– and that is exactly what I want.

I don’t want to be patronised because I am older and feel past it. I’d rather be seen as a strawberry that’s really tasty when it’s properly ripe than as a wrinkled old prune.

But mainly I want my age to be invisible. That could be made possible courtesy of COVID distance-learning and

‘I have no fear of failure because, if I fail, it doesn’t really matter’

facilitated by Zoom – and an awful lot of make-up, a diet and a wig. Still, I want to attend at least some lectures in the flesh.

I’m really looking forward to starting. It’s less scary than first time around because I’ve been there before. This time, I have the benefit of life skills that have taught me valuable lessons: don’t bother worrying about stuff such as how to get my library card. If I leave it long enough, someone else will have sorted out the problem and I can emulate them. I’ll only lose my library card anyway.

I have no fear of failure because, if I fail, it doesn’t really matter. I will be slightly touchy about any potential ageism; perhaps we need a Rock Against Ageism movement, the way we had Rock against Racism in my yoof. It could be fronted by Mick Jagger, Madonna or Paul Weller.

It does feel like the start of a new era for me. Perhaps I’ll get some added bonuses: fewer pop-up ads on my computer for funeral costs and earwax removal – and more for cheap flights for students. When I get my university card, I’ll be able to access loads of student discounts, although I’m not sure I can get a free Senior Railcard as well. I’ll find my pockets full of half-chewed pencils again, rather than the dog-waste bags I’ve got used to in recent years.

Bring on the best days of my life!

The Oldie November 2020 25

Twenty-five years after his death, Jenny Bardwell remembers her uncle Kingsley Amis – who mocked her Morris-dancing grandfather

Lucky Jim and my unlucky grandpa

I

still have my copy of Lucky Jim, published by Victor Gollancz in 1953.

Turning the dark green, cloth cover, I read on the front endpaper, ‘With love to Mary and Mick from Kingsley’, written in blue ink with seductive loops on the ls and ys. This dedication to my parents fascinated me from a young age.

I gradually learned more about Aunty Hilly (Hilary Bardwell, my father’s youngest sister) and her first husband, the glamorous Kingsley Amis, and their three children, Philip, Martin and Sally.

Kingsley married Hilly in 1948. He died on 22nd October 1995, 25 years ago, aged 73. Hilly died, aged 81, in 2010.

Aunty Hilly was 17 when she met Kingsley and told my mother that the daftest girl in Oxford had fallen for the cleverest chap. Older brothers, paying a rare visit to Swansea (where Kingsley taught at the university), remember £20 notes being lavishly thrown around

by Hilly – they’d never seen one before.

She also occasionally chucked objects at Kingsley from the top of the stairs as he made his way up with a conciliatory breakfast on a tray.

Lucky Jim, the novel that made Amis’s name, was a hit partly because of its revolutionary setting in a non-Oxbridge university. Amis was inspired as he eavesdropped on Senior Common Room chat at University College, Leicester, where his great friend Philip Larkin was assistant librarian.

The novel’s opening words, ‘They made a silly mistake, though’, kick the comedy off. Professor Ned Welch proceeds to tell the young lecturer Jim Dixon that some sloppy journalist has, in his review of a concert, only gone and mistaken a recorder for a flute!

26 The Oldie November 2020

Amis based the Ned Welch character on his father-in-law and my dad’s dad, Leonard Bardwell – our Grandpa Len. Grandpa Len struck me as the mildest of men, even if he was also one of the few men to not to heed the oft-quoted advice ‘You should try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.’ Len married his first cousin and was an avid Morris dancer.

For over 30 years, Len danced with the East Surrey, Oxford and Abingdon Morris troupes, frequently providing their only music on his concertina. Len gets a mention on the East Surrey Morris Men website as ‘a great enthusiast, if not

Uncle Kingers: Kingsley Amis in 1985

the world’s best dancer, and the prime mover in getting the 1937 tour going’.

You can imagine Amis’s lip curling in contempt. Len was not as cool, worldly or sophisticated as the jazz-loving Kingsley.

For Amis, the Morris-dancing theme was a gift which in Lucky Jim neatly translated into the arty madrigals weekend hosted by the Welches.

At one point, Dixon prepares to attend a dreaded folk-dancing conference.

Dixon takes against Ned Welch so much that he fantasises about squeezing all the air out of his body and carrying him to the staff cloakroom to stuff toilet paper into his mouth.

Top: Anthony Powell, Kingsley, Larkin, Hilly.

Above: Abingdon Traditional Morris Dancers, 1964. Len on concertina

– Bill’s flamenco records, and we never saw them again!’

She added, ‘Len had his head in the clouds with his various hobby-horses, but was a calm and loving person.’ Begonia recalled clearing out Len’s study to discover ‘some very obscure newspapers in Welsh, Basque and Swedish’.

She wondered if Amis envied the Bardwells’ love for culture – for foreign culture and languages in particular.

Another victim of the Amis pen was Jim Dixon’s colleague and potential girlfriend the passive-aggressive Margaret Peel, who induces feelings of desire, guilt, pity and disgust in Jim. Margaret was based on Larkin’s girlfriend, Monica Jones. According to John Sutherland, who is writing a book about Jones, there was even concern about a potential libel case because Jones was so unmistakable on the page.

Her ‘minimal prettiness’, ‘silver bells laugh’, spectacles, hairstyle, long neck and choice of lipstick gave the impression of ‘a neurotic who’d taken a bad beating’.

No wonder Larkin was in a state of

nervous tension when he sent her a bound copy of Lucky Jim on the eve of publication.

John Sutherland says Jones responded with a ‘2,000-word letter written in a storm of alcoholic rage; Ophelia-like mental derangement’.

Eventually, she talked herself down to dismiss it all as schoolboy japes: ‘She could not allow herself to think he would be treacherous enough to put her even at second hand in a novel,’ says Sutherland.

Larkin was forgiven again.

Still, I never heard from anyone that Len was hurt by the Professor Welch character, as Amis once intended.

Unlike with Monica Jones’s distress over Margaret, I doubt Len took much notice. He probably just picked up his concertina and skipped merrily along to the next Abingdon Morris Men’s gettogether.

He missed the May Morning dance in Oxford for the first time a year before his death, aged 81, in 1966. Morris Matters reported, in 2015, how Len’s jig was ‘genuinely missed’.

The other day, I mentioned Len in passing to a neighbour I knew to be a keen Morris man.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘He was very big in the Morris-dancing world. Then he added, as an afterthought, ‘Wasn’t he something to do with Kingsley Amis?’

The Oldie November 2020 27

ABINGDON TRADITIONAL MORRIS DANCERS

Dixon resents Welch, his boss, because he needs to keep him sweet to keep his job. This man has a decisive power over his future.

Before the huge success of Lucky Jim, his first published novel, restless, ambitious Amis was strapped for cash.

He felt trapped in the marriage and was also beholden to the Bardwells when Hilly inherited £5,000. This provided the money to buy their Swansea home, and it was here that Amis had the space to write the bestseller.

Amis’s behaviour towards the Bardwell family wasn’t helped by his serial adultery. According to a family story, if Hilly looked up at the bedroom window when she was out with the children and the curtains were closed, she knew he was up there with a student and she must wheel the pushchair on up the road.

I was lucky enough to meet Hilly properly when I grew up. She told me her parents had been upset by the Amis lifestyle – what ‘with their values and so on’. She added, ‘We were sandal-y sort of people.’

Wholesome and clean-living, my grandmother bought fabrics at Liberty’s.

Our family enthusiasms, recorderplaying and Esperanto, are mentioned in Lucky Jim, just before Dixon collapses during his Merrie England lecture.

Amis was dubbed one of the great, postwar, angry, young men. But the anger directed against such a harmless old pussy cat as Grandpa Len is bizarre in the extreme.

I say this not because Ned Welch is a particularly savage creation. The novel has charm and Amis wouldn’t have wanted to sour that. But, in Amis’s letters to Philip Larkin, he unleashes the no-holds-barred vitriol against Len. ‘I hate him,’ Amis writes. ‘I shall swing for the old cockchafer unless I put him in a book recognisably so that he will feel hurt and bewildered at being so bated.’

I was seven when Len died and so can’t speak too authoritatively of his character. So I rang his daughter-in-law, Begonia Bardwell, 90, who lives in Alicante.

Begonia is the widow of William Bardwell, Hilly’s oldest brother. Bill Senior, as we called him, composed experimental classical music (providing Amis with further inspiration for artist Bertrand and oboe-playing Evan Johns in Lucky Jim).

Begonia said, in her strong Spanish accent with considerable passion, ‘I never met Kingsley Amis, but he borrowed – and I say the word in inverted commas

My Pilgrim father In 1957, a bold British journalist built a replica of the Mayflower and sailed it across the Atlantic. By Randal Charlton

F

our hundred years ago, on 11th November 1620, the Mayflower, the most significant ship in American history, dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod and what is now the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

On board were 30 crew and the 102 Pilgrims who established Plymouth Colony, a crucial staging post in the foundation of modern America.

The original Mayflower sailed back to England in April 1621, was sold and, it’s thought, broken up.

Along time later, in 1957, my father, Warwick Charlton (1918-2002), gave a replica of the ship, the Mayflower II, to the American people. He wanted to recognise the contribution of the people of the United States to freedom and democracy in the first half of the 20th century. He’d built the ship in Brixham, Devon.

My father’s journey across the Atlantic in the Mayflower II took 53 days and was followed by media around the world. On arrival at Cape Cod in 1957, Mayflower II was greeted by Vice-President Nixon and vast crowds of a size that would be the envy of the current American president.

My father was a man of very modest means when he put his life as a journalist on hold to give the American people a piece of their history.

At first, he gave no thought to completing the project himself. He had no financial resources. He lived in rented accommodation. He had no car, savings or bank account.

However, in 1954 he formed a hundred-pound company, issued three one-pound shares and took a taxi from his tiny office in the City, across the Thames, to Greenwich Maritime Museum to research his Mayflower adventure.

There he found detailed plans for the ship, and identified one of the last and best wooden-ship-builders in England.

They were prepared, at my father’s insistence, to use 17th-century tools to

28 The Oldie November 2020

build the vessel with as much historical accuracy as possible. Then, although he had no knowledge of sailing, he identified a captain and crew capable of sailing Mayflower II across the Atlantic.

Warwick turned the shipyard into an exhibition. He dressed his office staff in Pilgrim costumes, built a hut of the sort constructed by the first North American settlers and charged visitors a modest fee for a guided tour.

Then he produced Mayflower memorabilia: a magazine called Mayflower Mail, Mayflower ties, Mayflower dinner services, Mayflower flags, Mayflower stamps and Mayflower medals. He came up with the idea of offering industrial companies the opportunity to buy a treasure chest that would sail with the ship.

With no alternative sources of funding, Warwick left Plymouth, England, for Plymouth, USA, in the spring of 1957 without paying all his bills.

He arranged for the ship to sail along the East Coast, confident that fees from New York, Miami and Washington, DC, would settle all outstanding obligations.

This would prove correct – but my father’s lack of business skills proved

fatal. While he translated draft written agreements into the old-fashioned language of the early-17th century, the Americans employed top Boston attorneys in 1957 to ensure they obtained the ship without any financial or other obligations. My father handed over the only item of value he possessed, the Mayflower II, for the nominal sum of $1.

The people who obtained title then to Mayflower II also took over my father’s agreements for East Coast exhibitions, which paid off the lingering British debts.

Then the ship was returned to Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts, where it made millions of dollars over the next 60 years and revitalised Plymouth.

Mayflower revenue was used to help finance a recreation of Plimoth Plantation, the village built by the first settlers in Plymouth, complete with massive visitor centre, gift shop and car parking.

Warwick made multiple attempts to remind those original American partners (long dead now) of his intentions for the ship. He was in his eighties and nursing a serious heart condition on his last visit to Plymouth. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to the Mayo Clinic, where he received excellent medical attention.

Some 70 per cent of my father’s ship has now been carefully reconstructed at Mystic, Connecticut, after a three-year restoration. In September 2019, she was relaunched to a packed audience of over 3,000 visitors.

Recently she returned to Plymouth to prepare for the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival.

Warwick Charlton gave the ship to the American people in honour of that contribution to freedom and democracy.

I hope Mayflower II will be used for that purpose in the years to come.

My father’s ashes are buried on the ship. They will rest easy if his ship sails up and down both coasts of America and through the Great Lakes to the benefit and pleasure of all Americans.

The Mayflower II and Warwick Charlton in his Pilgrim costume

Randal Charlton wrote The Wicked Pilgrim, a biography of his father

the interview At 70, he’s written over 40 books but insists he isn’t clever. He tells Frances Wilson about Charles Dickens, sex and Meghan Markle

A N Wilson – the man who knows so much

A

N Wilson reaches his three score years and ten on 27th October. It will come as a surprise to those readers who had assumed he had been around far longer than that.

Since the 19th century, in fact, when he had a place at the heart of the government, court and literary circles he writes about with such authority – or earlier still. He has long reminded me of those idiosyncratic parsons of 18th-century literature – like the Reverend Mr Yorick in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy – who move through the world with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.

And what energy he has. He’s written over 20 novels and over 20 non-fiction books, including biographies of Tolstoy, Dante and Queen Victoria.

To celebrate his birthday, I am having coffee with Andrew in a local café. We planned to meet in his new house by Hampstead Heath (he is pictured here in his old house, in Regent’s Park Terrace), but he moved in only last week. As he puts it in an email, ‘It will still be a case of “Jus’ move it up your end, Graham. No – to yer roight, vat’s roight”, followed by the noise of another spindly, Georgian banister turning to matchwood. We would not hear ourselves speak.’

At times like this, he calls to mind Charles Dickens, the subject of his most recent book. When I reviewed The Mystery of Charles Dickens for The Oldie, I suggested Wilson and Dickens were so alike – sharing an essentially comic vision and preternatural literary energy – that the reader is left pondering instead the mystery of A N Wilson. His 30 The Oldie November 2020

mystery is what I now have to solve.

Looking dapper in an aqua shirt and tie, tweed waistcoat, jacket and raincoat, with not a grey hair in sight, he’s absorbed in a newspaper when I arrive. I sit down, and we’re off.

Talking to A N Wilson is like an amateur playing tennis with a pro; he lobs each of my balls back into the court, winning in straight sets.

There’s plenty of mischief flying over the net. Meghan Markle, he tells me, is 50 years old if she’s a day, while Prince Harry is a medieval character straight out of Chaucer. He spent most of lockdown rereading Chaucer – so he knows what he’s talking about.

On the subject of turning 70, he quotes the late actor Jonathan Cecil: ‘Seventy is the new 80.’ Andrew’s table talk is shot through with similar quotations.

His dress sense, he tells me, is inherited from his father, Norman, and he means this literally. Norman passed his old clothes on to Andrew, who had the hems and seams adjusted where necessary.

Norman himself, when he was strapped for cash after retirement, ‘had a seamstress remove the labels from his smartest suits and stitch them into his cheaper ones’.

Andrew talks a good deal about his father, who was managing director of the Wedgwood factory, smoked 50 Senior Service a day, and ‘loved swanky cars like Bentleys and Lagondas’.

‘Any Oldie reader can beat me at Sudoku.

That’s the real test of cleverness’

He also talks a good deal about Dickens; our entire conversation, I now realise, circled around Norman Wilson and Charles Dickens.

‘George Bernard Shaw said that Little Dorrit was a more subversive book than Das Kapital,’ he says. ‘Marx saw only half of everything, but Dickens saw it all: he knew what was wrong with Victorian England.’

His father’s childhood had been, says Andrew, ‘purely Dickensian’, but then so too was Andrew’s. Was it true that his prep-school headmaster was a sexual pervert, and his wife a sadist who made him eat until he was sick, and then eat the sick?

‘Absolutely, yes.’

Does he feel any anger towards his parents, who were friends with the headmaster and his wife and stayed in their house when they came to visit their son?

‘None at all. My father was an innocent who couldn’t see wickedness because he had none himself. He was, in that sense, like Harold Skimpole.’

Skimpole is the character in Bleak House who reminds his friends, ‘I’m a child, you know.’

Andrew was raised in the Potteries, where Norman worshipped at the shrine of Wedgwood. ‘Because Charles Darwin was a Wedgwood, my father was a fervent atheist. He thought that Christianity was a load of baloney; he made scenes every Sunday morning when my mother returned from church.’

Having once considered the priesthood, Andrew has oscillated between believing and not believing.

Does he regret not joining the Church?

‘Not at all. The priest thing lasted for

NEIL SPENCE

about two weeks, in my early twenties.’

He was then lecturing in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University: does he regret not continuing as a don?

‘No. I’m not a scholar, and I will be eternally grateful to Alexander Chancellor [the late former editor of The Oldie] and Peter Ackroyd for inviting me to join the Spectator.’

He denies that he’s more than

averagely clever. ‘I’m a bookworm. It’s a different thing entirely. I bet any reader of The Oldie can beat me at Sudoku. That’s the real test of cleverness; had Plato seen Sudoku, he’d have said, “That’s what I was getting at all along.”’

Sam Leith, the Spectator’s literary editor, has suggested A N Wilson will be remembered as a journalist first,

then as a non-fiction writer, then as a novelist. Would he prefer it the other way round?

‘In my dreams, yes. Elderly people think I still am a columnist. I’m often congratulated on my latest column in the London Standard, [where he was also literary editor] even though I haven’t written one for 12 years. My happiest working times have been as a journalist, wasting time with other journalists. They write wickedly but they are not wicked people. My journalistic heroes are men like Michael Heath – a real commentator on our age – and Bron Waugh. Peregrine Worsthorne and Malcolm Muggeridge had served in the war.’

He also reveres Paul Dacre, an admission which ‘makes people scream at dinner tables. He was the best editor of his lifetime. He and Peter McKay [a Daily Mail veteran] opened my eyes to a new world, because they hated the one they depicted.’

Wilson isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool Tory; he votes for whichever party opposes the party he currently hates most. ‘I’ve voted for more or less everyone, including Plaid Cymru, whose founder [Sinclair Lewis] was one of the great political figures. The last time I voted in an election was for Gordon Brown, but nothing would induce me to vote now.’ He did, however, vote Remain in the referendum, and ‘would do so again’.

We are talking about a world that has disappeared, or is in the process of disappearing. Even sex, we agree, has become retro because only oldies seem to want it. Andrew’s beloved Church of England ‘is finished’; he was not sad to sell his home in the Gloucester Crescent environs because his neighbours, such as Beryl Bainbridge and Jonathan Miller, ‘are all dead now’.

Miller –‘the cleverest man in England’ – would demand, were you to meet him by the letter box, whether you had ever considered the ‘difference between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations’.

Knowing Andrew, he probably had.

I try a few more serves. Why does he work so hard? ‘To avoid boredom.’ Do you fear boredom? ‘No, because I’ve never felt it.’ So how do you know about it? ‘I watched my father becoming more and more bored when he retired. He had nothing to do all day except smoke, and then he gave up smoking.’

What did you read this summer?

‘Tristram Shandy, over and over again.’

What’s your next book? ‘A Shandyesque memoir of my father, to be called The Life and Opinions of A N Other.’

Game, set and match.

The Oldie November 2020 31

Town Mouse

My children love playing the blame game tom hodgkinson

There was one less pleasant aspect to lockdown.

It gave the young Town Mice, now all teenagers, an opportunity to list, in great detail, night after night, all the ways in which Mrs Mouse and I had been terrible parents when they were small.

There was a long list of complaints.

We didn’t feed them properly. We should have stayed in our town nest and not moved to the country, because they felt lonely and isolated. Why did we not have a television? Or a Nintendo Wii? We argued too much. We screamed at them.

We complained about money. Our cars were grotty. We were always late to collect them from school. The house was messy. We wrote about them too much in the Daily Mail.

And I was permanently grumpy. ‘You think you’re great, but you’re not,’ was one hurtful comment.

It seems the idyllic, free and easy, bohemian country life we thought we’d given them was not as idyllic as we’d thought. It now appears that they would have preferred bourgeois respectability.

I lay in bed worrying about this grievance list night after night. I comforted myself by reflecting that at least the young mice were telling us all of this now. How much better than spending a fortune on shrinks and waiting till they were 50 to tell us how much they hate us – or put it all in a book, like Nancy Mitford.

‘They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you,’ as Philip Larkin put it. When our first child was born, I remember thinking that I would be the first parent ever to avoid f**king up my children, but it seems that has not turned out to be the case.

I’ve since discovered that lockdown loathing, where the offspring review their parents unfavourably to their faces, has been very common.

32 The Oldie November 2020

Families have spent much more time together than usual. So the young ones have had the time and leisure both to ponder the subject and to discuss it at the kitchen table. To use the language of the young, it’s a meme. The teenagers may even have an app for it, I don’t know.

One friend told me that his 22-year-old daughter had exploded one mealtime, complaining that her childhood had been a disaster because Dad was always away and Mum was in a state of permanent panic. The older daughter, now 25, later told the parents that in her view they had done a great job, which took the sting out of the initial complaint somewhat.

Another dad endured years of penury

‘They listed, in great detail, all the ways in which we’d been terrible parents’

and struggle in order to send his daughter to Bedales. Under lockdown, the daughter informed him she would much rather have been sent to the local comp. She’d felt incredibly poor as everyone else’s parents were loaded. She now had unreasonable expectations of what life should be like, having been exposed to the offspring of the greediest people in the world.

I suspect the kids have got together on a review site called ParentAdviser and wound each other up about the terrible parenting they’ve received.

Why are they so whingy? It’s because, as a reaction to the distanced parenting style of the baby boomers, we hovered overmuch. And we constantly told them how amazing, unique, wonderful and talented they were.

I also blame the envy-producing advertising sales business – Instagram.

It’s very easy for people to post a picture that projects a perfect or happy life. The teenagers and twentysomethings are forced to make comparisons with others.

Even when you know the pictures are lies, you still feel somehow inferior.

Parent-whinging is nothing new.

Socrates’s son complained bitterly about his mother, Xanthippe. ‘No one could put up with her vile temper,’ he told his dad.

‘Which think you,’ asked Socrates, ‘is the harder to bear, a wild beast’s brutality or a mother’s?’

‘I should say a mother’s when she is like mine.’

Socrates reminded his son that his mother had suckled him at her breast and then clothed, cared for and worried about him for years and years. He should be more grateful.

The contemporary sage of the boomer generation, Lady Antonia Fraser, who gave her now middle-aged children a highly privileged education, told me recently that they all complained: ‘The one who went to boarding school told me he wished he’d gone to day school, and the one who went to day school is angry he didn’t go to boarding school. You can’t win!’

The upside of all this is that our shortcomings as parents have all now been thoroughly aired and we’re all getting on pretty well now, I think.

Nothing has been repressed. The little mice now accept we parent mice are full of faults, but we mean well. Maybe we’ve been ‘good enough parents’, as the kind paediatrician and psychoanalyst Douglas Winnicott recommended.

I do wish, though, that our children would display just a touch more Stoicism – and that, one day, they’ll forgive me for writing this piece.

Country Mouse

The agony of the British chainsaw massacre giles wood

‘To plant trees,’ said the distinguished landscape architect and Sufi mystic Russell Page, ‘is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.’

That better world has already arrived for me, as I enjoy the fruits, nuts and firewood from a plantation I started 30 years ago on a de-natured prairie. I have also delivered shelter from the wind and shade from the sun.

I am particularly proud of an ash tree which has so far shown no sign of chalara, or ash dieback. I happened to like the name – Westhof’s Glorie. It is a selected, or improved, version of the common or garden ash tree.

Mary used to object to my being outside all day, until her friends reminded her that it was the number of men who were suddenly not outside the house all day that ended with the phenomenon of Lockdown Splitters.

‘It could be worse,’ she conceded. ‘At least you’re not interested in sport. But you need to widen your horizons – otherwise you might become institutionalised after all these months on your own territory. How about that dinner you are invited to in London?’

No, thanks. That would be a bridge too far. Better for me to re-enter the wider world cautiously and by degrees.

Consequently, I lowered the bar by setting off for my local, ancient woodland, armed with a notebook and binoculars. I knew that the said place was due to undergo an imminent ash-tree health check from a so-called expert. A pre-emptive inspection could be my opportunity to build bridges with the local landowner. Not, Mary warned, to make more trouble.

‘It is said that since trees have no voice, we humans must speak up for them,’ I reminded her.

A troubling prospect greeted me when I arrived in the hilltop wood, as branches

were clattering and shedding twigs in a hellish, unseasonal, drying wind from the north-east – and yet it was hot, in late September. Only ash trees clatter like halyards in a boatyard and I found it intoxicating standing beneath them in their frenzy. They looked very lively to me and full of mistle thrushes, but many were presenting bare branches, which rang alarm bells.

Ash dieback disease most likely came to these shores from saplings grown abroad. The idea that you can achieve a wood only by planting a bog-standard mix of saplings in serried ranks with plastic tubing persists among landowners and farmers. Or, more likely, financial incentives are measured in months and years, not the decades of patience needed for the full expression of natural regeneration and vegetative succession.

Some ash trees in my local wood may be suffering from ash dieback but I would not want the living, healthy specimens to be destroyed as well in a foot-andmouth-style overkill.

Some people anthropomorphise trees.

By calling them ‘senile’ or ‘overmature’, jobbing tree surgeons can be chainsaw-

‘It’s not very easy being a living deadly sin’

happy. But, as dead wood, old trees are invaluable to biodiversity.

As Benedict Macdonald describes in Orchard (2020), dead wood attracts a huge variety of insects. Woodpeckers, and the holes they bore in it, are used as nesting places by many other species – dormice, toads, stoats, hornets and tawny owls. They are also havens for fungi.

Either way, my ecological antennae were bristling at the prospect of more ecocide. The last chainsaw massacre came in 2008, after a human was felled by a falling branch. That sparked a nationwide safety review, whereupon many fine specimens were condemned to oblivion.

This despite the fact that, as the Deputy Chairman of the Country Landowners Association pointed out at the time, ‘the average risk of a tree causing a death is about one in 150 million for all UK trees or one in 10 million for trees in public places’.

Trees can never, of course, be made completely safe. However, tree consultants are often under unrealistic pressure to certify them as such. This in turn leads to their being too cautious and prescribing excessive, invasive remedial work.

We are too impatient to remember that any piece of land below the tree line, left alone without any human interference or expense, will undergo a natural growth via scrub to become a fully mature forest of properly native trees.

Some 15 million trees came down in a single night in the Great Storm of 1987.

Trees that had merely fallen or tilted were assumed to be dead and written off as so much rubbish.

It was an entirely natural disaster of the kind our woods will have recovered from repeatedly over the centuries. But it was assumed to be reparable only by human intervention, as if trees were an invention of humankind or, worse, a kind of pet.

The late Cambridge botanist Oliver Rackham noted the same as he observed the wooded embankments lining the route of his railway journeys to and from London. ‘To prevent trees from growing,’ he noted, ‘calls for constant effort.’

‘I’ve got my conclusion as to what the landowner should do about ash dieback,’ I said to Mary as I re-entered the cottage.

She was relieved to see me, as it was dark outside and I’d been gone some time. She looked almost affectionate.

‘He should do nothing.’

She nodded, saying, ‘That’s the story of your life.’

The Oldie November 2020 33

Postcards from the Edge

Belfast’s ultimate guide dog

Mary Kenny admires the pet that mastered Ulster’s bus routes

TOBY MORISON

In Germany, the government has declared ‘a dog’s right to walks’.

Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner has devised a new law, making it compulsory for dog-owners to walk their pets twice daily. She’s been much mocked, but the lady insists German dogs need more walkies.

Dogs, actually, can learn to take themselves for a walk. In Chris Ryder’s biography of the late Gerry Fitt – that bonhomous Northern Irish MP – the author writes about Gerry’s dog, Mickey, who organised his own walks in Belfast.

Mickey, a foundling mongrel, was a much-cherished pet. But, as nobody ever found the time to take him for a walk, Mickey discovered for himself how to get his daily exercise.

He worked out that if he hopped onto one of the buses that passed the Fitt family home, it would take him to a nearby park. Mickey became known to the bus drivers and conductors – they had conductors in those days – and the bus staff ensured the doggie alighted at the correct stop. Mickey took his own walk in the park and returned home, similarly, by his familiar bus route.

The Germans are a clever people.

Surely they can train their mutts to be as smart as Mickey Fitt?

When I left London two decades ago, I did so reluctantly.

London was where everything happened – the galleries, the theatres, the clubs (be it the Groucho or the Reform), the restaurants and the buzz.

I’m a city person and migrating to a small town was exile to la vie de province.

A French colleague referred to life outside the metropolis as ‘l’atmosphere Balzacienne’ – as in a Balzac novel of overheated introversion. But I agreed to the move for the sake of marital duty and, in time, I came to see the virtues of this provincial life: the kindly people, the convenience of localism, a friendly,

My relations there tell me it’s become sadly ‘subdued’ – they’re now moving to the Bordeaux region.

I’m sorry for my native Dublin, too, and fear it may return to James Joyce’s description of it as ‘the centre of paralysis’, with its pubs continually closed.

I hope our grandchildren will see the great cities revived. But events, chance and technology have surely combined to revive life outside the metropolis.

nearby high street and the internet’s ever-growing facility to deliver global communications.

And then along came COVID and all its nasty, unwelcome restrictions on our lives. But one compensatory element has emerged: life outside London has acquired a new status. As more people discovered they can work from home, they also discovered the pleasures of not having to commute daily, spending vast amounts in the process.

Life isn’t as expensive outside the capital, but most of what’s available in London is now accessible outside the capital. Online shopping has changed habits. And while budget shops like Primark have been losing trade in London, they’ve been thriving outside the capital.

The loss of the theatre in London over the course of this year has indeed been catastrophic. But some theatregoers also remember how ruinously expensive a West End show was – and how much, now, can be performed via Zoom. Last month, a table reading of Noël Coward’s Private Lives attracted an audience of 1,400 via Zoom, at the cost of £35 a ticket.

I’m sorry to see how much London has been drained of its pulsating life, and I hope it recovers. I’m also sorry for Paris.

I don’t want to assume the role of Mrs Scrooge. But I won’t be joining the general lamentations that ‘Christmas is cancelled’ because of our new social rules and regs.

Isn’t this a good opportunity to reboot the festive season – make it a less raucous, panic-stricken and insanely stressful season? Not to mention a chance to cut back on Christmas decorations, available in the shops from August.

There are strict Protestant sects that disapprove of Christmas – they claim a Christian remembrance has been changed into a Pagan bacchanalia. I see what they’re driving at. Yule will be somewhat downsized this year, and that could lead to a more reflective Nativity season.

Yet the hullaballoo over Christmas must have been exciting when it was a novelty. My late husband was evacuated, as a young boy, to New York in 1940. An American Christmas seemed wondrous: English children had never before seen merry chaps dressed as Father Christmas or giant Christmas trees festooned with lights, or heard Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Poignantly, he and his brother were plied with gifts by Jewish New Yorkers as a special thank-you for Britain’s war effort. That was a Christmas he remembered with a true sense of the magical.

The Oldie November 2020 35

Letter from America

America the not so beautiful

The US election exposes ugly feelings in small-town Connecticut philip delves broughton In early August, my wife returned from a weekend in Vermont with a couple of lawn signs.

They showed a black fist thrusting through a white outline of the state of Vermont, with the words ‘Black Lives Matter’. She planted the first one by the side of the road. ‘I bet you someone steals it,’ she said.

Within a week, it was gone.

We placed the next one more strategically, just inside our property, but still clearly visible to anyone driving past.

Any thief would also have to trespass. A few days later, we found just the wire frame which had once held our sign.

Since then, we have been wondering two things. First, what kind of colossal and immovable sign we could construct next. And secondly, who’s the twitchy, sign-stealing bigot prowling our street?

Litchfield County is a couple of hours north of New York. At its southern tip, the commuter suburbs of Connecticut peter out. By the time you hit Massachusetts in the north, it is all rolling hills, woods and farms. The town of Litchfield itself, where we live, is about two-thirds of the way up; it’s a county town in English terms. Something like Chipping Norton or Ledbury.

Its 8,000 residents include urban evacuees, their number swollen at the weekends by New Yorkers, but the core are flinty Yankees. When I asked my mechanic once how he got through the ice-bound months of February and March, he flicked me a look of utter disdain and said, ‘You shovel and wait for spring.’

In 2016, Connecticut voted Democrat as it tends to do, but Litchfield County voted for Trump over Clinton by the thumping margin of 55 per cent to 41 per cent. The county is 94 per cent white, and many of its residents share Trump’s economic conservatism and his belief that their culture is under siege by the radical left.

This year, you can see plenty of lawn 36 The Oldie November 2020

signs and bumper stickers indicating another Trump win. Many of the New Yorkers who fled up here during the pandemic, assuming a kind of bucolic indolence, have been surprised by the zesty politics.

The virus has people revved up, bickering at the supermarket and at parties, claiming the whole pandemic is a Democrat scam. And there are plenty who say, ‘I don’t like the man, but the economy needs him…’ Or ‘I don’t agree with everything he does, but someone has to stand up to these radicals…’

Then off they go into these strange litanies of rumoured left-wing outrages.

Plots to cancel Christmas or erase George Washington from the history books, or to incinerate the forests of California to make a point about climate change. I’ve learned a 1,000-yard stare to get me through.

There is a zebra crossing near our community playground and baseball field. During the late summer, I noticed a small group filling in the white bars with the colours of the rainbow. I thought it was an art project, but it turned out it was a gesture of support for the LGBTQ community.

The group who did it wrote a letter to our local paper recently, bemoaning the reaction to their work. They had been told to erase it; the town didn’t want people like them. It is hard to tally the lazy, summer-evening baseball games – the epitome of small-town

‘Actually, I think I’ll walk ’

America – with this kind of prejudice.

The two petrol stations in town are owned by recently arrived Asian families.

The other day, I heard someone I know well, and like, referring to them as ‘dot-heads’ – suggesting that they were all packed into apartments without the legal right to be here.

I am half-Burmese; I look more like my English half. I am used to people flashing their racism in front of me, assuming I must agree. The dot-head comment, I felt, was coming from a place of prolonged economic pain; from years of steady erosion of this person’s place in the world. These are the very factors that drive so many people towards Trump.

The shame of it all is that Litchfield used to pride itself on its Yankee liberalism, a combination of conservative habits and liberal thinking.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, grew up here in a family of abolitionists.

When we moved here, there was a women’s prison on the town green, next door to the bank. I was told that the idea was to keep prisoners in the heart of town, so they had the best chance of reintegrating into the community on their release. The prison has since been redeveloped as a restaurant, shops and offices.

Today’s Litchfield has an organic farmer’s market alongside pick-ups each with an outsize Stars and Stripes jammed into their trailer hitch. It still exudes the patched-sweater self-sufficiency of New England, but there is also a sense of siege – the sense that one is always a cross word or two away from an act of emotional violence, a raised voice or a stolen lawn sign.

The two sides are not sitting well together, and the election cannot come soon enough.

Philip Delves Broughton was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph

Profitable Wonders

Orchards are buzzing with birds and bees

GILLIAN MOORE/ALAMY

james le fanu

My friend’s Oxfordshire garden was suffused with the golden glow of a late September afternoon. It could have been the inspiration for John Keats’s paean to ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in his ode To Autumn.

Six years ago, this was an impenetrable jungle of nettles, brambles, rusting bicycles and even, bizarrely, the hull of an old sailing yacht.

The only hint of the treasures it might conceal, she told me, were a few inaccessible, gnarled, old trees shrouded in springtime with pink and white blossom.

There was much hard toil, clearing the brambles, stripping away ivy and digging over the soil of her longneglected orchard.

She now enjoys (literally) the fruits of her labour. The branches of a dozen apple trees bend with greenish-brown Egremont Russets and cookers the size of small footballs. Interspersed among them, three tall pear trees are festooned with ripening Comice and Conference pears, while dangling clumps of plump Victoria plums seep juice through their dark purple skins.

Throughout the year, she shares this abundance of her reclaimed orchard – miraculous testimony to nature’s resilience and fecundity – with many visitors.

In winter, flocks of thrushes, wrens and blue tits pick energetically through the decaying windfall beneath the trees.

Come March, bees and butterflies emerge from hibernation to feed on the nectar of the early blossom. Every evening, as dusk falls, bats flit to and fro, eating their fill.

On a grander scale, the ancient, if fast-dwindling, traditional orchards of Herefordshire and Somerset harbour the most widely diverse assembly of life in Britain.

Some 2,000 species of insects, pestiferous sap-sucking aphids, weevils and codling moths are kept in check by their natural predators – ladybirds, wasps and spiders. There are butterflies 38 The Oldie November 2020

Scrumptious scrumpy: cider apples in a Somerset orchard

(comma, painted lady, red admiral and tortoiseshell) and exotic beetles (the stag and rhinoceros); rabbits and hedgehogs, badgers, stoats and weasels.

In their recently published Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden, Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates describe the hidden relationships between these diverse inhabitants, a self-sustaining ‘circle of life’ that underpins this ecological wonderland. Besides supplying a rich source of wholesome nutrients, orchards offer creatures shelter from the elements and a haven in which to breed and nurture their young.

Here they give pride of place to some of ‘Nature’s carpenters’, three species of woodpecker – the green, and the great and lesser spotted. Every season, each pair chisels out half a dozen or more nesting holes. They will use only one, leaving the rest for others to occupy: blue tits, jackdaws, tawny owls, hornets and grey squirrels.

The tawny owls feed their young with a steady supply of mice and voles.

Each of their emptied, subterranean homes becomes in turn an ideal place for the bumblebee queen to raise her family in ‘a tunnel of just the right width and length, leading to a moss-lined chamber’.

Once her offspring have hatched, their voracious appetite requires her to forage for pollen, visiting thousands of flowers every day.

Bumblebees are major pollinators of apple and pear blossom. Still, as the authors point out, the mellow fruitfulness of a healthy orchard is predicated on more than the imperative for the queen to feed her young. It also depends on the whole chain of causation by which, quite independently, those chiselling woodpeckers and tawny owls, preying on mice and voles, are instrumental in securing her a home.

That causal chain extends back still further: the woodpeckers prey on beetles and earwigs lurking beneath the bark, which in turn feed on the pestiferous aphids and caterpillars. Completing the circle, their major source of nutrients are the fruits of the orchard pollinated by the bumblebee.

We humans are the ultimate beneficiaries of this intricate ecological web, where each of the 2,000 varieties of apple has its own optimal seasonal moment of aroma, sweetness and acidity.

After the strawberry flavour of the early Worcester Pearmain, enthused the doyen of pomology Edward Bunyard, comes the ‘melting, almost marrowy flesh and juiciness’ of James Grieve, the aniseed-scented Ellison’s Orange and the ‘very attar of apples’, the Gravenstein. In November, there’s the Cox he judged to be ‘the Château d’Yquem [the most sublime and costly of sweet white wines] of apples’.

December is the high point for the ‘nutty, warm aroma’ of the Blenheim Orange.

Meanwhile, my friend, overwhelmed by her surplus of mellow fruitfulness, has bought a fruit press with which she makes a delicious, wholesome elixir of pear and apple juice.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Back to school – and back home again And so we’re back.

The school opened to all at the beginning of September and the children, with their shining morning faces, crept like snails unwillingly back to school.

To be honest, most were less unwilling and snail-like than normal. Much to their surprise, many of them were actually looking forward to being back in a routine. And they were pleased, of course, to see one another.

They rushed around, hugging each other, barging around corridors with no reference to or understanding of the one-way system and the new COVID rules. They were, at first, like puppies that had been kept in for too long.

As for me, I was so happy to see my tutor group I thought I would split my face with smiles. I had to remind myself that I was not allowed to hug them at the best of times and these, if not the worst, are still not what we want.

I welcomed them back. Then I reassured those who, for one reason or another, had done far too little work in the past six months that it was all right.

We had a year to go till their GCSEs – they could and would recoup all lost time. They had learned other skills and had found other joys within lockdown – all very positive; all very energising. And

GOLDEN NUGGETS Friedrich Engels was born 200 years ago, on 28th November 1820, and he and his chum Karl Marx produced The Communist Manifesto when both were still in their twenties.

Engels spent most of his adult life in England, where he developed a 40 The Oldie November 2020

they settled down, worked their way around the corridors, learned which lavatories they could use and which area their ‘bubble’ was to be kept in. We distributed new exercise books and timetables and were set to go.

One week later, we were on the national news. On the Friday, we were told there was one child with COVID in year 7. On Monday, there was one (unrelated) child with the virus in year 11.

On the advice of Public Health England, both year groups had to be sent home for a fortnight of isolation. So, eight days after reopening, we were back to half a school.

It’s different this time, though. This time, the students are expected to work through their timetables at home and do five hours a day. This time, they are confined to quarters while others are free. This time, there is no sense of adventure; just an overwhelming weariness. And this time, we are on the receiving end of some of the anger and frustration the country at large is beginning to feel.

It could not have happened to two more unfortunate year groups. The 7s have just transitioned from their primary schools and the 11s are in their last year before their GCSEs.

The 7s have not yet even been signed up to our online homework site, and have not even had their first IT lesson. The 11s don’t know – we don’t know – what their GCSEs will look like. If the rest of the country is going to experience what we’re experiencing, on a rolling wave throughout the year, how can qualifications be given out fairly across the nation? How can we keep the children going and feeling optimistic, if they are in and out of school like the old-fashioned weather man and woman?

Until now, I have always said my key job is to educate the children, and to educate them more widely than the curriculum demands, but we’re beginning not even to be sure what the curriculum itself will be. Poetry was out; poetry is back in – with ‘teachers raging’ according to the tabloids, but not this one.

Now I think that, even more than to teach them Macbeth, I need to instil confidence and optimism in them. While fighting against the trite phrase ‘the new normal’ (because it is not normal, and should not be allowed to become normal), I have to make them believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

And right now that makes teaching Macbeth to unwilling teenagers look like a piece of cake.

Happy 200th birthday, Engels! taste for foxhunting, choral music and lengthy trips to the pub. He worked as a manager of his family’s thriving textile factory in Salford.

The Manifesto began life in the unlikely setting of London’s Red Lion pub (today an up-market cocktail bar).

There the exiled committee of the German Workers’ Education

Association invited Engels and Marx to draw up a charter of their party’s beliefs.

Marx fathered a son (whom he named Freddy) with his housekeeper, and Engels enjoyed a convivial ménage with two unmarried sisters.

Right to the end, the old subversives combined a commitment to the class struggle with hedonism.

Just before he died in 1895, Engels wrote to Marx’s daughter Laura, ‘Here’s to your good health in a bumper of lait de poule, fortified by a dose of cognac vieux.’

He left behind the modern equivalent of £4 million in shares, held in everything from his local gas company to the Tory government’s colonial investment fund.

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

My duel with the masked Oxfam warrior Fred, my son, has finally landed a fulltime job, training as a history teacher.

Not that he was completely idle in the four years after he left university. He worked in television for a bit (hated it); taught English to Chinese students online; and had a short stint as a tour guide on HMS Belfast. He also wrote a novel about an unpleasant and dysfunctional family who live in the suburbs. No idea where that scenario came from.

The new term was delayed for a week to allow pupils to adapt to the new regime of having to wear face masks – the silliest, most impractical decision throughout this entire pandemic. A class of year 12s will swap them, drop them and use them as catapults. All the evidence shows that the chances of children’s passing the disease on to adults are minimal.

I have my own issues with wearing a muzzle (daughter Betty winces when I adopt Peter Hitchens-speak). As I suffer from a rare respiratory disease and find it hard to breathe when muzzled, I am ‘mask exempt’. The first time I ventured out post-lockdown, so many shop assistants came up and asked me to put one on that I now wear an explanatory sign around my neck, like a guide dog.

I thought this would be enough to keep COVID zealots at bay, but it just seems to reinforce their righteous anger.

On a trip to Guildford to get Fred kitted out for his new job (I was harbouring a secret fantasy that I could dress him like Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr Chips), I was made to feel like a criminal wherever I went. At one clothes shop, a security guard refused me entry like a bouncer at some exclusive nightclub. Eventually the manager appeared, offered profuse apologies and allowed me in.

At the threshold of Boots, a female employee spent so long reading my two-word sign with a furrowed brow, you’d have thought I was wearing The Waste Land.

In Zara, a fellow shopper recoiled theatrically at my approach, lost her footing and stumbled into a pile of jeans. And at the Oxfam bookshop, a muzzled gentleman customer grumbled loudly to the shop assistant about selfish shoppers without masks who tell lies about having underlying health issues.

As I was the only other person in the shop, my hackles rose. ‘Do you mean me?’ I blurted, like a Home Counties Travis Bickle. ‘Because I can’t see anyone else here not wearing a mask.’

He said he hadn’t meant me.

I suggested he mind his own business, adding that there was no overwhelming scientific evidence that masks even worked. ‘If anything, they might make things worse as people are forever fiddling about with them and then touching things.’

‘Well, if that’s the case,’ he said, ‘why do surgeons wear masks?’

‘To prevent bacterial infection, not viruses!’

On and on we went, each of us firing opposed pandemic theories at the other.

He was all for obeying government orders without question, while I droned on about personal freedom. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘So you’re an anarchist, are you?’ The mask made it sound as if he was asking if I was the Antichrist.

Then the manager appeared from the storeroom and told us to stop shouting. I told him we weren’t shouting; we were having a lively debate. But we stopped anyway. I bought a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four for £2, and went to have my first haircut in eight months.

‘How much do you want taken off, then?’ my stylist, Ryan, asked.

‘All of it!’ I said wildly.

When I admired his jungle-animal-

themed tattoos, he stopped snipping to tell me the meaning behind each one: ‘This bird represents my nan, ’cos she kept birds. The lion here’s my dad, ’cos he’s the provider.’ And so on. Prelockdown, my eyes might have glazed after the tiger, but it was so nice talking to someone friendly and unhysterical that I hung on to Ryan’s every word.

Afterwards, I met Fred in Caffè Nero.

‘You look as if you help run a lesbian co-op in Hackney,’ said Fred.

‘I had a row with a man in the Oxfam bookshop,’ I confessed.

It transpired that Fred had gone in there shortly after I left. And they were all still talking about it.

‘Were they agreeing with him or with me?’

‘Him,’ said Fred. ‘They all think you’re mad.’

Back at home, Mr Home Front and I did an online quiz to find out what Prime Minister we most resembled.

‘Why am I John Major?’ I asked, dismayed at my result.

‘Probably because you went to a state school and didn’t go to university,’ said Mr HF (a very smug Disraeli). Another quiz in the Mail concluded that both Mr and Mrs Home Front were Grumpy Social Conservatives.

‘But I’m blue Labour!’ I said, mildly affronted.

‘About as blue Labour as Alf Garnett,’ mumbled Mr HF. The Oldie November 2020 41

sister teresa

Archbishop of Canterbury’s pin-up ‘Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,’ wrote John Keats in Lamia.

Replace philosophy with theology and I would guiltily be tempted to agree. It is not an appealing subject to me: my heart sinks when I look at all the books in our library that I should have read and haven’t.

Many are by the late Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit, and one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. His works include 23 volumes, drily entitled Theological Investigations. Their difficult contents occupy over a yard of shelf space. But this daunting intellectual is sympathetically on record as being delighted to be taken to the best ice-cream parlour in Berlin.

Far more importantly, he preached regularly at Sunday Mass in the churches local to the German universities where he taught. Some of these sermons appear in The Great Church Year and Biblical Homilies. They offer, to any ordinary person who is prepared to pay attention, a depth of scholarship and understanding of the Christian life that would normally

St Alban, Britain’s first martyr and ideal patron saint

be available only to specialised academics.

He never talks down to his congregation and yet every word is comprehensible. I can only be grateful that there are people who are so fascinating and encouraging about scripture and doctrine.

We have, in this country, a scholar with the same ability. The joy is that he is alive, well and still lecturing and writing.

Last year Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, published Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way. It consists of lectures and sermons dealing with Christian – and, in two cases, Jewish – men and women whose lives cannot fail to inspire.

The book (all too short) starts with

St Paul, who is shown as surprisingly approachable. It ends with Bishop Óscar Romero, shot in the back while saying Mass because of his condemnation of the El Salvador government.

St Alban follows on from St Paul chronologically; he is Britain’s first martyr.

Having exchanged clothes with a priest to whom he had given shelter, Alban replaced him so that it was he (Alban) who was executed by the Romans for being a Christian. Dr Williams suggests, ‘If Alban had been recognised as the patron saint of this country, perhaps it would have been a way of reminding our society of the terrible dangers of misunderstanding loyalty and solidarity, and of the immense, exhilarating and rather terrifying gift of being invited to open our lives, our hearts, our homes and our economies to strangers.

‘But God, with his well-known sense of irony, has in fact given us a national patron in St George, who happens to have been what we now would call a Palestinian Arab.’

Memorial Service

James Humes OBE (1934-2020) The Rev – formerly the Rt Hon, Jonathan Aitken – conducted the transatlantic Zoom funeral for James Humes.

Humes was the White House Special Assistant, who wrote speeches for Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George Bush Senior.

‘Jamie embodied the true Churchillian spirit of “We shall never surrender”,’ said Aitken, who knew Humes for 30 years and led the service from his garden in Earl’s Court. ‘He also emulated his great hero by having an inspired and instinctive feel for the nuances and cadences of the English language.’

‘When he was 18 years old, in his last year at Hill School, Pottstown, PA, Jamie won an English-Speaking Union scholarship to Stowe School in England.

‘This was a life-changing year, which 42 The Oldie November 2020

he later said gave him “a severe case of Anglophilia”.

‘Remarkably, Jamie, the visiting American teenager, was invited to the 21st-birthday party of Princess Alexandra of Kent, where he met the Duke of Edinburgh and danced with the Queen – an experience which most uncharacteristically left him completely tongue-tied and lost for words.

‘Jamie also went to Parliament, where he met Winston Churchill, then in his second term as Prime Minister.

‘Churchill advised Jamie at that encounter, “Young man, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.” ’ Humes wrote 37 books, several of

them about Churchill. His bestseller Churchill: Speaker of the Century (1980) won him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. He was given an honorary OBE by the Queen.

Several of Humes’s family took part in the service at the Chapel of West Laurel Hill Cemetery at Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. It was shown on a big screen in the National Cathedral in Washington.

James’s daughter Bailey Humes read The Brook by Alfred Tennyson. Grandson James Quillen read from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’ Grandson George Quillen read Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister in the House of Commons in June 1940: ‘We shall not flag or fail.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

The bad taste of COVID-19

As coronavirus sufferers are discovering, a sense of smell is essential to enjoying the great pleasures of eating theodore dalrymple Of all sensory losses, that of smell is usually taken the least seriously.

Many people treat it almost as a joke, though it is essential to what we normally call the sense of taste. Without it, we can distinguish only sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Pleasure in eating then becomes minimal and food becomes mere fuel. In an age such as ours, in which culinary aesthetics are almost the only aesthetics that most people take seriously, or in which they show any judgement, loss of the sense of taste is of great importance.

The sense of smell declines with age and can disappear altogether in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Closely observing a relative with the former disease, I noticed first that he would push away his food, with the remark that it tasted of nothing, though to me it seemed quite highly flavoured.

He attributed the tastelessness to the food, of course, rather than to himself, and it never occurred to him to wonder why everything put before him was so bland.

His appetite has since dwindled, though how far this has been caused by his sensory loss I cannot say for certain.

Speaking for myself, if food lost its savour, I doubt I should be able to maintain much interest in it. The argument that one must eat to live would not impress me very deeply.

It sometimes takes more than an hour to cajole the old relative into eating something. When I watch his carers doing precisely this, I marvel at their patience. I would not be able to stand it myself – certainly not day after day.

One of the unexpected symptoms of infection with COVID-19 has been the sudden loss of the sense of smell, which (according to one survey) occurs in more than half of patients. Usually, the anosmia of COVID occurs in conjunction with more usual symptoms of infection, such as fever and persistent cough, but sometimes it is the only symptom.

In most cases, the loss of sense of smell recovers within a month, but one of my only acquaintances who has had the disease – a doctor as it happens – remains anosmic four months after he was first infected.

I think the loss of the sense of smell is harder to imagine than that of sight or hearing: which is not, of course, to say that it is more serious. Nevertheless, if I were condemned by COVID-19 or some other cause to sit through thousands of meals for the rest of my life and masticate something that had only consistency, sweetness, acidity, saltiness or bitterness, and to swallow it only because I knew I had to do so to keep alive, I think that I would feel it as a great loss.

It would not by itself make life not worth living, but it would certainly detract from my joie de vivre – and I count myself by no means a gourmet. In

my day, I even liked NHS sandwiches, and went to meetings only for their sake, before financial stringency made them a thing of the past, like haruspicy and moxibustion. Once we had to bring, and pay for, our own sandwiches, my rate of attendance at meetings declined. I don’t think I was much missed.

Can anything be done for anosmia, at least of the COVID-induced type? It is sometimes claimed that re-educating the nasal receptors by means of smelling essential oils hastens recovery, but I doubt this claim rests on sound scientific evidence. Have double-blind – or, I should say, double-anosmic – trials been performed?

In the absence of proof, however, we must (to change metaphors) clutch at straws. When you come to think of it, that is what human life is: clutching at straws.

The Oldie November 2020 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

Air Chief Marshal on RAF SIR: Colonel Southby-Tailyour’s disparaging dismissal (October issue) of Flying Officer Tebbit’s letter refers to a well-honed RAF myth.

No one doubts that, had Fighter Command been defeated in the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy would have done all in its power to keep the enemy at bay. Bu,t with a rampant Luftwaffe operating from forward airfields in France and the low countries, at what cost?

Subsequent evidence from the Mediterranean and the Far East convincingly demonstrated the vulnerability of our warships without air cover to airborne attack. This situation did not arise. The RAF defeated the Luftwaffe and that was that.

Fact, not myth.

Yours faithfully, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns, Chitterne, Wiltshire

conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Norman Tebbit, House of Lords, SW1

Norman Tebbit on Hitler

East Sussex FILTH

SIR: In his letter, ‘Norman Tebbit’s mistake’ (October issue), LieutenantColonel Ewen Southby-Tailyour OBE writes that ‘Flying Officer Tebbit perpetuates a well-honed RAF myth’ and asks if I ‘honestly believe that the (then) largest and most powerful navy in the world was going to watch from the sidelines as the German invasion fleet (consisting of slow, often experimental landing craft and dumb barges under tow) crossed 22 miles of water at night (when air cover on either side was more than limited)?’

Certainly Hitler knew that his invasion fleet could not make the crossing in the face of the Royal Navy, but Churchill and his Naval Staff knew that the Royal Navy dare not come into the Channel without air cover. Experience in the Far East established that a Naval fleet without air cover would be rapidly destroyed, and in the Channel even U-boats needed air cover to operate.

Nor is that what only I believe; so did Churchill, which is why he said of the RAF pilots, ‘Never in the field of human

SIR: Re Barbara Geere’s excellent article on useless acronyms (October issue), one that we find increasingly useful on the East Sussex coast is FILTH: Failed In London Try Hastings. It is possible to buy T-shirts bearing this acronym, which some of us wear with pride.

Best wishes, Tom Cowan, Battle, East Sussex

44 The Oldie November 2020

‘Hello. My name is Malcolm and I have imaginary friends’

Smoking Camels SIR: I enjoyed Johnny Grimond’s piece on sign language. My favourite sign was

‘The locals are a bit stand-offish at first.

But once they get to know you, they become deeply unpleasant’

one I saw in the airport terminal at Marrakesh Airport, some years ago. A room set aside for smokers had been named after an American brand of cigarettes. The sign on the door of the room read ‘Camel Smoking Zone’ – but presumably people were allowed in as well.

Yours, Geoffrey Preston, Stratfield Saye, Hampshire

Free earwax removal SIR: I don’t know who gave Oliver Pritchett his hearing-aid advice (October issue) but whoever it was conned him.

Normal behind-the-ear NHS hearing aids are free (as are the hearing test and replacement batteries).

It’s possible to pay mind-boggling sums for purely cosmetic differences and (metaphorical) whistles and bells which no one really needs. The sales staff will always suggest the most expensive option but please don’t fall for it.

Microsuction is also free via the NHS if you’re prepared to wait a while, and costs about £50 per ear if you’re not.

Stephen Haigh, address supplied

Murder most unreal SIR: Duncan Campbell asserts (Olden Life, October issue) that the cases

recounted in the Scotland Yard series and presided over by Edgar Lustgarten were real. While the early films were based on actual murder cases, the latter were not. The British Board of Film Censors of that time expressly prohibited the depiction of recent criminal cases.

As a result, Anglo-Amalgamated were forced to rely more heavily on fictionalised crime for the greater part of the series, often doggedly solved by Inspector Duggan of the Yard, played by Russell Napier.

The latter series, Scales of Justice, was less successful despite four episodes being made in colour – and Lustgarten, now out of his study and on the streets, seemed increasingly irrelevant.

Yours faithfully, Kevin J Last, Hinton St George, Somerset

Utter joy of otters SIR: I loved Kevin Pilley’s article on Gavin Maxwell and Eilean Bàn (October issue). I first read Ring of Bright Water in 1974, and loved it so much that, a couple of years later, my husband and I visited Sandaig.

We parked the car so as to walk the track down to the bay. I can’t describe how ecstatic I was when, a few yards ahead, an otter strolled out from the undergrowth, stopped in the middle of the track and studied us for a few moments, then bounded over to the other side of the road to disappear into the vegetation. I like to think it was one of Edal’s progeny.

We carried on down to the bay to see Edal’s memorial and soak up the view but, when I remember that visit, it is the thrill of being inspected by a wild otter that I feel most.

Yours faithfully, Heather Uebel, Filey, North Yorkshire

‘If you use the wrong trans pronoun, I’ll call the police!’

Bring Pooh home SIR: My message to Jane Reynolds (Letters, October issue) is: Agree with you That Pooh Should do As you Suggest – and return to Blighty.

It’s funny But honey When sunny (And money) Just might persuade him to come home.

But… Bring back Piglet, Eeyore too, Rabbit, Tigger, also Roo. I want to see them home – don’t you?

I’m sure that other oldies do!

And if any Oldie reader is in doubt, watch the film Goodbye Christopher Robin on the on-demand TV channel All 4.

Tim Stanley, Bristol

The ecstasy of Jennings SIR: I was delighted to see William Cook’s article about the wonderful world of Jennings and Darbishire created by Anthony Buckeridge (in Review of Books,

Dark Ages vs Middle Ages SIR: I enjoyed Town Mouse in the October issue, and agreed very much with all Tom Hodgkinson said, as I often do. Italian cities do put you in touch with medieval Europe, and make you appreciate its many virtues.

Just one thing … when I went to school, the Dark Ages was the more unstable period, after the Fall of Rome, preceding the more civilised Middle Ages. Was it perhaps different in England?

Yours sincerely, Bill Wright, Skelmorlie, North Ayrshire

October issue). I was introduced to the pair by the television series that appeared on BBC1 in 1966, and read all the books as they appeared in the local library. In adulthood, I collected them as first editions and was lucky enough to attend a couple of Jennings and Darbishire conventions and meet the lovely Eileen Buckeridge, the author’s widow, and Val Biro, who provided some of the book illustrations.

In lockdown recently, I re-read some of the books, and the bucolic surroundings and atmosphere of Linbury Court made great comfort reading in these uncertain times.

Martin Gulliver, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

‘For my next trick, I will save for a mortgage deposit – while renting!’

… and the agony SIR: William Cook’s review of the Jennings stories (October issue) brought back some painful memories.

Inspired by ‘The Four Marys’, ‘The Silent Three’ and Jennings himself, I too was eager, when going to boarding school aged 11, to embark on a life of adventure and the righting of wrongs.

The bitter disappointment when I discovered the cruel reality has, I fear, scarred me for life.

Best wishes, Pam Siddons, Manchester

Poetry demotion

‘We’re a little concerned. Usually by now, they’ve taken their first selfie’

SIR: I read Roger Lewis’s piece Poetic Injustice (October issue) with a growing sense of, initially, nostalgia, then gradual horror. I fear for the young who are these days taught little of worth and suffer a lack of both a cultural and a historical appreciation of their past.

I finished reading, my eyes glazed with tears and remembrances of what we had and what we have now lost.

Christopher Cattrall, Norfolk The Oldie November 2020 45

Ed McLachlan

46 The Oldie November 2020

I Once Met

Graham Greene In 1983, I was appointed Artistic Director of the Brighton Festival. Dickie Attenborough became our president and I thought we should focus on the work of Graham Greene.

It was made clear from the outset that he would never agree to appear in person; he was an inveterate recluse. But we established a correspondence. I would write to his address in Antibes, and prompt replies would come from a postmark in mid-Sussex. His sister lived in Crowborough; she kept a stock of pages signed by him and he would spend hours on the phone dictating his replies to her from France.

In time, I got to talk to his sister by phone. I was exploring the notion of producing one of his plays. He had written long letters about the films, and was clearly keen on my producing a play.

He wrote to me, ‘Of my plays, I only would say that I wouldn’t like The Potting Shed to be shown [in fact one of his few successful West End productions]. I think that For Whom the Bell Chimes is perhaps the most suitable for Brighton and I have a particular affection for The Return of A J Raffles.’

So For Whom the Bell Chimes it was.

And yes – he suddenly turned up,

accompanied by his brother Hugh Carlton Greene, former DG of the BBC. He was very diffident and apologetic.

‘Might I attend a rehearsal?’ he asked. He was enormously encouraging to the cast – drawn from Brighton-based professionals. He even agreed to have his photograph taken with them.

Then we talked about his old Brighton haunts. I suggested we might visit a few, and so we did. He and Hugh had already lunched at English’s, a once-fine seafood restaurant. First we went to The Cricketers, and there was Winnie who had run this pub for some 50 years and whom Greene remembered well.

She shed a few tears – as Greene would now if he came back to the Star and Garter, our next port of call, commonly known as Doctor Brightons, as it is now closed and boarded up.

Having walked along the Palace Pier (where Pinkie met Greene – without envy. The writer in 1964

his demise) – which then had its magnificent theatre – we walked along the prom; it was a lovely evening in May with a misty haze over the sea to the horizon. Passing a wind shelter, he recalled the character of Mr Prewitt – the lawyer in Brighton Rock, one of the few based on reality.

He wanted to know about the current unseemly side of Brighton. I briefed him on the ‘knocker boys’ who dropped leaflets into unsuspecting homes, offering quick money for antiques and family treasures, usually as a prelude to burglary. He made some notes and hoped to return to this theme.

We then walked towards the West Pier, with more of it apparent than is now the case.

‘Ah yes,’ said Greene.

‘The West Pier – title of Patrick Hamilton’s novel, and the finest one ever written about Brighton.’

This from the author of Brighton Rock!

Gavin Henderson

Life was sweet at Cadbury’s school

In 1947, I had been at the local infants’ school for just a year.

I had always been a rather sickly child, wearing irons on my legs at night to correct my ‘knock knees’, as well as suffering the usual childhood illnesses. In the summer of that year, doctors had also discovered a shadow on my lung, indicating possible tuberculosis.

As a result, I was sent to a special school in west London – an Open Air School.

Every day for two years, I made the five-mile journey to

school by trolleybus entirely independently, even though when I started there I was barely six years old.

My father followed the bus on his bicycle the first morning to make sure I got off at the right stop and crossed the road safely.

The regime of the school was designed to ‘build up’ its young charges. There were five classes, catering for children aged from five to 14, and pupils were placed in whatever class best suited their ability.

The classrooms had sliding doors and windows on three sides, all of which were open whatever the weather. Every afternoon we had a rest, lying on our right side (‘best for our hearts’) under a grey utility

blanket on the camp beds set up in serried ranks in the open-sided hall.

Each child’s blanket had a number embroidered on the corner in red wool – mine was 49. Dinner was served halfway through the day with copious amounts of salad, including celery which I had never eaten before and which I still dislike, and afterwards we were given a spoonful of cod-liver oil and one of malt.

In the summer, we took our chairs out into the orchard for our lessons and were allowed to take home the apples that fell from the trees.

The two male teachers on the staff wore shorts all the year round, while we had a sort of basic uniform: sundresses for the girls and

shorts for the boys, all provided by the school.

I don’t remember ever feeling particularly fragile.

Yet it is thanks to the philanthropy of the Quaker Cadbury family, who set up the first Open Air School in Birmingham at the beginning of the last century, that, after two years at that strange school, I returned to mainstream education a healthy little girl, with no sign of TB, knock knees or delicacy of any sort.

By Doris Thompson, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie November 2020 47

Books She captures the castle NICKY HASLAM The Windsor Diaries: A Childhood with the Princesses

By Alathea Fitzalan Howard

GARY WING

Hodder & Stoughton £25 This is an enthralling book. In 1940, aged just 17, the author started a diary, writing it up every day without fail until great old age, some seven decades later. Born in 1923, she died in 2001.

It is artless, candid, often funny and sometimes truly moving. While aware that so personal a document would interest future generations, she did not want it published during her lifetime, but willed it to Isabella Naylor-Leyland who, with the help of expert editing, has written a most touching foreword.

Alathea Fitzalan Howard was the daughter of Lord FitzAlan of Derwent.

Had she been male, she would have been the heir to the Dukedom of Norfolk. She twigged early on that her father was ineffectual and pretty dull (‘He talks only about that most boring topic, After The War’), and a glamorous and brittle but lukewarm mother she found hard not to dislike. Brought up in the highest Roman Catholic and aristocratic circles, she has a perspicacity not limited by her lineage.

Still, while just out of the schoolroom, she daydreams of which duke she’ll marry: ‘I adore Hugh Euston [later the Duke of Grafton] … if only he had a bit of money.’ There are no flies on her as the war approaches; she’s convinced the world is facing collapse.

At the outbreak of war, the family moved from ‘dear 18 Hans Place’ to her paternal grandfather’s royal grace-and-favour house, Cumberland Lodge. The Lodge is on the far side of Windsor Great Park from the castle, where its four close-knit royal occupants were sitting out the conflict.

Though older than the princesses, but still childish, somewhat clumsy and not conventionally attractive, Alathea was victim to bouts of serious self-harming.

One detects a (then unrecognised) bipolar aspect to her documented mood swings.

‘I am a lonely stranger in my family. I’ve always lived with hard people,’ she writes.

So it’s little wonder she formed a deep friendship, bordering on obsessive, with one to whom such problems were totally alien, Princess Elizabeth: and, in a more playful vein, with her much younger sister, Princess Margaret.

Early on, considering their diverse natures, Alathea observes, ‘Lilibet is placid, unemotional, conscientious and, above all, untemperamental’. Margaret, with her frivolity and irresponsibility, is ‘killing; she’s an angel, that child’.

The three shared tutors, cooking (‘L made jam puffs and we ate them after.

She loves washing up. I hate it’) and drawing lessons. There were weekly dancing classes taken by the eagle-eyed (‘I missed a step and had to stand at the

back’) Madame Vacani. Alathea wore her ‘flat slippers, as they make me look shorter’. Being taller than Princess Elizabeth was always a worry. They acted together too: ‘Margaret was a scream!’

Outdoor activities consisted of rainy walks and energetic games supervised by Crawfie – Marion Crawford, the princesses’ nanny. All three idolised Crawfie, who made everything fun: schooling ponies, fishing (fruitlessly, as ‘the King’s dog ate all our bait’) and swimming in the Royal Lodge pool – ‘Both L and M have hideous, black, Bath Club bathing costumes.’

After Girl Guide get-togethers – ‘MILES away; we hiked back to the castle’ – Alathea would ‘tidy’ in one of the girls’ rooms before nursery supper, or join the household for a film screening.

She was an acerbic movie critic. ‘I HATE funny films,’ she comments – understandably –after a George Robey comedy. She approves of Bette Davis in The Letter, but she rates Down Argentine Way – surely one of

The Oldie November 2020 49

the campest films ever made – merely ‘Not bad.’

What she particularly enjoyed was a zippy game of Racing Demon with Queen Elizabeth. But the family’s repetiton of jokes they had heard on the wireless – ‘on all day’ – annoyed her. Slapstick humour was never Alathea’s métier. As Isabella Naylor Leyland tellingly puts it, ‘She loved to laugh but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.’

It’s her eye for detail that captivates.

At a Windsor Castle ball, Queen Elizabeth wears – exactly the early image we have of her – a white crinoline sprinkled with silver. Alathea adds that both princesses wore smaller versions, all

by Norman Hartnell, and that Margaret, then all of 11, stayed up till 3.15.

It comes as a surprise to read that, while she was integral to this juvenile clique, Alathea frequently went to London theatres and parties. She went on to the Nut House, a louche Soho club, ‘when we couldn’t get into the 400’. She longed to be kissed while searching for possible suitors (of whom she is candidly critical). Her pursuit was spurred on by her sharing Lilibet’s secret: as early as 1941, when the princess was only 14, ‘her boy’ was Prince Philip.

Being three years older than Princess Elizabeth, Alathea became a nurse, locally at first; she could still be part of castle life. When the Royal Family move back to Buckingham Palace, there is less contact.

She harboured unrealised hopes of becoming a lady-in-waiting to her friend.

But Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to ‘her boy’, and later the Coronation, created a more formal distance between them.

Their friendship continued for Alathea’s long life, during which she learned fluent German, Spanish, French and Russian – for what reason, we will, one hopes, find out in further diaries.

Re-reading these Windsor years, she touchingly wrote, ‘I have to say, I don’t really find myself sympathique.’

She’s wrong about that. As I said, there are no flies on Alathea.

Et tu, Sasha?

SARAH SANDS Diary of an MP’s Wife

By Sasha Swire Little, Brown £20 The plain, self-effacing title of this book contains its secret and its joke. The wife who was treated as a nobody turns out to be a deadly double agent.

In a moment of dramatic irony, David Cameron signs a copy of his own dull old work of statesmanship to Sasha with

thanks for ‘love and support’. She accepts this warmly, while writing, ‘Of course, unless he is prepared to settle scores and wash his dirty linen in public, it won’t exactly fly off the shelves and I doubt he will do that as he is too much of a gent.’

The secondary joke is that it is not really the diary of an MP’s wife. It is a joint enterprise. Sasha Swire is mostly reliant on second-hand anecdotes from her husband, the former Tory minister Hugo Swire, and his own rather selfsatisfied quips and observations are polished like brass.

Sasha’s diaries have been treated by the Cameroons as the worst betrayal since Kim Philby. One acquaintance pointed out to me that Sasha’s mother was Slovenian – AS IS MELANIA TRUMP – and there is an East European deadliness born of an eyeing up of Russia. Slav blood. It is a thrilling notion that Melania could also be keeping a diary…

Sasha and Hugo infiltrated the innermost sanctuary of the Cameron mateocracy – so what is the calibre of the secrets they have betrayed? There is nothing to worry the intelligence services, but plenty to interest Netflix.

There has been an understandable closing of ranks. The responses range from lofty dismissal of the Swires (‘We barely knew them’) to wounded gravitas (‘They did not see or describe the seriousness of government’) and the revelation that Hugo Swire was allegedly unfaithful to his wife.

Funnily enough, in the book this exposé tactic is associated with the May regime, who tried to take down Boris by revealing his affair with Carrie Symonds.

It did not stop Boris Johnson and, in a different way, I do not think it will stop Sasha Swire, who has many more unpublished diaries still to come.

Her first volume is socially contemptible – and it’s also selling out. It is a twist that her agent, Caroline

Dawnay, is related to the Johnsons. The mateocracy turns out to be full of cracks.

Treachery is everywhere. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson betray David Cameron, and Cameron responds by saying the Gove family is no longer welcome in his house. It is personal.

Cameron once said in print that a consequence of power was that he stuck to old friends for safety’s sake.

This is how Sasha Swire describes in the book that circling of the social wagons: ‘The closeness of this circle is unprecedented. They are all here; the ones that eat, drink, party together, they are all intimately interlocked some from university days, some from the research unit, some later. We all holiday together, stay in each other’s grace-and-favour homes; our children play together, we text each other bypassing the civil servants… This is a very particular narrow tribe of Britain.’

Never mind Kim Philby; this is Iago.

A trusted confidante harbours a grudge.

This makes Diary of an MP’s Wife both compelling and shrewd. Of course, it is not how the protagonists would wish to see themselves portrayed. But there is, in its odd, crass way, a ring of truth about the book. There is no particular self-awareness about any of them but they reveal themselves by what they say.

The character of the narrator is also undisguised. Sasha is seeking something – perhaps status – and goes about it by being consistently rude to everyone in a flirtatious, devil-may-care manner.

Sometime she launches into policy tirades about Syria or Brexit, which must have been more tiresome.

David Cameron is the central character of the diaries, since they cover his time in power and because Hugo Swire is a friend whom he unaccountably promotes and protects. Cameron is sensitive about the charge that his was a government of Old Etonians, because that was his Achilles heel. He was comfortable among Old Etonians.

He could be himself among them, not having to pretend to be interested in football, able to make off-colour jokes about fanciable women and the size of Michael Gove’s member, enjoying his grasp of the class and wealth distinctions of the Swires, and able to chillax in the middle of a crisis. This was his political weakness, and Cameron has described the diaries as ‘mildly embarrassing’.

I reckon that mildly embarrassing is a good description. Cameron also comes across as a decent and loving husband and an extremely capable Prime The Oldie November 2020 51

Minister who rose to every challenge except the final one: the referendum.

George Osborne too is sketched in terms that may be selective but capture a political character: clever, calculating and a bit vulnerable.

Political autobiographies are about historical destiny. Political diaries reveal a different aspect of power. They are about houses and ministerial cars.

George Osborne beats Nick Clegg to Dorneywood and plants his toothbrush there, as if it is a flag. This diary is about placements at state banquets, rivalries and perpetual plotting. It is modern-day Hilary Mantel.

This is why Sasha Swire is probably right in her damning assessment of David Cameron’s political biography.

Nobody will remember his, and everyone will remember hers.

A spy like us JOHN PRESTON Agent Sonya

By Ben Macintyre Viking £25 At 1.20 on the afternoon of Saturday 13th September 1947, three men knocked on the front door of a pretty, rose-covered farmhouse in the village of Great Rollright in Gloucestershire.

The woman who answered the door was, in the words of one of them, ‘a somewhat unimpressive type with frowsy, unkept hair, perceptibly greying, and of rather untidy appearance’.

She was also one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished spies. For more than 20 years, Ursula Kuczynski – aka Agent Sonya – had been feeding important information back to her Soviet spymasters. At the time her three visitors – two MI5 officers as well as a Detective Constable Herbert from Chipping Norton police station – came calling, she was busily passing on details of the British nuclear programme from the ‘atom spy’ Klaus Fuchs.

Her game was finally up. Or rather it would have been, save for the astonishing incompetence of Jim Skardon, the senior MI5 officer.

Skardon then had a quite undeserved reputation for being a ‘fabled interrogator’.

He would go on to interview Kim Philby on ten occasions and afterwards declare that he was even more sure of Philby’s innocence than he had been before he started. He was similarly convinced of Anthony Blunt’s saintliness after interviewing him 11 times.

But even a dolt like Skardon could see that there was something not quite right

about ‘Mrs Burton’, as she was known locally. MI5 had been intercepting her letters for two years and knew perfectly well that she had close contacts with Moscow. Even so, she managed to shimmy out of Skardon’s clutches and decamp to Berlin where, in a twist no one could have foreseen, she reinvented herself as a children’s writer, becoming the East German equivalent of Enid Blyton.

Sooner or later, most writers – especially of non-fiction – find themselves facing an awful, yawning problem: what the hell to write next?

This doesn’t seem to have ever afflicted Ben Macintyre: he keeps them coming with remarkable frequency and equally remarkable consistency. This time he’s unearthed a real humdinger.

It’s a story that allows him ample opportunity to display two of his most distinctive traits: an eye for absurdity – on several occasions here, I found myself emitting loud parps of disbelief – and an ability to keep a narrative roaring along at breakneck speed.

Brought up amid the chaos of Weimar Germany, Ursula Kuczynski was a fiercely dogmatic, physically striking girl who, ‘even as a teenager, gave off a powerful sexual allure that many found irresistible’.

She had toyed with the idea of becoming a lumberjack before deciding that espionage offered more exciting career prospects. Like her brother, Jurgen, she was an early convert to communism. Jurgen, a colossal windbag even by Communist standards, would go on to write a 40-volume study of German labour conditions.

It wasn’t until she was in Shanghai with her first husband that Ursula became a Soviet agent. By now, she had given birth to a baby son. As she was as devoted a mother as she was a Communist, her bedtime reading consisted of a mixture of babycare manuals and ecstatic accounts of forced industrialisation.

‘We see this as a win-win-lose situation’

Having spent much of the war safely cloistered in Switzerland, she came to Britain in 1947. Here, she succumbed to one of the most destabilising things that can happen to a Soviet agent: galloping Anglophilia. Soon she was praising Churchill for his brilliant oratory, baking much-admired Victoria sponges and sending her son to a boarding school in Eastbourne.

But, all the time, the flame of Communist ideology continued to burn bright. Or perhaps it was simply that spying, as Macintyre writes, is an addictive business – ‘The drug of secret power, once tasted, is hard to renounce.’

In her own way, Ursula was as blinkered and credulous as Jim Skardon.

She described one of her Soviet spymasters as having a face that radiated ‘pure kindness’. In fact, he was a genocidal maniac who later signed the execution order for 22,000 Polish officers – the notorious Katyn massacre.

And while she must have known that Stalin was ordering the mass slaughter of thousands of innocent people, she did nothing – ‘She chose to look the other way.’

All this could easily make her a deeply unappealing subject. But such is Macintyre’s skill that he manages to create a vividly coloured – even sympathetic – portrait of a woman struggling to balance the demands of motherhood with the lure of espionage.

Although you may not end up liking Agent Sonya, you may, like me, wish you’d had a chance to sit at her kitchen table, sample her powerful allure and try one of her delicious cakes.

Soppy old Stoppard MICHAEL BILLINGTON Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee Faber & Faber £30 ‘Biography,’ says a character in Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, ‘is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.’

That’s one of Stoppard’s many gibes against our modern Boswells – but he has entrusted his life to Hermione Lee and been spectacularly well rewarded.

She brings to her task the same exhaustive research she has previously applied to the illustrious dead, such as Virginia Woolf. While the resulting book – at nearly 1,000 pages – is a bit of a wrist-breaker, it is also a highly readable eye-opener.

The outlines of Stoppard’s life have long been familiar. We knew that he was born Czech, as Tomáš Straussler, in The Oldie November 2020 53

1937; that he was an infant refugee first from the Nazis and then from wartime Singapore; and that, after early schooling in India, he arrived in England in 1946.

After his father’s death at the hands of the Japanese, his mother remarried an English major. The young Stoppard was educated at independent schools, became a journalist in Bristol and in 1965 awoke to find himself famous with the National Theatre production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The original outsider went on to become the epitome of fashionable success.

Lee skilfully interweaves the story of the life with analyses of the plays and suggests there is a far greater connection between the two than we had imagined.

But her real success lies in her dismantling of several of the myths that have grown up around Stoppard. He is often pigeonholed as a cerebral gymnast, but Lee shows that Stoppard, in both his life and his work, is a born romantic.

You see it in countless ways: in his early rhapsodic idealisation of England, his capacity for hero worship (everyone from Mick Jagger to Mike Nichols) and his lifelong attachment to his first Bristolian girlfriend.

Stoppard is unusual, in fact, in having stayed on the friendliest terms with nearly all the women in his life: from his second wife, Miriam, to ex-lovers such as Felicity Kendal and Sinéad Cusack. Lee explores all these relationships without a hint of prurience.

Lee also shows that romanticism threads its way through Stoppard’s plays.

Jumpers is a portrait of an anguished marriage. Arcadia is sustained by the idea that the quest for knowledge is what makes us human. In the Native State, a radio play calling on Stoppard’s memories of India and written with Kendal in mind, is imbued with a quiet tenderness and eroticism.

‘He’s really a soppy old thing,’ said its producer, John Tydeman, which is one of the shrewdest, most down-to-earth comments you’ll find in the whole book.

One of the other big myths that Lee

demolishes is that Stoppard is deeply reactionary. It is true he was once dubbed ‘Thatcher’s playwright of choice’ – but I suspect that in her case the field wasn’t all that wide.

As Lee demonstrates, Stoppard has also changed in myriad ways down the years. A long-standing concern with human rights has developed into a readiness to engage with political realities, in works like Rock ’n’ Roll and Leopoldstadt – a deeply moving play that clearly derives from Stoppard’s own research into his Jewish family history. It says a lot about Stoppard that if he came late to the subject, it was not because of lack of curiosity but out of respect for his mother’s wish to put her past behind her.

Lee also shows how Stoppard’s idealisation of the British press has shifted in the light of the phone-hacking scandal and how he now feels the need to write ‘obsequies for the England we have mislaid’.

If Stoppard has one big flaw, it is that his research sometimes sits on top of the play rather than being embedded in the action. And, just occasionally, Lee’s book mirrors Stoppard’s fault: I wondered whether we really needed eight detailed pages devoted to the history and restoration of Iver Grove, the house that Stoppard, Miriam and their family moved into in 1979.

But this is a seriously good book and will remain the standard work for many years to come. It tells us much that we didn’t know. I had no idea that Stoppard’s stepfather was an antisemitic xenophobe or that Stoppard supplied dialogue for such movies as 102 Dalmatians, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Robin Hood.

More crucially, the book charts Stoppard’s myriad public achievements while suggesting that there is something mysteriously enigmatic about the private man. Hardly anyone has a bad word to say about him, yet Stoppard himself says that he is good at performing niceness and, even for a man with a large family and many friends,

‘You could have told me I’ve been talking to your bottom for fifteen minutes’

he has an aura of impenetrable solitude.

But perhaps, as Lee subtly implies, that is just another feature of his innate romanticism.

Sad, funny girl

TANYA GOLD Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

By Jasper Rees Trapeze £20 Victoria Wood could have had a small life sitting in front of the telly, but she had a big one on it instead.

Four years after her death at the age of 62, this superb biography ensures we can’t forget how revolutionary she was.

Wood was the first woman to take a stand-up show to the West End; her ex-husband, Geoffrey Durham, the magician the Great Soprendo, says, ‘Men stood up. Women stayed sitting.’

She wrote plays, comic songs and sketch comedy; she acted better than she knew; she sold out the Royal Albert Hall for 15 consecutive nights. Alan Bennett, she noted, couldn’t do that. Every female comic follows the paths she made.

You’ll appreciate her more when you learn – and Rees takes infinite but never melodramatic care to tell you – what it cost her. She lived a life of great anguish and greater control: there is a reason those jokes are perfect. Her pains were infinite. Pity Celia Imrie and Julie Walters – luminously talented women, yet content to work in her shadow – if they got a line wrong.

As Dawn French told the author, ‘She wasn’t humourless. Whenever you tripped up, she would forgive you once. Once.’

‘If Julie [Walters] or I went wrong in front of the audience,’ Celia Imrie told Rees, ‘Vic would turn to the audience and say, “Tracey Ullman wasn’t free.” It made us feel like shit.’

She was unhappy, and Rees traces her emotional life with a sensitivity that is more powerful for its delicacy.

The portrait comes slowly into view between exhaustive – but not exhausting – descriptions of every piece of art she made.

Wood was the youngest of four children to Helen and Stanley. She grew up in a strange, monumental bungalow on a hill outside Bury because, she said, ‘My mother couldn’t be doing with neighbours and gossip and suburban life.’

Instead, Helen hoarded – she once bought all the costumes from a production of The Merry Widow – and read. Nobody came to the bungalow.

The Oldie November 2020 55

©RALPH STEADMAN ART COLLECTION

Helen, in a rare maternal intervention, had Victoria on diet pills at 12. She neglected her sensitive youngest child, who later fictionalised her mother: ‘I’m something of a celebrity since I walked the Pennine Way in slingbacks in an attempt to publicise mental health.’

Victoria studied drama at the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop and Birmingham University. She had early success with comic songs – she performed on That’s Life – and the play Talent.

But it was stand-up that obsessed her, because it was the ultimate antidote to Helen and Stanley – everyone was listening. It wasn’t easy, though: she hated her body and the world seemed to agree. An early manager would say, ‘I’ll speak for Fatty.’ She mined her selfhatred for material. That is normal, but the quality of it wasn’t.

Her workaholism – and her husband – sustained her. When she was asked which character she was in Pat and Margaret, her most autobiographical work – two sisters searching for their mother – she said, ‘It was both me. It was that battle between the one who can never get on, the impotent person, and the one who is so determined to get on there’s no room for anything else’.

Between the two of them, she exhausted herself. Rees has written a tragedy. Despite her striving, selfknowledge came too late, and Wood knew it: ‘You shove it all away, move on, grow up, cut your hair, and it’s all there waiting, isn’t it, waiting to be dealt with. I got very depressed, and I decided it was his [Durham’s] fault.’

They went for family therapy: ‘We’ve got to stop this,’ she told Durham after one session. ‘She thinks I’m the woman off the telly.’ Durham left her – though really she sent him away.

Though the final years were professionally rewarding – her performance as Eric Morecombe’s mother in Eric and Ernie is an understated masterpiece – I was left with a portrait of a woman who could not, despite her gifts, escape the root of them.

I see her fully, though, through Rees’s pen, and I salute her: she was clever and angry; haunted and talented; kinder than she pretended.

She was wrong about her looks, too, I thought dismally, staring at an early sketch – because she was pretty.

It seems odd that I would finish a book about a singular female comedian feeling quite so desolate. But if comedians were understood by the world, they wouldn’t need our laughter.

Boris Johnson, drawn for the cover of the Big Issue, September 2019.

From Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink by Ralph Steadman, Chronicle Chroma, £45

Hungarian ghostbuster KATE HUBBARD The Haunting of Alma Fielding

By Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury £18.99 Kate Summerscale has, until now, turned her cool, forensic eye to Victorian murders and scandals. In this latest book, she’s taken a rather different direction: a poltergeist case from the 1930s, a time when ghostly activity of all kinds was rife.

In the wake of the First World War, the bereaved turned to spiritualism and séances. As the Second World War loomed, ‘the nation’s phantoms’ became ‘distractions from anxiety, expressions of

anxiety, symptoms of a nervous age’ – in which case you might expect poltergeists to be making a comeback.

At the centre of Summerscale’s entertaining account is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian émigré and chief ghosthunter at the International Institute for Psychical Research in South Kensington.

Fodor travelled the country, investigating hauntings, levitations, automatic writing and spirit possession.

He wasn’t your average ghost-hunter.

An intelligent, lively, engaging character, he read Freud and developed his own theories about the possibility of supernatural events being generated by ‘psychological disturbance’.

Such suggestions went down badly in psychic circles, among whom Fodor was in hot water for being unfair on The Oldie November 2020 57

mediums and fixated on sex. He needed to restore his reputation; he needed a bona-fide ghost. The Alma Fielding case, in 1938, offered just that.

Alma Fielding was an attractive young woman in her 30s, who lived with her husband, son and lodger in Thornton Heath, Croydon, in a house under siege.

The air was thick with flying glasses, pots of face cream, cups and saucers, eggs and light bulbs. A wardrobe was thrown onto the bed of Alma’s son, who was so unnerved that he moved out. All the inhabitants of the house, especially Alma, from whom these happenings seemed to emanate, were frightened and anxious.

Fodor set out to investigate.

Poltergeists were regarded as secondrate and vulgar, compared with good old aristocratic ghosts. But, no matter, Alma’s poltergeist looked like the real deal. Fodor witnessed smashing china and hairbrushes floating down the stairs in Thornton Heath. He took Alma to the South Kensington Institute, where she produced multiple ‘apports’ (objects from the spirit world) out of thin air.

There was an outing to Woolies in Bognor Regis to see whether she really could perform ‘psychic shoplifting’ (she could).

Everyone was impressed: members of the Institute, mediums, an Austrian countess and Fodor himself. Then things got stranger. Deep scratches inexplicably appeared on Alma’s body, supposedly made by a tiger. Spirit guides started piping up.

Was it simply a hoax? Was Alma playing to her audience? Did she have accomplices – her husband? Her lodger, who was in love with her?

Disappointment is the ghost-hunter’s lot and Fodor had had plenty. The ‘flower medium’ Hylda Lewis proved a fraud – the flowers that sprouted from her body were concealed in her clothes. Gef, the talking mongoose, was stubbornly silent when Fodor went to visit him on the Isle of Man. It emerges that Alma has been concealing apports (bits of pottery and a live bird) on her person during visits to the Institute. Fodor discovers that, as a girl, she’d worked as a trapeze artist – she’d been ‘trained in dexterity’. The whole case is thrown into doubt.

As in previous books, Summerscale is adept at turning narrative holes or failings to her advantage. Here, ‘the genuine and the fraudulent marched in queer procession’. That Alma had resorted to trickery didn’t mean that supernatural forces were not at work in Thornton Heath. Fodor felt that the fraudulent phenomena could have

been ‘rooted in pain’ rather than in conscious deceit.

He began looking into Alma’s past for evidence of trauma resulting in psychic breakdown. Had she been the victim of sexual assault as a child? Could her two dead babies have been the trigger? The evidence was inconclusive and the Institute, having had quite enough of Fodor and his psychologising, fired him.

More recent research, identifying a correlation between childhood trauma and adult experience of the paranormal, backs up Fodor’s theories. Fodor went on to become a successful psychoanalyst in New York, working in a profession to which he was better suited.

Alma moved to the Devon coast and conducted occasional séances in her bungalow. Her grandson found her spooky.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Martin’s sweet sorrow A S H SMYTH Inside Story: A Novel / How to Write

By Martin Amis Jonathan Cape £20 The title of this book says it’s ‘a novel’.

Well, it isn’t.

The author makes this clear almost as often as he claims the opposite. No doubt he’s changed a few names. Probably moved things round a bit. Sometimes he’s written himself into the third person.

But so what? In his own words, ‘At least Mystic Meg [went] to the trouble of making it all up.’

Nor is it – contrary to the subtitle – a book on ‘how to write’. Nobody wants an Amis book on how to write. And if they did, they wouldn’t be looking for the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (I kid you not).

Lastly, it isn’t principally about his lifelong, close relationship with Christopher Hitchens – despite the jacket’s clear suggestion otherwise, which shows the two of them together.

No. Inside Story is a rather baggy assemblage of loving reminiscence, tough self-examination, hero worship, historical enquiry, quotation, a 2015 New Yorker article on the German migrant crisis and, yes, some scattered writing tips. With footnotes and a 13-page index.

Aware that he himself has not exactly lived the life of, say, a Solzhenitsyn, a Nabokov or even a Rushdie, Amis employs the framework of three other, personally relevant and occasionally connected literary lives (and deaths):

Saul Bellow (d 2005) as supplementary father figure; Philip Larkin (d 1985) as potential actual father; and Christopher Hitchens (d 2011) as brother in arms, in literature and all but in the sack.

Their stories (and all the rest of it) are threaded together by the amiable conceit that Amis is chatting to some young aspiring novelist.

Supporting roles are filled by his formative sexual relationship with ‘Phoebe Phelps’; his benevolent stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard; his wayward, needy father; and the now familiar coterie of boozy lunchmates (Conquest, Fenton and Clive James), influences (Nabokov appears on page 1, and then 42 more times), and all those Big Things Amis can’t prevent himself from writing about (the Holocaust, the Gulag and, latterly, 9/11).

Distractingly, the book opens with a lengthy, present-tense discussion of the looming 2016 US election and of Brexit, which Amis is comfortable Remain will win. Whatever effect this is supposed to have, the eye is trained on how much has aged quite badly. Lunches that involve ‘potted shrimps’ and ‘oatcake’.

Someone being ‘a pill’. ‘Gaspers’. Talk of ‘rugby football’, and girlfriends called ‘Doris’. The man the critics once called ‘Amis fils’, the enfant terrible of modern English literature, is – one suddenly realises – old.

Accordingly, perhaps, this ‘novel’ is lighter on the more aggressive flourishes of Amis prose style. Committed Amisites may rest assured, though. For every diamond-tipped incision – ‘childsong [being] like a ventilation of happiness’, – there’s still ‘the lime, the gold, the rose’ of – can you guess? – traffic lights. There’s a train ‘now slaked of motion’ (ie stationary). There’s a finance bloke who uses words like ‘bonce’ and ‘gaff’.

Amis snorts that you wouldn’t put a janitor called ‘Art Hitman’ in a novel, but can’t resist naming an American author ‘Jed Slot’. He laments that no one writes well about sex, and then describes a woman’s ‘musky, smiley, gauzy, rumpy, nipply presence’.

Despite all this, Inside Story somehow emerges as a compelling and courageous slice of autobiography. Thankfully – if tragically, and via a lot of other deaths – it ultimately returns to him and Hitchens. The bereft Amis has extracted positives from that great personal and public loss, almost a decade ago. The reader sits through the whole thing again – that slow, appalling diminution – and hopes that Hitch won’t die.

The book is worth it for that alone.

The Oldie November 2020 59

Media Matters

Will a British Fox News succeed?

There’s a demand for Andrew Neil’s GB News but it needs big bucks stephen glover Andrew Neil should be an inspiration to oldies. At the age of 71, the veteran Scottish journalist is becoming chairman and lead presenter of a new British news channel called GB News. It plans to launch in the first quarter of 2021.

This isn’t a half-baked operation. Its lead investor is Discovery, a vast American media company. GB News expects to reach 96 per cent of British television households via Freeview, Sky and Virgin Media, and will be on air for about 18 hours a day. You could be taking a look at it soon.

If you do, you won’t get the same kind of rolling news provided by the BBC News Channel and Sky News. That’s very expensive. Auntie’s offering costs licence-fee payers £57 million a year, while the annual losses of Sky News are around £40 million.

Making money out of broadcast news is a huge challenge in a country the size of the United Kingdom – and for a new channel looking for viewers in an already crowded market it’s close to impossible.

GB News will be more of a talking shop, with provocative, opinionated presenters and interviewees. Fox News in the United States is the obvious model.

In a country with much larger audiences, it is spectacularly profitable. It provides some news, but many more views – mostly right-wing ones.

There has so far been no British television equivalent, though GB News sources suggest their new channel could bear some resemblance to radio stations such as LBC and Talk Radio, where there is endless chatter, dispute and disagreement.

The question is whether GB News can square what it wants to do with Britain’s broadcasting impartiality rules, which are policed by media regulator Ofcom.

Its founders evidently think it can, and say they have secured the necessary broadcasting licences. But it will clearly

have a tricky line to tread between Ofcom’s insistence on overall neutrality and the new channel’s apparent intention to appeal to a largely right-of-centre audience.

On the one hand, Mr Neil is quoted as saying that GB News ‘is aimed at a vast number of people who feel underserved and unheard by their media’. This sounds like a dig at the BBC, from which Mr Neil has resigned to undertake his new role.

On the other hand, sources insist that although the channel will have something in common with the format of Fox News, it won’t share its unremittingly right-wing views. Nor would it be allowed to, under Ofcom’s existing regulations.

It’s true that Mr Neil’s political views have mellowed over the years, and he is no longer the red-in-tooth-and-claw man of the Right that he once was. But he is still right-of-centre, though as an interviewer commendably fair, and as hard on Tory politicians as on Labour ones. Still, it doesn’t sound as though GB News as a whole will consist of balanced interviews.

I suppose the channel’s founders think that, with a Tory government in power and an anti-BBC cabal led by Dominic Cummings in Number 10, there could be no better time to push against impartiality rules. And I imagine they will have been bucked by the rumours (unconfirmed as I write) that the new chairman of Ofcom will be ex-Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, a

lifelong champion of greater plurality in the broadcast media.

Will GB News succeed? I’m pretty sure that the amount of money it is raising (said to be between £45 and £55 million) won’t be enough. But if audience figures are moving upwards, it won’t have any difficulty in raising more cash from investors such as Discovery. Impartiality rules could be a problem, but probably not an insurmountable one – even though the Left can be counted on to create a stink over the issue.

Perhaps the best reason for thinking it could flourish is the presence of Andrew Neil. In the autumn of his career, with solid achievements behind him, he won’t want to be associated with a disaster.

That said, new media launches seldom run smoothly. Success, if it comes, is bound to be a struggle.

Spare a kind thought for Emily Sheffield, who replaced George Osborne as editor of the giveaway London Evening Standard in June.

Some believed that the former Chancellor’s departure after three years at the helm denoted failure. Surely only in the sense that a man running out of a burning building may be considered to have failed.

The Standard distributed 514,040 copies in August, a decline of 37 per cent over 12 months. With fewer commuters because of COVID-19, there are fewer readers. Advertising had already plummeted before the pandemic struck, and in 2019 the paper reported losses of £11.36 million. Ms Sheffield’s editorial budget has been slashed. The paper looks lamentably thin.

I hope it has a future. There are online aspirations. But I doubt its shareholders, led by Evgeny Lebedev, can sustain mounting losses for long. Was there something slightly caddish about Mr Osborne’s escaping when he did?

The Oldie November 2020 61

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

Good English? It isn’t rocket science

TOM PLANT

More than 60 years have passed since C P Snow drew attention to the two cultures that dominated the intellectual life of postwar Britain: one based on the humanities, the other on science.

Snow, a scientist and novelist, pointed out that highly educated humanities graduates would admit, often proudly, that they knew nothing of the second law of thermodynamics. For scientists, he argued, this was like boasting of never having read Shakespeare.

Things have changed a bit. Science is now more often ‘popularised’ by authors writing in plain English. And increasingly we put our faith in science, whether it’s medicine or the internet. Yet the ignorance remains, and the terror: rocket science is daily held up as the ultimate in complexity.

Oddly, though, it’s frequently considered cool, erudite or authoritative to use scientific terms. Often wrongly.

‘Epicentre’, for instance, is a word much heard in connection with COVID-19.

Wuhan, Northern Italy, New York and the entire continent of Europe have all been called epicentres. Yet the dictionary definition of ‘epicentre’ is ‘that point on the earth’s surface directly over the point of origin of an earthquake’. Using it to describe a place with many COVID cases suggests the coronavirus explodes underground in a single event and thereby

Stadium names For a football supporter, despite what they say, it isn’t the hope that kills you. Nor the occasional dodgy chicken balti pie; nor the myriad missed train connections on journeys home that prolong the misery of another defeat in a farflung League Two outpost.

It is the charmlessness of the stadium that is your destination.

62 The Oldie November 2020

wrecks an area on the surface above.

Yes, words take on new meanings. It would be absurd to say that ‘focus’ must be used only for a ‘point on which rays converge after reflection or refraction’, or that ‘square’ describes only an ‘equilateral rectangle’. But, in the COVID context, ‘epicentre’ is not apposite. It conveys nothing of the virus’s ability to infect and multiply, or its destructiveness to humans, not objects. It works no better than plain ‘centre’, inadequate though that is. ‘Epicentre’ is used merely to impress.

The same is surely true of ‘catalyst’.

This is a ‘substance that speeds up a chemical reaction while itself remaining unchanged’. When it crops up in everyday speech, it hardly ever fits this definition.

Whatever it is that is bringing the change is nearly always an agent that undergoes some form of transformation as it does so.

Non-scientists are also fond of the Richter scale. Scientists shun it. Charles Richter’s way of measuring earthquakes, devised in 1934, worked only for a specific type of seismometer used in California. Nowadays, earthquakes are measured on a scale that describes them simply as magnitude 5, say, or magnitude 6.

‘Viable’ is another word favoured by those who like the highfalutin. Not long ago, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, promised to make it ‘unviable’ for

Like our local newspapers, too many of the old stadiums’ kit-built replacements, apparently quicker to construct than a Nightingale Hospital, have migrated to the outskirts, where they share a retail space with a bowling alley, a tile warehouse, and the sort of low-rise hotel where travelling salesmen drink lager from which all taste has been chilled, in a profoundly characterless bar.

The old stadium names conjured up a bosky glade or other bucolic idylls; an Elysian escape for the cloth-capped working man in the midst of Lowry-like town centres, brooding beneath sooty chimneys.

But now, even when the stadiums survive, what

migrants to cross the Channel illegally. If she was using this word properly, it was a nasty threat. In biology or medicine, ‘unviable’ means ‘not capable of living’.

Journalists like an implosion. Google ‘Theresa May’ and ‘implode’ and you’ll find countless instances of those words together in published articles. Mrs May’s government was certainly feeble; the term in mechanics would be ‘in a state of unstable equilibrium’. But it always looked more likely to explode than to implode – and it did: about 60 ministers departed. In fact, ‘explode’ is far more often the right word for the circumstances.

Maths also provides the pretentious with opportunities to show off. When you read of something ‘entering the equation’, beware. All equations have two parts, and if something happens in one part, something must also happen in the other.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t be an equation.

But most people are too busy with their parameters, inflection points and exponential nonsense to stop and think.

Maths and science are no more difficult than French, history or the offside rule. If you doubt that, read Rocket Science for Babies, by Chris Ferrie, which in about 30 seconds will teach you all you need to know about lift and thrust. And then treat scientific language with a modicum of respect.

happens? Mansfield Town’s elegiac Field Mill has been renamed by the sponsors the One Call Stadium.

I cannot imagine any circumstance in which I would refer to my hometown club Bradford City’s ground, Valley Parade, by its present corporate identity, the Utilita Energy Stadium.

Whatever became of their

romantically-named predecessors? When Saturday came and the foundries fell quiet, the steel men trooped to see Scunthorpe United at the Old Show Ground. For the miners devoted to Doncaster Rovers, it was Belle Vue. Then there was the Dell (Southampton), Gay Meadow (Shrewsbury Town), Vetch Field (Swansea City), Plough Lane (Wimbledon), Elm SMALL DELIGHTS Park (Reading) and White Going wearily to the bedroom Hart Lane (Tottenham to make the bed and realising Hotspur) – though it turns you’ve already out that might have had made it. more to do with a nearby pub PAM than with a woodland site MARCHANT, where once medieval hunts BRISTOL chased panting creatures of that name.

Email life’s small delights to All now gone. editorial@theoldie.co.uk FERGUS KELLY

History

The 1,000-year soap opera

From Richard III to The Crown, monarchs make for perfect drama david horspool Some kings are sexier than others.

Naturally, since many of us are ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’, as Blake said of Milton, it’s the bad ones who interest us most.

So it’s no coincidence that the latest releases in the Penguin Monarchs series of brief lives are about two of the baddest: Richard III: A Failed King? by Rosemary Horrox and John: An Evil King? by Nicholas Vincent, both out now.

I should declare an interest: I have contributed a volume to the series myself.

I also wrote a book about Richard III. Books about English and British monarchs always have appeal. If you’re British and interested in history, kings and queens are likely the way you first made acquaintance with our past. From the school rulers with a list of incumbents – Anglo-Saxons to Elizabeth II – to ‘Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee’, monarchs are how we begin to think about our history.

Historians, in classrooms and university lecture theatres, have done their best to shift this royal fixation. We learn about our history differently these days, in theory. Monarchs fit into bigger pictures, dominated by social and economic shifts, changing diplomatic and strategic relations, even the weather and, of course, disease.

Along with that move to show the bigger picture, there’s another: to uncover parts of that picture that were previously sidelined or obscured. Children learn what it might have been like to be a peasant in the Black Death or live under enemy occupation or bombardment. And grown-up books are published for general readers on the importance of the Little Ice Age or the forgotten pioneers of black British history.

Nevertheless, monarchs remain good historical business.

The main appeal is biographical, especially with monarchs who lived at times when others’ biographies were rarely

Crowning glory: Olivia Colman’s Queen

written. We can guess at the personality and motivation of King John or Richard III in a far more informed way than with any of their subjects, even the most powerful of whom flitted on and off the historical stage with much less documentation.

We shouldn’t be too apologetic about our interest in those royal personalities.

In the Middle Ages, when monarchy was personal, what the king was like was crucial.

The fact that until Mary I only kings appear on those lists has a partially personal explanation, too. The single occasion when the plan was for a woman to inherit the crown, the personality of the woman in question – the famously uncompromising Empress Matilda – went a long way to ensuring that it didn’t happen.

Comparing the personalities of John and Richard III, as they are revealed in the Penguin books, gives us some idea of what made a bad king. This is despite the centuries that separated the two, and the very different circumstances in which they came to the throne, and reigned.

To put it simply, John squandered a far better hand than Richard. The former inherited a substantial empire established by a family with a formidable European reputation. The latter seized

the throne of a realm that had barely recovered from years of bitter civil war.

Still, it’s interesting to see how far personal traits contributed in both cases to their downfall. They both died with their kingdoms in civil war, and their own right to rule under the severest possible challenge. Although they were accused of similar crimes – not least the murder of their nephews, John’s Arthur of Brittany, Richard’s Princes in the Tower, Edward V and Richard of York – they interpreted their role very differently.

John ruled with a mean streak, taking hostages, extorting money, bullying and double-crossing. Richard, despite his crimes (Horrox is in little doubt that he ordered the princes’ murder), seems to have wanted to be loved. He was generous beyond his means, rewarded followers excessively and tried to keep servants of his brother, Edward IV, on side.

He was brave, too, unlike ‘Softsword’ John, an insult that, Vincent points out, was ‘sexually charged’. Horrox twice quotes Richard’s promise ‘to employ his own royal person as far as ever any king hath done’ in defence of the realm. Of course, he died making good on that promise, by his own lights.

John and Richard remind us most strikingly of the appeal of the monarchy as drama. Both were subjects for Shakespeare – more memorably in Richard’s case.

And if we no longer see our monarchs and their families as tragedies on the Shakespearean scale, it is in dramatic terms that we view them.

That applies to the high-gloss rewriting of recent history in Netflix’s The Crown – just about to start a new season. And it applies to the soap opera that seems likely to run for a few more episodes yet: the Meghan and Harry show.

Season 4 of The Crown begins on 15th November The Oldie November 2020 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE DUKE (released 6th November) At last, a jolly British film about oldies, played by oldies, that’s perfect for an oldie audience!

In what must be a world first for films, both the actors playing the two leads, Helen Mirren, 75, and Jim Broadbent, 71, are over a decade older than the real-life characters they portray. Hollywood prefers to dunk real people – particularly women – in the fountain of youth. How refreshing to move in the other direction.

And what juicy, archetypally British characters those real people are in this film. Kempton Bunton (Broadbent) – has there ever been a more English name?

– was the 57-year-old Newcastle bus driver who allegedly stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961.

Bunton was incensed at the nation’s paying £140,000 to buy the Goya, not least because he was outraged at having to pay the TV licence fee out of his modest income. Four years later, Bunton voluntarily returned the picture and gave himself up (having failed, in return, to secure a £140,000 payment to poor pensioners to pay their TV licence fees).

In Bunton’s trial, where he was represented by legendary lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson QC (a suave, gentlemanly Matthew Goode), he was convicted only of stealing the picture frame, which was never returned. Because Bunton had returned the actual painting, Hutchinson cleverly argued, he never intended to steal it. As a result of this nimble defence, Bunton served only three months for theft.

In a marvellous twist, a National Archive file revealed as late as 2012 that it was in fact Bunton’s son, John, who’d stolen the picture. He’d crept into the National Gallery, via its lavatory, in the early morning, when the alarms were deactivated for the cleaners.

It’s a dream plot for this most British of caper movies: the tale of the humble little man up against the might of the bamboozled Establishment. What’s more, the little man gets away with it, fooling the police, who thought a brilliant master-criminal must have been responsible.

Not surprisingly, a story with such a perfect plot was also huge news at the time, in 1961. The stolen Goya featured in a lovely scene – borrowed for this film – in Dr No (1962), where Sean Connery spots the portrait in Dr No’s lair.

Director Roger Michell and writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman have a wonderful time injecting what was a very serious crime with just the right element She steals the show: Broadbent and Mirren

of knockabout comedy, heightened by a 1960s jaunty jazz soundtrack, retro credits and scenes drenched in vintage colours. The run-down back-to-backs of Newcastle and the splendours of the city’s classical buildings around Grey Street are beautifully captured.

There are moments when you think a thief, however noble his motives, shouldn’t be treated as quite such a hero.

And there are some longueurs in the court scenes. But these are minor quibbles that shouldn’t take away from the sheer pleasure of this gentle, uplifting, easy-going comedy.

The part of Kempton Bunton could have been made for Jim Broadbent – with all his misplaced optimism, loopy confidence and a touch of crazy virtue.

Not only is his Geordie accent spot-on; it also nails all the teasing irony and steely sharpness that so often accompany the accent.

But the stand-out star is Helen Mirren – could this be her second Oscar-winning performance after her portrayal of Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006)? She is pitch-perfect as Bunton’s wife, Lilya, driven to distraction by the political obsessions that stop him earning a proper living. In an extra twist, it emerges that their daughter was killed in a bike accident, lending deeper meaning to the wrinkles in Mirren’s worried face.

When you’re used to seeing a superglam Helen Mirren on film or in age-defying bikini shots taken by paparazzi, here she is utterly worn down, scrubbing the lav for all its worth. In a minute tremble of her lips or a tiny twitch of the pouch below her left eye, she communicates concealed oceans of agonised worry.

In one scene, she pours all that worry into a furious bout of knitting. With her blurred fingers twisting and turning with anxiety, Dame Helen sure knows how to knit one, purl one.

The Oldie November 2020 65

THEATRE MADELINE SMITH RETURN OF THE MOUSETRAP

MIRRORPIX/ALAMY

St Martin’s Theatre from 23rd October Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952, is very old. Nearly as old as I am.

After a COVID-induced break, it’s returning, thank God, to St Martin’s Theatre in the West End on 23rd October.

It’s now totted up more than 27,500 performances.

Its return takes me back thirty years.

That’s when I acted the part of ingénue Mollie Ralston, first played by Sheila Sim in 1952. Mollie’s husband, Giles Ralston, was played by Sim’s real-life husband, film heart-throb Richard Attenborough.

The Mousetrap is Cluedo on stage.

Ill-assorted, unpleasant characters are thrown together – against their will, by a snowfall – in a creepy guesthouse. Their emotional lives are laid bare to the audience, and there ensues murder most foul. My character, Mollie, is an innocent, with a husband scarcely more knowing than her. Together they mismanage Monkwell Manor, the grim guesthouse.

My Mousetrap stage husband, Giles Ralston, was played by a handsome American, David Evans.

One night I noticed that David looked most peculiar. His face was beetroot-red and looked as though it was boiling over.

In our key scene together, I was busy accusing him of scuttling off to London, evidenced by my finding a copy of the London Evening Standard in his pocket.

As I threw the newspaper down onto the table, shouting, ‘I KNOW you are lying!’ a weeping David cradled himself into the plaster mantelpiece and started declaiming speeches from Hamlet, crying out for his imaginary lost love, Helena Bonham Carter, who had once played Ophelia.

David was very evidently raving, poor chap. With no choice, I left him whimpering on stage, and dashed into the wings, softly crying, ‘HELP!’ The company manager should have responded by bringing the curtain down on proceedings. Instead, he flapped his long arms, said ‘Don’t bother me now!’ and disappeared into Dressing Room Number One – where Pamela Lane, former first wife of playwright John Osborne, was always waiting with a chilled bottle of Chardonnay.

Her character had already met an untimely end; so she spent the second half joyfully inebriated.

Now in despair, I called my elderly 66 The Oldie November 2020

Gripping: Mollie (Madeline Smith) and Miss Casewell (Cheryl Kennedy), 1990

friend the late Paul Imbusch from his second-floor room. Paul was always bad-tempered before the show but, by now, his foul mood had dissipated and he was game to have fun. He relished his role as The Mousetrap’s red herring, Mr Paravicini. Our verbal spats were loud, and apologies came in the shape of cream cakes and port – good for the throat, of course.

On that night, Paul and I invented some extraordinary dialogue, until the curtain was finally brought down.

David, meanwhile, had said goodnight to a very surprised stage-door lady, picked up his car and driven to Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he left the vehicle and wandered the streets.

He was found, incarcerated and given electric-shock treatment – and returned to The Mousetrap exactly one month later, as though nothing had happened.

The tedious, under-written part of the Major was played by Nicholas Smith, well known for his role as Mr Rumbold in Are You Being Served?

Nicholas had a very big belly and a passion for taking his clothes off. He wandered among the dressing rooms between the shows on matinée days in only his underpants. He was a lovely chap but, when almost nude, was not a pretty sight.

When he came to my tiny third-floor dressing room, Paul told him, ‘Stop playing with Madeline while you are in a state of undress!’

Cheryl Kennedy is a beautiful and very gifted actress. Her performance as complex Miss Casewell was subtle and understated. Off-stage, she is a devoted wife and mother with a gloriously

waspish mother-in-law, the late actress Kathleen Byron.

Cheryl and I had adjoining doll’s-house-sized dressing rooms. The poor chap with all the lines, who played the policeman, was at the end of our corridor.

They both used to scurry home the moment it was curtain-down. But I am an oddity and loved to stay awhile and just imbibe the atmosphere of the quiet theatre. I enjoyed the peace without all the jolly chat. A great way to wind down.

One day, I was very, very bad. I locked poor Cheryl in her dressing room. Not for long, I promise – and afterwards we embraced and laughed a lot. On my shelves still is a brilliant book, Women at War, that Cheryl gave me on our last day together in The Mousetrap.

Yes, it was a very good year.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE Alan Partridge, you will recall, first emerged in all his ghastliness in 1992, in Radio 4 comedy’s heyday.

He was the sports presenter in On the Hour, translated to TV as The Day Today. His creator, Steve Coogan, was the latest practitioner of cringe comedy (from Tony Hancock to Patricia Routledge, a noble strain in British humour). Partridge was the inept, tactless TV host who irritates or offends his guests: filled with self-importance but no self-knowledge.

After TV and film, Alan has now discovered the podcast – as have I, nudged by the enthusiasm of my family and others

NETFLIX

who had enjoyed nearly seven hours of From the Oast House (Audible, £19.99).

Alan delivers his philistine, bigoted musings and moanings from Norfolk (in a ‘replica oasthouse’), punctuated by a grating signature jingle. He pontificates in cliché: ‘truth be told’, ‘so be it’, ‘with the best will in the world’ and ‘whatevs’.

And he is so un-cool. ‘Not many men my age can get away with a tight polo neck tucked inside a belted trouser.’ His new fleece is first-class at wicking sweat.

His personal hygiene – ‘After cufflinks and watches, what you have to get right is your man pong’ – is five aftershaves mixed in.

He adopts the panther walk of his favourite James Bond, George Lazenby, and aims to resemble the Milk Tray man. When he’s caught prowling round a neighbour’s house you hear him being challenged.

‘I’m Alan Partridge, by the way.’ ‘I know you are.’ ‘Oh thank you, thank you.’

Through Echelon, a high-class dating service, he has a date fixed with a woman who ‘runs four dog-grooming parlours!’ (faux admiration). So he practises ad-libs (‘Who designed this place – Genghis Khan?), his chat-up lines (‘Is that your natural skin colour or a tinted foundation?’) and witty asides: ‘This area is quite upmarket – less Deliverance, more Deliveroo.’

Alan commends another podcast – ‘Recall!’ – ‘which follows in detail the lead-up to and fallout of the 1972 product recall of the Triumph Toledo. In 12 parts. Narrated [hear Alan’s pain] by John Stapleton.’

Coogan is brilliant. So fluent. But the sustained cringeing reminded me of several saddo Alan Partridges I have known, especially a pimply youth in the sixth form who organised our school dances and wore leather motoring gloves to drive his dad’s Triumph Herald. This made me plunge with relief into Schitt’s Creek on Netflix, which cheers with endorphin-releasing guffaws.

Kirsty Wark, new presenter of The Reunion, is fine, but Sue MacGregor departed without fanfare or tribute.

Reparation came with Archive on 4’s compilation of MacG clips (Thatcher, Mandela, Greer etc), which reflected her reporting skill, well-tempered charm and ability to listen to the answers – often lacked, as Gillian Reynolds says, by BBC presenters on six-figure pay deals. She also understood the forgotten necessity to pronounce people’s names audibly.

Radio 4’s programme Can I Still Read Harry Potter?, presented by Aja Romano, was heralded by a publicity email from a BBC ‘communications trainee’. I reeled when I read that Aja Romano ‘has decided to pack their Potter

books away’. And that, in the programme, ‘Aja examines their decision to stop reading the books about the boy wizard.’ The clear intention here is to mask the gender of Tennessee-born Ms Romano – clearly a female; Google her picture on the Vox website. ‘Hi! I’m Aja,’ she chirrups. ‘I’m a culture reporter for Vox. I like horror movies, scary stories, regencies, cozies, YA and the occasional SFF.’ Is the BBC adopting the wilfully erroneous ‘their’, where once it would have said ‘his or her’ – except for the occasions when, and only when, Aja’s gender was in doubt? This is ominous.

I shall write to Charles Moore, the on dit new Chairman. Perhaps he can prevent the BBC from kowtowing to the cancel culture, with its destruction of grammatical clarity.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Keen always for a further squeeze of the lemon, producers make films and programmes about the fledgling versions of established characters: young Indiana Jones, young Sherlock Holmes … even young Scooby-Doo, in series called A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. The young Morse is followed in Endeavour. In First of the Summer Wine, the young Compo, Clegg and Seymour were as tiresome as their elderly selves. I wouldn’t mind seeing the young and bashful Basil and Sybil Fawlty, before marital happiness curdled. (What was it that first drew them together?) Or a young Captain Mainwaring, smarting and class-conscious at the provincial bank.

What we do have is Young Wallander, which seems to be unfolding in a parallel universe: I couldn’t work out where it fitted in chronologically. The mobile

Pretty boy: Adam Pålsson as the young Wallander

phones, cars and Malmö street scenes were very up to date, yet a younger incarnation of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander should have been at large, surely, in the Scandinavia of the seventies. How confusing, especially as Adam Pålsson was very pretty, lolled about half-naked on the bed or towelled himself dry in the communal showers at the police station – and, man and boy, Kenneth Branagh was never what might be called male crumpet.

As usual, the story involved Yugoslav gunrunners, racist murders, corporate bad deeds and fatal stabbings that weren’t fatal. I think I’d have preferred watching a young George Dixon of Dock Green instead, especially as older viewers like me will never forget Victor Maddern having difficulty with the line ‘It’s down at Dock Green nick.’ This was delivered as ‘It’s down at Dock Green dick,’ before Maddern corrected himself and said, ‘It’s down at Dick Green dock.’ Sometimes I believe I’ll die laughing.

There was a Young James Herriot series, too, back in 2011, about the vet’s experiences as a Glasgow student. It never quite took off, not like the original BBC shows, when, between 1978 and 1990, a Saturday night wasn’t a Saturday night without Christopher Timothy sticking his arm up a cow’s bottom.

Channel 5, which suddenly seems a proper channel, has now splurged on a remake, complete with the piano cascades on the soundtrack.

With improved production values, the green of the Yorkshire Dales is greener than ever before and the Yorkshire towns have more cobbles than seems feasible, like an idyllic railway poster, while the Yorkshiremen in the pubs and farmyards are so crafty and taciturn they reminded me of extras in horror films who always fall silent when strangers appear.

Nicholas Ralph is workmanlike as Herriot, Callum Woodhouse terrible (and utterly unlike the sweet Peter Davison) as a churlish Tristan Farnon, the black sheep, but as usual the series is dominated by Siegfried Farnon, a character who is a gift to actors who go in for overacting.

Anthony Hopkins, to no surprise, played him in a feature film, as did Colin Blakely.

No one will forget Robert Hardy, however, who in 90 episodes was perfectly ridiculous, shouting, running in and out of rooms, losing his temper, whispering and talking quickly, then very slowly – all to suggest what a fascinatingly eccentric cove Siegfried must surely be, as well as a tiresome show-off.

This time, it is Samuel West, who now resembles his dad when he was Edward VII, and Siegfried has become a repressed The Oldie November 2020 67

Ed McLachlan

‘I wish someone would invent penalty shoot-outs!’

and sleek homosexual, his clothes slightly too dandyish – I haven’t seen polished boots like that since the Third Reich. No wonder Nigel Havers, as a curmudgeonly general, eyed him up warily and backed away. Diana Rigg, God rest her, was the old bag with the spoilt dog, Tricki Woo. My vote still goes to Margaretta Scott, who as Mrs Pumphrey was dotty without being mannered.

David Tennant has always been a chippy, snappish actor, surliness never far off, his Scottish accent lending itself to sneering. So he was ideal as Dennis Nilsen, the whining and self-regarding serial killer, in Des. Hoping to see the special-effects team in action, with severed heads in the Baby Belling, chopped up limbs down the drains – what fun could have been had, devising such props – I was sorely disappointed.

Apart from the way the cast smoked 68 The Oldie November 2020

non-stop, nothing nasty was shown, unless you include Brian Masters’s horrible pastel shirts and matching ties.

Nor was there anything by way of plot or suspense, as Nilsen confessed instantly.

There was still a lot of talk – hours of it. As a television drama, where it belonged was on radio.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE SALZBURG’S (COVID-FREE) CENTENARY FESTIVAL ‘A triumph over adversity or reckless folly?’ was the headline in the Guardian, as the Salzburg Festival got under way on 1st August. By late August, triumph had romped home by a country mile.

Back in April, when most late-summer and autumn festivals were busily

throwing in the towel, Salzburg held its nerve. Guided by a well-resourced and well-organised Austria that had quarantined early (and would later boast one of Europe’s lowest per capita death rates), the festival could afford to bide its time. When it was announced in mid-May that gatherings of up to a thousand people might be possible from 1st August, it was game on.

This is not the place to chronicle the logistics – or the cost – of the astonishing, artistic, administrative, technical and medical programmes that now swung into action. Suffice it to say that when I forwarded the end-of-festival analysis to an old friend from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, he emailed back, ‘Does the Festival Office also run countries?’

The planning was such that there was no need for physical distancing between players on stage or reductions in orchestral forces. For Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic fielded the prescribed 108 players; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony went ahead with soloists and a full choir.

Audiences, strategically seated, were not required to wear face masks during performances, though the use of fans was strictly forbidden. Some 76,000 tickets were sold during the festival, yet by the end not a single case of COVID-19 had been reported to any authority, local or national. (Madrid’s Teatro Real had a similar nil return after public stagings of Verdi’s La traviata in July).

Though opera suffered, Salzburg rescued 108 of its planned 200 performances, quite a few of which can still be enjoyed over here on Europe’s free-to-view TV culture channel ARTE. A new production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra (ARTE until 30th October) was one of the operas saved. It’s a work deep in Salzburg’s DNA, since it was after seeing Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s reworking of Sophocles’s tragedy, directed by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1903, that Strauss resolved to create the opera. And it was this same triumvirate who founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920 in the aftermath of war, as a vehicle for hope and reconciliation rooted in shared European cultural values.

My first Elektra ­­– Salzburg’s third, back in 1964 – was conducted by Karajan, and staged by him. Set in Agamemnon’s Mycenae, it was far more atmospherically charged than Krzysztof Warlikowski’s drably designed 2020 staging, though things such as the interaction of the death-obsessed Elektra (Aušrinė Stundytė) and her more life-affirming sister Chrysothemis (Asmik Grigorian,

beginning with the eight-year-old Mozart’s astonishing, J C Bach-inspired first symphony, written for London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1764, and ending with his last, the Jupiter, in a performance guaranteed to make any heart rejoice.

As long-serving festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler said in her farewell address, ‘How fortunate we have been to be able to make a statement of the power of the arts in powerless times.’

Fortunate, yes – and brave, too: immensely brave. The founding fathers would be proud.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON Electric Elektra: Aušrine Stundytė at this year’s Salzburg Festival

mesmerising as ever) were more interestingly handled by Warlikowski.

Musically, it was a matchless evening – though, should you watch it, feel free to skip the spoken prologue in which Clytemnestra explains why she murdered Agamemnon. Lifted by Warlikowski from the final scene of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, this ruins the impact of Strauss’s own unforgettable opening.

If it’s unalloyed pleasure you seek, turn to Christof Loy’s white-box staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte (ARTE until 30th October). It’s been cut to last 150 minutes (no intervals at Salzburg this year) but then, weirdly, Salzburg has always cut Così – witness the 1974 Karl Böhm performance that’s included in Deutsche Grammophon’s new 58-CD box 100 Jahre Salzburger Festspiele.

Other ARTE highlights include a deeply moving account of Mahler’s tragic Sixth Symphony from Andris Nelsons and the Vienna Philharmonic (until 6th November); and Martha Argerich, still amazing us at the age of 79, with a recital of sonatas by Beethoven, Schumann and Prokofiev with star violinist Renaud Capuçon (until 18th November).

Not the least of Salzburg’s annual delights are the 11am Mozart Matinées, and this year was no exception: septuagenarian Ádám Fischer led one of the most vibrant and life-enhancing concerts I’ve heard for quite some while (until 21st November). Elder brother of the better-known Iván, Ádám is an ebullient, warm-hearted, smiling man of music whose aim is ‘to help the musicians play better’.

And, boy, how the Mozarteum Orchestra played! The programme itself was a joy: a career-spanning journey,

AUTUMN CLASSICS Stuck in a hideous traffic jam (the trains may be empty but the roads are full – the two are not unrelated), I heard comedian/author James Acaster plugging a book, and up pricked my ears.

The thesis of Perfect Sound Whatever is simple, he explained. It is that ‘2016 was the greatest year for music of all time.’

I snorted audibly. So did my husband, who, as keen readers of this column will recall, was actually present at Jimi Hendrix’s last gig on the Isle of Wight 50 years ago; ie he’s that old. We secretly think that most pop music since about 1980 is trite and disposable.

We therefore both waited for the 34-year-old stripling from Kettering to back up his idiotic claim. We heard that Acaster bought 366 albums in the course of his 2016 project … and then I’m afraid I tuned out, as I had started making my own list.

It’s the season of mists. Forget 2016 – what about right here, right now? What are the albums to snuggle up to by the fireside, as the nights draw in? Back

home, I scanned the CDs on my shelves, and my eye fell on ten mellow and fruitful autumn bangers.

1 The Eurythmics’ Here Comes the Rain Again for when the heavens open from now until Christmas.

2 Joni Mitchell’s Blue because 2020 has been that kind of year. Alexa, fast forward to 2021!

3 The Best of the Rat Pack box set to remind you it’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.

4 Carole King’s Tapestry, to remind you that it’s the small pleasures in life, like coffee, jokes, old friends (and needlework?) that sustain us, not status and money.

5 Neil Young’s Harvest, as it’s the time of year when small children place tins and Weetabix on altars.

6 Florence + the Machine’s Ceremonials as the lead singer Welch is young, gifted and Brit.

7 The Beatles’ remastered Love album to wipe the film Yesterday from your consciousness.

8 Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes?, which is what we all ask all the time, as we see our children change and our parents age, and avoid our own ravaged visages in the mirror.

9 Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left: pure, bare, ruined-choirs music.

10 Lastly, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, to remind my husband that since he was a spotty, druggy teenager at the Isle of Wight, one of the greatest singers to walk the streets of Camden and this land both was born and died, and her name will shine for ever in lights in the musical hall of fame.

PS I will not be taking questions on this list.

PPS James Acaster has, would you believe it, bought another 500 albums since 2016, but I’m STILL not convinced by his superior knowledge on these matters.

Baby, it’s cold outside: albums to snuggle up to by the fireside The Oldie November 2020 69

Above: Louis Turpin’s Delphiniums in the Border and Peacock Garden. Right: Little Celebration Dance by Mick Rooney

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU Louis Turpin & Mick Rooney Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold 1st to 21st November, online from 19th October Louis Turpin offers gardens and landscapes; Mick Rooney, myths of his own making. I admire both artists. A careless glance at this exhibition might allow one to think it a surprising pairing.

In fact, it is as inspired as it is natural. In their different ways, both are among the music-makers and dreamers of dreams.

They go back a long way, not quite to their south-London boyhoods, but to the early 1970s, when they met at a southcoast exhibition, having moved to Peasmarsh and Hastings respectively.

Rooney moved away, eventually to the Cotswolds, while Turpin stayed on, but they have remained friends.

As blues man Turpin says, while their paintings may be inspired by different triggers, their meetings have always been ‘celebrated with food, conversation and music. At parties we would usually end 70 The Oldie November 2020

up playing guitars together, Mick adding a jazzy riff to the mix.’ Most recently, they have been working while battling cancer, complicated by COVID. A brief art-college flirtation with abstraction left a trace in Turpin’s slightly impressionistic style, which avoids plant portraiture in favour of structure and colour patterns. He began by painting human portraits, then moved on to interiors, and then to gardens treated as outdoor rooms.

The glory of his colours is sometimes enhanced by subtle use of a gold ground, which emerges to great effect between

‘We all draw on our walls but he has to make such a big deal of it!’

colours or makes a whole sky. The gardens include Scotney, Rodmell and Sizergh, and he is also showing a small number of ink-wash-on-paper landscapes around Rye. Dreams do not have to follow logic, or have storylines, and this is true of those that Rooney paints. He describes the process as freeing the mind ‘to wander to and fro amongst the ghosts of one’s own vocabulary’. Occasionally titles are indicative, as in Fast Exit from Eden, but more often the artists leave us to play with whatever impressions the pictures suggest. We may build our own stories around the groups of bears and circus people set against Italianate landscapes in Entry of the Pilgrims and Family at a Belvedere.

Rooney exhibited with the Fosse when it opened 40 years ago. Now he notes, ‘Both Louis and I have lately been conversing with the bad boys. That we share an exhibition at Fosse Gallery is testament to our survival instincts, energy resources and the tender ministrations of family and friends. It’s almost as if now we have no time left to worry about art. But of course we still do.’

Prices range from £1,200 to £8,000.

Pursuits

MALCOLM PARK/ALAMY

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER NATURE’S LAST HURRAH With spring-flowering bulbs planted, hedges trimmed for the last time this year and leaves swept, what else can the gardener look forward to in November?

I’ve been chatting to chums…

To protect the privacy of two highprofile people, I won’t identify my favourite Mediterranean garden, hidden among hills at the end of a grassy track, studded with wild orchids, in the southwest corner of Mallorca. In May and June, colours and heady scents are intoxicating.

I’ve not seen it in November. The English owner tells me, ‘It is the time when everything is trimmed and tidied.

There are usually some late roses and, with luck, Podranea ricasoliana, the pink trumpet vine, is still flowering.

Closely clipped now, the evergreen and evergrey shrubs are a special delight, with all their different shapes and shadows, but there is not much other colour right now.’ Blissfully restful.

In Dublin, clinical geneticist and wizard gardener Willie Reardon says there’s ‘no hiding’ in November. ‘The canopy of our magnolia has fallen, exposing the felt-roofed carbuncle of a neighbour’s shed in all its infelicity – such is the fate of the suburban gardener.’

But Willie also sees the month’s advantages. With work done to rid paths of moss, it’s the moment for his Viburnum farreri to take centre stage.

‘The scent reaches me while I’m on my knees with wire brush and skinned knuckles. The plant itself is unremarkable, requiring little care, hidden throughout summer by the somewhat invasive Aster umbellatus, a magnet for late-summer insects. But once the aster has been cut back in late October, this viburnum has its moment.

Every visitor marvels at its scent.’

Sally Gregson gardens in Somerset and has a small nursery specialising in hydrangeas and epimediums. ‘The end of autumn and the onset of winter is a very special time,’ she says. ‘All the chaotic growth of late summer is over and gone, and the very first winter flowers of Prunus x subhirtella “Autumnalis” are emerging on bare branches. In a sheltered, west-facing corner, a large pot of Camellia sasanqua is just cracking open its pale rose-pink buds to celebrate the season. And I have time to savour the beauty all around, and plan for next year.’ Again, restful; a time for inspirational contemplation.

Lord Cavendish’s family’s 16thcentury Cumbria estate Holker Hall (American guests giggle at its correct pronunciation, Hooker) is set in handsome countryside with gardens merging into parkland, framed by the Lakeland Hills and the expanse of Morecambe Bay, which in many a year helps to mitigate winter’s worst chills.

‘In north-west coastal gardens,’ he says, ‘winter rarely arrives before mid-December.’ Hugh Cavendish regards November as an extension of autumn, ‘with its beautiful, washed light, continued autumn colour and bright berries seen at their best. It is the time of year when evergreen trees and shrubs stand out and reveal their true value. To

In the pink: sweet-smelling viburnum

nominate just one: the mellow colours and texture of the fruiting sweet chestnut appeal to me greatly – as does its harvest.’

Hugh’s book A Time to Plant (2012) makes known the intimacies of a garden that is age-old yet continually evolving through the introduction of new plants.

And since his daughter Lucy and her husband recently moved into the Hall, fresh innovations doubtless prepare these hallowed acres for yet another distinguished era.

For me, shielding through lockdown on England’s border with Wales, November brims with opportunities to plan ahead. Mañana is an important word in the gardener’s lexicon – for we all hope to do better tomorrow, next week, next month or next year.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD WATERCRESS/LAND CRESS Don’t eat the watercress in the river, I remember being told as a child, or you’ll get liver fluke. According to Richard Mabey, author of Food for Free, the watercress to avoid grows in stagnant water or in streams that flow through fields, where this nasty little parasite, having infected livestock, may get into the stems of watercress.

Grown commercially, in pure running water away from rivers, watercress presents no health hazards – in fact, it has high nutritional value, being packed with vitamin C, iron and calcium.

However, it is simple enough for kitchen gardeners to grow their own, without the need for running water in the garden.

Perhaps the best advice is to grow watercress in large pots of damp compost, standing in troughs or other containers in about two inches of The Oldie November 2020 73

water, changed or freshened once or twice a week. A plastic washing-up bowl or, with a number of pots, an old bathtub is suitable for this purpose.

The plants can be propagated from seed or from a bag of watercress bought in a supermarket, which will root more quickly if first soaked in water for a week.

The seeds may take up to two weeks to germinate in early spring, but the plants will then grow quickly and provide cut-and-come-again salad leaves throughout the summer.

Nasturtium officinale is the scientific name for watercress. While its peppery taste is similar to that of nasturtium flower leaves, the two are apparently unrelated. Watercress leaves should be picked before the plant’s small white flowers appear.

Then there is land cress (highly recommended by Sarah Raven); its seeds can be sown as late as October. At this time of year, land cress is best grown in a container or, if in the ground, under a cloche. It should be watered regularly and doesn’t mind cold weather.

The flavour and the health benefits are similar to those of watercress, and the leaves can be cropped continually through the winter for soups and salads. To use the modern expression, what’s not to like?

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD RAID YOUR APPLE STORE As autumn closes in, it’s a good time to tidy up the store cupboard, sort out the freezer and repurpose what’s lurking in the back of the fridge.

My paternal grandmother, an Edinburgh Scot who let nothing go to waste, was of the opinion that, if in doubt, you should use your nose. Her autumn tidy-up in preparation for restocking the larder amalgamated the contents of all opened jamjars, regardless of furry little hats, giving the whole lot a good boil-up and repotting.

Unfinished jars of marmalade were treated similarly but with the inclusion of a slug of whisky. Last year’s left-over chutney was stirred into the new batch to deepen the flavour.

Chores saved for grandchildren included wrapping apples in neat squares of newspaper and arranging them on slatted shelves in the attic.

When the attic air began to smell cidery, the grandchildren were sent up the pull-down ladder to sniff out the baddies and take them to the kitchen to be turned into chutney or apple jelly, flavoured with thyme, sage or mint, to be eaten with the Christmas cold-cuts.

74 The Oldie November 2020

boil and cook until the fruit is mushy.

Strain through a cloth or tip into a jelly bag – don’t press or squeeze the pulp.

Measure the juice and return it to the pan with its own volume of sugar. Bring all gently back to the boil, stirring till the crystals dissolve. Turn down the heat and simmer for 30-40 minutes, till the mixture jells when you put a drop on a cold plate. Stir in the chopped chilli and reboil for a minute or two. Ladle into hot jars and lid tightly. Store in the fridge.

Ready immediately.

Apple and ginger chutney Chutney is easy-going and forgiving. But it’s the devil of a sticker in the later stages – so choose a rainy afternoon when you’re home, and keep stirring regularly.

If you forget and it burns on the base, don’t scrape or stir; just tip it all into a clean pan. Only what’s left behind will taste burnt. Makes about 4 jars 1.5kg apples, cored, peeled and chunked 100g fresh ginger root, roughly chopped (no need to scrape) 2 medium onions, skinned and finely chopped 100g sultanas and/or diced dried apricots 1 tbsp salt 1 tsp powdered cloves 350ml cider vinegar or malt vinegar 500g dark brown sugar Dump everything, except the vinegar and sugar, into a roomy preserving pan, bring to the boil, turn down the heat, lid and simmer for 30-40 minutes, until the apple is soft and the onions tender.

Add the vinegar and sugar, and stir until the crystals have dissolved. Bring back to the boil, lid loosely and cook for another 1½ hours, stirring regularly, until the mixture is thick and rich.

Ladle into sterilised jars and lid tightly.

Good in a week; better in a month.

Apple and chilli jelly Brogdale apple orchard, the national varietal archive in Kent, is in financial trouble as a result of lockdown. The season runs till November – so there’s still time to collect supplies. Herbs can be used as flavouring instead of chilli.

2kg apples (any variety) About 2kg granulated sugar 1-2 fresh red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped Wipe and roughly chop the apples – ­ skin, core, pips and all – and drop into a roomy pan with enough water to cover. Bring to

SOHO RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE Before Harvey Weinstein, NSIT (Not Safe in Taxis) was the epithet awarded by mothers to swathes of young (and old) blades raised on Carry on Cabby.

My patient wife, Josephine, has officially dubbed me NSAL (Not Safe at Lunch), owing to my overflowing diary over the last four weeks. Literally tens of post-COVID escapers have shone a Fatman searchlight into the night sky.

And, lo, I have arrived at 1pm, napkin a-go-go.

David from Chester even brought his friend, Piers the surgeon, for two lunches in a row; the first in my garden, which morphed into a takeaway Greek mezze; the second at that temple of joy Boisdale, with its packed post-prandial cigar terrace.

Apart from that, all my dates were concentrated on sunnier-than-ever Soho, whose table-strewn streets will remain car-free until the end of October. The Editor and I cycled down to Polpo, in Beak Street, owned by Oldie shareholder Richard Beatty and his chef wife, Florence Knight, whose new menu offers the closest-to-the-real-thing Italian food in Soho.

Then Jim, whose Northern vowels break glass, took me to Vasco and Piero’s, the long-established and underrated Umbrian restaurant in Poland Street.

Joyous Joey from Notting Hell swigged Bloody Marys at Prix Fixe in Dean Street – a bargain set menu in the ultimate bargain-menu street.

Then, for my birthday, I took the Oldie sales team and art editor to Yalla Yalla, part of the excellent Lebanese chain, in Winsley Street, which offers a massive mezze for just £19.95 for two. We were all thrilled with the Lebanese Ksara wines at just £24.95 a bottle.

Best of all, the manager let me open the bottle of 2014 Château Moulinet Lasserre that my lunch guests had generously given me that morning, without knowing that three bottles of the

2015 vintage of the same wine were waiting for me at my Safe Six birthday dinner. Even the Editor, who bypassed childhood because of ‘all that nonsense about fairies’, conceded that the odds of two near-identical wines in the same day must be several thousand to one.

Josephine chose our Lunch of the Month at the Gay Hussar’s recent reincarnation, Noble Rot, in Greek Street. I was nervous, of course. Why hadn’t they incorporated the old name into the new? Would they have kept Martin Rowson’s cartoons of Labour Party regulars such as Michael Foot and Roy Hattersley?

Richard Ingrams used to have lunch either there or at the Star Café in Great Chapel Street. So countless Oldie staff lunches of Hungarian wild-cherry soup and roast duck were devoured under the wicked eye of John Wrobel, the devoted manager.

Twenty-five years ago, I booked one of the private rooms to interview the three Goodies for my doomed magazine Cult TV. My best childhood moment was when I was plucked from prep at my prep school to appear in an episode with the trio. So overjoyed was I by our reunion that I ordered for them. ‘You’ll love the duck – it’s magnificent.’ I yelped.

‘I bet it was,’ gasped a sullen Bill Oddie, Britain’s most famous birdwatcher.

Well, Mr Goodie Two-Sandals, you must return. Rowson’s cartoons are in the National Portrait Gallery but the £18 set menu (smoked trout and sausages) is the best deal in the West End. I ordered a bottle of a Hungarian Áldás Bikavér, in memory of the restaurant’s glorious founder, Victor Sassie. If he was Hungarian, I was the fourth Goodie.

DRINK BILL KNOTT TAKE THE SLOE ROAD Brambles are early this year.

At least, that’s how it appeared in mid-September, as I ambled among the hedgerows of Cornwall. Many were already past their best, while the sloes on the blackthorn bushes – not usually ripe until late October –

‘All I said was “Your round” ’

were plumply purple and shiny.

Much though I love the countryside in autumn, I have an ulterior motive: both brambles and sloes, combined with gin and sugar, make terrific winter tipples.

Sloe gin is the classic, a marriage of two inedibly astringent berries, transformed by sugar and alcohol into a deliciously fruity, heady liqueur.

Thankfully, the disobligingly spiky juniper does not need picking, its distinctive aroma already distilled into the spirit, but sloes (Prunus spinosa, which offers a clue) are nearly as fiercely protected by thorns. One of these spines was traditionally used to prick each berry, releasing its juices into the gin, but it is much easier simply to freeze the fruits: when defrosted, the skins burst, achieving the same effect.

The method is very simple. Take 500g of frozen sloes (or damsons, if you have a glut), layer them in a sterilised two-litre preserving jar (Kilner or similar) with 250g caster sugar; then top up with a litre of gin. Store it somewhere dark and cool, giving it a shake every day until the sugar has dissolved, then every week or so for two or three months: longer, if you can be patient. Then strain through a muslinlined funnel into bottles and leave for at least another few weeks before opening.

The lengthier the maceration, the more the bitter almond flavour of the stones will leach into the gin. Add some almond essence as a short cut, if you like.

The leftover sloes are usually discarded, although ingenious recipes for jellies and chutneys exist. There is also ‘slider’ – sloe cider – made by infusing the gin-soaked berries in still cider.

Northamptonshire-based cider-maker Saxby’s even makes a commercial version (18% ABV, £29.99, ciderlicious.co.uk).

Bramble gin is quicker to mature. The fruits turn mushy much more easily and are less astringent; so they need less sugar. 500g of brambles, 200g of caster sugar and a litre of gin, a fortnight in the jar and another month or two in bottle will do the trick. Both sloe gin and bramble gin can be drunk chilled on their own as a digestif, or over crushed ice, or with tonic. An extra squeeze of lemon helps balance the sweetness.

I must confess, however, that my foraging this year has taken me only as far as my local Lidl, where I found Finton’s London Dry Gin (£9.99 for 70cl) and frozen blackberries (£1.99 for 600g).

The fruits of my (minimal) labours are now strained and bottled, awaiting Christmas house guests, whom I shall regale with tall tales of scratched flesh amid Cornish hedgerows. The truth will remain my Lidl secret.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines, two whites and a red: a classic, tangy Muscadet that would be very happy with a few oysters for company; a lovely Verdelho from the banks of the Tagus; and a spicy red from one of Côtes du Rhône’s best villages. However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie ‘Les Hauts Pémions’ 2019, offer price £10.50, case price £26.00 Crisp, flinty Muscadet with a pleasing complexity from ageing on its lees.

Verdelho, Quinta da Alorna, Tejo, Portugal 2018, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Complex apple-andpear fruit, faintly spicy, with a long, rounded finish.

Château de Bord, Laudun, Maison Brotte, Côtes du Rhône Villages 2017, offer price £11.75, case price £141.00 Plummy, satisfying blend of Grenache and Syrah. One for the Sunday roast.

Mixed case price £132.96 – a saving of £23.91 (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 30th November 2020.

The Oldie November 2020 75

SPORT JIM WHITE HOLLYWOOD FC When news came through that Ryan Reynolds, the star of Deadpool, and his mate Rob McElhenney, the leading man in highly successful American TV sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, were about to buy Wrexham Football Club, the Telegraph’s James Ducker sent a tweet to McElhenney, asking the obvious question.

‘Why Wrexham, Rob?’ he wrote.

‘Why not, James?’ he replied.

‘Why not?’ is the only explanation.

Because nobody would take a controlling interest in Wrexham for logical reasons.

If the old saw about how you make a small fortune in football (start with a large fortune and buy a lower-league football club) ever held sway, it is right now. COVID restrictions mean clubs like Wrexham are almost devoid of income.

So this is the perfect time for a takeover.

That can be the only reason Reynolds and McElhenney have become involved.

After decades of maladministration, Wrexham has since 2011 been a supporterowned club. But even the diehard fans on the board recognised they could not sustain the place without help. So the Hollywood stars have agreed to buy the club for a nominal fee, but with a guarantee that they will invest £2 million immediately to keep it afloat.

For Reynolds, this is small beer. Last year, he is said to have been the secondhighest-paid star in Hollywood, thanks to Deadpool. If you are worth £40 million, forking out £1 million for a slice of romance is not a bad way to spend your money.

Because that is what the pair are doing: they are buying the chance to make a difference. And what a difference they might make. Founded in 1864, Wrexham is not merely the oldest football club in Wales; it is the thirdmost-senior in the world. At the moment, as it enters its 12th season in the National League, this is an institution on its uppers. So the new owners could be the men responsible for its revival.

In Britain, the worlds of showbiz and sport rarely intersect. True, every football club boasts its celebrity supporter. But, beyond Elton John owning Watford, Eric Morecambe serving on the Luton Town board and Tommy Cannon of Cannon and Ball having a short-lived spell as chairman of Rochdale, few entertainers have entered the board room.

For a Hollywood model owner, Reynolds and McElhenney should divert their gaze to Australia. There, Russell Crowe has transformed the fortunes of the rugby league club the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

76 The Oldie November 2020

Glenda Jackson, Morecambe and Wise

Unlike Wrexham’s new investors, who both admit they have never even visited the town, Crowe is a lifelong fan of the club. When he made it in Hollywood, he secured shirt sponsorship for one of his films, The Cinderella Man. In the 1990s, he sprinkled the place with movie glamour when he took Pamela Anderson along to a match. And when the team were facing financial implosion in 2006, he became co-owner.

His investment – and his close interest – transformed the place. In 2014, they won the National League Championship for the first time in 43 years. The following year, with Crowe watching from the stands, they won the world title. It would never have happened without him. And as a result he has become a hero among the club’s supporters.

That is what awaits Reynolds and McElhenney. All they have to do now is co-ordinate some success and the freedom of Wrexham is theirs. Why not indeed?

MOTORING ALAN JUDD A HALF-BRITISH GRENADIER Short-term treats are one of the answers to life.

In the long term, we’re all dead – so it’s wise not to look too far ahead. That’s why I’m focused on the Grenadier in 2021.

The Grenadier is a pub in Belgravia, named after a soldier beaten to death for cheating at cards. However, it’s not the pub that’s the apple of my eye but the result of a conversation that took place in it in December 2017. That was when Sir Jim Ratcliffe, head of chemical conglomerate Ineos, hatched the idea to build a new version of the Land Rover Defender.

Land Rover stopped making the old Defender in 2016 and were working on its current, not-at-all-similar successor.

The company wouldn’t sell Ratcliffe the Defender designs and tooling – so he formed Ineos Automotive, giving it a billion euros to produce his own modern version. It’s called the Grenadier.

At first sight, it looks like the old Defender: high and upright with clam-

shell bonnet, flat or nearly-flat wings, windows and panels, minimal overhangs and vertical grill. But, in fact, it’s a ground-up recreation, similar in size to the Mercedes G Class, though slightly narrower and powered by six-cylinder BMW petrol and diesel engines (with future hybrid, electric and hydrogen versions on the cards).

It’s mostly engineered at Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria, where they make the G Class, with the chassis made in Portugal and final assembly at Bridgend, where it will create 500 jobs. The commercial director is Mark Tennant, a successful ex-Land Rover marketeer.

Ratcliffe appointed his friend and yacht designer Toby Ecuyer to design it.

He produced the hose-out interior (like the original Range Rover’s), body shoulders for storage in the lower doors, more storage in the rear pillar and wet storage in the rear wing, as well as a load-bearing roof with built-in bars and no need for a rack. There are also utility rails for hanging lights etc.

Echoing the old Defender, it’s a bodyon-frame chassis with coil suspension and aluminium bonnet, doors and mudguards. The gearbox is an eightspeed ZF automatic, while the engines offer from 261bhp to just under 400bhp.

It has five doors (a four-door pick-up will follow), weighs 2,400kg, tows 3.5 tonnes, has a 1-tonne payload and has undergone a million miles of testing. It won’t come cheap – prices, depending on spec, are likely to be £40,000-£50,000 plus VAT, about the same as a new Defender. Ineos reckon they have to sell 25,000 a year to make a profit, which is slightly more than the old Defender was selling in its final years.

Ecuyer prioritised off-road performance, seeking a vehicle that was ‘assured, robust, faithful, dependable and purposeful’. He benchmarked vehicles that had proved themselves in the field and, crucially, ‘found their way into people’s hearts’.

Those words encapsulate the old Defender’s DNA which, judging by appearance, is lacking in Land Rover’s successor version. Today’s Land Rover products, from Range Rover downwards, look like replications of each other, variations on the same theme.

Of course I’m biased, being addicted to old Defenders. I’ve owned about a dozen, the latest and newest being my current 2001 TD5. If I’d kept them all, I’d be a richer man. But that’s the nature of short-term treats; they come and they go, which is why you have to keep them coming.

The Grenadier is due out by the end of 2021. You could do worse than put a deposit down now.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Confessions of an oldie internet addict Exactly ten years ago, I wrote this column from a family holiday in a cottage on the English coast with no phone, no internet, no television and negligible mobilephone reception.

The grown-ups suffered the withdrawal symptoms, marching around looking for a signal, fretting about their email. The teenagers just got on with mucking about in boats, doing jigsaws and laughing. I reflected that

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Sir Ken Robinson www.askwebster.co.uk/robinson Sir Ken Robinson, the distinguished educationalist, died recently. He caused a storm with this talk at a conference in 2007. It is always worth watching.

USA Elections www.fec.gov The Federal Election Commission has jurisdiction over the campaigns for the US Presidency. It could be worth watching in November.

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

life without electronic connections had its attractions.

We have taken that cottage for the same week every year for 27 years and we’ve just repeated the experience. Many of the same people who were with us ten years ago joined us, and some now have children of their own, all under five years old. This latest generation has no notion of what life is like without the internet.

They think that having long video chats with Grandma is how it’s always been..

The cottage is on the periphery of the electronic world, and the mobile-phone signal is still dreadful. Incidentally, that may change soon: the chairman of a major mobile-phone network has bought a house there, and I can’t help speculating that the signal strength may soon miraculously improve.

However, before we arrived one of the charming owners of our cottage called to warn me that wi-fi had been installed, and said she hoped I didn’t mind. She sounded a little embarrassed, I thought, and told me I was welcome to unplug the router and hide it if I wanted to. She said one of the previous tenants had done just that – not because her children were using it, but in order to force her husband to engage with the family.

I muttered grumpily about ‘Change and decay in all around I see’. I talked of the ravens leaving the Tower. But, in the end, I decided the time had come to admit that nowadays we know better how to manage such matters and I risked

leaving the wi-fi on, with all the concomitant cultural perils.

To my relief, it all worked out rather well. It was good, for example, to be able to read our newspapers on tablets at breakfast, without having to drive a few miles to pick up a copy. My son-in-law, a solicitor, was grateful to be able to check work emails unobtrusively from time to time, without making an expedition to do so. It was reassuring to know that we had Netflix or iPlayer (via tablets) in reserve in case of urgent child-related need.

In the event, we were lucky with the weather, and all five of the children were perfectly happy playing with each other or the grown-ups and certainly happier than if they’d been stuck in front of any screen.

The lesson we learned is rather encouraging. We are acquiring the ability to moderate our dependence on phones, laptops, tablets and the rest. The trick is to use the internet properly, for our benefit, and not to allow it to suck us into the morass of addictive games, endless scrolling and mindless nonsense.

As my daughter, the mother of three of the under-fives, wisely pointed out, the internet is like a machete: you can use it to cut a safe path through the jungle, or as a weapon when you’re leading a national uprising. Either way, it’s not the machete’s fault. So it is with the internet: a force for good, if managed and used properly.

It’s up to us all to make sure the young know how that’s done.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Wisdom of crowdfunding Crowdfunding is a quick and easy way to support people.

Perhaps a friend is running a marathon for charity, or parents need money for their sick child. Your small contribution might help save someone’s life.

But there is more to crowdfunding than giving away £10 here or £20 there.

As well as individuals requesting small donations, businesses and charities raise large amounts through crowdfunding, usually in return for a 78 The Oldie November 2020

reward or profit. Many well-known names – including River Cottage, the Eden Project and BrewDog – started with crowdfunded money.

Anyone can try to raise money through crowdfunding: start-ups, small companies wanting to expand, community projects, voluntary groups and creative projects perhaps involving artists, film-making or music festivals.

They use websites, such as Crowdfunder, which have been set up specifically to match donors and beneficiaries. These

are called platforms and they charge fees, taken from donors, recipients or both.

There are four types of crowdfunding.

The simplest is donation crowdfunding: you give money to a person or charity because you support the cause. Often this is a pure donation but you might receive a gift such as a T-shirt. GoFundMe and JustGiving are two well-known platforms for donation crowdfunding.

Next comes reward crowdfunding, where you expect to get something in return; perhaps a board game you are

helping to be developed. Here Kickstarter is a large platform.

The following two categories are far more risky: they are investments and you hope to profit from your contribution.

You can still spend just a little, but you can also part with substantial sums of money – which you could lose.

One is debt-based crowdfunding, also known as peer-to-peer lending.

Investors lend money to start-ups and expect to earn interest on the loan, via platforms such as Funding Circle, Zopa and Ratesetter.

Sometimes the loan is in the form of mini-bonds – an IOU from the issuer to the investor. These are so high risk, and investors have lost so many millions of pounds, that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has permanently banned advertising mini-bonds.

Lastly, there is investment crowdfunding, where you receive shares for helping start-up companies get off the ground and so own a stake in the company. You hope eventually to sell your shares for a profit but there are no guarantees. Platforms in this market include Crowdcube, Seedrs and Triodos Bank. Triodos is an ethical bank and takes investments only for organisations

‘Nightshift is always livelier at Halloween’

designed to make an environmental, cultural or social impact.

There are numerous risks to your money with crowdfunding, and little protection. The business you support might go bust, you might not be able to sell your shares or the crowdfunding platform itself could collapse before it has handed on your money.

All crowdfunding falls outside the Financial Services Compensation

Scheme. Only investment and loan crowdfunding are regulated by the FCA. You might read a heartbreaking story online about someone urgently needing money for an operation – but it could be a fraud. To be safe, donate only to people who you know are genuine and check out any companies you are tempted to fund.

However attractive the crowdfunding proposition sounds, only ever part with money you can afford to lose.

The Oldie November 2020 79

Getting Dressed

From heroin to hero

DAFYDD JONES

How Guardian sketchwriter John Crace was called to Parliament brigid keenan My lockdown hero, my new superman, is John Crace.

He’s the Guardian’s political sketchwriter – the sharpest, funniest commentator there is on the mad world we’re currently living in.

The nicknames he’s given politicians have become part of the language: Failing Grayling, Door Matt Hancock and the Maybot – thanks to Theresa May’s robotic repetition of ‘Brexit means Brexit’.

Crace’s pieces, which appear several times a week, are created in the suburbs of south London.

As you round the corner into his street, you can see that every house is similar, except for one whose front garden is a small, tropical plantation. ‘Oh please, let that be his,’ Dafydd Jones (the Oldie photographer) said as we approached.

And – bliss! It was.

Crace is 6’2’’, slim and strong – my literary superman does actually look like Superman. If I were a member of the Government, I would wither under his direct blue gaze.

He is responsible for the banana trees, palms and giant ferns in the exotic front garden. The back garden, bigger and more conventional, was created by his wife, Jill.

They have been married for more than three decades – through thick and thin – and there have been periods of very, very thin.

Crace’s father was a vicar and his mother a marriageguidance counsellor. He did well academically, studying politics at Exeter University and 80 The Oldie November 2020

the LSE. But, all the time, inside, he was lost, anxious and vulnerable.

‘I kind of felt that I didn’t have all the building bricks you are supposed to have; I didn’t know how to negotiate life.’

Heroin became the answer. He was an addict from the age of 20 till he was almost 30. ‘Do you remember that Ready Brek ad in the ’70s which had a picture of a kid going off to school with a glow around him? Well, heroin gave me that glow – a layer of protection.’

Over those years, he did odd jobs: sold ice cream, worked in a bookshop and got sacked from an insurance company. And he married. I wondered how the marriage had survived his addiction.

‘Well, I was keeping a lot of this secret from her. It was like trying to have two or three lives going on at the same time.’

Two years after their wedding, they found a treatment centre and Crace got clean. He has remained so for the past 33 years, though he has had a nervous breakdown since and demons still occasionally haunt him. ‘My comedy comes from a dark place,’ he says.

It was a much-respected friend he met at Narcotics Anonymous who got him writing. ‘I remember seeing something he’d written in the paper and thinking, “Hmmm, maybe I could actually do that.” It was as arbitrary as that. And one of the attractions of journalism was that no one asked me to explain the ten-year gap in my CV.’ Crace had a lucky start.

Telephoning to pitch his Crace in his writing clothes: sweater and jeans, both from All Saints

Street casual: on a skateboard, aged 20

first idea to the Independent on Sunday, he got straight through to someone in Features, who said, if he wrote it, she would consider it. (He suspects now she thought he was the writer Jim Crace because she later dramatically reduced his fee.)

He did most work for the Guardian educational supplement. Then he was given their ‘Digested Read’ column, then ‘Westminster Digested’ and, in 2014, when Simon Hoggart sadly died, he found himself, unexpectedly, inheriting Hoggart’s job as political sketchwriter.

When Crace entered Parliament (as it were), the uniform was jacket, shirt and tie; John Bercow later abolished the tie.

When he’s there, Crace wears a slightly worn jacket from Rohan – ‘very Guardian’ – and ‘smartish’ trousers. Off duty, he is invariably in a sweater and jeans from All Saints.

Four years ago, his wife started cutting his hair with clippers at grade one.

During lockdown, he grew a beard: ‘She leaves the facial grooming to me,’ he laughs. He reckons the best £229 he ever spent was on an exercise bike which he pedals away on for 75 minutes most days. ‘I turn up the resistance and end up in a full sweat. It’s as good for my mental health as it is for keeping me fit – almost like a meditation.’

The Wigeon

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd At Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey, last March, numerous premigrating wigeon (Anas penelope) were resting.

The peace they spread was in keeping with this private and exemplary reserve, run by Georgina Fulton, who inherited the former farm, and her husband, Gareth, once adjutant of the Yorkshire Regiment. They keep numbers civilised by not having a café or a shop, while predators are also controlled. One result is that Elmley’s 400 breeding lapwing pairs represent 80 per cent of the south of England’s total.

Two hundred wigeon breed in Britain, and 450,000 winter here. Among duck, only mallard outnumber them. It is the whistling call that gives it the name and voices the melancholy of its favourite habitat, the salt marshes bordering estuaries and bays. Isolated lochs and deserted reservoirs tempt them inland, but they are most abundant, sometimes in large flocks, by the sea.

This makes the wigeon the wildfowler’s duck par excellence. With few exceptions, our great hunter naturalists – J G Millais, Abel Chapman, Peter Scott and ‘BB’ – have been wildfowlers.

As Millais wrote (The Wildfowler in Scotland, 1901), when the wind howls and the snow falls, the wildfowler must abandon the fireside and be ‘off at once to listen for the whistle of the duck overhead, or to peer through the gloom for the pack of wigeon’ and thus enjoy, ‘as few other men, the inexpressible beauty of the coming or the departing day’.

For the purist, wildfowling is estuarine punt gunning – the steering of a 1¾-bore gun mounted on a boat. That supreme conservationist Sir Peter Scott has been its most famous exponent. ‘The thrill of stalking a great pack of wigeon or geese, as one lies flat and hidden in a craft which only shows a few grey inches above water, and draws fewer below, cannot easily be described,’ he wrote (Morning

Flight, 1933). ‘In this sophisticated land, it is one of the few remaining sports to offer adventure.’

In Norfolk, I saw a newly-built, two -man example – 24 feet long; 8½-foot gun; wood and steel that had been camouflaged grey. Its traditionalist makers, both irreproachable conservationists, hope to take it to the northern firths this winter. Punt gunners are a rarity, but since 1897 there has been a punt-gun salute every Coronation and Jubilee at Cowbit, Lincolnshire.

The wigeon is prized for its taste and size; it was formerly indicated as a ‘half

duck’ or a ‘lady fowl’. Because it’s a ‘wild fowl’ by nature, its whereabouts are hard to predict. Personal memory encompasses a Perthshire lochan in August and a November evening in the Borders, when a succession of packs flighted into a ‘flash’ by Greenlaw Moor, where before only teal had come.

At Elmley, from autumn to spring, you are certain to see this beautiful duck; you can even rent one of several bell tents, huts or the cottage for an overnight stay.

The 2021 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie November 2020 81

Travel Barbados revisited Forty years ago, a teenage James Pembroke killed lizards in the blistering Caribbean heat. Now he rejoices in early colonial buildings

I

n 1980, a travel agent’s list of winter-sun destinations would have included Florida, the West Indies and Kenya (for a safari).

And that would have been it, apart from Acapulco if you were a Goldsmith or an Elvis fan. Thailand and Goa were of interest only to stamp-collectors or backpackers, and it would be ten years before those specialists returned as hardpressed workers looking for a decent cabana.

I remember those narrow horizons well, because my mother was catatonic with envy when, 40 years ago, Giles ‘Nappy’ Knapman, my boon companion at prep school, invited me to stay in his grandfather’s hotel – not the one in Torquay, but his newly-built compound of small villas in Barbados.

In my parents’ world view, only the likes of Mick Jagger and Robert Sangster went there during those winters of discontent. Most of my contemporaries had never been abroad – not in spite of being posh, but because they were posh.

Cornwall, Scotland and, at a stretch, skiing were the established repertoire.

Not for me: I was thrilled to be

82 The Oldie November 2020

embalmed by that initial blast of tropical heat on exiting the aeroplane. For the first four days, Nappy and I spent 14 hours a day bodysurfing the warm bath of those enormous Caribbean waves. Back then, the protection factor of English suntan cream peaked at a wildly paranoid eight – that was the most Cornwall required.

After four days, the cream’s inadequacy and my devil-may-care ignorance rapidly manifested itself in bubble-gum blisters all over my forearms, which a large nurse pierced with scissors.

We were both banned from the waves for the next few days, but we quickly

Caribbean team: Churchill and Eden

found a revolting new form of entertainment: killing lizards with sticks.

After a day of slaughter, Nappy and I discovered that, beneath each villa, were colonies of ravenous cockroaches to which we could feed the lizards’ corpses.

On day three, Nappy won his master torturer’s gold medal: he realised the roaches were so absorbed with their feasting that they wouldn’t mind losing some of their number to the dripping plastic from our ignited cocktail-stirrers.

Nappy’s mother decided it was safer for us to return to the water.

Forty years on (to the very week), my wife and I fled soon-to-be-locked-down Britain, clutching our invitation to the estimable Cobblers Cove hotel, famous for its eponymous cocktail, the gravitydenying Cobblers Cooler. I’d have worked our passage on a banana boat from Liverpool to revisit Nappy’s and my youthful paradise.

Owing to my self-imposed confinement in our compound 40 years ago, I wrongly assumed Barbados would be a moribund, fly-and-flop destination, enlivened only by its multicoloured

©MIKE TOY

Clockwise from top left: Heron Bay, based on Palladio’s Villa Barbaro; classical café; former slaves’ chattel houses; Nidhe Israel Synagogue, founded in 1654

chattel houses, rum cocktails, ubiquitous calypso and bursting-with-warmth people. Many tourists are happy with those alone; its edge over the Maldives and Seychelles is its early colonial architecture. Much of it has survived, thanks to the efforts of both the 50-yearold Barbados National Trust, which has just four employees, and its latter-day colonists including Anthony Eden (Villa Nova), Sigrid Rausing (Fustic) and the Bamford family (the Palladian Heron Bay).

Its geology has helped: Barbados emerged from the Atlantic as a landmass later than the other West Indian islands.

I can’t help thinking the size and appetite of its current inhabitants may well push it back under. Fortunately, it has a solid coral stone base, while all the other islands are volcanic.

Being some distance off the rest of the chain, Barbados is also far less subject to hurricanes. Hence it feels gentler, less dramatic and more benevolent.

This shows in the people, too. The understandable anger of the 1937 feudal riots is long forgotten, and independence in 1966 was achieved peacefully.

Over 350 years ago, it was Sephardic Jews who originally realised the island’s terrain and climate were ideal for sugarcane production, which they had learned in Recife, in South America. In 1654, the Portuguese took control of Brazil and continued the Iberian pogroms, forcing the Jews to move on again, to the West Indies. They brought their windmill technology and manuring techniques, which helped to make Barbados ‘the richest spote of land in the new world’.

By 1700, there were 250 Jews in Bridgetown; their original 17th-century cleansing bath, or mikvah, still stands next to the town’s 1833 synagogue.

To meet the labour demand, Cromwell deported legions of slaves or indentured labourers from Ireland and Scotland; they at first outnumbered the Africans. While staying with Eden, Churchill went in search of the descendants of these benighted Red Legs and Red Necks, who are still holed up in the remote parish of St Lucy.

Such prosperity – and the bricks used as ballast on these voyages from England – gave us the grand plantation houses. If only our own National Trust could divert

the funds wasted on such erroneous schemes as their beaver-reintroduction programme, Bridgetown could be further rescued.

Except for a few 17th-century buildings such as Drax Hall, which has remained in the same family for centuries, and Dutchgabled St Nicholas Abbey in St Peter, the Georgian/Palladian style of casement windows, arcades and pedimented porticoes is dominant. Its influence can be seen in the narrow single houses of Charleston, with their long side verandas, and, more locally, in the island’s numerous more humble chattel houses.

After emancipation, the former slaves rented their land but owned their highly movable houses, in readiness for the inevitable rental dispute. These wooden houses were placed on a groundsill of coral blocks or sawn stone, which helped the circulation of cooling air. The steep, gabled roofs are made of zinc sheets or ‘galvanise’, and there are high jalousie windows at the gable ends. Larger versions have several sections or units, each with a separate gable, placed one behind another. Palladio would have approved of the symmetry and grandeur of their central front door and hooded windows either side, and their front porch with its pediment on classical wooden columns along with carved tracery.

Cobblers Cove itself is no slouch in the architectural stakes. Originally known as Camelot, the Great House, complete with crenellations, was built in 1944, by Joss Haynes of the island’s planter dynasty, as a cool seashore villa. The two deeply rounded bays are in imitation of their main home, Villa Nova, where Eden lived.

Fifty years ago, the Godsal family created a hotel of two-storey villas in the grounds, which the current generation have updated, ensuring that every chair, lamp, basket and mirror is made on the island itself. Sam Godsal even commissioned the metal monkey chairs around the pool to a design by Oliver Messel, one of the island’s major postwar architects.

The elegance of this family home isn’t starchy in the least thanks to the handson manager, Will Oakley, who could run a small country without breaking into a sweat. The wit and warmth of his staff are everywhere, not least in the provision of water pistols at breakfast to deter the beautiful scaly-naped pigeons. Claudette Colbert, who lived just down the beach at Bellerive, would have approved.

Why not winter there in safety like Miss Colbert?

From just US$200 per person per night: www.cobblerscove.com/cobblers-cove-offers The Oldie November 2020 83

Overlooked Britain

Prince of Art Nouveau

lucinda lambton The Duke of Clarence Memorial – Alfred Gilbert’s tribute to Queen Victoria’s scandalous, spectacularly stupid grandson The sinuous, entangling, architectural forms known as Art Nouveau first writhed their way through Europe at the turn of the 20th century.

Their tendrils barely touched England’s shores. They flourished in Scotland, but Charles Rennie Mackintosh was careful to straighten their twists and turns. For the English architectural profession, it was the Arts and Crafts movement that then reigned supreme.

Because that movement loathed sham and loved honesty, the fashion for Art Nouveau’s ‘squirm’, as they called it, was denounced. The criticism was sneering: because such an outlandish style supposedly obscured all architectural construction, with its ‘fidgety, vulgar obtrusiveness, it was quite destructive of all dignity and repose’.

Even Alfred Gilbert, master creator of curvilinear forms – responsible for the whirling merbabies and fish beneath Eros in Piccadilly Circus – loathed the term Art Nouveau, calling it a ‘duffer’s paradise’!

There were colourful counterblasts.

Architect Charles Harrison Townsend retorted that the Arts and Crafts cry for simplicity was due to omission – ‘with a negation that is a poor substitute for invention, a cowardice pretending to be courage’. Oh dear, oh dear.

He himself boldly grasped the nettle with the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Horniman Museum – both in London – and St Mary’s Church in Great Warley, Essex, all of them writhingly related to their Art Nouveau counterparts abroad.

When it comes to Art Nouveau, the beauties of Barcelona are hard to beat.

Let us give particular praise to the Metro entrances throughout Paris, designed by Hector Guimard between 1900 and 1913.

With gloriously swooping forms of cast iron and glass, 141 of them huzzahed their arabesque presence in the city.

Some have been destroyed, but the remaining 86 are now protected as historic monuments.

The style is so rare in England that coming upon it invariably gives a 84 The Oldie November 2020

Jack the Ripper? The ‘abnormally dormant’ Duke of Clarence

heart-stopping surprise. It is always a shock to see such diverse delights as the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in Liverpool, of 1898-1900, rich with its sweeps of brass decoration.

Otherwise, there is the smotheredwith-colourful-tiles (Edward) Everard’s Printing Works in Bristol of 1900, today being transformed into a deluxe hotel.

What about Harrods Food Hall, with its wealth of ceramic scenes of hunting and herding, designed by W J Neatby in 1901? He was the head of the Doulton architectural department – his work is loved and lauded to this day.

A royal tomb is our finale: Alfred Gilbert’s memorial to the Duke of Clarence in the Albert Memorial Chapel, within the walls of Windsor Castle.

It’s a colossal, filigreed masterpiece of breathtaking beauty, with a grille (around the sarcophagus) of bronze, aluminum, marble and ivory, with semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl and paint.

The memorial was designed to be a great deal more splendid than the man it honoured. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864-92), known as Eddie, was Queen Victoria’s grandson

and heir to the throne, who I fear was considered a dullard.

According to James Pope-Hennessy, he was as ‘heedless and aimless as a gleaming goldfish in a crystal bowl’. One tutor described him as ‘abnormally dormant’ while another doubted the wisdom of his going to university: ‘I do not think that he can possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge, as he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read.’

Queen Victoria described his life as dissipated. His reputation was indeed rent through with sexual scandals – although largely unproven: with male prostitutes and chorus girls (one killed herself by drinking carbolic acid). There was even the unproven suggestion – though with such startling smoke that there must have been at least some spark of fire – that he was Jack the Ripper.

Maybe it was simply his suffering from gonorrhea that gave rise to such rumours.

It took Gilbert a full 36 years to master the tortuous twists and turns of his great, black, bronze grille, with its 12 ‘saintly guardians’ standing over all. They join a virgin, 12 saints and 12 pairs of angels, whose wings and robes follow the flow, all surrounding a sarcophagus of Mexican onyx.

They are protecting the Duke’s effigy, clad in the bronze and brass uniform of the 10th Royal Hussars.

His face and hands of white marble can be seen through the grille (pictured, right). Photographs show him to have been particularly fetching in this attire during his life, and so he will remain for eternity after his death – at the age of 28 from pneumonia.

Gilbert’s use of marble, as well as of ivory for the hands and faces of all the languorously graceful figures, is particularly haunting.

Elizabeth of Hungary’s bronze face (pictured, right) is painted to look like ivory; her robes of tin and bronze are painted red, high-lit with gold and inlaid with decorative gems.

St Elizabeth, an ancestor of Prince

LUCY LAMBTON/ RCT/ALAMY STOCK

Albert, was Landgravine of Thuringia and a Christian queen with a pagan husband. When concealing food intended for the poor beneath her cloak, she was waylaid by her husband, asking her what she was hiding.

‘Only roses,’ she replied, as her cloak fell open, revealing the miraculous blooms tumbling to her feet. They are painted red, as are the roses on the figure of the Virgin.

St Elizabeth’s face is said to be the likeness of Nina Cust, a grandee writer, editor, translator and sculptor, who was also a member of the group of intellectuals known as The Souls.

A great stone angel – deemed by Queen Victoria to be ‘quite lovely’ – soars above, holding a crown over the Duke.

Beneath him stand the Virgin and St

The prince’s white marble face (right); St Elizabeth in red robe (foreground).

Below: Alfred Gilbert’s plan

George, who is cast in aluminium, again with ivory face and hands. Gilbert wrote that it took four years of ‘steady work’ to complete this figure. Each of the 20 pieces of armour was made separately and would be wearable if cast to human scale.

Gilbert worked night and day on this important royal commission, commemorating the man who, had he lived, would have been King of England.

Here was an unparalleled chance for the sculptor to become the greatest of his day and he took it with obsessive zeal, working for many years, doom-riddenin-terms-of-financial-reward – until he collapsed from a nervous breakdown.

It wore him out. Gilbert was declared a bankrupt in 1901 and retired, a broken man, to Bruges. Only in 1927 was the last figure put into place.

The Albert Memorial Chapel was restored for Queen Victoria in 1869, set a-shimmering by George Gilbert Scott, with marble and mosaics by Henri de Triqueti. Alfred Gilbert beautifully beat this flamboyance at its own game.

The Oldie November 2020 85

Taking a Walk

Superpowered dog? Normal for Norfolk

GARY WING

patrick barkham

When we think of natural walkers, we picture long-legged people, with lolloping gaits – taciturn toilers who gobble up the miles, effortlessly, with every stride.

My new walking companion is definitely the strong and silent type, but she speeds through the most epic of expeditions on legs no more than four inches long.

Betty the miniature dachshund has added not one but dozens of new dimensions to our walks since we became one of those families who paid enormously over the odds for a lockdown puppy.

Despite her unexpected aptitude for a long trek, I have never before known a dog not to greet the picking-up of collar and lead with anything other than unrestrained joy. Betty rolls her soulful eyes and slinks into a corner. For the first quarter of a mile, this small, brown sausage is on stroll-strike, tucked under my arm.

Eventually, she agrees to join in.

This scenic North Norfolk round began with a peaceful lane up to Wiveton Downs, one of several striking eskers – narrow ridges of sand and gravel – deposited on this southern boundary of the last glaciation. There followed a peaceful track and footpath through high, dry farmland, where Betty

happily trotted off the lead, legs blurred in movement like the wings of a bumblebee.

The dogs of my childhood, wild German pointers and an untrainable Jack Russell, were rarely trusted off the lead, but Betty is the most loyal of pack animals, sticking close to our legs and never haring over fields in pursuit of prey.

There were fine views along the coast as the path descended Blakeney Downs and joined the busy coast path alongside Morston salt marsh. Betty was now on the lead and ready to meet her public.

One dimension that this four-legged celebrity has added to my walks is conversation. Norfolk people (I can say this because I am one) aren’t the most gregarious. My cheery ‘Hello’s are often greeted with a suspicious grunt, but speechless Betty elicits a far better response – usually ‘Ohmygodshe’ssocute.’

Like any well-trained VIP, Betty receives all attention with a gracious affability while maintaining an imperceptible distance. Every fan gets a minute, but no more. She’s a child star, after all, having calmly endured since birth being grappled by her breeder’s kids and then our small children.

Her adoring public are tolerated, but she prefers the company of her own kind:

big hounds, small pooches, bullish terriers, salivating attack-dogs and primped-up toy pups – Betty greets them all with wide-eyed interest and a companionable sniff of the bum.

We followed the coast path north across the marshes on the sea bank that protects Blakeney Freshes. This is emphatically not a dog-off-the-lead stretch, with diverse populations of wading birds perusing muddy creeks, terns over the sea and overwintering geese on the grasslands. Best not to bring a dog here at all during the April-July nesting season.

Readers with long memories might recall a column in which I ranted about the dominance of dogs on walks. I still think there should be dog-free paths and if I was GB dictator, I’d pass a one-dog-per-household decree. But dogs add greatly to the sum of human happiness, too – the perfect pack animal for pack people.

Another dimension that Betty has added to my walks is helping me see places anew. Her picture of the world is painted by her questing nose, sniffing the air, tasting for notes of interest, friendship, food and danger. I’m in awe of her doggy superpowers and her willingness to see the very best in every person and drooling dog we pass.

Her legs were still whizzing away when we returned to Wiveton and its lovely pub.

Park in Wiveton villlage car park across the green from the Wiveton Bell, grid ref TG043428. Follow lane up to Wiveton Downs; turn right along the downs to pick up the public footpath that wiggles across fields to Blakeney Downs, crossing the road to join the Norfolk coast path.

Turn right (east) through Blakeney, around the Freshes, returning inland towards Cley Windmill. Turn west along the coast road. The first left returns you to Wiveton. Shorter versions of this eight-mile walk are available!

OS Map 251 Norfolk Coast Central The Oldie November 2020 87

Genius crossword 393 el sereno Four clues have no definition, but have something in common. One other clue has four extra words in, which will reveal the key to this.

Across 1 Laces drinks after time in still (11) 9 Registers discussion of character before summons (4-5) 10 See 18d 11 Fix a date to entertain quiet writer (6) 12 Pretend to be mummy with endless tea for companion (8) 13 Stuck outside with pot, one might fix food (6) 15/14 Flipping stud - and no experience! (8,8) 18 Snake-like big cheese with the Queen dines without protection (8) 19 Tackle figure producing an element of litter (6) 21 Northern capital with church by university is pretty good (2,6) 23 One’s learned to park a vehicle in street (6) 26 Month’s interest that’s payable on one pound?

(5) 27 Dancer’s song mostly about Ireland (9) 28/25 Steak (rare) (11,4) Down 1 Popular Greek island

rumoured to make progress (7) 2 Growth - large one in sheep (5) 3 Might one tell of cut on rear going bad? (9) 4 Caribbean line on the west of Trinidad (4) 5 One can’t fly snuggling up comfortably (8) 6 Impertinent fool venturing into unoccupied study (5) 7 Eccentric copper may be so when not doing rounds? (7) 8 Shoot a scene initially in favourite capital (8) 14 See 15 16 Girl from My Fair Lady gambled on hotel (9) 17 Place that may offer a sandwich course? (5,3) 18/10 French wine label stuck on English pack (7,5) 20 The frequency of lice that’s found in fertiliser?

(7) 22 Old dealer finally cut deck using some custom sharpeners (5) 24 All the best gold rings perish (5) 25 See 28

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 11th November 2020. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 393 Across 1 Court panel (4) 3 Lose liquid (4) 6 Atmosphere (3) 9 Understanding (13) 10 Way in (8) 12 Engrave (4) 13 Unhappy (3) 15 Stings (6) 18 Jewelled headdresses (6) 20 Boar (3) 22 Haywire (4) 23 Banana-like fruit (8) 26 Railway intersection (5,8) 27 Marry (3) 28 Neat (4) 29 Scream (4) Down 1 Short coats (7)

Genius 391 solution 2 Send (payment) (5) 4 Study of morals (6) 5 Monarch (4) 6 Airman (7) 7 US cattle farm (5) 8 Extent (7) 11 Consume (3) 14 Thickness, faintness (7) 16 Came (7) 17 Small concession (3) 19 Seen lag (anag) (7) 21 Stared angrily (6) 22 Permit (5) 24 Nimble (5) 25 Apartment (4)

The 7 seas are China, Java, Sargasso, Dead, Tasman, Baltic and Yellow.

Winner: Stuart Bailey, Ponthir, Newport, Wales Runners-up: Barbara Jackson, Saint-Usuge, France; Ray Foxell, Lapford, Devon

Moron 391 solution Across: 1 Cede, 4 Hubble (See double), 7 Ado, 9 Star, 10 Autocrat, 11 Mar, 12 Orca, 13 Dreadful, 16 Lackadaisical, 19 Enormity, 23 Tutu, 24 Ire, 25 Initiate, 26 Garb, 27 Lie, 28 Shrewd, 29 Rude. Down: 2 Entertaining, 3 Earmark, 4 Hoard, 5 Bathe, 6 Lucid, 8 Manufactured, 14 React, 15 Ass, 17 Arm, 18 Integer, 20 Retch, 21 Image, 22 Yield.

The Oldie November 2020 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO I remember well the flight to Miami in 1986 for the World Bridge Championships. Not only did it launch my international career; it also launched the career of several others, including many-times world champion German Sabine Auken. I even recall playing bridge with her and a couple of other nervous young folk on that plane journey.

Auken would be many people’s vote as the best-ever woman player, and her enthusiasm for bridge has remained undimmed for the intervening 34 years.

Indeed, her one book is entitled simply I Love This Game.

This month’s deal features Auken in a typical virtuoso performance, matching bold bidding with excellent card-reading.

Dealer West North-South Vulnerable North ♠ Q 10 8 3 2 ♥84 ♦ A J 10 3 2 ♣J West ♠ K974 ♥5 ♦7654 ♣K 8 5 3

East ♠5 ♥KQJ9632 ♦KQ9 ♣6 4 South ♠ AJ6 ♥ A 10 7 ♦8 ♣A Q 10 9 7 2

The Bidding South West North East

pass pass 4 ♥ 5♣(1) pass pass pass (1) You can’t easily steal from Auken.

West led ♥5 and Auken won East’s ♥J with ♥A. At trick two, she led ♣A and followed with ♣ 9, winning the trick, then ♣ Q, West winning ♣ K (dummy discarding ♥8 and ♦2). West switched accurately to ♦6, but Auken rose with ♦A, trumped ♦3 (noting East follow with ♦Q) and, leaving West’s last trump outstanding because she could not spare a further discard from dummy at this stage, led ♠ J. West correctly refused to win ♠ J with his ♠ K, but declarer overtook ♠ J with dummy’s ♠ Q, trumped ♦10 bringing down ♦K, then drew West’s last trump (now able to afford to discard ♠ 2 from dummy). She next led ♠ A, then followed with ♠ 6. West won ♠ K but had to give dummy the last two tricks with ♠ 10 and ♦J. Eleven tricks and game made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 259, you were invited to write a poem called Cooking for One. Philip Booth’s solitary cook wondered whether to stay at home and cook for widower Dad, while Peter Davies’s married narrator dreamt of pleasing himself. Richard Spenser’s favourite things repelled: ‘Licking my lips at my Spam-based frittata / Turning a Twirl into “chocolate moussaka”.’

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to G M Southgate.

First thing: turn your computer off, you’ve worked since six am, You’re absolutely starving and you’re on your own, pro tem.

So dig a fat white onion out, and dice it very fine, Add two crushed cloves of garlic and a glass of good red wine, Then put in oregano, thyme, and sugar (just a tad), A tin of chopped tomatoes, and the best mince to be had.

If you like, throw in some pepper, broken mushrooms, what you will, Some fennel, even, but leave out the stronger herbs, like dill.

Cook all of this down slowly on an even, gentle heat, And you’ll end up with a pasta sauce that’s pretty hard to beat.

At this point, pour yourself another glass of something red, Boil up spaghetti in a pan, or penne shapes instead, Add just a little oil so that the pasta moves about, Then drain, supply a shallow bowl, and spoon the supper out.

Italian food is just the thing to cook if you’re on furlough; A dish for one, and perfect with another glass of Merlot.

G M Southgate ____________________________ Over the final years, he served her food With salted tenderness, knowing one day Her illness would prevail, yet it was good Simply to share. Meal-making was his way Of giving life. He watched her fingers reach For the spoon she liked to use, but in the end His hands were hers and through his gentle touch She fought to stay a lover and a friend.

Cooking for her made living purposeful;

On careful plates he brought her breaths of life.

She sighed and coughed, but life was bearable When fate allowed this service to his wife.

Two weeks ago such dinner times were done.

God only knows how well he cooks for one.

Frank McDonald It isn’t fun to cook for one, No warm anticipation Of what will greet the food we eat, No joy in conversation.

Nor is it fun to sit with none When cooking time has ceased; No friendly chat, no ‘How was that?’, No friends around a feast.

Our TV cooks write clever books That give a solo meal Some golden name as if to claim It has its own appeal.

But where’s the fun in having none To share delicious roast?

Instead, for me, I’ll brew some tea With humble beans on toast.

Max Ross ____________________________ I’m telling you, Officer, just what I saw.

They stood in the lounge and she laid down the law.

She shouted; he cowered – the usual war.

She’s proud of her cooking; her kitchen’s her life.

He shops and he cleans. He’s a slave to that wife.

A meek little chap; she’s a tongue like a knife.

I’ve followed her recipes, tried out her cakes, Admired her skill and the care that she takes.

He’s banned from the kitchen – the fuss that she makes!

No, please, this is serious – I don’t ring for fun.

I’m telling you, Officer, murder’s been done.

I’m perfectly certain – HE’S COOKING FOR ONE! Shan Middleton COMPETITION No 261 I have, I admit, been bad-tempered on some days this year.

A poem called Snapping (in any sense), please. Maximum 16 lines. This month we cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 261’, by 12th November.

The Oldie November 2020 91

UK Travel

Welsh Border

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Retirement Accommodation Overseas Travel

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Wanted

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OLD POSTCARDS WANTED

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Health

Gifts

Genealogy

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The Oldie November 2020 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Let’s talk about sex frankly

Q

Please don’t print my name because my problem is too embarrassing. When I was young, I used to suffer from premature ejaculation. Slowly, and with the help of my loving wife, I got over this and we had a very good sex life. Now, at 73, I have a wonderful new female friend – but I have the opposite problem: I just can’t ejaculate. I’m too embarrassed to go to my doctor because I’m sure he’ll say I shouldn’t be having sex at my age. Can you think of anything that might help?

Name and address supplied Of course your doctor won’t say anything of the kind. It’s quite normal for people of your age to be having sex (or not to be having sex!).

And it’ll be even easier to talk if you’re having a consultation on Zoom and not face to face. This problem is very common with older men. It could of course be a physical problem caused by too much alcohol, diabetes (usually type 1) or surgery to the bladder. And if you’ve had prostate treatment, you might suffer something called retrograde ejaculation, but that shouldn’t bother you unless you want children. But if you’ve checked with your doctor and it’s nothing physical – for instance, if you can masturbate quite successfully – then it’s probably psychological and it could get help to see a sex therapist. Might loyalty to your first wife be, at a subconscious level, holding you back? It’s worth considering – and a therapist will be able to help you hugely.

A

Q

My ex was a bully

I have three children by a previous marriage and I know they had a difficult time as they were too young to understand that their

father was a bully; they thought it was my fault he left. I’m now happily married again and, while my daughters get on well with me now, the youngest son, now 30, seems still to be furious with me. It seems whatever I do for him – give him money, take his family on holiday or look after the children – it’s never enough. What can I do?

Edwina S, by email You’ve just got to accept that, for the moment, nothing is good enough for your son. If you can accept it and not feel hurt, your son will find his anger loses its power. He’ll be left with no one to take it out on and have to sit with it himself. I imagine you’ve tried to apologise for any shortcomings. And hope you’ve suggested some kind of family counselling. But beyond that, you can’t do anything. He’s happy to come on holiday with you. You can see his children.

And he feels close enough to you to air his grievances. He’s connected to you still. If he really couldn’t stand you, then why would you still be seeing him and his family? He can stand you. It’s just that he feels better telling you that he can’t.

You’re involved in an unspoken dance – you longing and craving, he pushing you away. Dispel the longing and you won’t get the unpleasantness. Try it.

A

Q

Thumb sticks rule

Can I contribute a new walkingstick idea? I agree it’s good not to get dependent on ordinary walking sticks, as they tend to make the user bend forward, which isn’t good for the spine. But I have found that using a thumb stick is excellent. Not only does it offer support; its height encourages you to walk upright and push your shoulders back so you can breathe deeply – and it’s

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also a very good weapon against any marauders who might come visiting.

Patricia J, Huntingdon Very good idea! It has the added benefit of making you look not like a frail old duck but, rather, like a daunting prophet from the Old Testament, ready to breathe fire and brimstone over all comers.

A

Should we go Down Under?

Q

My grandson – whom we adore – is working in Australia before, we hope, going to university here next year. My husband and I have always longed to visit Australia and have suggested we visit him next summer – when presumably all this virus stuff will be over. But we’re very hurt because he doesn’t seem keen. We’d be staying only a week near him – and the rest of the time we’d be travelling about. Should we just go anyway?

Name and address supplied Go if you must, but keep the timing of your visit open. Don’t suggest meeting until you’re actually there. Then it won’t be such a big thing. A week would be too long anyway; one night is the maximum. Make it casual. Otherwise he’s got the whole onus of your visiting Australia – a big deal for grandparents, however full of beans you feel – on his shoulders. How can he know what he’s going to be doing next summer?

He might be planning to travel around before coming home. Don’t pin him down.

If you want to go, go. But don’t make seeing your grandson your main motive.

A

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Christmas

Gift Guide 2020

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December birthdays are half the fun – John Banville Win a Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper Festive feast: champagne & caviar Jilly Cooper’s favourite greyhounds Gifts Books Music Quiz UK Escapes Winter 2020 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Christmas Gift Guide 2020 Welcome to our Christmas Gift Guide! There are some brilliant gift ideas in these pages, but don’t forget that a subscription to The Oldie is the best present of all (see below).

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Presents by post EMILY BEARN’s ingenious gift ideas, at the click of a button Quintessential quince

A fruit tree is the gift that goes on giving, and the recent vogue for homemade chutney has placed the quince tree at the top of every gardener’s wish list. The Rea’s Mammoth variety is known for the size of its fruits, and is beloved by landscape gardeners for its beautiful, rose-pink blossom.

5ft trees from £95.

Victorian treasures

One is never too old for clockwork toys. Last year we recommended competing Granny and Grandpa figures and this season it’s these cheeky Wind-up Racing Penny Farthings who are top of the bill.

Watch as they wobble across the Christmas lunch table. A must for kids and clockwork enthusiasts, alike. £5.99.

www.paramountplants.co.uk

www.toyday.co.uk

Life stories

For those who have struggled in vain to write a memoir, Book of My Life might prove the answer to a prayer.

The company offers a bespoke memoir-writing service, based on a series of at-home interviews with a professional author.

Prices start at £1,900 for a concise 80-page biography, based on up to five hours of interviews, rising to £9,750 for a full-length biography running to 250 pages. www.bookofmylife.co.uk

Fancier chicken

Forget tortoises and peacocks: the empty egg aisles at the start of lockdown swiftly turned the humble chicken into the nation’s most sought-after garden pet. Many breeders still have long waiting lists, but Bristol firm Pipinchick Poultry offers pre-ordering for Spring 2021 and will deliver nationwide. www.pipinchicksilkies.com

4 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

A smaller splash

The above-ground swimming pool was this year’s ultimate staycation toy, but most suppliers had sold out by mid-May. With pools slowly coming back in stock again, now is the ideal time to buy one before the spring rush.

This would make the dream present for a grandchild – or for a sporting grandparent who wants to avoid the municipal pool. All sizes, including an 8ft Intex model at £87.99. www.splashandrelax.co.uk

Keep cool

The ice-cream maker was once voted the gift most likely to lie unused at the back of a cupboard – but the recent run of hot summers has made it king of the kitchen worktop. For best results, opt for a model with a built-in freezer, such as the Magimix Gelato Expert, which will keep ice cream at serving temperature for up to two hours. £429.99 www.nisbets.co.uk

Smile, please

We all have a glut of photographs on our phone – but quality beats quantity, and a professional family photo shoot will always provide something to treasure. The Oxfordand London-based photographer Douglas Fry is known for his joyfully informal portraits, which have gained him a reputation as the Mario Testino of the south-east. Shoots start at £450 (extra for shoots outside the capital), with a 20% reduction for Oldie readers. www.douglasfry.com/family-photographer-london

Temperature control

Knee-saver

Aching joints are the bane of many a mature gardener – so hooray for this cunning sit-on cart, which will trundle your tools round the garden while providing an adjustable seat from which to prune in comfort. It’s sure to be blessed by anyone with stiff knees – and the jazzy red frame bestows a deceptively youthful air. £61.99. www.aosom.co.uk

Cheers!

The lights are dimmed, the Burgundy’s on ice – but the romantic mood is all too easily dampened when your ageing hands can’t operate the corkscrew. All such anxieties will be a thing of the past with the Final Touch Easy Turn Corkscrew, whose built-in spring mechanism will ease off the most stubborn wine corks with minimum exertion. £100 (reduced to £60 as we went to press). www.homeloft.uk

We’re now more interested in body temperature than in the weather – which is why a state-of-the-art thermometer is likely to be one of this year’s most keenly appreciated gifts. This snazzy contact-less model can take instant readings from a distance of 5cm – ideal for politely vetting your Christmas guests. Non Contact Forehead Thermometer, £39.50. www.clinicallabproducts.co.uk The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020 5

Pasta bellissima

Pasta was in such short supply during lockdown that desperate shoppers resorted to buying erotic penne from Ann Summers – which in some areas was the only variety to be found. It is small wonder that a pasta maker has become this year’s must-have kitchen accessory. For authentic Italian design, try the Marcato Atlas 150 Wellness model in nostalgic copper, which can make everything from ravioli to reginette. £113. www.johnlewis.com

Camp chairs

There comes a time in life when sitting on a rug is not as easy as it used to be – and these reclining, portable camping chairs will make family picnics an infinitely more civilized affair. Equipped with armrests, a cup holder and a detachable side table, each chair fits into a compact over-the-shoulder bag.

Asteri Camping Chair. £61.99.

Virtual friend

For anyone who is prone to forgetting to take their pills, Alexa – Amazon’s loquacious virtual assistant – could prove an invaluable friend. This surprisingly easy-to-operate gadget will provide any number of daily reminders, as well as enabling users to make hands-free calls, turn on lights and adjust thermostats. It will even challenge you to a pub quiz. Echo Dot, £49.99.

www.amazon.co.uk

www.amazon.co.uk

Shopping seat

Step aside Ena Sharples – shopping trolleys are now youthful fashion accessories, with a version by Louis Vuitton on sale for £14,100. The mature shopper will look just as good wheeling the latest Shop ‘N’ Sit model by Drive, a trolley with a handle that hinges down to make a comfortable seat – ideal when stuck in a queue.

Shop ‘N’ Sit Shopping Trolley (pronounce with care), £106.80. www.activemobility. co.uk

Shaken not stirred

In recent years, the drinks trolley has teetered on the brink of extinction – but when Britain’s pubs closed last spring, it acquired a new burst of life. This dinosaur of the drawing room deserves only the most retro adornments – such as one of these glorious, pineappleshaped, silver cocktail shakers, replete with golden leaves.

Pineapple cocktail shaker, £25. www.johnlewis.com

6 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

Readers, rejoice!

Book ideas for all the family, by LUCY LETHBRIDGE The working lives of the past look very different to us in the age of Zoom and online shopping. What a good time to revisit the utterly brilliant oral historian Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, first published in 1974. Terkel talked to a wide range of workers, including miners, piano tuners, waitresses, grave diggers and that threatened species – office workers. The Folio Society has produced a deliciously beautiful new edition for £59.95.

Talking of the workplaces of long ago, what about a novel set in a 1930s department store, once a hive of human industry? Handheld Press’s attractive reprint of Business as Usual (£12.99) by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford was the surprise hit of this strange summer. A particular pleasure of ordering from Handheld is that every book comes beautifully wrapped. Lovely.

The Second World War is still a reading winner, of abiding fascination – especially so perhaps in the Home-Front atmosphere of lockdown. For anyone with a yen for adventure among the make-do-andmend set, Lissa Evans’s well-received new novel V for Victory (Doubleday, £14.99) is set in wartime Hampstead, in a lodging house where the

8 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

landlady is not all she seems. Good news too that Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War (edited by Anne Boston, £9.99), first published in 1988, has been reissued

by Virago. Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe (Bantam Press, £25), James Holland’s readable new account of the largest seaborne landing in history, is a highlight of the autumn.

It’s been a year of shenanigans in the Royal Family – and whispers of ‘vipers’ in the royal household.

Wendy Holden’s acclaimed novel The

From top: Cliff Richard; Studs Terkel; Princesses Elisabeth and Margaret with ‘Crawfie’; Counting Creatures

Governess (£12.99, Welbeck Publishing) revisits the story of the first great modern betrayal – by Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, the governess of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She wrote the story of her royal life and was cast forever into exile for it.

Gruffalo fans, rejoice! Julia Donaldson’s Counting Creatures (Two Hoots, £11.99) has been illustrated beautifully by Sharon King-Chai and is a fun compendium of peepholes and pull-outs for very young children.

Richard Osman’s number one bestselling novel The Thursday Murder Club (Viking, £14.99) is set in a retirement village where the resident sleuths form a club to solve gruesome crimes. And everyone knows this is a field in which age and experience come out on top.

There’s more inventive artwork on a numerical theme in historian and biographer Alexandra Harris’s fascinating look at the history of calendars and how we present the nature of time, by the alwaysinteresting publishers, Little Toller.

Time and Place: A Pocket Book on the Art of Calendars is £12.

Talking of calendars, Mary Berry once revealed to Graham Norton in a memorable interview that, every year, she bought a Cliff Richard one to hang in her kitchen. So doubtless

she’ll be one of the many enthusiasts who’ll be rushing to buy Cliff’s new autobiography The Dreamer (Ebury Press, £20), which is published at the end of October.

And for those in a mood for the 1960s, there are some evocative photographs of London fifty years ago in Lisa Tichner’s sumptuous new book from Yale University Press – London’s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s (£35). Or what about Blake Gopnik’s compendious biography of curiouser and curiouser Andy Warhol – Warhol: A Life as Art (Allen Lane, £35) which was hailed by none other than Elton John as revealing ‘the man and the genius under the silver wig’?

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path (Michael Joseph, £9.99), an account of how she and her husband set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path in the face of terminal illness, homelessness and bankruptcy, was a huge bestseller. Her second book The Wild Silence (Michael Joseph, £14.99) finds the couple back in Cornwall where they embark on a rewilding project. It has ‘luminous conviction’, said the Observer.

Rose Macaulay was another who wrote her way out of some personal tragedies. Handheld have reprinted her bracingly unsentimental collection, Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (£12.99), and Macaulay fans will also enjoy her biographer Sarah LeFanu’s journal of her research into her subject: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal (Handheld, £13.99).

Teacher Kate Clanchy has won this year’s Orwell Prize for her extraordinary work helping children

make remarkable poetry. She follows her acclaimed book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, £6.99), with a guide to writing poetry for everyone. How to Grow Your Own Poem (Picador, £14.99). Anyone can do it.

Dara McAnulty wrote Diary of a Young Naturalist (Little Toller, £16) when he was a 15-yearold schoolboy in Northern Ireland.

It is a moving and vivid account of his obsession with nature. He writes, ‘This diary chronicles the turning of my world from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head.’ It deservedly won the Wainwright Prize.

Everyone’s talking about mushrooms. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and

From top: naturalist Dara McAnulty; Andy Warhol; baby gem lettuce with burnt aubergine from Falastin; Great Dixter’s kitchen garden seedlings

Shape Our Futures (Bodley Head, £20) is a dazzling scientific account but also an adventure into the deep unknown. Robert Macfarlane was blown away – ‘dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing’.

I love memoirs about the solace of reading and the latest in a fairly well-stocked genre, Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books

by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador, £12.99), looks like a cracker. ‘Reading has saved my life, again and again, and has held my hand through every difficult time’, writes Rentzenbrink, a former bookseller and author of The Last Act of Love (Picador, £3.99), a moving book on the death of her brother.

As for cookbooks, this year’s biggest surprise hit was Falastin (Ebury Press, £28), a book of Palestinian food by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. Lots of delicious-looking mezze in here – with some surprising takes on Middle-Eastern classics like hummus. And who wouldn’t want to try a sesame crumble?

Recommended.

Now that lockdown has unleashed so many urban gardeners, Grow Fruit & Vegetables in Pots (Phaidon, £24.95) is a valuable addition to the kitchen bookshelf. It’s from the kitchen-garden stable of Aaron Bertelsen of Great Dixter and is gloriously, enticingly illustrated.

Guaranteed to inspire.

Quoted prices are subject to change.

The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020 11

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Audio Books Headphone highlights chosen by Lucy Lethbridge CDs are fast going the way of cassettes – into oblivion. A talkingbook aficionado could ask for no better present therefore than a subscription to Audible and a techie young relative to help fix them up.

It starts at £7.99 per month and you can get a trial month free. Not much to lose, considering how expensive hard-format audiobooks are (and libraries, too, are increasingly encouraging us to download talking books rather than take them home).

You can take a few risks. I was intrigued by the new Penguin Classics edition of two unknown (by me) novels: Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft, and Matilda by her daughter, Mary Shelley, narrated by Kristin Atherton. 12 hours 4 mins of listening on Audible (if I stay the course) would have set me back £22.74 if I’d forked out for the CD box.

There are hundreds of thousands of titles in the Audible list, with every mainstream book accompanied by a talking version.

Top of the newly-released charts at the time of writing is From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast (6hrs 44 mins) which will be a hoot for Steve Coogan fans. I like the idea too of William Gaminara narrating Trevor Barnes’s book Dead

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Top: Mary Wollstonecraft; Above right: Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where Mao declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949; above, Alan Partridge

Doubles, about the Portland spy ring (10 hours, 53 mins).

Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers’s charming new novel set in the 1950s, is read by Karen Cass (9 hours 58 mins). The equally charming Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce is read by Juliet Stevenson (12 hours, 4 mins). Stevenson is the undoubted queen of audio narration, lending her dulcet tones to novels by Austen, Eliot and the Brontës among others.

Michael Wood is a magisterial historian. His reading of his book The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and its People lasts a meaty 23 hours 7 mins. But not as

meaty as Jonathan Keeble reading William Feaver’s two-volume biography, The Lives of Lucian Freud (44 hours, 38 mins) or Ben Miles reading the last in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (38 hours, 11 mins). Miles is just as dark and gravelly as Simon Slater, who read the first volumes.

Both make an interesting contrast to Mark Rylance’s Cromwell in the television adaptation, with his sinister, quiet reasonableness.

Do try Laura Cumming, narrating her wonderful memoir On Chapel Sands (7 hours 41). A real treat is Gabriel Quigley reading Deborah Orr’s enjoyable memoir Motherwell: A Girlhood (10 hours, 15 mins).

For children, there are books that will beautifully cover a long carjourney or two.

I recommend Katherine Rundell’s light-footed and diverting tale, Rooftoppers, read by Gordon Griffin (6 hours 7 mins).

Older ones will be gripped by the brilliant Andy Serkis (Gollum in the films) reading The Hobbit (10 hours 24 mins). And Julia Donaldson’s new book The Go-Away Bird, beautifully read by Noma Dumezweni, lasts a mere 15 minutes. Bliss.

’Tis the season to give freely In a year when many charities are struggling to survive, familiar faces seek support for their favourite causes Princess Michael of Kent

One of the charities for which I have special care as a royal patron is called Let’s Face It. It supports and links people with facial disfigurements. By offering support, not only on an emotional level but also by exploring sources of innovation for treatments, as well as resources for mental and physical recovery, this charity helps members not to fear the world but to learn to ‘face’ their disability. Since childhood, I’ve known a cousin whose face was badly burnt as a baby when a Christmas tree caught fire. With the help of a large, loving and supportive family, and countless operations, I know how stoically – and successfully – he has come to terms with his quite severe disfigurement and has led a normal life. Let’s Face It was not yet there for him but I know that, with generous friends, the charity can help others to survive such trauma. I doubt I would have such courage. www.lets-face-it.org.uk

Barry Cryer

It’s the 20th anniversary of the inpatient unit at St Luke’s Hospice, our local. At my age, I have visited friends in hospices in the final stages of their lives and I was struck by the cheerful atmosphere there, totally unlike a hospital. Both staff and patients know the situation and, as a result, there was chat and, indeed, laughter. I was so taken with this, I did a show for them to raise funds in aid of their work and have kept in touch.

Check out your local hospice and go and see them. You won’t regret it. www.stlukes-hospice.org

Lady Antonia Fraser

Give a Book is the ideal charity for someone like me, for whom the idea of a life without access to books is a nightmare. Lockdown merely confirmed that lifelong impression. It was founded by Victoria Gray in memory of her husband, the playwright Simon Gray. Give a Book has extremely low overheads – another thing in its favour – and, in effect, every fiver given is turned into a book, which is then distributed to people who need them. These notably include prisoners, for whom book rooms and reading 14 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

groups have been established, and disadvantaged children.You can either give money or check the website for ways to give books. giveabook.org.uk

Jilly Cooper

Greyhounds In Need (GIN) is a marvellous charity, which has rescued and found loving homes for thousands of abandoned and often horribly-treated greyhounds.

Their speciality, however, is saving Galgos (Spanish-bred greyhounds) who as old dogs are raced into the ground during Spain’s four-month hare-coursing season, before being chucked out to die or brutally slaughtered. Please help save these lovely dogs. www.greyhoundsinneed.co.uk

Claire Tomalin

Médecins Sans Frontières is the charity I hold most dear – for the unending, gruelling, worldchanging work they do, saving unaccompanied children from the Mediterranean and helping those trapped on Greek islands, for example. They are the best. www.msf.org.uk

Robert Peston

When I created Speakers for Schools ten years ago, it was because of a conviction that education is about more than the official curriculum and passing exams. Vital too is acquiring the confidence, knowledge and skills for life. That’s why Speakers for Schools provides inspirational talks by distinguished people for state school students and amazing work experience for disadvantaged young people – all completely free of charge for students and schools. In this COVID-19 era, with its particular challenges for the young, we need support more then ever. www.speakersforschools.org

Mary Berry

Child Bereavement UK is a charity that helps children and young people (up to the age of 25), parents and families, to rebuild their lives when a child grieves or when a child dies. The charity also provides

training for professionals, equipping them to provide the best possible care for bereaved families. When my son William died, there was little support available for bereaved families. Through my links with Child Bereavement UK, I have met families who have received and benefited from the services of this wonderful charity. www.childbereavementuk.org

Sir Trevor McDonald

I am proud to have been involved with Depaul UK for almost 20 years and have seen the incredible work they do to help disadvantaged and vulnerable young people escape or avoid homelessness. Supporting Depaul’s work is vital at this time because young people are among those hardest hit by the economic downturn and homelessness has increased sharply. www.depaulcharity.org

John Banville

Few readers of this magazine have experience of being homeless, though there but for the grace of God… The Simon Community does wonderful work – doggedly, determinedly, and without fanfares. It deserves as much support as we can afford, and perhaps a penny or two on top of that. www.simoncommunity.org.uk

Baroness (Doreen) Lawrence

I would like you to consider the Caudwell Children’s Charity, who help children with disabilities and support their parents with state-of-the-art equipment to put fun in their lives. www.caudwellchildren.com

Steven Appleby

I’m a cartoonist, author and trans person. I’ve dressed in women’s clothes in secret since my teens and, for me, trans is quite simply the struggle to be yourself when the you inside doesn’t match up to the you that’s visible to the outside world. It took me nearly 40 years to become comfortable with living as a trans woman full-time. Finally I’m happy. But I wish there’d been someone to help me navigate the

Photo credits: Jilly Cooper by Judy Zatonski ;Mary Berry by Georgia Glynn Smith; Barry Cryer and Princess Michael by Neil Spence

Clockwise from top left: Jilly Cooper, Trevor McDonald, Mary Berry, Barry Cryer, Antonia Fraser and Princess Michael of Kent

journey. Thankfully, nowadays there is. CliniQ is a friendly, extremely approachable organisation that offers advice, counselling, sexual health and transitioning. They provide, quite simply, a patient, knowledgable, listening ear. Please donate. www.cliniq.org.uk

Margaret Busby

Tomorrow’s Warriors is an innovative jazz music education and artist development organisation that especially nurtures young talent that otherwise would have no chance of entering the industry on a level playing field. And connected

with my work as a writer and publisher there’s also the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award Scholarship (soas.hubbub.net/p/ MargaretBusby), covering the costs for a woman student from Africa to do a course at SOAS. www.tomorrowswarriors.org The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020 15

Merry birthday December babies have half the fun, grumbles JOHN BANVILLE

16 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

Writer John Banville today and in Wexford, Ireland, aged nine

who got to get drunk and tell stupid jokes, sing questionable songs, overeat and spend most of the afternoon of Christmas Day sprawled in sagging armchairs with party hats askew, snoring and dribbling?

And yet. Like the first day of spring, Christmas was always a surprise, as if it had not happened before, or had happened but not in quite the same way. Cross and suspicious though we were after weeks and weeks of advertisers’ razzmatazz, we were still suckers for the glitz when it finally arrived with all bells jingling.

There is, in even the hardest human heart, an unquenchable gleam that springs into flame when fanned by the offer of simply being happy, if only for a day. We know,

John Banville’s latest novel, Snow, is out now (Faber, £14.99)

Photo: Doug Banville

I was one of those misfortunate mites whose birthday fell within spending-distance of Christmas.

So, every year, the glitter of the great day itself was a good way dulled by the fact that I had already received many one-covers-two gifts from aunts, uncles, cousins and even closer kin. The affront was worsened by the gift-givers’ mysterious conviction that I should be as pleased as they were, if not more so, by the happy, for them, nearcoincidence of the two dates – and the consequent tidiness of their being able to save themselves the trouble, and the expense, of buying me two presents in one month.

And how could I complain when on my birthday, the eighth of December – Feast of the Immaculate Conception, by the way – I was handed a gift-wrapped book or a pristine shiny toy and informed with a twinkle that ‘It’s for Christmas as well, you know.’

How smugly pleased they were with themselves. I failed to see the logic of it. When Christmas came, I had to watch others delightedly unwrapping their brand-new gifts while my book was already read and my toy as like as not broken. Not fair; not fair at all.

And there was a contaminant effect. It’s true that Santa Claus didn’t visit on my birthday and get to pull the one-for-two trick, but the presents he left on the foot of my bed, no matter how sumptuous, inevitably seemed, by a piece of illogic of my own, to be only half as good as they should be.

Childhood is a fraught passage in our lives; no wonder we grow up into grumps. And why did adults persist in telling each other, with infuriating complacency, that Christmas ‘is just for the children’, since it was they

and knew even as children, how ridiculous Christmas is, how tawdry its promises, how brittle its gaiety and how ashen its aftermath. But we don’t care, not while it lasts.

When we were young, between the ages of five and 11, the pleasure of Christmas was a form of euphoric tiredness.

Remember that dazed and halfdelirious state of wanting things to go madly on and on until we dropped from the sheer relentlessness of it all? My family were Catholic, my parents devoutly so. On Christmas Eve, we would all, even toddlers, attend Midnight Mass. This meant staying up unimaginably late, and coming home to sausages and fried bread and slices of plum cake – the latter a puzzle in not containing plums – and the ritual lighting of the candles on the Christmas tree. No health and safety regulations then.

How different the world looks and feels to a child when he is still dressed and awake and moving among adults at two o’clock in the morning. At such moments, rare as turkeys’ teeth, we glimpse the thrillingly bright, far domain of being grown-up.

Perhaps this is the most valuable gift Christmas delivers to the young, a quickening sense of the future and its limitless possibilities.

The long day wanes. The candles singe the needles of the Christmas tree and let fall gobs of grease on to the carpet before sputtering out. The toys’ first fine lustre fades and we begin already to tire of them. Adult tempers fray, old sores flare, old scores get settled and are replaced by new ones that will be totted up next year. Life, quotidian life, reasserts its drab and melancholy verities.

We fall asleep, and wake to a new day. And there’s always next Christmas, getting ready to fool us again with its fake but always consoling cheer.

Getting away from it all Dreading December? SARA WHEELER finds UK-based escapes Xmas camper

Well, aren’t we set for a distinctly uncool Yule? But all is not lost! Why not rent a camper van and drive away from it all this year? Almost all the vans at Quirky Campers (quirkycampers.co.uk; 0330 133 1121) have some kind of heating.

Just put your postcode into the website and a range of options for motorhome pick-ups pops up. Most are around £80-£90 a night at Christmas, and many accept pets.

To save money, check out Brit Stops (www.britstops.com) for places to park up that aren’t campsites but welcome campers – pubs, farms and so on. This could make for a great sprout-free break, and you’ll probably be able to book at the very last minute.

Winter waterways

Fancy a narrowboat? Bristol-based Anglo Welsh (www.anglowelsh. co.uk; Tel. 0117 304 1122) has Christmas availability from some of their bases. Centres open for winter cruising (at the time of writing) include Bunbury in Cheshire, Great Haywood in Staffs and Wootton Wawen near Stratford-upon-Avon.

All vessels have heating and you can rent for short breaks or for a week.

The website is good for interactive maps and background info but, for last-minute booking, it’s worth phoning first.

perfect for pootling around the city centre on foot and the 23rd-floor bar, the Observatory, has marvellous views – get the twinkly Christmas vibe without dire faux-festive music.

Their breakfasts are tremendous.

Scottish stargazing

I recommend the excellent Visit Scotland website (www. visitscotland.com; Tel. 0131 472 2222), which has ideas and late deals from city breaks to island sojourns.

There are some brilliant stargazing and dark-sky locations, for example.

There are films on the website – so you can bone up on what to look for in the Christmas heavens, like a Nativity shepherd. NB it’s cheaper if you book to depart before Hogmanay.

Capture the castle

Here’s a treat if you saved for a foreign break but couldn’t go because of lockdown restrictions: Thornbury Castle (www. thornburycastle.co.uk; Tel. 01454 281182), a Tudor pile in south Gloucestershire. I stayed here years ago and remember it fondly. It’s suitably baronial for socialdistancing purposes and you will feel like kings (not Herod) and queens.

Capital caper

Brilliant Belfast

I stayed in the historic Grand Central Belfast (www. hastinghotels.com; Tel. 028 9023 1066)during a literary festival before lockdown and thoroughly approved.

There are 300 rooms – so you’ll almost certainly be able to get a Christmas deal; the location is 18 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

From top: carry on camping – in winter; jolly boating weather; Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire; a Highland welcome

Why not try a Premier Inn (www. premierinn.com; 0333 003 0025)?

At the time of writing, two people can have five nights in the London Leicester Square hotel for £297, beginning 23rd December. The capital will be less frenetic than usual over the festive season and you can eat in Chinatown – on the doorstep – without fear of turkey.

Happy and Safe Travels from all at Oldie Towers!

Make ’em laugh – and cry Peter Sellers’s biographer ROGER LEWIS picks DVDs starring his favourites, from Kenneth More to Victoria Wood Mr Topaze (1961) For the first and last time, Peter Sellers directed a film in which he also starred. Made on location in France and released in 1961, it was a flop.

Critics and audiences didn’t want a muted, subtle film – they wanted Sellers the Goon to be goonish. The prejudice dogged his career, and he was compelled to be zany and farcical (Dr Strangelove’s false arm giving Nazi salutes, Clouseau falling in ponds or blowing himself up), when his actual genius was for stillness and reflectiveness, as on view in Being There, his curtain call, and also in Mr Topaze, made in the early stages of his fame. It is derived from a Marcel Pagnol play, about a schoolmaster who becomes a master criminal. The cast contains Leo McKern, Herbert Lom and Billie Whitelaw. Sellers lost faith in it, withdrew the prints, and had them shipped to Nigeria to be melted down and made into guitar picks and combs. One copy survived, from which this DVD has been created (£14.13).

The Wars of the Roses (1965) With time on my hands during lockdown, I got to grips with Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays.

What rubbish the three parts are on the page – convoluted plots, interchangeable characters, a plethora of uncles, cousins, brothers, in-laws, named for English counties (including saucy Worcester), general confusion and preposterousness.

Basically – it’s dozens of old dukes doing one another in, a great grind of battles and betrayals, ‘rancorous spite’, ‘furious raging broils’, ‘jarring discord’. Miraculously, Peter Hall and John Barton made sense of the dramas when they adapted the text for The Wars of the Roses, at Stratford in 1964, i.e. at the height of the Cold War. Everything is metallic, pewter, and hurtles towards the end of the world: ‘O, let the vile world end / And the premised flames of the last day / Knit earth and heaven together!’. The cast is magnificent: Peggy Ashcroft, David Warner, Roy Dotrice, Janet Suzman – and Ian Holm as a genuinely scary, snickering Richard III (£25.53).

20 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

erotic. It’s intensely sad, too, as this is obviously the high point in the characters’ lives, a period when everyone was laughing and full of hope for their futures. With Minnie Driver, Aneurin Barnard and Tom Harries (£2.50).

Victoria Wood Collection

(2010) I still can’t believe she’s gone, or that she suffered for so many years from cancer. In her jokes and scripts, Alan Bennett’s northern camp and John Betjeman’s quaint England of fish knives and sponge cakes came together. I like the early plays, about fat girls struggling to make something of themselves, or pretty girls (played

by Julie Walters) fending off terrible men. Then there is Acorn Antiques, which is still funny, and Dinnerladies, which gets more poignant. She could sing, play the piano, fill the Albert Hall. Without doubt the most impressive (and beloved) comic star since Eric Morecambe (£14.99).

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1972)

From top: Mr Topaze; Hunky Dory; Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing

Hunky Dory (2011)

Set in South Wales during the boiling hot summer of 1976, this film is sheer nostalgia. I was there at the time and I was the same age as these characters, who are putting on a Bowie-inspired version of The Tempest before leaving school. The golden or straw-coloured light is magical, hallucinatory – and

I came across a reference to this in Kenneth Williams’ correspondence, when he wrote Maggie Smith a fan letter about it. Made in 1972, it’s about a chance encounter on a coach trip in Spain between Smith, who plays a scatty spinster, and Timothy Bottoms, a handsome, slightly dim drifter.

An awkward romance ensues, with Smith running her gamut of dramatic tricks, flapping her wrists, falling over her long legs, being a mixture of attractiveness, snappishness and gaucherie (£2.92).

This Country (2017-2020)

I watch this repeatedly, with absorption and joy. It is about absolutely nothing happening in the English countryside, a grim place of flat empty fields, pylons and petrol stations. The camera follows Kurtan and Kerry Mucklowe as they fill their days, chucking plums at pensioners, pestering the vicar (the brilliant Paul Chahidi), failing to hold down duff jobs and pouring Fanta into the postbox. It reminds me of the twenty years I spent going off my onion in the Herefordshire Balkans (£18.99).

Joker (2019)

Clowns are always creepy, and here is the creepiest of any of them.

Joaquin Phoenix is agonised, twisted, full of mania and need – a tragic figure, unloved, neglected, bullied, disregarded. Driven to seek psychiatric help, he slips between reality and fantasy, taking lots of pills from little yellow pots. The backdrop, Gotham City, is ratinfested, garbage-strewn. We are already in hell. Phoenix is also Nijinsky, the broken puppet, especially in the way he runs about and dances with zigzag steps. It’s the kind of big performance that draws us in, and we end up sympathising with, and rooting for, a character who is a tortured soul – and a psychopath (£6.99).

I Clowns (1970)

There’s darkness here, too – but Fellini’s sort of darkness, which is bright and brash and loud. I love the way the director goes around interviewing retired circus folk, recreating their acts and routines, paying homage to the Big Top, paying homage to everyone’s skill and style.

The melancholy comes from seeing how the rough beauty and pleasure are transient. Everything is going to fade, rot away. A film of genius (£7.99).

From top: Timothée Chalamet in A Rainy Day in New York; Kenneth More in The Comedy Man; I Clowns; the Two Soups sketch by Victoria Wood, with Julie Walters

The Comedy Man (1964) Kenneth More is a provincial actor who wants to be a star – but becomes a star only of television commercials, so starts to despise himself. Plus, middle-age is closing in. It is an immensely intelligent, adult film, not unlike Look Back in Anger, with a wonderful cast, including Dennis Price, as a predatory agent, and Cecil Parker, as an out-of-work thespian, cadging drinks. What I cherish about the film are the voices – Parker’s hesitant rasp, Price’s supercilious drawl, and there is a beautiful scene where More recites from Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘My soul, be satisfied with flowers, with fruit, with weeds even …’. £5.99.

A Rainy Day in New York

(2019) We are not meant to see this, such is the general opprobrium heaped upon Woody Allen, his work suppressed and undistributed, his name blackened – all part of Mia and Ronan Farrow’s Ahab-like quest for revenge. My DVD came from Poland. It’s about, yes, New York, and rain, and young people mixing and mating, none of them, needless to say, slow to express seething, anxious emotion. Timothée Chalamet, the star, later denounced Allen publicly – but, according to Allen’s memoirs, told him privately that he did so only to improve his chances of winning industry awards.

Shame on him. £6.99.

All from Amazon – prices fluctuate The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020 21

Enjoy English Heritage

Join the club

Lockdown-defying gift memberships, by WILLIAM COOK What a rotten year it’s been for family outings. However, the good news is that almost all English Heritage’s historic sites have now reopened, and since so many are outdoors they’re ideal for social distancing. As well as famous landmarks like Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall, EH looks after hundreds of monuments, from hilltop forts to Cold War bunkers.

HOW TO ORDER: Individual membership is £63pp (£55 if 65+); £109 per couple (£84 if both are 65+). Each member can take six children for free. www.englishheritage.org.uk. Tel. 0370 333 1181.

planet and would like to do something about it, but don’t know where to start. How about adopting an animal for a friend or relative, through the World Wide Fund for Nature? The adoptee receives a fact pack, regular updates and a cuddly toy. Which animal to adopt? The WWF says tigers and jaguars are especially endangered (there are now fewer than 4,000 tigers in the wild), while jaguars are also losing their jungle habitat at a rate of three football pitches a minute.

HOW TO ORDER: Adopt an animal from just £3 per month. www.wwf. org.uk. Tel. 01483 426333.

Magazine for grandchildren

A monthly book for a year

If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for an inquisitive grandchild, can I recommend a subscription to Aquila magazine? My mother bought it for my son and daughter for several years and they loved it. It’s full of lively, informative articles about all sorts of subjects and, though it’s intended for 8-13 year-olds, older teens and adults love it, too. It’s aimed at bright pre-teens who love reading, but there’s nothing elitist about it. What a treat to find a children’s magazine that isn’t interested in dumbing down!

HOW TO ORDER: A year’s subscription costs £60, four months for £35. www.aquila.co.uk.

Tel. 01323 431313.

Adopt an animal

Berry Bros fine wine

Why not send a splash of wine to go with all that cheese? Berry Bros & Rudd, Britain’s oldest wine merchant, was founded in the 17th century – so they know their stuff. Their gift vouchers can be redeemed against wine tastings and fine dining as well as fine wines and spirits, for collection or delivery.

Their Good Ordinary Claret is a good place to start or, for something more quirky, consider a bottle of The King’s Ginger, a potent liqueur created by Berry Bros in 1903, to ‘stimulate and revive’ King Edward VII. HOW TO ORDER: Gift vouchers from £10. Good Ordinary Claret, £11.95 a bottle; The King’s Ginger, £23.50 for a half litre. www.bbr. com. Tel. 0800 280 2440.

Unlimited visits to Kew

One of Britain’s most beautiful and atmospheric bookshops, Heywood Hill, has been a London institution since Nancy Mitford worked there in the 1930s, but you don’t need to live in London to take advantage of its bespoke service. A Year in Books buys your lucky recipient a consultation with one of their specialist booksellers, and they’ll then send a personal selection throughout the year, attuned to taste but also broadening horizons.

HOW TO ORDER: 12 paperbacks for £225, or 12 hardbacks for £390 (inc. p&p).www.heywoodhill.com.

Tel. 020 7629 0647.

Feast on fromage

Most people I know are worried about our wanton destruction of the

on a strict diet, worse luck, but others would greet the gift of a monthly delivery of three, seasonal, top-quality, mixed British and European cheeses with delight.

HOW TO ORDER: A year’s supply costs £360 (inc p&p). Each monthly selection weighs at least 600g in total and comes with a pack of Fine Cheese Co crackers. Both cheese and cracker selections change monthly. www.finecheese.co.uk.

Tel. 01225 448748.

For my last birthday, my wonderful wife bought me three cheeses from the Fine Cheese Co in Bath, and I’m happy to confirm they were all utterly delicious. She’s now put me

Some of my fondest memories are of taking my children to Kew Gardens, and the good news is that it’s still open, hurrah, though visitors need to pre-book tickets online, because of COVID-distancing rules.

Membership not only includes unlimited visits to Kew but also to Wakehurst – a wild botanic garden in Sussex. There’s a printed magazine, an online newsletter, 10% discount for Kew’s on-site shops plus member events included. Note that tickets for ‘Christmas at Kew’ are running out fast.

HOW TO ORDER: Make sure you buy a GIFT membership voucher: from £81 for individuals, plus kids, couples and family options. www.kew.org. Tel. 020 8332 3200.

The Oldie Christmas gift Gift guide Guide2020 202023 23

Caviar & cream Mail order goodies and festive offers, by ELISABETH LUARD

Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper

Bless ye merry gentlefolk, with the Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper.

Festive deliciousnesses packed in a red hamper box include their own Original Chelsea Flower Gin (nineteen botanicals), No 2 Chelsea Flower Gin (bergamot, vanilla, coriander), Fever Tree Tonic, Manzanilla Olives, Mymoune Orange Blossom Water, Belvoir Elderflower Cordial, Partridges Earl Grey Tea (for that iced G & Tea sundowner), their own Rose Fudge and a jar of Wild Hibiscus in Syrup.

HOW TO ORDER: £105 (usual price £121) inc. delivery mainland UK, quoting Special Oldie offer. First ten orders get a copy of Ian Buxton’s 101 Gins to Try Before You Die. Use code OLDIE20 at check-out. www. partridges.co.uk. Tel.020 730 0651.

Caviar and vodka

Go for broke on the Eve – fast before feast, remember? – with a little pot of Exmoor caviar preserved with Cornish sea salt. It’s the real thing, prepared with the roe sacs of the female sturgeon of the Siberian breed (Acipenser baerii), brought to maturity in the cool, clear waters of the River Mole on the edge of Exmoor national park. While a kilo at £2,000 might suit a newspaperowning oligarch with a seat in the Lords, the 30g tin at £60 is just enough for supper for two, served Anglo-Russian style with floury, crisp-jacketed, baked potatoes, soured cream, chopped raw onion and a shot of frozen vodka.

HOW TO ORDER: £60 for 30g tin, free delivery in London (add p&p for overnight, chilled delivery elsewhere in UK mainland). www.exmoor caviar.com. Tel. 020 7223 3640.

Triple-layer cheesecake

More fun than the usual cheeseboard is the Courtyard Dairy’s cheese celebration cake. Made in North Yorkshire, a triple-layer tower delivers 200g of ‘Finn’ English brie, an unpasteurised cow’s milk cheese suitable for vegetarians; a kilo of Fellstone, a Dales-style hard cheese; and 100g of fresh-flavoured Hebden Goat’s cheese to perch on top. Add nuts, grapes, dried fruit and sparklers, and pop a sprig of festive holly on top.

HOW TO ORDER: £31.60 plus £5.95 p&p from www.thecourtyard dairy. co.uk. Tel. 01729 823 29. Quote Oldie Special for a £5 voucher, valid for purchases in Jan. and Feb. 2021.

Time to pig out

English charcuterie is having a moment. Ben Dully of The Salt Pig Curing Company left his day job as head chef at the award-winning Kingham Plough in the Cotswolds to build up a family business with wife Sue. The result is some of the best home-grown, salt-cured, air-dried products, including ’nduja, salami, prosciutto and chorizo (yum!). Their Large Gift Box delivers nine of the best, for a six-person antipasto.

HOW TO ORDER: £35 plus £6 p&p Quote Oldie Special for an extra goody. www.saltpigcuring.co.uk.

Tel. 01608 641105.

Roast sirloin

No question – this year, it has to be beef. Us rosbifs owe it to ourselves to prove that our friends across the Channel are right – we’re a bunch of meat-eating barbarians capable of only one sauce. Order on the bone just to underline the point, even if the carving is a tad more challenging, and marshal the full supporting cast of Yorkies, roasties, gravy and sprouts. Northfield Farm of Rutland will supply a three-kilogram, free-range, grass-fed, properly aged sirloin rib roast with enough bits and pieces on the bone for tomorrow’s cottage pie and a hefty chunk of carved-out rib to beef up the stockpot.

HOW TO ORDER: £90 for a 3kg aged sirloin rib for 5-6 people (plus £9.95 overnight delivery). Quote Oldie Special Offer and they’ll pop in free jars of horseradish cream AND strong English mustard, while stocks last. www.northfieldfarm.com.

Tel. 01664 474271.

Chocolate surprise

If it’s Christmas, there must be chocolate. Nothing ordinary. And, for that, William Curley, the nation’s classiest chocolatier, is your man. Apprenticed at Gleneagles, trained under Marco, Raymond and Pierre, William set up on his own 13 years ago, mostly supplying restaurants and those in the know. While classic, boxed selections are great presents, it’s his nostalgia collection – handmade lookalikes of childhood favourites – that are most fun as a Christmas treat.

The Oldie Special Hamper has two each of Jaffa Cakes, millionaire’s shortbread, coconut ice, caramel raisin bars and orange marzipan.

HOW TO ORDER: £50 hamper (inc. p&p). www.williamcurley. co.uk. Tel. 020 7287 4777.

The Oldie Christmas gift guide 2020 25

Champagne trail BILL KNOTT on how to make Christmas sparkle Champagne goes to all the best parties. De rigueur at birthdays and weddings, popped negligently from balconies at Lord’s, sprayed wastefully from Grand Prix podiums… nothing says ‘celebration’ more than the famous French fizz.

With its expertly-marketed cachet of glamour, celebrity, style and status, it is easy to forget that, behind that flashy façade, Champagne is also a wine. The general quality of that wine has never been better, and – thanks to this least convivial of years – there is plenty of it in the cellars of Reims and Épernay. Indeed, in the semi-feudal system that governs the region’s wine-making, the Comité Champagne has decreed that permitted grape yields this year will be capped at about 20% less than usual, in an effort to prevent overproduction and a consequent fall in prices.

For wine lovers, as opposed to racing drivers and rap stars, some of the most interesting and bestvalue bottles are made by the grape growers themselves. Look closely at any bottle of Champagne and you will find two letters, followed by a numeric code. The most common are: NM for Négociant-Manipulant (for Champagne houses that buy in most of their grapes, including all the grandes marques like Veuve Clicquot, Moët and Taittinger); CM for Coopérative de Manipulation (wines made by co-operatives: Pannier, Palmer and Nicolas Feuillatte are three of the best); and RM for Récoltant Manipulant: so-called ‘grower Champagnes’, a category that’s now flourishing.

It might be more accurate to call them ‘single-vineyard’ Champagnes.

Both Charles Simon and Gallimard Père et Fils, for example, make wines from their own vineyards in the southern Côte des Bar region, but both have NM on their labels.

Charles Simon’s Brut Suprème (Oldie price £21.50), predominantly Pinot Noir with splashes of Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay, has a lovely apple-and-pear crispness and a toasted nuttiness. Gallimard’s Cuvée de Réserve (Oldie price £22.95) is made from 100% Pinot Noir, with a 26 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

lingering, honeyed character enhanced by a high proportion of reserve wines. Both are available from Oldie favourite DBM Wines (see How to Order).

DBM also stocks a supremely elegant Veuve Fourny Blanc de Blancs (Oldie price £25.99), 100% Chardonnay. Based in the Côte des Blancs village of Vertus, the Fourny brothers’ reputation for making Champagne of real finesse has been on the rise for some years, and a visit to their cellar was a highlight of our last Oldie trip to the region.

For deeper pockets, and a really special present, splash out on a grower’s vintage Champagne: Vazart-Coquart’s Blanc de Blancs 2012 (£66), for instance, a delicately citrus-spiked Champagne from the grand cru village of Chouilly, its bone-dry palate rounded out with the honey-and-hazelnut flavours that come from long cellar ageing.

Or, from the same village, the equally harmonious Pierre Gimonnet Chouilly Grand Cru 2012 (£82), made – like all Gimonnet’s wines – from low-yielding but characterful older vines. Both are from the famous ‘Club Trésor’, embossed ‘Special Club’ and stocked

by The Finest Bubble (see How to Order), a treasure trove for fizz lovers. Their list also features excellent English sparklers from Hambledon and Nyetimber.

Grandes-marques Champagnes offer reliability and familiarity.

The best growers’ and singlevineyard Champagnes, by contrast, offer unique expressions of a particular terroir from the region’s patchwork of more than 300 wine-producing villages.

Growers have been pioneers, too, in moving Champagne in the direction many other wine regions are travelling, especially in looking after the health of their soils, something for which the region has a deplorable record. Thankfully, you are now more likely to see wild flowers (or grass, at least) growing between rows of vines, rather than the non-organic bits of glass and plastic left from the Parisian rubbish that was traditionally used as fertiliser. Organic wine-making is gaining ground, too, spurred on by the biodynamic revolution in Burgundy, their southern neighbours.

And experimentation among Champagne’s nouvelle vague is rife: judicious use of oak, for instance; the championing of lesser-known varieties like Arbane and Petit Meslier; and a reduction in the amount of sugar added to the wines.

Sustainability, diversity and transparency are the new watch words. For those of us who care more about a bottle’s contents than its prestigious label and marketing budget, that is terrific news.

HOW TO ORDER Three champagnes from DBM Wines (per bottle): 1. NV Charles Simon Brut Suprème Champagne, £21.50 2. NV Champagne Gallimard Père et Fils Cuvée de Réserve, £22.95 3. NV Champagne Veuve Fourny Blanc de Blancs, £29.99 Tel. 0117 370 9930 www.dbmwines.co.uk.

(Quote ‘The Oldie’ when ordering) Two champagnes from The Finest Bubble (per bottle): 1. Vazart-Coquart’s Blanc de Blancs Special Club 2012 £66 2. Gimonnet Chouilly Grand Cru Special Club 2012 (£78) www.thefinestbubble.com Tel. 020 7359 1608

Games & puzzles

S

Fun family pastimes by NIGEL SUMMERLEY

crabble, Monopoly and other old favourites enjoyed a popular revival in lockdown.

Apart from occasional fallings-out, they brought family and friends together in a much more sociable way than computer games or gorging on Netflix. So here’s a selection of new and less well-known games, guaranteed to liven up any Christmas party.

and sheep on top of a crocodile. But the roll of the die brings enough elements of chance and tactical choices to challenge oldies, too. www.amazon.co.uk. £23.87, 4+; 2-4 pl.

Hide and seek

thing about this game is that players work together (not quite mirroring reality as we know it); so it shouldn’t trigger too many tantrums. www. board-game.co.uk. £27.99; 8+; 2-4 players.

Animal magic

Feeling feline?

Tempting as it might be to suggest a quick game of Russian Roulette with some of your relatives, it’s probably better to stick to a less messy alternative: Exploding Kittens. Draw the wrong card and you’re as good as dead – unless you have some game-changing cards up your sleeve, thanks to the pig-a-corns or bear-odactyls. Yes, it’s all very silly, but fun. www.waterstones.com.£19.99; age 7+; 2-5 players.

Bluff justice

The essence of a good card game is that it’s simple yet addictive; so you can play it over and over.

Skull fits the bill because everything hangs on the difference between a skull card and a rose card – but it’s also wickedly dependent on the art of the bluff. www.gameslore.com £15.99; 10+; 3-6 players.

Viral attraction

The board game Pandemic hasn’t just been rushed out – it was created in 2008 – but its time has definitely arrived. You may not need it to be explained that, when the world is hit by disease, the priority is to find a cure. The great 28 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

Root, on the other hand, is hugely competitive: it may involve groups of furry woodland creatures but it’s definitely a jungle out there. In short, it’s a real war game that will require patience to learn all the rules – and a ruthless streak to help your animals gain control of the wild land. www.kidult.co.uk. £40.99; 10+; 2-4 players.

Shark attack

Old movies don’t die; they just become new board games. With Jaws, you get two bites at the action, thanks to a double-sided board. Part one is played out around stricken Amity Island, and part two around the even more stricken boat, Orca.

You can be a hunter or the great white shark itself. www.johnlewis.com. £24.99; 12+; 2-4 players.

Balancing act

Stacking games are unpredictable but it’s certain that at some point everything comes crashing down.

The coloured, wooden pieces of Animal Upon Animal are primarily designed for children, who will find it fun to balance penguins, snakes, monkeys

Jigsaws? You probably love ’em or hate ’em. But the Where’s Wally?

1,000-piece jigsaws offer fiendishly difficult puzzles, plus the even more fiendishly difficult challenge of trying to answer that eternal (and infernal) question. www.alljigsawpuzzles. co.uk. 19in x 27in, £14.99; 4+.

Any questions?

For some revelatory light relief, try The Game of Things, a card game that requires everyone to give written replies to questions such as, ‘What should you never do when naked?’, and then identify who gave which answer.

Shocks and surprises are more or less guaranteed. www.squizzas.co.uk. £19.99; 5+; 3-8 players.

Short cut to Fleet Street

And finally… my personal all-time favourite is Scoop, a much underrated Waddingtons game that was always more fun than Monopoly or Risk! (which both tend to lead to quarrels or sulks). It recreates the thrills, challenges and back-stabbings of Fleet Street, with not only front-page layouts to fill, photographers and reporters to organise, and lots of money to spend, but also an amazing telephone that puts you through to the editor for his verdict on your stories. Out of print but still available at specialist sites; pricey but priceless. www.vintage-playtime. com. £69.95; 10+; 2-6 players.

Retail prices may fluctuate.

A blizzard – of feathers RAYNOR WINN remembers raising Christmas turkeys as a child

Photo of Raynor now: Big Issue North

Three days until Christmas and I’m knee deep in whiteness.

But I’m inside, not out.

Although my feet are ice cold, the air’s warm with a raw, clinging, sweet smell. The radio, suspended from the rough-hewn oak beam by a piece of baler twine, is playing Christmas songs on an endless loop and Bing Crosby is still dreaming.

So am I but, when I pull aside the hessian sacking from the window, I can only see greenness outside. There’s no hope of a white Christmas.

The only whiteness I will see is inside, knee-deep in feathers in the turkeyplucking shed.

The turkeys. As much a part of my childhood Christmas as Santa or the hope of snow, but the preparation for their arrival began months before.

I grew up on a mixed farm of sheep, beef, potatoes and fields of barley, wheat and oats. The corn was held in huge granaries on the upper floors of the old Georgian brick barns.

After the harvest, they overflowed with barley to be crushed and fed to the pigs, and oats to be rolled for the cattle over winter.

But one granary was always left empty. At the end of the summer holidays, a day was spent cleaning the dust and cobwebs from the crumbly brick walls, huge oak beams and slatted shutters that covered the windows. Then sawdust was scattered across the wooden floorboards in time for the arrival of the two-day-old turkey chicks. Tiny, chirping balls of yellow fluff that gathered under the warmth of heat lamps and pecked crumbs from my hands.

Four months later, the granary is full of huge birds with red combs and powerful beaks. They’ve grown big and feathered in their vast, airy space, where they run up and down, stretching their wings in the bright light from the windows that are only shuttered at night to keep out the cold.

I’m not allowed in there any more: the turkeys can knock me off my eight-year-old feet. One, much bigger than all the others, rushes

Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path; top, with her grandfather in 1963 on the family farm in Staffordshire

to the door every time it’s opened, with a cackle of ruffled feathers and fury. He’s for Mr Whitmore, who wants the biggest bird we have.

My job is the last in the processing line. I take the birds in their labelled plastic bags to the cold store, four at a time in the wheelbarrow. Parking the wheelbarrow outside the kitchen door, I run in and take my gloves off to feel the heat pulsing from the Aga. I then ferry the birds to the cold store. Beyond the kitchen, the rooms and corridors of the old house have no heat. They are the same

temperature as the barns outside and the coldest spot is on the stairs.

They’re already filling up, two turkeys to a tread, one either side of the stair runner.

I read the labels with their names and weights: Mrs Green – 14lbs 6oz; Mr Copley – 18lbs 9oz. By the end of the day, the stairs will be full and the tarpaulin on the living-room floor will be covered too.

Tomorrow people will be queueing outside the door to collect them.

Then finally it will be Christmas Eve and there’ll be a Christmas tree on the carpet, instead of turkeys, and Mum will be making mince pies.

Back outside with the empty wheelbarrow, I look up at the sky; heavy matt-grey clouds are starting to gather and it’s getting a little warmer.

Maybe, just maybe, it will snow.

Christmas Eve morning and there’s an argument on the doorstep.

Someone's saying their turkey’s too big for his oven. Mum takes ours from the pantry and hands it over.

It’s the only one left – does this mean we won’t have one? It doesn’t matter. I push past the squabbling adults, drag my sledge from the shed and run to the fields through ankle-deep snow that’s still falling.

From the top of the hill, I push off and the sledge races downhill, hitting the ridge, where it takes off for brief, brilliant seconds of flight, and Christmas is perfect.

Not so perfect the next day, when I’m sitting at the Christmas table and Mum says we’ll be having sausages.

Until Dad comes through the door with a huge roast turkey on a plate.

It’s Mr Whitmore's bird – well, half of it at least.

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn is published by Michael Joseph, £14.99 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020 31

Music matters RICHARD OSBORNE’s classical CD selection Few composers have added more to the gaiety of nations, while recognising the thinness of the ice on which civilisation skates, than that precociously gifted child of war and revolution, Gioachino Rossini.

Who can forget those madcap ensembles in The Italian Girl in Algiers and The Barber of Seville?

Nonplussed by events, the characters find themselves frozen to the spot before dashing lemming-like over the

Above, Gioachino Rossini; right, Henry Purcell; below, Claude Debussy

cliff as the music accelerates away?

Classic productions of both operas have recently appeared on DVD. The Italian Girl in Algiers (Unitel DVD 801808 £27.99, www.amazon. co.uk) derives from the 2018 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, with that consummate Rossinian Cecilia Bartoli. Her longstanding stage collaborators, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, are famed for their ability to turn stereotypical opera buffa plots into gilt-edged comedy, and this is no exception.

Even more remarkable is Laurent Pelly’s finely-honed neo-classical staging of The Barber of Seville (Naxos DVD 2110592 £23.36, www.europadisc. co.uk), recorded live in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 2017. It’s a joy to see Pelly dipping his bucket into a well from which such practised French comedians as Beaumarchais (author of the original stage play), 32 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

Feydeau, and the great Jacques Tati have already drawn copious draughts.

Every gesture and move in this superbly cast production takes its cue from jokes Rossini himself has already embedded in the music.

Rossini wrote 39 operas, Offenbach nigh on 100. That may explain why Offenbach’s elegant and engaging three-act opéra bouffe Maître Péronilla (Bru Zane 2CD BZ1039 £31.00, www.prestomusic. com) – a late-flowering bloom with a Spanish setting and a Viennese lilt – has never been recorded. At one point in the action, the delectable 19-year-old Manoëla finds herself married (ecclesiastically) to an ardent young music-teacher and (civilly) to an elderly dolt.

All these limited-edition releases from the Venice-based Palazzetto Bru Zane come with the discs inserted into an elegantly produced 180-page hardback book, complete with background essays, text, and translation. Look out, too, for Gounod’s perennially popular Faust, (Bru Zane 3CD BZ1037 £32.50, www.prestomusic.com), heard here for the first time on record in the wittier, more down-to-earth original version of 1859.

The country having recently got its knickers in a twist over a phrase in Thomas Arne’s Rule, Britannia!, it’s good to cool off with an exquisitely realised account of Henry Purcell’s patriotic ‘semi-opera’ King Arthur (Signum SIGCD589 £18.00, www. signumrecords.com). Poet Laureate John Dryden, who wrote the libretto, thought Purcell’s music ‘destined for immortality’ but the manuscript was lost. That’s why it’s taken conductor Paul McCreesh the best part of 25 years to reassemble the parts. His exemplary two-disc recording with the Gabrieli Consortalso comes in a small hardback book, nicely illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the very landscapes and trades – wool, grain, fish – that by Stuart times had made Britannia rich.

For anyone coming new to Chopin’s music,

the pianist is as important as the work itself. Which is why it’s something of a win-win situation with Benjamin Grosvenor’s recent account of the two Piano Concertos (Decca 485 0365 £11.16, www.amazon.co.uk).

Grosvenor has studied the playing of the old masters, yet he has his own wizardry, too.

The young Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s idea of juxtaposing the keyboard music of Claude Debussy with that of his 18th-century soul mate Jean-Philippe Rameau shows intelligence and sensibility of a special order. The result, Debussy & Rameau (Deutsche Grammophon 4837701 £12.75, www. prestomusic.com) is a gem of a disc that works both musically and as therapy in strange times.

Finally, Our Father in the Heavens, (Regent REGCD543 £12, www.prestomusic.com) is a superb disc of church anthems by Sir Edward Bairstow (1874-1946), the longserving organist of York Minster and the North Country’s erstwhile Mr Music. Sturdy and sensitive, the anthems are royally served by organist Carleton Etherington and Simon Bell’s Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum – the Tewkesbury Abbey Choir in effect – now based in Dean Close School, Cheltenham.

A choir that sports boys’ voices of stellar beauty alongside the work of professional lay clerks is a rarity these days, and could soon be extinct if the cost-cutters, diversity lobbyists and anti-religionists of the New Britain have their way.

Hurry while stocks – and the culture – last.

Golden oldies

MARK ELLEN’s nostalgic pick of jazz, pop and blues CDs Anyone occasionally wishing to feel teleported back to the distant past – all of us? – would be amused to note that in June the top two entries in the UK album charts were by Bob Dylan and Neil Young.

If Young’s album Homegrown (£14.99) sounded like his old self – crackling guitars, rubbery bass, harmonica with a whiff of woodsmoke – then that’s because it was his old self, recorded 45 years ago (with Emmylou Harris and the

get ‘I paint nudes’, ‘I eat fast foods’ and ‘all the young dudes’.

Another enthralling record to hit a groove and sustain it is Rejoice (£10.99) by Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and the magnificent South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, which comes rammed with timeless, rippling, Afrobeat rhythms, chiselled melodies and the odd dash of bebop.

‘A swing-jazz stew’, as Allen called it.

Life Goes On (£17.99) by the Carla Bley Trio is equally atmospheric –

Band’s Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson). It was shelved while he released Tonight’s The Night (£6.99).

Inspired by the break-up with his then girlfriend, he thought it ‘too personal’ to put out at the time. He thankfully changed tack and billed it ‘the one that got away’. Bruised, beautiful and well worth exploring.

Dylan could hardly sound more different from his mid-1970s incarnation. Twenty years ago, he started writing songs rooted in the delicate jazz, swing, incendiary blues and big, comforting show tunes he heard growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.

You catch echoes of all of them on the captivating Rough and Rowdy Ways (£12.99), especially of Django Reinhardt, Jimmy Reed and barrelling 1950s rhythm and blues. His fabulously creaky old voice – described recently as a ‘phlegmy croon’ – sounds at times like an intensely intimate poetic recitation. It’s an unbeatable gift for young and old alike.

You can play ‘spot the reference’, since the lyrics allude to William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Burroughs, Anne Frank and the Rolling Stones.

There are splendidly amusing rhymes: on I Contain Multitudes, we

delicious jazz-blues excursions by the great pianist, vividly embroidered by saxist Andy Sheppard and full of wry musical references. Beautiful Telephones amusingly quotes the old patriotic tunes You’re A Grand Old Flag and Hail To the Chief, ending with the last four bars of My Way. Dust-blown images of the vast and attractive landscapes of Middle America are part of the appeal of Xoxo (£11.99), another divinely spirited outing from the Minnesota country rock band, the Jayhawks.

34 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

This Forgotten Town drops you into the set of a western, their gorgeous harmonies conjuring flavours of the Beatles and Byrds on these soulful contemplations on the state of their nation.

The Byrds are a key part of the mix, too, for Summerlong (£15.04) by Rose City Band, an eternally sunny modern rock adventure by the

generously bearded and heartwarming San Franciscan songwriter Ripley Johnson, who plays all instruments apart from drums.

The effect of its lazy, fuzzed-up guitars and gently cantering pace is delightfully hypnotic. As is Love & Peace (£10.99) by the raw-edged Californian folk-and-blues showman, Seasick Steve, whose songs mine a rich seam of sunbaked modern American folklore, awash with scuffling minstrels, carnivals and travelling shows.

The Pet Shop Boys’ 14th album, Hotspot (£9.99), came out in January. As ever, their influences – Abba, Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Kraftwerk and 1980s New York dance hits – merge in their symphonic blend of literate, machine-tooled British pop.

This is as clever and characterful as usual. The short stories and poetic observations are set against the backdrop of Berlin (where it was recorded), which feels as cinematic as Vienna in The Third Man. Two other towering figures in the electronic pop landscape were back in the frame too – the pioneering composer, producer and former Roxy Music member Brian Eno and his brother Roger. Their Mixing Colours (£10.99) is a richly tuneful, softly supercharged, piano-driven, ambient record.

Any ripple of friction at a family gathering can be swiftly dispelled by a few minutes of this: relaxing, consoling and guaranteed to bathe your living room in a warm and luminous glow.

Goes well with port and mince pies.

All CDs from: store.hmv.com

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Christmas Quiz

The winner of our prize quiz, by MARCUS BERKMANN, gets a Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper worth £121 1 Which Asian nation of more than 600,000 square miles has an average of just five people for every one of them, and accordingly the lowest population density in the world?

2 When Captain Scott and his team

sailed to Antarctica for their expedition to the South Pole in late 1910, they took some idiosyncratic items with them. An upright piano, a full china dinner service, and the complete published works of which British writer, then aged 70?

shared it with a PG Wodehouse character, the no less fearsome Duke of Dunstable.

androids and roving municipal spaceships, does the lead character make a call on a payphone?

8 Which man, who left the editorship of the Evening Standard in the summer, was quoted as saying he wouldn’t be satisfied until Theresa May was ‘chopped up in bags in my freezer’?

16 Armo virumque cano – ‘Of arms

9 What physical

18 Who are

abnormality is shared by Vulcans and Time Lords?

10 Which 1957 film lasts 96 minutes, of which 93 take place in a single room, measuring 16ft x 24ft?

3 In 1965, who, in his official capacity

as Postmaster-General, tried to remove the Queen’s head from British stamps? (He was foiled.)

11 Which early US president had only one or two of his own teeth left by the time he attained office, and had

4 Letzdebürgesch, which has much in common with Flemish and German, is a dialect native to which European country?

5. In autumn 1910, English art critic Roger Fry put together an exhibition in London featuring the works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh. What hyphenated term did he coin to describe it? (Be careful here.)

6 In April 2012, the tiny village of

Dull in Perth & Kinross embraced its heritage when it became the official sister community of which town in Oregon, USA?

and looted Rome, the first time the city had fallen to a foreign power in 800 years. What was the name of the Goths’ military commander? He 38 The Oldie Christmas Gift Guide 2020

17 Which Scottish company

normally generates £40m a year of sales with only five products: teacakes, caramel wafers, snowballs, caramel logs and wafer creams?

Frances Quinn, Nancy Birtwistle, Nadiya Hussain, Rahul Mandal and David Birtwistle?

19 Gargamel the Evil Wizard, who

has bad teeth and lives in a run-down hovel with his mangy cat Azrael, is the sworn enemy of which small, blue people, who wear Phrygian caps and live in mushrooms?

20 In 1844 at Tunbridge Wells, in

various sets of dentures fashioned from the teeth of cows, hippos and walruses, which he kept soaked at night in port to improve the flavour?

1849 at Lord’s, in 1858 at the Oval and at Lord’s again in 1871, cricket matches were staged between The Singles of England and The Married of England.

Which team won three of the four matches?

12 Hippophagy is practised by the

French, among others, but not usually by the British, (at least not intentionally). What is hippophagy?

13 Which British artist spent his final

years living as a recluse in a small Chelsea apartment under an assumed name, Admiral Booth? His diet reputedly consisted solely of rum and milk and, when he died in 1851, he left 19,000 paintings to the nation.

7 In AD410, the Visigoths attacked

and the man I sing’ – are the opening words of what?

14 Which London tourist attraction had 32 pods when sponsored by BA and now has 32 capsules?

15 In which 1982 film, set in a bleak and dystopian future, full of rogue

A fabulous Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper worth £121 (see p. 25 for more details or visit www.partridges.co.uk) is the prize for the first set of all-correct answers drawn out of a hat.

Email your entry to: comps@ theoldie.co.uk, subject heading Xmas Gift Quiz Prize Draw. Or post to Xmas Gift Quiz Prize Draw at The Oldie address. Closing date: 20th Nov. 2020.