The Oldie magazine - October issue

EXTRA 32-PAGE REVIEW OF BOOKS MY PLAGUE JOKE

GYLES BRANDRETH

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October 2020 | £4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 392

The Wizard from Oz The Female Eunuch turns 50 – Germaine Greer Shipwreck that sank the monarchy – Earl Spencer Thrill of the steeplechase – Robert Bathurst When Elvis met the Beatles – Craig Brown

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The wreck of the White Ship page 18

Features 13 My fleet of Matchbox minis Joseph Connolly 14 Germaine Greer unmasked Valerie Grove 18 The shipwreck that rocked the monarchy Charles Spencer 21 My lockdown deafness Oliver Pritchett 22 Heavenly metal: London’s railings Harry Mount 24 The thrill of the steeplechase Robert Bathurst 27 The glorious Guinness girls Emily Hourican 31 Poetry demotion Roger Lewis

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was Edgar Lustgarten? Duncan Campbell 12 Modern Life: What is TikTok? Richard Godwin 32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 33 Country Mouse Giles Wood

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ABC circulation figure Jan-Jun 2020: 47,170

London’s railings rise again page 22

34 School Days Sophia Waugh 34 RIP useless acronyms Barbara Geere 35 Home Front Alice Pitman 36 Letter from America Ivo Dawnay 37 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 39 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 40 God Sister Teresa 40 Memorial Service: Sir Roger Moate; Lord Spicer James Hughes-Onslow 41 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 42 Readers’ Letters 45 I Once Met… Robert Robinson Hunter Davies 45 Memory Lane 57 Media Matters Stephen Glover 59 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 59 Rant: Book thieves Sarah Watling 60 History David Horspool 85 Crossword 87 Bridge Andrew Robson 87 Competition Tessa Castro 94 Ask Virginia Ironside 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

Robert Bathurst’s favourite page 24

Books 47 The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011, by William Feaver Nicola Shulman 49 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake Fiona Stafford 49 Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean, by David Reynolds Lucinda Lambton 51 Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates Rosie Boycott 53 Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays, by Helen Macdonald Charles Foster 55 The Lying Life of Adults,

by Elena Ferrante John Lanchester

83 On the Road: Bryn Terfel Louise Flind

Arts 62 Netflix: Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story Harry Mount 63 Theatre: Krapp’s Last Tape Nicholas Lezard 63 Radio Valerie Grove 64 Television Roger Lewis 65 Music Richard Osborne 66 Golden Oldies Craig Brown (Rachel Johnson is away) 67 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

78 Realm of Bright Water: Scotland’s Eilean Bàn Kevin Pilley 80 Overlooked Britain: Thomas Gray’s tomb, Stoke Poges Lucinda Lambton 82 Taking a Walk: Messing about on Devon’s River Dart Patrick Barkham

69 Gardening David Wheeler 69 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 70 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 70 Restaurants James Pembroke 71 Drink Bill Knott 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 76 Getting Dressed: Alidad Mahloudji Brigid Keenan 77 Bird of the Month: Redwing John McEwen

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Travel

The Oldie October 2020 3

The Old Un’s Notes How to buy The Oldie during the lockdown The Old Un is afraid that many W H Smith shops and some independent newsagents have closed – so buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be as easy as usual at the moment. There are three simple ways of getting round this:

1. Order a print edition for £4.75 (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. Buy a 12-issue print subscription for just £24 and

receive two free books – see page 38.

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

Sixty years ago, on Saturday 22nd October 1960 at 8.35pm, Associated Television proudly introduced their prestigious new comedy programme – which they

seems they hated it. The show lasted only until 26th November 1960.

However, it was a concept that much appealed to one David Jones, a 13-year-old viewer from Bromley. In 1973, the renamed David Bowie reflected, ‘I was Anthony Newley for a year. Remember the Gurney Slade series?’

Unusually for the period, ATV shot the programme on 35mm film, which resulted in the survival of all six episodes.

Gurney Slade continues to fascinate and beguile, while the conclusion anticipates The Prisoner by seven years.

And any enterprise in which Anthony Newley and Una Stubbs dance with a vacuum cleaner has to be worth the price of a DVD box set.

spokesman. ‘Visitor numbers have dropped significantly and, if we find that we are unable to bounce back financially in the coming months, we may be forced to consider closing.’

The club was founded by members of the Friends Ambulance Unit after the

First World War. It was home to John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids, who was a long-time member. The club often had long-term residents then – Wyndham lived and wrote all his most famous works there.

Now the Eat Out to Help Out scheme has ended,

Slade fan: Anthony Newley

eventually banished to a graveyard slot.

How surreal it was: the hero of The Strange World of Gurney Slade spoke to inanimate objects, engaged in debate with a cow voiced by Fenella Fielding and ruminated on the nature of identity.

The show’s credited writers were Sid Hills and Dick Green, but the vision it represented was that of its star, Anthony Newley – who was also its co-director. He informed the press, ‘People will either love it or hate it.

There’s no middle way’. It

Calling all Oldie readers who like to visit London and stay the night.

The charming Penn Club in Bloomsbury provides bed and breakfast for just over £100. It is celebrating its centenary year – but is in trouble.

‘The club is now in very serious risk of having to close permanently,’ says a

Among this month’s contributors Emily Hourican (p27), an Irish author, writes for the Sunday Independent. Her new book is The Glorious Guinness Girls.

She lives in Dublin with her husband and three children.

Charles Spencer (p18) wrote Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape. His new book, The White Ship, is out now.

Craig Brown (p66) is author of One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. His biography of Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, was a bestseller. He writes for Private Eye and the Mail on Sunday.

Robert Bathurst (p24) is in Cold Feet, Downton Abbey, Toast Of London and Joking Apart. He stars in Love, Loss & Chianti by Christopher Reid. He won the 2020 Audie Award for best male narrator.

The Oldie October 2020 5

it’s time to Sleep Out to Help Out.

Important stories you may have missed Man in his pants damaged window Western Telegraph

Lego piece falls out of New Zealand boy’s nose after being stuck for two years Guardian

After last month’s Oldie article by Damian Thompson on Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, the Old Un is looking forward to taking a virtual, online walk in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Old Un will find out all sorts of secrets: the hidden mystery behind 221B Baker Street; Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Holmes; and where in London Sherlock Holmes was nearly killed by his archenemy Moriarty.

The one-hour virtual Zoom walk is led by Blue Badge Tourist Guide Janice Liverseidge. The walk around Marylebone takes place on 1st October at 4pm.

Tickets cost £10 per household (www.eventbrite. co.uk/e/walking-in-thefootsteps-of-sherlockholmes-and-his-creatortickets-117371486275).

Desperate bid not to lose the loos Peeblesshire News £15 for published contributions

NEXT ISSUE The November issue is on sale on 14th October 2020.

FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867.

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KATHRYN LAMB

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6 The Oldie October 2020

‘Rodin’s The Whatever’

The Old Un is enchanted by a new book on the beauties of marble and stone.

Fabio Barry, an art history professor at Stanford University, uncovers some delicious treasures in Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, £50).

The Old Un’s favourite is the 1268 Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey (pictured). Just the list of the stones used in the Pavement is pure poetry: Egyptian alabaster, porphyry, Spartan green porphyry, and

Westminster Abbey’s Italian corner: the Cosmati Pavement, made in 1268

yellowish limestone with red, turquoise, cobalt-blue and bluish white glass in a Purbeck marble matrix.

The 25-square-foot Pavement was created by craftsmen from Rome. An inscription around the central circle reveals its meaning: ‘The sphere shows the archetype; this globe shows the macrocosm.’

In other words, the central circle represents the idea of the world in God’s mind before he created it. And the circles around it show the world as formed from the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.

The science is of course nonsense but, still, what a beauty the Pavement is. It was a royal commission by

Henry III, and was unique in Britain.

‘Be honest. Does my bum look big in this?’

Even Tony Blair, that old moneybags, couldn’t afford to buy a Rembrandt these days.

Sir Robert Peel, his antecedent as Prime Minister, didn’t buy just a Rembrandt

Rubens’s Lady in a Straw Hat inspired Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Julia Peel, now in the Frick Collection, New York

(a portrait of Philip Lucasz, for which he paid 59 guineas).

He bought, as well, several Rubenses, several pictures by David Teniers, a couple of van Dycks and Pieter de Hooches, and three Albert Cuyps.

He also commissioned no fewer than 18 portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence, including one (opposite page, bottom right) of Peel’s wife, Julia Peel.

That in turn was inspired by one of his Rubenses (for which Peel paid £2,725 in 1824), Le Chapeau de Paille (The Straw Hat), (opposite page, bottom left).

The pictures were paid for with Peel’s cotton fortune.

All this is revealed in a new publication by the Peel Society, Sir Robert Peel – Statesman and Art Collector,

by Nigel Morris.

The pictures were dispersed after the death of Sir Robert Peel, 170 years ago, in 1850. His son, also Sir Robert Peel, was keen on slow horses and fast women, and 77 of the pictures were sold to the National Gallery in 1871.

The Prime Minister’s great-grandson, also Sir Robert Peel, went bankrupt seven times and sold some real gems, including the picture of Julia Peel, now in the Frick Collection in New York.

Inland is a new solo exhibition by The Oldie’s Bird of the Month artist, Carry Akroyd.

Carry’s interest in the

landscape, she says, ‘draws on many levels of fascination, producing a soft yet vibrant colour palette depicting landscape and nature’.

The show is at the Jerram Gallery in Sherborne, Dorset (10th-24th October 2020). Prices range from £350 upwards.

The Old Un is much enjoying Clubland’s Hidden Treasures, a new book by Sam Aldred.

He’s now longing to be invited to Brooks’s, the St James’s club that’s home to the Society of Dilettanti and its marvellous pictures.

In the early years of the Society, founded in 1734, members conducted an alluring ritual which the Old Un longs to take part in.

Whenever someone became a member, the President donned a toga and admitted the postulant while sitting on a throne of crimson velvet. A vote was taken on

As the crow flies: Dorset Landscape, from Pilsdon Pen, by Carry Akroyd

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Toasted, seeded baguette, spread with garlic mayonnaise and topped with grilled aubergines, tomato sauce and basil

each new member. Still today the club’s treasures include a ballot box carved like a Greek temple, with the ballot balls deposited between the open legs of the female figure of Justice.

Who knows how many double entendres the object has inspired over the years?

Bluebottle Goes to War

by P J Brownsword tells the story of Peter Sellers’s time in the RAF Gang Shows.

Sellers arrived in Bombay in August 1944 (pictured) and raced around India, Ceylon

Sellers, 19, in India, 1944.

White knees were a classic giveaway of a new arrival

and Burma. He did over 100 shows in ten months – crucial training for a comic genius.

‘I especially liked the part where Bambi’s mum got shot’

Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism.

What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 45 of this issue).

Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place.

How to send your entry Simply email your entry to publisher@theoldie.co.uk by 31st October 2020.

Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.

The Oldie October 2020 7

DAVID HOCKNEY

The Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing How to enter

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Have you heard the one about the virus?

I got into hot water when I told a coronavirus joke on TV

People have taken to shouting at me in the street.

Sometimes, when I am trundling back from Tesco on my tricycle, it’s a friendly ‘Good on you, mate!’

At other times, it’s hostile. The other day, from across the road, a man pointed a finger at me accusingly and called out, ‘You! You!’ I looked towards him. ‘Shame on you!’ he cried, ‘Shame!’

I knew at once what it was because I had seen the headline in the Sun: ‘Gyles Brandreth should apologise’.

My crime? On TV, the day before, when I was out promoting my new family joke book, What’s Black & White & Red All Over?, the amiable Eammon Holmes had asked me if I had a new joke to share.

I said I’d like to tell him my favourite coronavirus joke, but we’d have to wait 14 days to see whether he got it.

Eammon chuckled obligingly, but some of This Morning’s viewers were not so amused. They took to Twitter demanding an apology from me and an inquiry from Ofcom, the media regulator.

The joke was in ‘bad taste’, according to some, and ‘cruel and heartless’, according to a man who had lost a family member to COVID-19. What do you think? I thought the joke was nicely topical, but perhaps I told it too soon.

There’s an old equation that says Comedy = Tragedy + Time.

And talking about being recognised in the street, I went to see my friend the gardener, broadcaster and poet Alan Titchmarsh recently, and he told me he’d not long since been chatting on the phone to his friend the playwright, diarist and national treasure Alan Bennett.

Bennett revealed how gratified he’d been during lockdown when he and his partner, Rupert, had set off for their evening stroll to find people emerging from their houses to greet them.

Alan was rather moved to find perfect strangers applauding him and cheering

as he walked past – until he realised it was a Thursday evening and the public was in the street saluting the NHS. This year would have marked the 75th birthday of the virtuoso cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose extraordinary career was cut short by the onset of multiple sclerosis when she was 28, and who died, aged only 42, on 19th October 1987.

To celebrate her life, BBC1’s The One Show had the bright idea of forming an ‘MS orchestra’ – comprising entirely musicians with MS – who got together ‘virtually’ to record Elgar’s Nimrod in Jackie’s honour. Earlier this month, the recording was played on a huge screen to an audience of just two seated in the deserted stalls of the Royal Albert Hall, where Jackie, famously, had enjoyed some of her greatest triumphs playing the Elgar Cello Concerto at the Proms.

I call du Pré Jackie because I knew her a little and everyone called her that. And I was one of the fortunate two in the audience to hear the MS orchestra’s moving Nimrod. Sitting with me was Jackie’s older sister, Hilary Finzi, now 78, who talked of her sister with an affection and enthusiasm that brought tears to the eyes – hers and mine.

‘Jackie was a genius,’ Hilary said to me. ‘She heard a cello on the radio when she was five and announced, “That’s what

‘Put your finger here, nurse’

I want to play.” She lived to play the cello.

She hated to practise.’

‘What?’ I interrupted, ‘She hated practising?’

‘She wouldn’t practise,’ insisted Hilary. ‘She went to study with Rostropovich in Moscow and all the other students were practising 12 hours a day. Jackie didn’t need to. She couldn’t see the point. She just played.’

This is not a story I shall be sharing with my grandchild who is learning the cello.

On my travels to promote my book, I have been asking people for their favourite jokes. One of my favourite actresses, the great Dame Eileen Atkins, stood up to perform hers for me, trumpeting like an elephant and squeaking like a mouse. The joke involves a huge African elephant walking through the jungle, where he encounters a tiny mouse. ‘I’m enormous!’ roars the elephant, looking down at the mouse disdainfully, ‘And you, mouse – you’re very, very small.’ ‘Well,’ sniffs the mouse, ‘I’ve not been well.’

Dame Eileen also reminded me of one of my father’s favourites, the one where the hedgehog clambers off the hairbrush muttering, ‘We all make mistakes.’

At an Oldie lunch, the late, great Ken Dodd told me that his ‘favourite’ joke varied from day to day, but that day it was the one about the shrimp that went to the prawn’s cocktail party – and pulled a mussel.

I bumped into the daughter of the Irish comedian Frank Carson, who said her dad’s favourite joke was undoubtedly the one where the Sergeant Major bellows at the young recruit, ‘Smithers!

We didn’t see you at camouflage training this morning!’ – and the recruit replies, ‘Thank you very much, sir!’

Yes, it is the way you tell them.

What’s Black & White & Red All Over? is published by Puffin, £9.99 The Oldie October 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Driven to distraction

Want to go mad? Ring a call centre about a car-insurance blunder matthew norman Asked whom he would pick if he could become anyone else on earth, someone clever – probably Woody Allen – said, ‘Anyone else on earth.’

I strongly endorse the sentiment, though with a caveat. The solitary someone else (apart from serial killers, and Lord Sugar) I would not choose to be is anyone in a call centre who has to deal with me.

To James of Direct Line, and to his supervisor, Daniel, sincerest apologies for the cocktail of coiled rage and pure pomposity that made our recent dealings so deliciously intoxicating.

Neither of these fine chaps was directly responsible for my having driven without insurance for some days.

With hindsight, the error was entirely mine. What kind of chump is naïve enough to assume he’s insured from evidence as scant as a car-insurance certificate? Ignorance, as the late Lord Denning will confirm, is no defence in law.

The details of this fiasco being of zero imaginable interest, they are ideally suited to this space. So suffice it to know that Direct Line (a) elected unilaterally to cancel a new car policy and (b) failed to satisfy itself that I knew about this.

Before we go on, I should mention that, to folks who are naturally suspicious of modern communication methods, such as my parents, I cannot recommend Direct Line strongly enough.

By and large, for example, it eschews the use of email. Its commercial rivals email important information, such as policy documents and warnings of imminent cancellation. Yet despite the huge cost, and the COVID-heightened risk of letters arriving late or not at all, Direct Line cleaves courageously to the post.

It would be small surprise if it relies on carrier pigeons for the most crucial stuff, and none at all if its actuaries do their calculations using quills.

What was a surprise, when Direct 10 The Oldie October 2020

Line finally made a sortie into the present century, was an emailed survey asking why I had cancelled the brand-new policy.

The first of these having been ignored on the apparently compelling ground that I hadn’t, the second activated the siren.

After a typically refreshing half-hour on hold, James began by asking me to confirm my address, on the basis that a letter sent months ago had been returned.

He then explained that my policy has been cancelled owing to a minor scrape in March. The problem was that Direct Line still didn’t know the identity of the scraped vehicle’s owner.

‘But you settled the claim months ago,’ I spluttered. ‘I’m guessing you don’t generally settle claims without knowing who the claimant is.’

James agreed with that premise, confessed to bafflement and nipped off to talk to an underwriter.

The news on his return was disappointing. Since the cancellation letter had been sent, it wasn’t Direct Line’s fault. Therefore they were not obliged to reinstate the policy.

‘Hang on,’ I said, struggling to make the words audible over the sound of tooth enamel being ground, ‘you know the post is unreliable. It’s a few minutes since you told me a previous letter had been returned.’

Although once again bamboozled, James summoned the strength to calculate the price of another policy identical to the one for which I paid some

‘The doctor said I haven’t got to get you too excited’

£700 a few weeks ago. The new price was over £1,600.

It’s not just for whimsy that I keep a blood-pressure kit at hand for encounters of this type. Reassured that a blue-light ambulance ride wasn’t mandated, I asked James why, even if email is too precious to be squandered on anything less crucial than a survey, no one had rung about the cancellation.

It seems that Direct Line, much like Mr Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs, is nervy about that new-fangled invention the telephone. That its logo is a jolly red phone struck me as too sledgehammerish an irony to be verbalised.

James’s patience and charm were then matched by those of his boss. Heroically triumphing over the corporate telephonophobia, possibly assisted by my reference to the press office after I revealed I was a journalist, Dan rang promptly and repeatedly.

The genesis of the cock-up lay in the Delhi office, he revealed, where the virus had caused a massive backlog. The policy would be reinstated at the original price.

Furthermore, as requested, I would be compensated for the hours I’d spent resolving the issue. Would £40 be all right? Given the astonishing worthlessness of my time, I said, it was more than ample.

We parted on excellent terms, though not before Dan had been treated to a spectacularly tedious lecture about the potential for catastrophe. Suppose I had mown down a group of insurancecompany staff on a zebra crossing when unknowingly uninsured? I could have been bankrupted at best, and cordially invited to spend several years as Her Britannic Majesty’s house guest.

Apparently, in cases of the kind, where customers legitimately believe they are insured, the firm can issue an indemnity document to satisfy a court. That’s tremendously kind of it. But what the hell happens when it gets lost in the post?

who was Edgar Lustgarten?

‘Have you ever murdered anyone?’ Edgar Lustgarten would ask his audience, which consisted of the millions who flocked to cinemas in postwar Britain.

‘Perhaps you’d rather not say.’

For many filmgoers, his short Scotland Yard B movies were a regular part of the evening’s entertainment throughout the 1950s.

It is easy to forget now, when rarely a day passes without a blood-soaked ‘true crime’ documentary on television, that there was a time when such fare barely existed. It was Lustgarten who changed this, bringing the genre to the airwaves through his radio programme Prisoner at the Bar, and to the big screen through those laid-back, black-and-white Scotland Yard films.

Born in Manchester in 1907, the son of a Latvian-born Jewish barrister, he went to Manchester Grammar School followed by St John’s College, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union. Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, was a contemporary and admirer, and in the 1930s Lustgarten had a promising career as a young barrister.

Turned down on health grounds for active service in the war, he broadcast counter-propaganda, aimed at challenging Lord Haw-Haw, under the pseudonym Brent Wood – ­ his name changed to conceal his Jewish identity.

After the war, he wrote crime fiction,

POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

what is TikTok? TikTok, a social-media channel, began life in 2014 as Musical.ly, a ‘lip-synching app’ that allowed users to film 15-second videos to their favourite pop songs and share them with their friends.

Music remains central to its appeal, since every video demands a soundtrack.

Old Town Road, a country pastiche by rapper Lil Nas X which spent 19 weeks at the top of the American charts in 2019, began life as a TikTok meme.

12 The Oldie October 2020

notably A Case to Answer and the memorably titled Blondie Iscariot. He found his true calling in 1952, when the BBC hired him to present Prisoner at the Bar, in which he recounted the details of major trials.

He was a hit. Listening figures surged from two million to six million in a month, and Time magazine described him as a ‘top writer in the true crime field’. As a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1957, he told Roy Plomley his luxury item would be a woman’s evening gown.

But it was his films and his barristerial presentational style – lofty and reassuring – that established his national reputation in the cinema, through first the Scotland Yard series and then The Scales of Justice, which ran until 1967.

The bow-tied Lustgarten would talk

straight to the camera from behind a desk, rising occasionally to pour himself sherry from a decanter. The cases he described were real, although the names had been changed. He specialised in the verbless sentence: ‘Seaside promenade.

Country beauty spot. A church. A genteel boarding house…’ And, in his day, the Yard always got their man, because, he assured us, ‘the murderer always overlooks something’.

His style was easy to mock and many did. Stanley Baxter lampooned him on television and so, later, with a character called Edgar Dustcarten, did Robbie Coltrane. By the 1960s and ’70s, he was out of step with the public mood, championing the whip, the birch and the noose on Question Time and denouncing Britain as ‘degenerate’.

His last days were sad and strange. A young woman who had become besotted with him and moved into his London flat died in his bath in mysterious circumstances. This attracted attention, not least because he had narrated, in a Famous Trials series, the Brides in the Bath case, in which George Joseph Smith was hanged in 1915 for drowning three of his wives in the bath.

Lustgarten died of a heart attack in 1978 in Marylebone Public Library, while reading a copy of the Spectator.

In his will, he left some of his estate to a rest home for donkeys. As to what he would have made of the constant revisiting of serial murders on television today, perhaps he’d rather not say.

Duncan Campbell

But TikTok is also home to family dance routines, comedy skits, to-camera rants and pet-based pratfalls. There are TikTok celebrities – a 15-year-old from Connecticut called Charli D’Amelio is the reigning queen with 60 million followers – but the emphasis is more on ‘Real People’ (as the tagline has it). It seems every other user has filmed themselves doing a silly dance in a supermarket.

At the time of writing, TikTok has been downloaded 1.5 billion times and has an estimated 800 million monthly users, which puts it far ahead of Twitter and Snapchat and just behind Instagram

as the world’s sixth-most popular social-media app.

Those users skew towards the young.

According to the Business of Apps website, although only nine per cent of Americans use TikTok, 49 per cent of American teenagers do. If you want to know what Generation Z are up to, here is where to look.

But this can be disorienting. TikTok is fast and frenetic. Whereas Twitter centres on words, and Instagram on pictures, TikTok centres on short videos, usually 15 seconds long, presented in a smartphone-friendly portrait format.

Murdered anyone? Lustgarten (1907-78)

Although the currency of Twitter is outrage and the currency of Instagram is envy, on TikTok it’s silliness. In this respect, at least, it marks a welcome change from the febrile interactions of other social-media platforms.

TikTok even managed to pull off a political masterstroke on 20th June, disrupting a Donald Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event played to a two-thirds-empty stadium. Trump had boasted that a million people would show up. In fact, 19,000 did.

A master of Twitter he might be, but Trump had been undone by teenagers using TikTok. The teenagers, who had formed an online community based on their shared love of Korean pop music, flooded the event organisers with fake ticket requests, inflating expectations and maximising humiliation. And –

surprise, surprise – in August, Trump set about trying to ban TikTok. Did I mention that TikTok is Chineseinvented and -owned? And that it boasts some of the most sophisticated artificialintelligence software? And has already

faced record fines in the US for breaches of child-privacy laws? And has censored material on China’s human-rights record?

Well, never mind – here’s a video of a Labrador eating cereal.

Richard Godwin

CHRIS WILLSON/ALAMY

My glorious f leet of Matchbox minis No child of the 1950s will ever forget how they chose to squander their pocket money – were they lucky enough actually to receive any.

I never did – though there were pennies and even shillings to be had from obliging aunts in return for shopping for all their essentials, such as bread, milk and Parma Violet cachous. Money also came from discarded Tizer bottles – 2d a time, which very conveniently was the cover price of the Beano.

But if you could run to real money (1/6d), then there was no contest: what you wanted was a Matchbox toy.

These hugely covetable little die-cast models came about in a rather ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ sort of way.

Jack Odell, Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith (not related) owned a metal company called Lesney Products (the name a conflation of the first and second portions of the two Smiths’ Christian names). One day, Odell’s daughter told him that no toys were allowed at school

unless they were small enough to fit into a matchbox – and lo, the rest is history!

The packaging rather cleverly mimicked real matchboxes (a sort of cross between Bryant & May and England’s Glory), though they were larger than the real thing – so who knows whether Odell’s daughter got away with it.

The very first miniature vehicle came off the production line in 1953: a greenand-red roller – not a slangy Rolls-Royce, but a steamroller. By 1960, there were 75 models; these are still referred to by collectors as the 1-75 series. Throughout the 1950s, there were only ever 75 models available – as one was added to the range, an old one was dropped. In the first year came a bestseller – the Coronation coach, complete with horses.

Other early models were surprisingly mundane – a cement mixer, for heaven’s sake – while Dinky was introducing very cool Jaguars and even American saloons.

Corgi, meanwhile, was installing

interiors and windscreens and tyres, whereas Matchbox models, because of the very low price, remained quite hollow with one-piece metal wheels. Therein, though, lay the charm: the more glamorous toys were presents; Matchbox we bought for ourselves.

The company was sold and resold throughout the 1960s and beyond (it’s still going, now owned by Mattel), but the raison d’être of Matchbox rather vanished when they came to be sold in blister packs, this making a nonsense of the original concept.

I still have a few of mine (the Routemaster and the E-Type) – though I wish I’d kept the boxes. Apart from the aesthetic side, although a bashed-up (ie played-with) model might fetch a pound or two, a fine boxed example of a 1-75 series can fetch many hundreds.

Such models are avidly collected by the very old men who once, long ago, saved up to buy them at 1/6d apiece.

Joseph Connolly

Little treasures: Routemaster, RollsRoyce and Land Rover

The Oldie October 2020 13

the interview Fifty years after The Female Eunuch, the writer tells Valerie Grove about unsexy Clive James, her transgender war and scalping herself

Germaine Greer unmasked G

ermaine Greer has been an Oldie heroine since The Oldie began. Richard Ingrams, who used to weep on her shoulder when his first marriage was falling apart, founded his new magazine in February 1992 and gave Germaine a column.

It was called ‘From Stump Cross

Roundabout’ – the Essex fastness she inhabited: a pair of millhouses in dull countryside with ‘not a single handsome room’. But she waxed rapturous about the vast East Anglian skies, which she’d been ‘too busy projecting myself’ to notice in her Cambridge days. ‘I am so full of joy,’ she wrote in the first Oldie, ‘I hardly dare move in case I spill some.’

I arrive under a pall of cloud just as she is wrestling with a new problem over the sale of The Mills. The three-year saga of this sale — its price cut to less than £1 million — could ‘suck the marrow out of the bones’, as she put it. The buyers wanted her out in a fortnight, and she hadn’t yet found a bungalow to rent. She might end up sleeping on a park bench.

‘Typical Greer problem,’ she said.

I recall (she doesn’t) where we first met. It was in the summer of love, 4th June 1967, at the Granta party at Cambridge: Michael Frayn, Clive James, Ted Hughes and so on. There stood La Greer, PhD, Shakespearean scholar and star of Footlights. Long, lean and drop-dead gorgeous in pre-Raphaelite curls and a mini-dress seemingly made of chain mail, she held forth, surrounded by awestruck men.

At 81, she has aged carelessly and without artifice. As she said in The Change (1991), the menopause liberated her from vanity. She scorns women who squander fortunes ‘fashioning themselves into ghastly simulacra of youthful bodies’. Accident-prone, she 14 The Oldie October 2020

described in gruesome detail how she fell downstairs, scalping herself on her furniture, just as she was due to fly off on a speaking tour of Australia.

She uses a stick to walk from her workshop (its filing cabinets empty, since she sold her archive to Melbourne University for £1.8 million), past doves and geese, up the path to the creepercovered house which already wears an unlived-in air. Handsome pieces of furniture – some Biedermeier; quite valuable – have been promised to friends.

Her assistant Lorraine offered coffee, which she would fetch from the café in the village.

‘Don’t you have a kitchen here any more?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t bought coffee for about ten years,’ said Germaine. ‘Can’t be arsed.’

Really? I associate her with high standards of hospitality as of horticulture. She used to bestride her meticulously organised orchards like Vita Sackville-West. She was ‘Rose Blight’, Private Eye’s gardening columnist, a walking Stearn’s dictionary of plant names from Alchemilla to Zygopetalum.

‘What I’d like,’ she said now, ‘is a bottle of prosecco and a straw.’

What luck! With uncanny prescience I had a bottle of chilled prosecco in my bag, which The Oldie’s photographer later served with a flourish, in flutes.

I had also brought my copy of The Female Eunuch, signed ‘Carry on!’ in Greer’s bold hand at the launch party 50 years ago – in October 1970 – organised by her fellow Melbourne convent girl Carmen Callil. Tucked inside the book were the notes for my review for the Evening Standard. I was 24 and a child bride. ‘Wives downtrodden, lonely. Men’s loathing, women’s guilt. Terms of contempt: skirt, tail,’ I wrote. ‘Women

must value themselves more highly.’

Alongside these jottings is a list of things to do that weekend along with my review. ‘Vacuum,’ it says. ‘Clean fridge.

Kitchen floor.’

‘Well, someone has to do it,’ says Germaine. ‘What nobody wants is to have to do it all the time.’ As she has, having been without a cleaner since March.

The Female Eunuch, in print for half a century, offered women no solutions to having it all. That wasn’t its aim. Dr Greer was no equality feminist: ‘To have women merely doing what men do would achieve nothing.’ (She herself would never aspire to drive a bus or command an army.) The goal was to make us think.

Its standout theme, ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’, still applies: two women are murdered by a partner every week.

The book’s opening assertion, ‘The sex of a person is attested by every cell in his body,’ was a foretaste of her clash with the transgender lobby (The Oldie made her Iconoclast of the Year in 2016).

She never intended to become embroiled in this (and her Cambridge college, Newnham, denied her a Fellowship because of it). ‘You can’t cut your dick off and call yourself a woman: you are a mutilated man,’ she says, but this is ‘an opinion, not a prohibition’.

April Ashley is our sister, she wrote in Eunuch, surgically fashioned into ‘a masquerade of femininity’. ‘Let them suck on that,’ she says now. She won’t change a word. ‘It’s out there. It was of its time. I’m not going to doctor it now.’

She has never succumbed to social media and why should she? She gets quite enough publicity (and trolling) without it. ‘I don’t have a mobile phone, I don’t have Facebook and I have no idea what is the point of

NEIL SPENCE

The Oldie October 2020 15

that vomitorium the Twittersphere.’

Go ahead, call her mad: she’s used to it (see her collection entitled The Madwoman’s Underclothes).

Far from being de-platformed, she remains in constant demand, always greeted by prolonged applause. If anyone stands up and says, ‘I don’t agree,’ she zips back, ‘Good! I don’t want you to agree with me. Go on disagreeing!’

She never tempers her words out of consideration for sensitivities and perhaps this is a key: when I mention Greta Thunberg, she says, ‘Well, little Greta is autistic … and I am beginning to suspect there is a stripe of autism down my back.’ She adds, ‘My mother thought other people didn’t exist.’

The mystery that remains is her absurd ‘marriage’ – lasting three weekends – to Paul du Feu, who posed naked for a coy Cosmo gatefold in 1972.

‘He married me because he hated me,’ she replies. ‘You know who he married after me, don’t you – Maya Angelou.

He was a very submissive husband to Maya. I think he wanted a dominatrix.

But that’s not what I do, contrary to popular belief.’

She did try to bear a child. At 37, in 1976, she told me all about it. There was ‘a flotilla’ of men in her life – one was Martin Amis. What with her having only one ovary, constantly travelling and the most eligible father being in America, it was difficult: ‘Trying to get pregnant is like playing billiards in the Sahara with the pockets in the ocean.’

She’s been a godmother 14 times. I doubt she’d have been a contented mother: she once said all the mothers she knew were ‘the walking wounded’. ‘Babies are so adorable. But that little body that used to fit you so well,’ she says, hugging herself, ‘turns into an Anglepoise.’

Often in the 1970s she was squired by handsome Old Etonians – who compete over which she said was best in bed.

Among them were Jonathan Aitken and The Oldie’s apparently well-endowed Memorial Service correspondent James Hughes-Onslow. ‘But I was also enmeshed with Willie Shawcross at the same time,’ she now recalls. She added, days later, ‘I’ve thought of another Etonian: Heathcote Williams’ (the late poet and visionary). Their appeal, she explained, was their way with words.

‘They were taught to write the best English: with clarity, without mannerisms or posturing.’

Giving an after-lunch speech once, she invited each table to submit one question. ‘The very first I opened said, “What’s Clive James like in bed?” ’ But James was not among her 16 The Oldie October 2020

With Viv Stanshall in Oz, March 1969

acknowledged lovers, from Fellini to Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan.

On BBC2’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning in 1982, she appeared with James, reminding him of how they met at Sydney University, when he cut a fine figure. ‘You’d just done your Nasho [National Service], you still had hair, you were so fit,’ she reminded him. ‘But just … not sexy.’

When they did cabarets together, James fell in love with her, she says: ‘In his archives are songs he wrote for me.’

(Me too! I have a folder of songs written for me, a few years later. James, we agree, was always falling in love with people.)

She’s been watching daytime TV in lockdown, ‘in a state of simmering rage’.

Why do TV hostesses wear four-inch stilettos ‘just to sit on a sofa!’? But she loves the bedside manner of Dr Amir Khan on GPs: Behind Closed Doors.

She urged me to try this programme on Channel 5. I saw one young man suffering from a tight foreskin when he masturbates, and an older chap with scrotal itching.

No wonder she is such an authority on matters genital and gynaecological, and on medical malpractice.

‘There is very little we don’t know about Germaine,’ Dr Anthony Clare said, when she sat in his Psychiatrist’s Chair.

He knew about how she lost her virginity, her rape, her abortions and miscarriages, her naked posing – including her famous anti-porn gesture of displaying her anus for Suck magazine in 1972. Was there a private Greer at all? ‘Probably not.’

She is her own woman, blithely sui generis. Of course she won’t sign up to the #MeToo movement, even if Helena Kennedy reproaches her as a fallen idol: ‘Germaine, I am so disappointed in you.’

Greer joins no clubs or sisterhoods. Of

course she found the Big Brother house intolerable – but, with the fee and the articles she wrote, the show brought in £100,000 for her rainforest in Queensland, which remains her passion.

I asked her once why she’d left the ‘Recreations’ space blank in Who’s Who. She replied, ‘I don’t have hobbies. I do everything with all my might and main.’

This includes absorbing facts and seeming omniscient. I know: we were once fellow panellists, with Stephen Fry and Sebastian Faulks, on a staged University Challenge, dons v alumni (I was the token dunce). She warned us years ago that ‘We’re more likely to be destroyed by a pandemic than to populate another planet.’ She knows how to combat moths in cashmere with tiny, parasitic trichogramma wasps, and how to propagate mosses to preserve the biodiversity of her rainforest.

She can veer totally off-piste: ‘Women have destroyed our political system, in my view.’ She launches into a diatribe against ‘the shambles of Theresa May’s miserable time in office: women sitting around cackling and squawking, wearing those earrings with huge lumps on them, looking like temple donkeys in Kerala – and poor old Theresa tiptoeing through that cornfield’. Exhilarating – but too complicated to decode.

The sight of a cut-out cat on her windowsill prompted me to mention that my cat, Bosie, aged 16, missing presumed dead for the past nine weeks, had suddenly snaked through the catflap at midnight the night before. I’d scooped him up and fed him but he instantly vanished again. ‘My cat Digger is like that,’ said Greer. ‘He’s my cat the way so many men have been my man. Never know where he is, or when I’ll see him again. He’ll turn up when all other avenues have been exhausted. Story of my life.’

To see Greer at her glamorous, brilliant best, take a look at Town Bloody Hall, the 1971 debate in which she made mincemeat of Norman Mailer with his ‘picayune’ brain. There’s a clip in Clare Beavan’s 2018 TV documentary, Germaine Bloody Greer.

People constantly seek her comments – on Mrs America, Bridget Jones and Meghan Markle, who she predicted would bolt. A TV company invited her to examine ‘power couples’, one couple being Sir Elton John and David Furnish.

‘Their two sons were born to two women, but David Furnish is the “mother” on their birth certificates,’ she says indignantly. ‘How did we give that title up? Are we going to have a world where families can be all-male?’

Well said. Carry on, Germaine!

Nine hundred years ago, Prince William, Henry I’s heir, drowned in the White Ship disaster – leading to civil war, says Charles Spencer

The shipwreck that rocked the monarchy

E

xactly 900 years ago this autumn, the English crown was rocked by the greatest maritime tragedy ever to afflict this kingdom.

Henry I had quickly brought the over-mighty aristocrats of England to heel, and had established financial discipline by founding the exchequer, still in existence today. He had also stolen Normandy from his older brother, leaving him to languish for the rest of his very long life in jail.

Finally, after four years of fighting, Henry had defeated the greatest of his many enemies, King Louis ‘the Fat’ of France. He forced Louis to recognise Henry’s sole legitimate son, William Ætheling, as rightful heir to the family’s Norman dukedom.

In late November 1120, Henry arrived in triumph at Barfleur, the port in Normandy commonly used as the springboard for voyages to Southampton.

He was surrounded by the great men and women of his court. Several of his 22 illegitimate children led the throng of aristocrats, accompanied by famous knights and the mighty bureaucrats that further underpinned his power: men whom he had promoted from obscurity to oversee the efficient governance of his realms on either side of the Channel.

Thomas FitzStephen, the skipper of a splendid vessel, the Blanche-Nef, stepped forward to greet the king. He proudly recalled how his father had served Henry’s own father, William the Conqueror, as captain of the Mora, the flagship of the Norman invasion fleet in 18 The Oldie October 2020

1066. FitzStephen now sought the honour of serving as Henry’s captain in his ship that possessed power to match its beauty: it had 50 oarsmen to supplement the wind in her sails.

But Henry, ever practical and organised, explained that he had no wish to change his arrangements – so he declined the invitation. To lighten FitzStephen’s disappointment, Henry conceded that it would be fun for William Ætheling, along with others of his children born out of wedlock, to enjoy all that the BlancheNef had to offer. ‘Blanche-Nef’ translates into English as the White Ship.

The King set off first for England, leaving the White Ship to follow later that night. The prince and his party delayed their departure, preferring to give Henry a head start while they set about a huge quantity of wine. They shared it with the crew, who were drunk before the White Ship set off.

A sea voyage was considered a dangerous endeavour by the medieval mind. The waves were viewed as impenetrable hiding places for terrors, real and imagined. Writers speculated about a menagerie of deadly

Quillebeuf Rock in Barfleur harbour

sea creatures lurking beneath. These were thought to include sea elephants, sea dragons, sea wolves, even sea goats. And, beyond these fanciful beings, there were rocks ready to crash through the finest of hulls.

When monks came to bless the White Ship before it sailed, they were chased away by revellers on the vessel. To God-fearing contemporaries, this would be viewed as the moment all was lost.

Soon after casting off, the ship struck the Quillebeuf Rock, still visible at low tide off Barfleur today. Passengers were tipped into the icy water, to die.

The prince was spirited away by his bodyguards in the one rowing boat available but screams for help from a half-sister persuaded him back. As his men rowed towards her, many of those drowning desperately clung to the skiff’s side, taking it and the prince down (pictured, right). One man survived, whose recollections added colour and immediacy to the ghastliness of it all.

When Henry I was informed of the catastrophic loss of his children, and of many of his greatest subjects, he collapsed, screaming. They say he never smiled again during his remaining 15 years. Whether or not this is true, he certainly never produced another heir.

The result of the shipwreck was civil war.

There was a time when the tragedy of the White Ship was so well known that historians apologised for excavating the hackneyed tale once more.

Winston Churchill devoted a moving page to it in A History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples. Though he curiously

DE LUAN/ALAMY

Prince William, centre, in the doomed lifeboat he sent back to save his sister

confused the identity of the initial survivors, he luxuriated in the scarcely credible heartbreak contained in the death of the king’s heir. ‘This was more than the agony of parental grief,’ Churchill wrote. ‘It portended the breakdown of a system and prospect upon the consolidation of which the whole life’s work of Henry stood.’

When, in 1905, H E Marshall wrote Our Island Story for children, she gave a roll-call of the great moments in England’s history from the arrival of the Romans to the death of Queen Victoria.

Her chapter on Henry I ignored many of his achievements but focused on the White Ship. In what was a drums-andtrumpets history of England, there was room for the melancholy of this terrible tale. Indeed, it was an essential part of the study of the Middle Ages.

I was born in 1964 and Our Island Story, for all its factual creakiness, was still being used in the classroom by teachers eager to ignite a passion for the past. The White Ship was one of my favourite tales, and I assumed it was known to all.

It was just over five years ago that

I learnt otherwise. I received a frantic call from Alison Weir, the historian.

Could I get from Northamptonshire to Maidstone in Kent immediately? She was hosting an international group of history enthusiasts on a tour learning about the queens of England. Their speaker at their final dinner, at Leeds Castle, had dropped out – could I stand in?

Alison has spoken at my literary festival several times; it was time to repay the favour. I composed the speech in a café in Maidstone, and realised that so many of the personalities I would talk about would be well-known to them – Boudicca, Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth I. I mixed in a few of the more obscure queens, including the consorts of James I and James II, but realised I still needed to add to the brew. I reached for the White Ship, which ended the direct male line stemming from William the Conqueror, leaving Henry I determined to be succeeded by his daughter Matilda, the ‘nearly queen’.

It provoked an extraordinary reaction: during the Matilda section of my talk, the audience changed from the polite nods at the bulk of my speech to genuine interest in the drama I unfurled for them. It was new to almost all of them.

A few months later, I repeated the talk, and provoked the same reaction. I realised that I was from the last generation who had been taught this period of history as a standard part of my education.

Since then, history has spiralled down from a guaranteed part of each pupil’s curriculum to a minor discipline that is quickly optional. For history teachers to remain in a job, they have to dish up Henry VIII and Hitler.

With my last book, on Charles II’s great escape at the end of the civil war – hiding in his oak tree, and all – I offered to give a talk about it at a boarding school with which I have a family link.

‘Please do!’ said the wonderfully upbeat head of history; ‘but we don’t actually teach the Stuarts…’

For eight and a half centuries, Henry I’s tragedy was a stalwart part of education. ‘No ship that ever sailed brought England such disaster,’ wrote William of Malmesbury soon after the White Ship went down. That remains the case 900 years on. But sadly few today know much about it.

The White Ship by Charles Spencer is published by William Collins on 17th September (£25) The Oldie October 2020 19

My lockdown deafness Social distancing and an earwax fatberg made Oliver Pritchett face up to the truth – he was losing his hearing

T

he woman on the telephone said she was from Kingston University’s Department of Geology. I told her rather haughtily that she must have the wrong number, but she wouldn’t go away.

It turned out she was speaking from the Kingston Specsavers department of audiology and she was ringing to confirm my appointment. This, surely, was also confirmation that I needed my hearing tested.

Since the beginning of the year, it had been becoming clear to me that things were becoming less clear to me; that my hearing was getting worse with age. The radio and TV were turned up high; in groups of friends I found myself doing more and more wise nodding while I failed to catch the drift of what they were talking about; my patient wife had to repeat everything she said.

Just as I was deciding that something must be done, lockdown came. Social distancing was a new problem. Holding conversations with neighbours standing not-so-near in the street involved more guesswork.

Meanwhile, I became a connoisseur of TV subtitles. The stage directions are enchanting. Besides an awful lot of ‘sighs’ and ‘chuckles’, there’s ‘chirruping’ and ‘sympathetic piano music’. When the detective arrives at the suspect’s house and presses the bell, you read ‘doorbell ringing’.

Then, on Father’s Day, things took a ridiculous turn. I found I was completely deaf. My family had to mime or write me notes. This went on for a week, before I was reluctantly admitted to the fortress that is our GP’s surgery.

The doctor had a quick look, said it was wax, pointed out that the practice wasn’t doing ear-syringing (of course not) and said she thought Specsavers were offering microsuction. I couldn’t hear any of this, of course – so she wrote it down. (I had to lend her a piece of paper and a pen.) The whole consultation

lasted about a minute and a half. Hardly worth sanitising one’s hands for.

There was more than a week’s wait for a Specsavers appointment and I was getting desperate. The trouble was, it turned out, there was a big demand for miscrosuction appointments. You might as well try for a ticket to Hamilton.

Lockdown had led to a national build-up of earwax – a hideous fatberg.

I was finally able to get it done in a half-deserted building in south-west London in a small upper room, opposite an abandoned gym with its herd of forlorn, riderless exercise bikes.

I could hear again, but not all that well, so I went to Specsavers for the test.

You sit in a booth wearing headphones and pressing a button whenever you hear beeps or squawks of varying faintness.

As with an eye test, it’s a struggle with one’s impulse to bluff.

The results of all this appear on a computer screen as two rather attractive mountains with different-coloured strata.

I was easily convinced it was time for hearing aids. All very unobtrusive these days. I was advised to go for those devices that nestle discreetly (and expensively) behind the ears.

A week later, I returned for a fitting.

‘And the airlines refunded everyone in full’

That part of the process was difficult: having complicated things explained through a mask and a visor when one’s hearing is iffy presents an extra problem.

The audiologist warned me that at first extraneous sounds would dominate my hearing – the rustle of papers, footsteps on carpet and so on. And my voice would sound different to me. It was true: I spoke and what came out was strident and slightly tinny. I had turned into the lovechild of Brian Blessed and a Dalek.

As I walked out into the street, I could hear a musician playing the violin in the distance, bin lorries beeping as they reversed streets away, bicycle brakes squeaking and buses wheezing. I felt I was part of the soundtrack in an arty French film.

Then there’s all the equipment you are given – the user manuals, the safety instructions, the extra gadgets and the mystery fiddly parts. It’s like coming away with a brand-new, ever-so-smart phone and also a scale-model kit for an Avro Lancaster bomber.

It would take two weeks for my brain to adjust, as the audiologist (or ‘Hearing Care Professional’) explained to me.

The first lesson I learnt, just a few yards after leaving the shop, was that behind-the-ears hearing aids (or ‘hearing instruments’, as the manual calls them) don’t go well with the strings of a face mask. There’s fierce competition between spectacles, hearing aids and mask for beyondthe-ears territory.

Things began to work out. I got used to the roar of Sellotape being deployed and the amplified clatter when I dropped a fork. Now I am not so aware of these things stuck in my ears, and the raucous rustle of the newspaper pages is calming down.

I’ve started to read the user manual and enjoy the safety hints. I see I mustn’t wear the hearing aid when I take a shower. And I mustn’t dry my hearing instruments in a microwave oven.

The Oldie October 2020 21

Harry Mount tours the Tottenham factory that’s replaced miles of railings ripped out of 40 London squares during the war

Heavenly metal

D

avid Sugarman has changed the face of London.

In the past 23 years, his family-owned factory has returned elegant railings to no fewer than 40 London squares. David, 61, has built gates for the Royal Albert Hall and Buckingham Palace and installed balustrades at the back of Downing Street to conceal Tony Blair’s air-conditioning unit.

This summer, his company, Metalcraft, set up in 1960 by his father Lewis Sugarman, has made copies of John Nash’s 1817 railings round St James’s Square. He’s also erected railings 22 The Oldie October 2020

around Gloucester Square and Hyde Park Square for their owner, the Church Commissioners. When I visit his factory in Tottenham in north London, he’s in the middle of recreating the railings around Hanover Square.

Those four jobs alone involved over 900 yards of beautiful, period-style railings returned to the city. In his career, David has laid miles and miles of railings around our loveliest garden squares.

The original railings were crazily ripped out during the war, in an admirable, doomed attempt to melt them down to be made into munitions to help the war effort. In 1941, in St James’s

Square (pictured, opposite), the railings were replaced by a wooden fence, William III’s statue was removed for safe-keeping and the Auxiliary Fire Service dug up the square for vegetables.

‘The iron wasn’t of the right quality,’ says David. ‘So they were dumped – some say in the North Sea.’ After the war, dull, utilitarian railings were installed in St James’s Square.

When Metalcraft installs new railings, the old ones are resold, stored, reused by the client elsewhere or recycled.

Sugarman, a civil engineer, took over his father’s business in 1987. In 1997, he installed the company’s first railings in

PHOTOS: EMILY BOWLING/WESTMINSTER CITY LIBRARIES

Opposite: New railings, ‘dog rails’ and gate. Above: making Hanover Square railings Left: Park Crescent spearheads.

Below: St James’s Square after removal of the railings, 1941, by Adrian Allington

Bramham Gardens in Earl’s Court.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea then commissioned his railings for Bina Gardens, Bolton Gardens and Gledhow Gardens. Commissions started to pour in. Metalcraft has now made and fitted more railings around more London squares and gardens than any other British company.

The railings projects for the squares tend to cost around half a million pounds each and take six months to install. The railings are made in a process that’s barely changed since John Nash’s railings more than two centuries ago.

Often, all David has to go on is a

pre-war photograph of the original railings. At St James’s Square, he copied a single surviving ‘dog rail’ – a short, low rail between the tall railings to keep dogs out. This surviving dog rail was dug up by the square’s gardeners. You can spot it today – it’s the only green rail in the square, surrounded by black railings.

Some pre-war railings survive in other squares, too, particularly where they protected a lightwell and so couldn’t be removed for fear someone might fall in.

The railings vary enormously from square to square. During the Victorian era, there were hundreds of foundries in London and they made thousands of

railing features: pineapples, flowers, balls, fleurs-de-lis, artichokes, urns – such as the ones in St James’s Square – and spearheads. David shows me spearheads for railings in Park Crescent

by Regent’s Park (pictured, bottom left).

Each railing gets three layers of paint: light grey, dark grey and black. According to legend, railings were painted black in mourning when Prince Albert died at the early age of 42 in 1861. Camden Council bucks the mourning trend – their railings are in Dulux Heritage Green.

Once a photo – or original dog rail – has been located, designs are drawn up in the Tottenham factory and sent to the foundry, Ballantine Castings, in Bo’ness, Scotland. All the components for the railings are manufactured in Britain.

Models of the railings are made in wood and then cast in iron in a sand bed.

Thanks to 3D printing, models can also be quickly made in resin. Laser cutting is used for ultra-intricate designs.

The components are then shipped down to London to be assembled in David’s factory.

How thrilling it is to see things actually being made in London by the 26 employees on the 30 jobs that are being done at any one time.

I saw the bases for the Hanover Square railings, in lovely, shiny, new iron.

Next to them are 1930s railings, with pretty iron trellises, being restored for the old Nestlé factory, now a residential development in Hayes, west London.

In one corner lie some plainer structures: stairs and Juliet balconies for a Travelodge in Stamford Hill. In another corner are the iron pilasters that will support the period lamps of Hanover Square – these have hollow tubes, so electric wire can run through them.

I watch a welder, careful to avoid ‘arc eye’ from looking at his torch. He’s binding the railings to horizontal holding bars (pictured, top). Another worker hammers panels of railings together.

The length of the railings and the depth of their bases have to be carefully worked out. In St James’s Square, the north end is 24 inches higher than the south end. That has to be taken into account before the railings are slotted into lead-lined mortices in reconstituted Portland Stone bases (made in Leeds).

The tops of the railings must be level.

It’s a tricky job, combining heavy metal with a light touch – but David loves it.

‘If those railings hadn’t been ripped out during the war, they could have lasted for hundreds of years more,’ he says. ‘It’s a joy to do work that will last well into my grandchildren’s lifetime.’

The Oldie October 2020 23

Jumping over the sticks is often regarded with disdain by its richer, flat-racing cousin – but not by Robert Bathurst

The thrill of the steeplechase T

he jumps season will soon be getting properly under way.

Fixtures are scheduled all year, but it’s in September that the higher-quality runners restart their training, fans of the jumps pore over lists of horses to follow and trainers get to polish their artful, non-committal, gnomic pronouncements.

As I write in Gold Cup Prattle, a hymn to the language of racing: We’re very happy with our horse Serious contender Makes plenty of appeal Could play a big part Very hopeful.

Highly regarded Fancied to go well He’s looking in good order He’s been showing all the right signs at home I’m expecting a big run Hopeful, yes, very hopeful.

The difference between the jumps and the flat, according to top jockey Tom Scudamore, ‘is akin to [that between] Rugby Union and Rugby League; they’re completely different sports, different techniques, different ways of training’.

There’s a snobbery, too, towards the jumps from its richer cousin. I went to Newmarket one autumn and tried to go to the National Horse Racing Museum, which was manned but shut. It closes every year, they said, ‘when racing stops’.

I muttered that there was a full jump-racing calendar that very day, but I was talking the wrong code. To their credit, they let me in anyway.

24 The Oldie October 2020

What is it about a crowded jumps meeting that so appeals? I got a whiff of realisation at the Cheltenham Festival in 2009. I’d taken a day away from a vigil at my father’s hospital bed. He died within a week; my mother had died the month before. I don’t pretend that these circumstances are anything out of the ordinary but, on a personal level, I was deep in a misery I hadn’t met before.

At the festival, in among the uncompromisingly fervid crowd, I understood that everyone there was also in a kind of freefall, aware of the crazy uncertainties and danger of the sport and brooking the shrugging acceptance that chance has the upper hand. Walking with the throng, I felt we were all in one of those fairground attractions in which the floor wobbled, sank and rose.

Order and rational predictability could go hang. This was real life.

With the jumps, you can follow the career of a horse for, perhaps, eight years. The males are gelded – just try straddling that birch hedge, sir; so of course the journalism after a race has nothing to do with stud value.

With luck, you can witness a horse develop from novice to champion, to its comeback, to its retirement race as it’s applauded back to the stands.

My favourite horse of all time was Moscow Flyer, the Champion Chase

‘His horse ran off but Charlie didn’t.

Doctors put up the dreaded screens’

winner, trained in Ireland by Jessica Harrington. Also, more obviously, Kauto Star: two Cheltenham Gold Cups and five-times winner of the King George VI Chase. His final, unlikely King George victory in 2011 caused me to shout so excitedly at the TV that my family gave worried glances at one another.

I’m a weedy punter; it’s not the betting that grabs me, but the language of racing and the stories the sport throws up.

My love for it all started with the writing of Alastair Down in the Racing Post. He is to racing what Neville Cardus is to cricket, Norman Mailer to boxing.

When he was a broadcaster, his instant reading of a race was masterful and his phrases perfectly turned. In his role as a journalist, his prose, sometimes teetering on the edge of what sports journalism fans might call McIlvanney Purple, never fails to be hair-raising.

He conveys better than anyone the soul of an activity that is harsh, sometimes unforgiving and riven with unassessable risk. Yet it’s underpinned by a mutual respect and regard held by all its fierce combatants. Proper sport.

The racing industry – both codes but especially the jumps – is insecure and feels the need to widen its public appeal.

The problem is that the business model is so rooted in gambling – as it has always been.

ITV has recently extended its coverage by three years. It’s done a great job in selling the sport as an entertainment, but the revenue from media coverage, £25 million, is a fraction of what the industry needs to receive from the betting levy. A pandemic only makes the situation worse. I’d better do my duty

Bathurst’s favourite: Barry Geraghty on Moscow Flyer, Cheltenham, 2002

ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY

and punt more heavily, making what Jeffrey Bernard called ‘contributions to the Joe Coral Benevolent Fund’.

Meanwhile, back in the paddock, the trainer is still talking up his chances in Gold Cup Prattle: The horse is progressive He’s well in himself There’s a big whisper for him He acts on the ground He’s coming into himself Today will answer a lot of questions Likely to be a very warm order I’d say hopeful, yes, very hopeful.

Charlie Deutsch is a 24-year-old jockey who epitomises the physical hard graft of his trade. In the past two years, he’s earned an average of £450,000 for his owners in prize money. In the 2018 Grand National, he fell heavily at Becher’s. His horse ran off but Charlie didn’t. The doctors put the dreaded green screens round him. Eventually he got up and was OK to

walk; OK enough to travel the next day to Sussex and ride a winner at Plumpton.

I asked him why, after such a rattling fall, he didn’t take a day off, the way any normal human being would.

He said, ‘I just remember being 16, when you’re desperate to get a ride. You have that driven into you; you don’t want it to stop – there’s always the fear of missing out on a winner.’

There is no other sport that demands that level of physical and mental robustness, combined with the reality that at least eight per cent of the time you will lose. Scudamore, who at 38 is a wise elder of the weighing room, told me, ‘The one thing in racing you can’t be is a prima donna. If you are, you’re going to get kicked in the face.’ His father, Peter, eight times Champion Jockey, warned his son that for the majority of the time a career in racing is a disappointment. It must make the winning so much sweeter.

Constantly losing or, rather, constantly not winning very often demands that jockeys appear positive and constructive, however slowly their horse has run. The same is true for

trainers. And, above all, the post-race excuses must be plausible.

After a race, I often veer away from the winners’ enclosure, and head to the area where the also-rans are unsaddling:

Fought valiantly.

Travelled well.

Hampered three out, He was funny in his wind, Unlucky.

The jockey is fighting to keep the ride; the trainer is fighting to keep the horse in the yard; the owners are sucking their teeth and thinking of vet bills.

The disappointed trainer is stopped by a camera crew and asked to comment:

The main thing is he got home safe That’s … all that matters.

We’ll run him again before long And, yes, we’re very hopeful.

So, as the new jumps season gets into its stride with all its uncertainties, I’ll take my lead from racing, check life’s odds and remain, as ever, hopeful.

The Oldie October 2020 25

A century ago, three heiresses lit up the Roaring Twenties in Ireland’s loveliest houses with charm and gaiety. By Emily Hourican

The glorious Guinness girls

Three sisters: Aileen (1904-99), Maureen (1907-98) and Oonagh Guinness (1910-95)

J

ohn Huston called them ‘witches – lovely ones to be sure. They are all transparent-skinned, with pale hair and light blue eyes. You can very nearly see through them.’

They were the three Glorious Guinness Girls: sisters with, between them, eight marriages, 13 children, three very grand houses and three very distinct personalities.

Aileen, the eldest, was elegant and social. She moved through a jet-set world of movie stars, society heiresses and international playboys, including the Aga Khan and Ursula Andress.

Maureen, the middle child (with all the look-at-me desire to shock that being the middle child can animate), made a 27 The Oldie October 2020

virtue of her connections, conducting a lifelong obsession with royalty and the Queen Mother in particular.

Oonagh, the youngest and sweetest (and, she believed, her father’s favourite), was almost a bohemian. A friend to artists and poets, she kept open house at Luggala, just outside Dublin. There she entertained Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, Claud Cockburn and, later,

‘Churchill whipped him across the face, catching his eye and scarring him for life’

when her son Tara grew up, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and John Paul Getty II. They were the daughters of Arthur Ernest Guinness, second son of the first Earl of Iveagh (these were the brewing Guinnesses, rather than the banking Guinnesses or clerical Guinnesses).

His younger brother, Walter, later Lord Moyne, was Minister of State in the Middle East, while the elder, Rupert, once shared a governess with Winston Churchill – and lived to bear the scars.

The boys were once bought a toy harness and coachman’s whip. ‘You be the horse,’ the young Churchill said.

When Rupert didn’t want to, Churchill whipped him across the face, catching his eye and scarring him for life.

Aileen was born in 1904, Maureen in 1907 and Oonagh in 1910. They spent their childhoods mostly in Ireland, at a house called Glenmaroon which was actually two houses. There was a home cinema, an indoor swimming pool, even a coal scuttle that played a tune.

In 1923, the Guinness family set off on a round-the-world yacht trip, aboard the Fantôme II. When they came back to Britain a year later, they began their social careers properly. They were just in time to join in with the Bright Young Things – those giddy young people who were too young to fight in the First World War, with a complicated mix of shame at not having joined up, along with a feeling that life was short and should be lived fully and outrageously.

Throughout the Roaring Twenties, the Guinnesses were part of that group that orbited around Baby and Zita Jungman, Stephen Tennant and their cousin, Bryan Guinness, then married to Diana Mitford.

The Guinness girls soon married: Aileen in 1927 to Brinsley Sheridan Bushe Plunket; Oonagh in 1929 to Philip Kindersley; and Maureen in 1930 to Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood.

Each had £1 million (around £65 million today) settled on her by Ernest. Aileen moved back to Ireland, to Luttrellstown Castle, where she threw herself into whatever society Ireland had to offer at the time – mostly revolving round horses.

The marriage didn’t last – by the start of the Second World War, Aileen and Brinny were divorced. Aileen sat the war out in America, leaving her daughters with Oonagh – she by then was also divorced, and remarried to Lord Oranmore and Browne (whom her father nicknamed ‘the Stallion’). They lived at Castle MacGarrett, County Mayo, in a jolly mix of his five children from his first marriage, her two children with Philip, their son Garech, and now Aileen’s daughters.

Maureen, meanwhile, had become Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava barely two weeks after her marriage, when her husband’s father was killed in a plane crash. Clandeboye, the vast family house in County Down, had a 3,000-acre estate.

Maureen preferred to spend time in London, where she continued to give lavish parties, distinguished by practical jokes described by the poet John Betjeman as ‘pretty good hell’.

Her husband, the new Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was killed in 1945 at Ava in Burma, from where his ancestor had taken his title. On the day of his death, he wrote home to his children, 28 The Oldie October 2020

Guinness is good for you: Hourican’s new novel about the three heiresses

‘God bless you, my darling Perdita and Caroline and Sheridan … work hard, love your mother and daddy … I’ll write again soon.’

Oonagh divorced Lord Oranmore and Browne in 1950. They had been through several tragedies together. Dominick’s daughter Biddy died of pneumonia. In 1943, a child born to the couple died after two days and before being named.

Shortly afterwards, Oonagh lost custody of her son Gay despite a protracted court battle. In 1946, her daughter, Tessa, died aged 14 after she had an allergic reaction to a diphtheria injection.

After the divorce, Oonagh moved to Luggala, a house described as ‘the most decorative honeypot in Ireland’. Visitors talk about parties that lasted days, with guests falling asleep wherever they happened to be, sometimes midconversation, then waking and starting over again, fuelled by champagne and Bloody Marys.

Oonagh at Luggala and Aileen, by then back at Luttrellstown, embodied the twin peaks of Irish social life at the time. As Oonagh’s children, Garech and Tara, grew up, they brought her into the worlds of Irish music. Garech was a lifetime lover of Irish culture and it was his record label that launched The Chieftains.

Tara was a kind of It Boy of his time, a haunter of nightclubs, a friend of models and pop stars, and inspiration for the

‘Parties lasted days, with guests falling asleep, then waking and starting again’

Beatles song A Day in the Life after his death in a car crash in 1966, at the age of only 21.

In 1957 Oonagh was married for a third time, to Miguel Ferreras, a Cuban couturier. He managed to run through a large amount of her considerable wealth before she discovered he was in fact a former Spanish fascist who’d taken the name of a friend’s deceased brother. She had her marriage dissolved in 1965, on the grounds that ‘Ferreras’ was legally dead, and reverted to the title Lady Oranmore and Browne. Oonagh died in 1995; Maureen died in 1998.

Aileen’s second marriage was to a Yugoslavian interior decorator who, like Oonagh’s third husband, was flamboyant and madly extravagant, and ran through much of her money before they divorced in 1965. She died in 1999.

Long before writing about the Guinnesses, I read about them. Guinness is a name that crops up constantly; in history, politics, business, social diaries and other people’s biographies. In Ireland, many of our state buildings, including the Irish Embassy in London and the official Irish state guest house, were once homes of various Guinnesses.

It was Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh who really captured my imagination. So much money, glamour and beauty; such privileged and amusing lives; but also plenty of heartache and tragedy.

Of the three, only Maureen seemed really to enjoy herself. Aileen and Oonagh both appeared burdened by their wealth and at heart rather unhappy.

Romantic love was clearly a struggle for all three – and motherhood not easy, except maybe for Oonagh, who tragically lost three children; Maureen and Aileen both lost husbands to the war.

Their lives were irresponsible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t painful. And yet all three had a kind of charming, insouciant gaiety. They took the business of frivolity seriously, and were correspondingly anachronistic. When a generation of women was, for the first time, considering careers and looking further than their own homes for fulfilment, the Guinnesses were content with diaphanous roles as muses and patrons.

It’s impossible to write about real, unknown people and not ask myself whether I’d have liked them.

I think I would have. They fascinated me enough to make me want to write a novel about them. I did so – and they still fascinate me.

The Glorious Guinness Girls by Emily Hourican is published by Headline Review (£20)

Poetic injustice As poetry disappears from the curriculum, Roger Lewis recalls the poems he learnt at his Welsh comprehensive

O

ne of my favourite films is Hunky Dory, set in South Wales in the hot summer of 1976, when the grass looked like burnt paper.

A school is putting on a rock-music adaptation of The Tempest, and the mood is somehow authentically Shakespearean and magical; everyone on the brink of moving on; the golden or straw-coloured light; hallucinatory moments.

I was there at the time – at Bassaleg Comprehensive, near Newport – and so this film has always had a powerful effect, particularly the epilogue, about the characters’ futures, where we see the gorgeous girls are now fat old bags; the nice-looking boys are bald, paunchy, divorced or prematurely dead. The teachers are mostly dead.

Not very many people ever fulfil their promise is the unspoken theme. But putting on a play like that, learning and reciting the verse, can be looked back on as a high point in anyone’s life, when everyone was brave and laughing.

What will today’s children have to look back on? They have not been taught to appreciate our sensual and intuitive language, the sentences and phrases that have, as D H Lawrence said, their own ‘blood of emotion and instinct’ running through them, like fire in a ruby.

From next year, poetry will be dropped as a compulsory topic for GCSE pupils. English literature is ‘out of tune with the times’, according to Ofqual, which is not an Arabic word but the disgusting-sounding Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, which failed to distinguish itself in the A-level charade.

Local-authority budgets for public libraries were slashed by £30 million in 2017/18 alone. Libraries that haven’t closed completely – their stock flogged on Amazon for 1p a book – have become ‘community hubs’, where you can pick up leaflets on cycle trails or mobile

chiropodists. Apart from large-print editions of Maeve Binchy, the written word is not given much of a look-in any longer.

Why has this philistinism, which amounts to Nazi book-burning, happened? Larkin wrote poems ‘to preserve things I have seen … both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.’

Betjeman wrote to capture the little, forgotten, obscure instances in the British scene: gas lamps, railway stations, fish knives, bungalows, sponge cakes, wet shoes – the surface of things that reveal a way of life.

The instinct to preserve is now anathema. The past not only means nothing; it has to be reprehended. (‘You do well … to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed,’ said Goebbels.) Men prior to the millennium, runs the orthodoxy, were wicked and despotic; women oppressed, not permitted to vote or be lesbians if they felt like it – everything was a series of negatives. The Empire, which gave much of the world its legislature, engineering marvels, medicine and the English language itself, was only evil.

Children don’t know things because their teachers don’t. I have met teachers who have never heard of Orson Welles or Muriel Spark. They don’t read for pleasure, or watch black-and-white movies, and they never stray outside the syllabus. The word I’d use is thick.

Anyone with talent quickly resigns in despair.

‘Were I an undergraduate today, I’d probably get chucked out’

I was taught by people with real degrees from proper universities. They knew about history and its context. A properly educated, grown-up person would know about opera, films, plays and the latest books.

My parents had subscriptions to the TLS, LRB and New Yorker. The issues posted on to me were covered in blood, as my dad was a butcher.

Self-improvement – making yourself middle-class if you were working-class – was an unceasing process. You were applauded for doing this.

At Bassaleg, we were encouraged to be original – to treat exams like a gymkhana.

The playfulness of the intellect was prized. Discrimination wasn’t a dirty word; it meant the ability to distinguish good from bad. But in 2020, when Firsts are handed out for spelling one’s name right, blandness and conformity are what everyone wants; otherwise, cross people materialise wanting to pull statues down.

To voice an opinion is to prompt shame and horror, in case a multicultural, transgender vegan gets upset.

The cultural background and assumptions of my early life have gone; the pleasure principle is mistrusted.

Poetry can be jettisoned from the curriculum without compunction, as its meanings and purpose are lost. Were I an undergraduate today, I’d probably fail and get chucked out. Yet all over South Wales, people in their sixties can quote reams of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Hopkins, Keats and Owen. None of our younger equivalents now, everywhere in the British Isles, has any aesthetic sense.

The modern world and the modern heart need a study of poetry: a knowledge of, and feeling for, the strength and simplicity of language, and the way it can bring back ‘sunken sensations’, to borrow Rilke’s phrase.

Poetry doesn’t mean florid, extraneous or obscure. It gives people a sense of their separate existence, which is what the characters experience in Hunky Dory.

The Oldie October 2020 31

Town Mouse

The Dark Ages were really the Light Ages tom hodgkinson

Over the summer, the Mouse family braved the threat of coronavirus – possibly the least scary plague ever – and went to Tuscany.

While there, I visited Arezzo and once again had cause to reflect on the beauty, practicality and revolutionary nature of the medieval city-state.

At the back of the 14th-century Basilica de San Francesco, we saw the movie-like fresco Legends of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca, a stunning bit of late-medieval art.

These Italian cities not only produced such brilliant art and architecture, but also were self-governing and predated modern nationalism with all its arbitrary borders and wars.

This city and others like it, built between 1,000 and 500 years ago, elevate you somehow; they make you feel like a citizen, even though you’re a tourist.

They are civilised.

When I praise the Middle Ages to my friend Mr Vole and other worldly friends, they laugh at me. They’ve been duped by Puritan and Enlightenment propaganda which characterised those 500 years of peace and equality as an age governed by superstition. No one could read or write, everyone died at 35 and we all lived in pigsties – or so they think.

Thanks to Edward Gibbon, we call them the Dark Ages.

These calumnious caricatures are recycled by people who ought to know better. A new book, The Light Age: A Medieval Journey of Discovery, shows that the medievals were scientifically highly sophisticated. The author, Seb Falk, a Cambridge academic, says the myth began in the 16th century, when theologian William Camden wrote that the Middle Ages were ‘overcaste with dark clouds’.

Others perpetuated this lazy portrait, including Gibbon and Carl Sagan. More 32 The Oldie October 2020

recently, TV presenter Dan Snow tweeted that the Middle Ages lacked ‘the most basic understanding of scientific method’ and embraced ‘quackery’. Meanwhile, he said, everyone got dysentery.

Feeling superior to the Middle Ages is a simple strategy for us to feel good about our own dismal, violent, ugly, moronic age.

Falk’s book demonstrates the immense breadth and open-mindedness of medieval scientific enquiry. This is the age that invented clocks, astrolabes, universities, modern musical notation and innovative calendars. Islamic astronomy, he said, enjoyed enormous prestige among Christians.

During the Middle Ages, we developed sophisticated economic systems that sought to avoid exploiting the poor through a ban on usury. David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, shows that medieval Europe more or less

completely banned slavery because it was abhorrent to Christian ethics.

It returned in the 17th century, when even the peace-loving Quakers became slave-owners. Graeber also shows that once you got past the age of one or two, you had a good chance of getting to or exceeding your three score years and ten.

The medievals developed the idea of the commune, the Italian word for city-state. If I had to build my ideal town today, it would be medieval in spirit. As in central Arezzo, there would be no cars and electric scooters would be banned.

Life would be lived on the streets, where we would sit all day drinking coffee and beer and doing nothing in particular. People would shout from their balconies and, every week, a public meeting would be held in the main square. A new mayor would be elected annually to prevent creeping corruption, and work would be organised around a system of guilds to keep quality high and prices reasonable.

We would have laws against undercutting to prevent monopolistic vehicles like Amazon from emerging.

And, rather than being an Italian, you would identify as a Florentine, a Pisan or a Roman.

Colourful flags would hang from the balconies, and in every church you’d find awe-inspiring frescoes. An education in grammar, rhetoric and logic could be got for free at the monastery. The poor and lame would be well looked-after by the charities of the city.

There’d be no chain stores. Instead, a collection of small business run by their owners would sell musical instruments, cakes, fine cloths, wooden furniture, beer, wine, locks, bread, cured meats, cheeses, medicines, wool, olive oil and leather goods.

After lunch, everything would close and we’d have a nap. Work would resume at around four and go on till six, after which we’d get together for chatting, dancing and drinking.

Yes, I am aware that the Middle Ages was also the time of the bonkers practice of indulgences – probably the central factor in the era’s undoing. The idea that you could pay money to go to heaven, or that your sins would be forgiven if you died in a crusade, was clearly very weird.

No wonder it was condemned by the reformers like Luther and Calvin.

But for a Town Mouse with a firm belief in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the contemplation of beauty, lots of days off and a dignified life for all, medieval Europe was the ideal nest.

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler (www.idler.co.uk)

Country Mouse

My tip from Boris’s sister?

Make ramblers pay giles wood

I received anecdotal evidence that Britain was full up, jam-packed or ram-packed (like Jeremy Corbyn’s Virgin train) with staycationers.

It came in a telephone conversation with younger brother Pip, who confirmed that he arrived at dawn with his second son to climb the foothills of Snowdon. He had only just squeezed into the last available car-parking space before a fleet of coaches arrived with air brakes hissing as they disgorged cohorts of fellow solitude-seekers from the great conurbations of the north-west.

Pip, unlike his older brother, being a well-adjusted, altruistic, useful member of society, spent a large part of his one day on the mountains with his son, guiding a hysterical woman from Ormskirk in tears and flip-flops along a precipitous, narrow ledge featuring loose rocks to safer pastures below.

The good-shepherd gene seems to have passed me by. When Mary asked me to give a malodorous, bedraggled, millennial, lost walker, currently sheltering in the village telephone box, a lift back to Devizes, I said it would cost him. Especially in a time of corona! ‘It’s important to instil in young people survival skills or you’ll foster dependency culture,’ I mansplained to Mary.

‘My time – even at only labouring rates – is worth £30 an hour, there’s the cost of fuel, and that would be waiving my normal upholstery depreciation and disinfecting charge.’

‘Are you serious?’ she shuddered.

‘Oh yes, entirely. I believe strongly in self-reliance.’

I was inspired to refuse the request for transportation by no less a personage than the Prime Minister’s sister, whose Exmoor bolthole sits astride a well-worn regional footpath dotted with reassuring wooden fingerposts. These hobbitfriendly posts with babyish lettering give

no indication of the potentially wild and forbidding nature of the treacherous abysses unfolding on the moor beyond her garden gate.

So frequently was Rachel Johnson called upon in her downtime by ramblers sporting injuries, varying from minor sprains to mini-strokes, that she considered posting a noticeboard of charges based on a sliding scale for services ranging from provision of Elastoplast, tea and sympathy right up to urgent transportation to A & E. Seasoned observers of lowland shires like my own have noticed an explosion of visitor footfall at every point on the compass. Time was when the wife and I would train powerful Chinese binoculars onto tiny, nit-like figures in the landscape to see if we recognised them. The wife hates my comparing human beings to headlice, but I’ve always been haunted

by Voltaire’s comparison of a city to an ‘anthill teeming with assassins’ (la petite fourmilière).

But that parlour game is over. ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus up there now,’ grunted a local terrierman.

‘Yeah. Though them says Piccadilly Circus is not what it was, what with COVID,’ I replied in the thick Wiltshire accent I use to ingratiate myself

‘I’m not sure we should have flocked to the beach like this’

with terriermen, even though Mary says it can only enrage them as they know perfectly well I’m not a local (after only 32 years here).

According to those in touch with social media, it is commonplace for young people – anyone under 60 – to immediately share details, including GPS references, of desirable locations that they come across. You know this has happened when a cavalcade of strange cars, as in a Renault Clio advert, suddenly arrives in a remote hamlet.

According to Lady Sanderson in the big house, ‘Can I help you?’ used to be the question that sent a shiver down the spines of trespassers. When she posed it the other day to a group exuding entitlement as they wandered through her woodland garden, one replied eagerly, ‘Yeah, please. Can you tell us the way to the AONB?’ Stranger scenes I have witnessed in the village during my short tenure in geological time here. None stranger than a family of grinning picnickers sitting on rugs in the church graveyard while their kids, more used to soft-play areas, clambered over gravestones.

I observed only last week a motley crew parking in a passing place and squinting in the strong sunlight as if they had just been abducted by aliens and returned to Earth. Disorientated, they walked a few yards and then embarked on a lively discussion as to where to go next.

The majority of staycationers head for the hills, where they fan out in all directions in the hope of achieving a wilderness experience – which, according to Marion Shoard in The Theft of the Countryside, downland can no longer deliver.

But this outfit were absolute beginners at orienteering. They quickly settled for a footpath sign and plodded through a hobby farmer’s garden, where they admired an ornamental pond sporting recently purchased garden art, as if our English sylvan scenes needed embellishment.

If ever a humanitarian gesture were called for, this was the moment and I was prompted to forget preaching about self-reliance and tell the clueless troop that all above them was the best walking country in the world, with springy, herb-rich turf propelling them upwards through clouds of azure-blue butterflies, each step revealing a progressively widening horizon.

But just as I emerged from my viewpoint – lurking behind a nut tree in another man’s orchard – I saw these troops had suffered low morale. Like a human centipede, they had squeezed themselves back into a people-carrier, and had already driven away.

The Oldie October 2020 33

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Williamson’s war on the clever poor Algorithm. A word I sort of knew the meaning of but in a vague, it’s-somethingto-do-with-maths-and-computers-and-Idon’t-really-care kind of way.

Until suddenly I did care; it was the application of the algorithm that made such a mess of things – along with the determination of a man who probably understood the algorithm as little as I did but was determined to adhere to it.

Gavin Williamson’s stubbornness – not his U-turn – was what marked him out as a stupid and craven man. And his excuses, when he did finally give in to sense, only underlined those attributes.

From the moment it was announced (in March) that there were to be no public exams this summer, the top priority of anyone even tangentially involved in education should have been to create a coherent and fair (as fair as possible) way to award the grades.

Yet Williamson took almost a week after the fiasco of the A-level results to say he was sorry, saying that he had realised ‘over the weekend’ that there might be some sort of a problem.

Perhaps, after all, the best way of giving the grades was to ask the teachers who had worked with these students for two years.

For us who work in schools with 11- to 16-year-olds, the announcement came just

How many times do you come across an acronym in the middle of an article, with no explanation, as though everyone, of course, knows what it stands for?

After spending bewildered moments raking back through the text in vain, I either make a guess or, confused and irritated, abandon the whole thing.

What is an acronym? The word comes from the Greek akron – ‘end, tip’ – plus onoma – ‘name’. It is defined by the Concise Oxford English 34 The Oldie October 2020

in time. Our school would have suffered on account of the algorithm, which downgraded state-school A-level pupils because they came from a poor area or were in a school without a good success rate.

Williamson’s original A-level results had one very direct result – they penalised the clever poor. And, by doing so, they created a deep distrust in the system which claims to be all about equality of education.

When I went online to view my pupils’ results, I knew there would be no surprises.

So, in comparison with other years when my heart is in my mouth for my borderline pupils, the emotion was a little flat.

Yet there was still something marvellous in seeing a 5 (good pass) for one EAL (English as an additional language) boy.

He was predicted a low 4 by the computer when he entered the school but had been working at a 5, verging on a 6, by the time I entered my predicted grades.

The machine would have given him a 4 – he’s an immigrant; his family is not well off; our school is Ofsted ‘good’ but in a socioeconomically low catchment area.

The machine would not have known how hard and determinedly he had worked, in a class often interrupted by foul-mouthed outbursts and stormingsout (not by me, I hasten to add).

And the machine would have given a couple of girls in that class a 4 or 5 as the machine would not have known how little they came to school, how very little work they did or how disruptive they were. I could have as little borne to see them be given 5s as I could to see this boy be given a 4. ​So for this year’s GCSE students, at least, there was a fair and happy outcome.

But what about the A-level students whose university places were given away before the results reversal and who are now having to settle for universities or courses that are not those they would have wanted? Clever, hardworking, ambitious students who still face the chaos from the fallout? What about next year’s A-level and GCSE students who have missed out on a chunk of learning – or at any rate a chunk of teaching?

Even if next year’s schooling is not interrupted by a second spike or a second closure, these students are at a huge disadvantage. Whom can they trust?

Whom can we trust? I don’t think there’s a teacher in the land who thinks that Williamson should stay in office.

In a week or so, we all go back to school.

Our children may have finally been given the grades that we deemed to be fair – but we are still a long way from satisfied.

RIP useless acronyms Dictionary as a word formed from the initial letters of other words, eg AIDS: ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’.

There is even an acronym for the word ‘acronym’: ‘abbreviated coded rendition of name yielding meaning’.

Acronyms often occur in medical, educational, military or business jargon.

They began as convenient and succinct tools for

specialists, but now hinder communication rather than helping it.

Some acronyms seem particularly inappropriate, eg NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence – considering the painful pronouncements they make.

Other acronyms are spot-on: BLEATERS are ‘born losers expending all their energy rubbishing success’.

Or how about BURP – ‘bankrupt, unemployed rejected person’?

Sometimes acronyms are chosen deliberately to avoid a name considered undesirable. In Canada, the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party was quickly renamed the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance.

You can see why.

BARBARA GEERE

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

Mass wisteria dishes up trouble When we started subscribing to satellite television, I made the mistake of being out. I left Mr Home Front in charge when the engineer arrived to install everything.

When I came home, I found the dish – larger than I’d anticipated – was not placed up high like every other customer’s, but fixed to the wall four feet above the ground next to our patio doors.

The back of our house looked like a GCHQ listening post.

‘Why have they put it there?’ I asked.

‘Why shouldn’t it be there?’ said Mr HF with the air of shifty feigned innocence that accompanies all his domestic disasters. ‘Because it’s so ugly!

It’s ridiculous! And the wisteria will cover it in no time and then it won’t work!’

‘Of course it will – these dishes are all high­-tech now.’

‘But I specifically asked you to make sure they fix it high up. Why did you let him get away with just putting it there?’

‘Stop going on. It’ll be fine.’

But it wasn’t fine. Every time there was heavy rain or wind – interference.

Every time the wisteria grew – interference. Mr HF dealt with this latter annoyance by hacking the wisteria back intermittently with a pair of shears. This infuriated me; it’s the only plant I’ve grown successfully. Repeated requests that he get the company back to relocate the dish fell on deaf ears.

Wisteriagate came to a head during lockdown. Mr HF got the shears out for some more hacking as interference stopped him enjoying Where Eagles Dare.

I rushed outside and stood in front of the wisteria like a deranged eco-warrior protecting an ancient tree from developers. ‘I’m not budging until you phone that company!’

‘Why don’t you phone them?’

‘I did. They’ll only speak to the account-holder…’

Days later, a text from Betty alerted me to the fact that not one but three satellite engineers had arrived while I was upstairs painting: ‘Come down quick! They’re refusing to move the dish and Daddy’s letting them get away with it.’

I downed my brushes and dashed downstairs to the patio. Here, to my dismay, Mr HF was holding court, cracking jokes and calling them ‘lads’ in the same blokey voice he adopted for the pest-control man when we had rats.

‘I understand there’s a problem with

the dish,’ I interrupted, with a hint of Penelope Keith.

‘Er, yeah,’ said engineer No 1. ‘That dish can’t get a signal ’cos of that bush.’

He tossed his head towards a tall, purple-leafed perennial in the garden.

‘And the wisteria,’ I said. ‘Whenever the tendrils grow, the signal fails. That’s why we’ve called you out – to get the dish moved up higher.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Why not?’

‘Health and safety.’

‘But it’s your job to move it!’ daughter Betty exclaimed from inside the house.

Everyone fell silent at this sudden unexpected contribution.

‘No need for rudeness, young lady,’ said No 1.

‘Very rude,’ agreed No 2.

‘Yeah,’ said No 3.

‘But surely you chaps are climbing ladders all day?’ I asked, like Ian Carmichael in I’m All Right Jack.

‘Yeah, but it’s all red tape now,’ said No 1. ‘We’ve got to get permssion from the office to go on a sloping roof like that.’

‘But it doesn’t slope all that much.’

‘Sorry, those are the rules.’

The others murmured agreement. The only character missing from this tableau was shop steward Fred Kite, crying, ‘Everyone out!’

‘How about the side of the house, then?’ I persisted.

‘Sloping roof?’ asked No 1 suspiciously.

‘No – it’s a flat roof. I sometimes go up there to clean the landing window. It’s perfectly safe!’

‘If it’s that safe, you do it, then!’ blurted out No 2. They all burst into appreciative laughter – including Mr HF, who stopped abruptly when he saw me glowering at him.

The side of the house was ruled logistically tricky. So it was back to square one.

Eventually, Team Home Front bored them into submission.

No 1 reluctantly went away and phoned for permission to climb a ladder.

Minutes later, they returned from their van wearing hard hats and grim expressions, as though they were going into Chernobyl after the explosion.

One dismantled the old satellite dish and the other held the ladder, while the third got on to the roof and installed an upgraded one to the wall in less time than we’d taken talking about it.

As they were packing away, I poked my head out of the upstairs window and called down a cheery thank-you. ‘It looks lovely,’ I added absurdly when no one responded.

‘We’d better get overtime for this,’ I overheard No 1 say.

‘Too right.’

‘Yeah.’

They left without saying goodbye.

At the time of writing, the wisteria is in full bloom. The satellite dish stands where it should have been in the first place. And Where Eagles Dare is back on the box.

The only interference now is Mr HF quoting Richard Burton’s lines before he says them.

The Oldie October 2020 35

Letter from America

No driving licence? You’re going to jail

Full of frontier spirit, Americans arrested – and befriended – me ivo dawnay A perennial mystery about America is how a nation that rightly prides itself on friendliness and abundant, generous hospitality can be capable of such irrational spasms of anger, aggression and violence.

The people who, after all, invented saccharine sentiment with ‘Have a nice day’ are more likely than most to make sure you have a nasty one if you so much hint that you might ‘step outta line’.

People are nice; officials can be lethal.

Anyone who has negotiated the terrifying ordeal of immigration at JFK Airport will know the feeling. The signage alone, in the ‘Walk’/‘Don’t Walk’ imperious brevity of nearby Manhattan, reminds visitors of their inferior status.

Everywhere there are official notices barking orders to do this and not do that.

Foreigners are unashamedly described as ‘aliens’. After nervously handing in their landing card promising not to subvert the US Constitution – ‘Sole purpose of visit’, one British wag is said to have written before, no doubt, being frogmarched back to the plane – visitors are treated as such, fingerprinted and brusquely interviewed by blackuniformed officials determined to show who is boss.

Yet drive only 50 miles inland from the coastal cities and the default mode of the American in the street is kindness itself. This Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of the US character is exemplified by the current presidential campaign, with the incumbent in the role of the triggerhappy marshal and the challenger as the good ol’ boy chewing a straw on a fence.

My own experience of US authority is a mix of good and peculiar. I was once parked outside my home in Chevy Chase, an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, when the familiar, dreaded ‘whoop, whoop’ preceded the flashing blue lights of a police patrol vehicle pulling up behind me.

36 The Oldie October 2020

‘Don’t get out of the vehicle!’ boomed from the loudspeaker. ‘Put your hands on the wheel, where I can see them.’ The officer strolled over, hand on holster, to issue the command to see my driver’s licence which I suddenly remembered was in my wallet, 30 yards away across the front lawn.

‘I am terribly sorry, officer,’ I gabbled in as British an accent as I could muster.

‘I live here. I forgot to bring it with me – can I get it out of the house?’

‘DO NOT MOVE,’ came the reply.

Within five minutes, a second patrol car arrived, I was removed from the car, slammed against it, frisked, cuffed and on my way to a cell at the local station.

My wife collected me an hour later.

The other occasion was when my son was taken ill. Only minutes after our 911 call, half a dozen enormous and jovial firemen in full gear were trampling through our living room. Why the Fire Department, we asked?

‘We are always the first citizen responders – it’s historic,’ came the reply; the ambulance would be here in a minute.

With the US still in the Black Lives Matter semi-crisis after George Floyd’s killing and the centre of the liberal city of Portland, Oregon, still in the hands of the citizenry and a no-go area for cops, is time up for the heavy hand of US officialdom? And if so, why?

A South Carolinian lawyer friend says part of the reason for the lethality of US law enforcement is in response to a generalised culture of suspicion of big government, a fear of the ‘other’ or

‘I was removed from the car, slammed against it, frisked and cuffed’

outsiders and a frontier fierceness in defending property rights.

‘In the South, the view was always to have as little to do with government as possible – it was there for the hard edge of society to keep those other people in line and to defend your property.

‘Furthermore,’ he added, ‘it was largely Southerners who pioneered the opening of the West and brought their culture there – a belief in the primacy of the individual and that government was merely a necessary evil.’

An academic paper from 2017, published in the American Journal of Public Health, established a clear correlation between fatal police shootings and localities where firearm ownership was commonplace and unencumbered by restrictions.

In New England, where Second Amendment rights are most inhibited by background checks on gun ownership, police killings are 51 per cent lower than in the lowest quartile where guns are commonplace and easier to obtain. It is, at least in part, the police’s own fear of being shot at that leads them to shoot first and ask questions second.

All that said, it might just be that it is the same frontier spirit that makes Americans so overwhelmingly friendly and hospitable – a readiness to welcome the stranger as a necessary counterweight, if you like, to an in-built dislike of officialdom. It’s tough out there; you’d better come inside.

The proof of the pudding is in the travelling. In almost six weeks touring around the presidential primaries this year, I stayed in hotels for less than a week. The rest of the time I was a guest of supremely welcoming and generous hosts, each determined I should indeed ‘have a nice day’.

Ivo Dawnay was the Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent

Postcards from the Edge

The joy of singing away the blues

TOBY MORISON

With hymns banned, Mary Kenny does a duet with the diva of Deal I’ve found it dispiriting that hymnsinging in church has been banned since all this lockdown business started.

Belting out a rousing hymn with others was hugely cheering. Even though Catholics aren’t great hymn-singers, things had improved in recent years, especially since the RCs had the bright idea of nicking some of the best in the Anglican hymnal. It’s an awful shame that choral singing, generally, has been a victim of this rotten affliction.

Still, at least I have my own private singing lessons to lift my spirits and pump some natural serotonin into the system, and these can be carried out very effectively via Zoom and Facebook.

I am not one of nature’s musical performers, but I was recommended by no less an authority than the Royal Brompton Hospital to practise singing.

Singing exercises the bronchial and pulmonary area, and is frightfully good for the chest. So my regular sessions with Mrs Avril Gray, a wonderful operatic diva who retired to Deal, have kept me singing.

Lessons begin with breathing exercises, which involve stomach, arms, tongue and facial muscles. The ‘happy surprise’ facial expression and the arms stretched fully expanded over the head are strangely stimulating, and loosen up body and posture. Deep breaths and breath-holding precede scales, and then the singing itself begins. A professional singing teacher also finds even a notespecially-gifted singer’s natural range, encourages it and patiently expands it.

There are many reports of people feeling gloomier, lonelier and generally more wretched under the ‘new normal’, but I can truthfully say that every singing session has cheered me up.

It has also improved my health. For three winters now, I’ve had no chest infections, and I’d swear that singing strengthens the immune system.

Choral singing does pose problems of proximity but, once they get the ‘social

improper frolicking with young ladies, or condoled with for paying rather a high price – divorced, disgraced and sentenced – for his misdemeanours.

distancing’ sorted, the habit of singing should be restored as a regular tonic.

It’s been a record year for migrants crossing the English Channel in rubber dinghies and other frail vessels. Up to mid-August, the toll was around 4,500 – five times what it was last year.

These refugees appear along the Kent coast, near my Deal home, at Dover, Folkestone, Dungeness, Walmer and elsewhere. You might expect these weekly appearances to be a talking point among residents of my local Channelside ports, but in my experience it is seldom an issue of local discussion.

This could just be an English thing about not being embarrassing. Or not being political. Or not wanting to seem hard-hearted on the one hand – since the picture of pregnant women washed up on a beach is pitiful – while not wanting to seem soppy about the cruel traffickers on the other.

And, in any case, the migrants are whisked away swiftly to be ‘processed’.

So the problem becomes ‘invisible’.

The Dover MP, Natalie Elphicke, has her hands full, trying to coax the French to control things better. There is possibly more local discourse about whether Natalie’s ‘naughty Tory’ husband, ex-MP Charlie, should be condemned for

Visitors hoping to do a legendary pub crawl in Ireland this summer will have been disappointed: many of the most famous pubs have been closed throughout the tourist season and it’s reckoned that a third, perhaps half, of Irish pubs won’t open again, according to the Vintner’s Association. From Dublin’s Brazen Head, established in 1198, to Belfast’s Crown Bar, adorned with stunning decorative tiles, hundreds have shut their doors.

This may presage a return to drinking in hotels – always considered more acceptable for ladies. Yet I fear that you-know-what has turned ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ into a hostile place. I tried to go to Dublin in July, but was warned off by the Irish authorities as being a possible ‘spreader’. When I suggested that, legally, there’s a common travel area between Ireland and Britain, I got a shoal of abuse.

‘Stay away!’ ‘You’re not welcome!’ ‘Don’t dare travel here!’ A literally insular mentality seems to have taken hold.

There are two sides to the Irish character. One is the bonhomie associated with the pub. The other is the stern, puritanical side, quick to censure and to reprimand, and I fear the second collective personality is now dominant.

I collect German portmanteau words, which can so often express a complex situation in just one locution. My new discovery is zugzwang.

This is invoked in chess, meaning ‘a position in which every move is disadvantageous’. My German pen friend tells me it often means circumstances in which one is ‘under pressure to act’. But I like the chess definition better – it seems to define various situations I recognise, when, whatever choice might be available, it seems like a zugzwang!

The Oldie October 2020 37

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Profitable Wonders

Corals – the world’s great builders

IMAGEBROKER/ALAMY

james le fanu

We are forever awestruck by the scale, and ambition, of monumental engineering projects, past and present – the pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the Suez and Panama canals dividing continents, and the massive Hoover and Aswan dams across the Colorado and Nile rivers.

Still none can compare to the endeavours of the tens of billions of minuscule invertebrate creatures, the corals. Over millennia, they have built in limestone the largest durable structures on earth – fantastical, teeming subaquatic cities stretching for thousands of miles along the coasts of Australia, the South-East Asian archipelago and the Caribbean.

These coral reefs occupy less than one per cent of the ocean floor yet are home to a quarter of all forms of maritime life, thousands of diverse species of fish, molluscs, lobsters, shrimps, turtles, starfish and many, many more.

The coral’s mode of construction of this ‘most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet’ was first comprehensively described by Frederic Wood Jones, a British naturalist and son of a Hackney builder. His first appointment, after he had qualified at the London Hospital, was as medical officer on the remote, sparsely inhabited Cocos (Keeling) Islands, then a British protectorate in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It had been ‘ruled’ benignly by three successive generations of an eccentric Scottish family, one of whose daughters he would eventually marry.

‘Most of my days were spent wading across the reefs or sailing a boat on the lagoon,’ he recalled in his classic work Coral and Atolls (1910). ‘The beauty of the clear water and the breaking surf on the barrier made these expeditions a perpetual delight.’

The young corals begin life as freefloating, translucent, pear-shaped larvae – each the diameter of a pinhead – before settling on a stony surface. Once affixed,

Brain corals (Platygyra daedalea) grow on shallow reefs. Indonesia

they differentiate, forming six tentacles surrounding a mouth, opening into a single sac-like internal cavity.

The tentacles come armed with stinging harpoon-like nematocysts for capturing the passing plankton on which the corals feed, excreting the waste products of digestion back out through the mouth.

The coral’s subsequent growth and development is predicated on one of the most profound (in its consequences) symbiotic relationships in nature.

Early on, the young coral traps chlorophyll-containing algae which it incorporates into the tissue of its tentacles. These algae make use of the carbon dioxide, nitrates and phosphates produced by the coral’s metabolism. And, in return, the chlorophyll within their cells, activated by the sunlight passing through the translucent water, generates – through the process of photosynthesis – oxygen, glucose and amino acids.

These provide the coral with the energy and chemicals necessary to secrete the limestone that forms its protective, cup-like residence.

The young coral, once established, buds off numerous further polyps,

creating over time a colony of cloned replicas of itself. Each is ensconced within its own limestone niche.

Nonetheless, the colony acts synchronously, emerging and retracting in response to external stimuli, collectively reacting to any damage by the secretion of yet more limestone.

Despite having no nervous system, corals, Wood Jones noted, are ‘an impressionable and responsive class of animals, resourceful when faced by the demands of their changing surroundings’. The defining feature of the sub-aquatic cities they build is their pristine, breathtaking beauty – a panoply of extravagant forms and brilliant coloration unparalleled in our terrestrial world.

Each of the 700 species of coral has, astonishingly, its own distinctive architectural style: yellow and cylindrically branched (the staghorn corals), greenish-blue, domed and fissured (the brain corals), flat, tablelike corals interspersed with slender, upstanding minarets (the pillar corals), gold star corals, flowery coronation corals, mushroom, and fan and bubble corals.

Through this wonderland flit shoals of fish more variegated than seems possible – butterfly fish, angel fish, surgeonfish and cardinal and parrot fish. The variants of each species exhaust the full possibilities and more of design and colour: striped – some horizontally, others vertically or diagonally – hatched or stippled in vivid and boldly contrasted hues of blue, green, purple, red and gold.

Since Wood Jones’s pioneering observations, we have learnt vastly more of the attributes and behaviour of the numerous marine inhabitants of these ocean kingdoms and the web of interconnections that sustain them.

Still, in his words, ‘the strange and fantastic efforts of nature’ that underpin their pristine beauty remain as elusive as ever.

The Oldie October 2020 39

sister teresa

Good grief ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted’ (Matthew 5:4).

When one comes to grips with the first surge of grief, this is very hard to take and seems to be nonsense.

Jesus is not, in the Beatitudes, glossing over the pain of loss. He himself knew grief at first hand, just as we do, and it made him cry. He is telling us that God will accomplish a miracle, in that ultimately we shall be delivered from this agony. He is not, for heaven’s sake – and pace some of the translators of the Beatitudes over the last few decades – telling us to be happy.

Grief is not something to be ashamed of, nor should it be repressed and muzzled. It is part of our humanity, and it is vital that we experience it. It is also vital for our health and peace of mind that we express it.

The British are more inclined to stoic resignation than to hopeful mourning.

We are not disposed to make a lot of noise over our greatest losses. But perhaps we should sometimes think

Mourning sickness: Rachel weeps for her children

about the necessity of releasing the anger and anguish caused by the death of someone we love in the way that is to be found again and again in both the Old and the New Testaments: by lamenting – and lamenting noisily.

One of the most haunting declarations of sorrow is to be found in Jeremiah 31:15. ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamenting and weeping bitterly: it is Rachel weeping for her children because they are no more.’ Matthew quotes this in the account of the massacre of the innocents at the

beginning of his gospel, and there is no restraint there.

The Scots and Irish have an advantage over the English when it comes to grief: with the help of the bagpipes (developed by the Hittites, c1000 BC), they can howl.

They can allow the pipes to make their sorrow known and heard.

And they can allow the sound of their crying to be drowned by them. For Scots, this takes the form of a solitary lament – a funerary, rather than a martial, pibroch. It is uniquely moving, especially when heard outdoors.

Words are incompatible with the sound of the pipes: not only are they inaudible, but also they are unsuited to the wild, primeval sound produced by a goatskin bag with drones and chanter attached.

I knew a piper and I loved him. He has just died, after a long and debilitating illness, and never again will one be able to say to him, ‘Piper, pipe that song again.’

But others will play those songs, bringing him to mind more evocatively than any photograph.

Memorial Service

Sir Roger Moate (1938-2019) Lord Spicer (1943-2019) Two Tory Brexiteers died last year, just before Boris Johnson came to power.

Roger Moate became MP for Faversham in Kent in June 1970, the election that put Edward Heath, who was determined that Britain should join the Common Market, into No 10. Moate languished on the back benches, always a champion of local issues, for 27 years.

‘Roger was a Eurosceptic before the term was coined,’ said former Tory leader Lord Howard of Lympne – who, as well as being a fellow Eurosceptic was an MP in Kent – in his eulogy at St Mary of Charity, Faversham. ‘He was one of the first to call for a referendum and it must have given 40 The Oldie October 2020

Roger Moate, left, and Michael Spicer

him great pleasure to see its result in 2016. I overlapped with Roger in the House of Commons for 14 years before the boundary redistribution of 1997 led to the dismemberment of the constituency he’d loved and served so well.’

Sir Roger’s son, Andrew Moate, read

an extract from Yes Minister in which Sir Humphrey says, ‘Britain has had the same foreign-policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. We have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and the Italians. Divide and rule, you see. We had to break up the whole EEC, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside, we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing.’

Sir Roger’s daughter Sally Brunner

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

Depressing boom in antidepressants There has been an increasing number of reports in the medical journals of the negative results of controlled trials of various treatments. It’s one of the most important advances in medical science of the last two decades – though an inconspicuous and perhaps surprising one.

This is important, because if positive results only of trials are published, misleading impressions of the efficacy of treatments are created. Indeed, until recently the non-publication of negative results was a favourite technique of the drug companies. In part, that explains why so large a proportion of the adult population is now taking antidepressants – that and the ghastliness of life itself, of course.

Another dangerous line of argument in medicine is that ‘it stands to reason’.

It stands to reason, for example, that if nutrient x is lacking in disease y, giving a patient nutrient x will prevent

‘Don’t worry – it’s medical marijuana’

or cure his or her case of disease y.

But nature does not always obey human reason, which is always founded on partial knowledge and frequently on false premises. That is why the proof of the curing is in the healing.

There was a recent trial of a cocktail of a drug and two vitamins in a grave condition called septic shock – the collapse of the cardiovascular condition in the presence of severe infection, particularly likely in the old. The trial gave negative results when, theoretically, they might have given positive ones.

Because vitamin C and thiamine (the B vitamin, whose shortage may lead to permanent brain damage in severe alcoholics) are at reduced levels in this condition, and because hydrocortisone reduces the inflammatory response, it was hypothesised by the researchers – and not only by them – that a mixture of all three might improve survival. So they conducted a trial.

The results were disappointing. A slightly higher percentage (34.7 per cent) died with the active treatment than with placebo control (29.3 per cent), but this was not statistically significant. The treatment did not prevent kidney failure, one of the complications of septic shock.

It did not reduce the need for artificial ventilation. It had no cognitive benefits (of special interest to the old). It had one or two minor benefits of a temporary nature of no lasting clinical significance.

In short, the treatment was a failure.

That would seem to be that, then.

What stood to reason didn’t work and no

read from one of her father’s rhymes: ‘Henry was a cannibal/ His girl was Henrietta/ And was such a tasty dish/ That hungry Henry ate her.’

Daughter Sophie Proudfoot read If, by Rudyard Kipling.

The service for Lord Spicer, former chairman of the 1922 Committee, was held at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Daniel Hannan MEP led the tributes.

‘Michael led the Eurosceptic movement in this country from the beginning of the 1990s to the 2005 election. He founded the European Research Group in 1993.

You didn’t know that? I’m not surprised: he was reluctant to take credit,’ said

Hannan. ‘If you’ve ever wondered why the ERG has such a bland name, by the way, the answer tells us a great deal about Michael’s approach to politics.

‘When the group was about to launch, I kept bouncing putative titles at him – titles that struck me as suitably stirring, involving words such as “independence”, “democracy” and “freedom”.

‘Then, very patiently, Michael said, “Daniel, if you’re setting up a campaign to take over the world, you don’t call it the Campaign to Take Over the World.

You call it something generic like the …

European … Research Group!” ’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

one in the future need waste his or her time, effort or hope by giving these drugs in such a situation. The lesson seems perfectly clear.

As is always the way in medicine, however, things are slightly more complicated. To obtain their final sample of 200 patients who fulfilled all their criteria for entry to the trial, both positive and negative, they had to exclude 4,369 patients with septic shock for one reason or another – to make sure that they compared like with like.

In other words, their results applied only to those patients who were very similar in those selected for the trial, who were only 1 in 22.5 of all patients with septic shock. It would therefore still be reasonable, or at least not unreasonable, for an experienced doctor to say, ‘I have seen this treatment work in many cases, and therefore I am going to use it. The trial is not relevant to the patient I have before me.’

These complexities explain, perhaps, the violence of the recent controversy over the use of hydroxychloroquine in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

It is always possible to argue that it might not work in these patients at this dose, but it would work in those patients, at that dose.

It is not only of the making of books that there is no end, but also of medical controversies: and yet progress, somehow, takes place.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Embargo and Other Stories

‘Before we leave, remember to put on your afterlife jackets’ The Oldie October 2020 41

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

Bring Pooh home SIR: On the subject of Gyles Brandreth’s piece about Winnie-the-Pooh and friends in New York City – yes indeed, the lovely creatures can be seen (no admission charge) in New York’s Public Library. I go to say hello every time I am in the city.

(This summer’s trip was thwarted by COVID-19.)

But time has wreaked havoc in a different way from what might be expected: not deterioration, but restoration – which, though meticulous, has eliminated the signs of habitual cuddling and other adventures, to a point where Pooh and co are so immaculately patched up that, very sadly, some of the charm has been lost in the process.

I so agree they should be repatriated to England!

Best wishes, Jane Reynolds, London

Wilfred’s schooldays SIR: I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and recently had the good fortune to be given some back numbers of your magazine by a fellow resident of the senior care home I live in.

I was astounded to find in them articles by and about Wilfred De’Ath. He and I were students together at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Barnet, from 1948 to 1955. Our studies became separated in the fifth form when Wilfred specialised in languages and I turned to sciences; however, we were both members of the Dramatic Society and performed together in Mr Bolfrey, among others.

‘Hello – Carter’s Corporate Cake Company? This cake you’ve supplied – just how old is it?’

The attached photo is of the prefects of 1954/5; Wilfred is third from the left in the back row, and I am second from the left in the front row.

Charles David Shargool, Vancouver

Sober Keith Floyd...

SIR: The article by Bill Knott (August issue) brought back happy memories. My family summer holiday started with a night at the Hôtel D’Europe in Avignon where Keith Floyd was in the cheapest room. For dinner he would go out for a cheap Indian and then return for cheese.

When he saw my children seated in the courtyard restaurant, he insisted on saying hello to each one of them in turn.

He was sober and delightful.

Yours faithfully, Professor Dominic Regan, Bath

...and his boozy lunches

Wilfred (third left, back row) and Charles (second left, front row) 42 The Oldie Octobber 2020

SIR: Perhaps your correspondent Bill Knott (Raise a glass to the greatest TV chef ever, August issue), has had one slurp for the chef too many.

He writes, ‘[Floyd’s] ambitious Devon gastropub had already collapsed… He would never venture into restaurants again, except as a customer…’

I am afraid Mr Knott is wrong. I interviewed Keith Floyd, on two

consecutive days, over pleasantly boozy lunches in Phuket, Thailand, in late 2005 for the Phuket Gazette.

He was on the island overseeing development of the brasserie that was to bear his name – for just a short time – at the Burasari Jungceylon resort in Patong.

He was great fun – and none too fond of the phrase ‘TV chef’.

Yours etc, Andy Johnstone, Barmouth, Gwynedd

Floyd on good form – in Thailand

Stockbrokers’ Sussex SIR: Jonathan Meades’s article about Ian Nairn (September issue) reminds us of a great talent destroyed too young by the demon drink.

Some of Nairn’s best writing is in the West Sussex section in his and Pevsner’s Sussex in the Buildings of England series.

For example, he describes with love and affection his visit to the remote and simple church of Up Marden, high up in the South Downs, beginning with the words ‘One of the loveliest interiors in

England … it is incredibly moving whether one is Anglican or not, whether one is religious or not…’.

As for West Sussex as a whole, Nairn says that it was saved from some of the ugliest 20th-century development by being relatively prosperous. ‘God bless the sensitive stockbrokers of West Sussex’!

Yours faithfully, Charles Halliday, Burghill, Herefordshire

A good bottle for a fiver SIR: Benedict King’s piece (Rant, August issue) was less a rant and more an excellent guide to visiting art galleries.

However, I have to question his pejorative reference to ‘your usual £10 plonk’. Because the tax on a bottle of still wine is a uniform £2.23, regardless of the shelf price, £10 will buy quite a good wine.

Furthermore, it is still possible to get a half-decent, drinkable wine for around £5, especially if you try some of the excellent wines on the shelves of the so-called discount supermarkets.

Cheers!

David Holme, Accrington, Lancashire

Confessions of a wage slave SIR: I enjoyed Liz Hodgkinson’s piece in the September Oldie. I think that people like her, who enjoy work, should be allowed to work for as long as they like.

But I do not think employers should be forced to employ old people if they prefer younger people. Employers need freedom of choice too. But working for yourself is fine.

Personally, as I got into my fifties, I found that work as an office wage slave became increasingly distasteful; so I retired as soon as I could.

That was 22 years ago and I am happy with my pension finances and am happy to do whatever pleases me.

And that involves quite a bit of doing nothing much.

Each to their own. Nobody should be made to feel that work is the only thing in life. A mix of idling, pleasure-seeking and light work suits me fine.

Yours faithfully, R Havenhand, Nantwich, Cheshire

Three degrees of separation SIR: What chance the subject of one letter being related to the sender of another on a different topic, who then has a third letter published in successive months?

‘Everything all right with the PPE, sir?’

I am Ian Carmichael’s nephew (Letters, August and September issues).

Yours etc, Malcolm Watson, Ryde, Isle of Wight

Battle of Britain blunder

1940, Hitler, endorsed by Grand Admiral Raeder, realised that his naval force available to protect a seaborne invasion was pitifully inadequate. They both knew that any such operation would be doomed to failure by the one service they feared the most: the Royal Navy.

It would have been a massacre – and they knew it.

The British First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, might, with some justification, have echoed Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent, who in 1805 said of the French, ‘I do not say they cannot come; I only say they cannot come by sea.’

If Norman Tebbit doesn’t know this, he should read Peter Schenk’s Invasion of England 1940: The Planning of Operation Sealion.

Yours faithfully, Lieutenant-Colonel Ewen SouthbyTailyour, OBE, Ermington, South Devon

SIR: I am sure that I shall not be the only reader to point out the anachronism in the Old Un’s final note in September’s Oldie.

Rachel Billington, who is said to have witnessed the Battle of Britain, was born in 1942, but the conflict took place in 1940!

In fact, the 80th anniversary of the Battle is currently being commemorated.

Arthur Spencer, Weston-super-Mare

Norman Tebbit’s mistake SIR: Flying Officer Tebbit perpetuates a well-honed RAF myth.

Does he 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)?

Following the Norway campaign in

‘Well, how are we supposed to know if it’s the right bed for us?’

Maggie’s favourite poster SIR: James Hughes-Onslow wrote a glowing account of Lord Tim Bell’s life and achievements, but I must correct the credit given him for designing the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster.

My good friend Andrew Rutherford was working under Bell at Saatchi & Saatchi when Maggie Thatcher asked them to devise a really punchy slogan for the 1979 election. Andrew and others were put to work, and Bell chose a short list; Andrew’s wasn’t one of them.

He arrived at the firm very early on the presentation day and slipped his slogan into the ones Maggie was going to be shown. ‘That’s the one!’ she exclaimed.

It turned out to be one of the most famous images in UK politics.

Andrew comments, ‘When I showed my idea to Bell, he was distinctly lukewarm about it.’

Tim Paine, Bristol The Oldie October 2020 43

I Once Met

BRYAN WHARTON

Robert Robinson Bob Robinson always seemed too literary, intellectual, upmarket and refined to be a mere Sunday-tabloid hack.

And yet that was where I first met him when, in 1959, I joined the staff of the Sunday Graphic.

Bob was ten years older than I was and a superior, cynical figure. He was the paper’s film critic, a job I thought must be wonderful – yet he was ashamed. ‘I dread when my children get older and ask me what I do – and I will have to admit I interview appalling Hollywood film actors for the appalling Sunday Graphic.’

Bob was born in Liverpool in 1927, where his father was an accountant. They soon moved to London and Bob went to Raynes Park Grammar School, of which he was inordinately proud. While at Exeter College, Oxford, he edited Isis and later became a journalist.

In 1960, the Graphic closed. We were all dreading what would happen: would I be out of work or have to go back to Manchester? But then Bob and I got moved down the corridor to the Sunday Times. Bob was in charge of the Atticus column – with me as his assistant.

Pictured, right, are all the living Atticus editors in 1967.

The column had previously been edited by John Buchan, Ian Fleming and Sacheverell Sitwell – but was anonymous. Bob preferred to stay in the office while I went out. At a London art gallery, I talked to L S Lowry and we got on so well that he agreed I could visit him at his home in Lancashire. When I told Bob, he said he was the boss; he would do it. I was furious. But he did a good interview – and bought direct from Lowry one of his paintings, later worth a great deal.

Bob had a passion for Dr Johnson – and for 18th-century manners. When he went to the pub for lunch, the barman would say, ‘Nice day.’ ‘Would that it were,

Atticus editors: Robert Robinson (left), Philip Oakes, Sacheverell Sitwell, Hunter Davies, Godfrey Smith, 1967

Mr Smith,’ replied Bob. On leaving, Bob would say, ‘I bid you goodbye.’ I thought it was weird but charming.

When he became well known on radio and TV, presenting programmes such as Ask the Family and Brain of Britain, he still retained touches of his flowery, 18th-century persona. I think he felt embarrassed by the quiz programmes, longing to be a literary novelist.

When I first met him, he lived in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a grand address for a mere hack. How could he afford that? It was in fact rented, but eventually he and his wife Josee managed to buy it – from the mother of Richard Ingrams.

My wife and I were invited for dinner once. They had a butler and some very distinguished guests, such as Robin Day. He decided to pick on me, asking if I was Bob’s boy – did I make his tea and wipe his bottom? My wife was more than a match for any such Oxford Union smartypants and laid into him.

She wrote our thank-you afterwards, laying into Robin Day. I still have Josee’s reply: ‘I expect my dinner guests to reply nicely and if they did not like the evening, not to come again.’

Hunter Davies

DEZO HOFFMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK/ DE LUAN ALAMY

Bringing up the Mary Rose’s bodies

Forty years ago, I was in my third year as a volunteer diver on the Mary Rose.

I’d learnt to dive in 1970 and had packed a few hundred dives under my weight belt, but working in the Rose was different. On 29th May, I was told I had a special job to do. The ‘job’ was to raise a skeleton that had been found in one of the trenches.

Margaret Rule, who directed the excavation, had said something about ‘blooding’ the divers; there were going to be a lot of bodies

deeper in the wreck and it could be a bit of a charnel house later on. A large plastic bin had been taken down to hold the remains.

All I saw was the end of a femur coming out from under a wooden chest, a mass of ribs and a sternum. As soon as I touched the first bone, the visibility blotted out and I worked in total darkness.

Instead of nice, light, firm clay, the material surrounding the body was dark and sticky, the flesh having turned into something like a soft dough.

I plunged my hands into the heap and hauled out as much as I could, placing it into the bin. I could feel bones – large, small, some smooth, some sharp and spiky. I felt softer material – leather, wool?

It went on and on until, after an hour, I’d filled the bin to the brim. I swam into clear water to get my bearings. I could taste something foul around my lips; whether it came from within me or, God forbid, from the mess I’d been handling, I didn’t know.

Working together, another diver and I got the bin to the bottom of the shot rope and up to the surface, where waiting hands lifted it on to the deck.

Later, the shore team went through it and found the remains of three bodies, along with two kidney dagger handles, three coins, the pointy end of a spear shaft, part of a powder measure and the sole of a shoe, as well as a mass of leather fragments.

I swilled out my mouth with water and gratefully took the proffered cup of tea.

A soak in the bath rid my suit of most of the smell and feel of the bodies, and a shower completed the cleansing ritual.

By Colin Fox, a recreational diver, who receives £50

The Mary Rose sank in 1545

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie October 2020 45

Books Freudian analysis NICOLA SHULMAN The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011

By William Feaver

GARY WING

Bloomsbury £35 Lucian Freud’s reputation now hangs at such a pitch – a zenith, perhaps – that it’s easy to forget how for much of his life he was an unfashionable painter.

At the start of this, the final volume of William Feaver’s near-miraculously vital portrait of Freud, the subject was nearly 50, his gallery (the Marlborough in London) still struggled to find buyers for his work and he had not been exhibited in a public gallery since 1954.

Nevertheless, things were about to change: a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery was planned, and Feaver, sent to interview him for the Sunday Times Magazine, met Freud for the first time. Detecting Freud’s jumpiness at this breach of his exorbitantly private life, he tried to calm his fears.

‘I’m not interested in your private affairs,’ he said.

‘Hooray,’ said Freud.

It’s probable that the real-time William Feaver, as distinct from the one who has reached this stage in his project, was not then aware that he was offering the impossible. You can’t engage with Freud’s work without being interested in his private affairs. They are of a piece.

As Freud said, ‘All my work is autobiographical.’ His studio, where he lived and slept and worked, was a kind of burrow, littered with the personal spoor that formed the textures, light and atmosphere of his paintings, and into it came friends and lovers.

The price for being his lover was to sit for him, and the common consequence of

sitting, in the case of the women, was to become his lover. Love, he had discovered early on, was the solution to finding sitters who would privilege that particular activity, or passivity, over everything else in their lives. It was a system of genius, and proved even more effective when it turned out, as we see here, that the many children he had sired along the way could take the place of their mothers in the unbecoming studio light. ‘It’s nice to breed your own sitters,’ he said.

Even his neglect of them worked in his favour. Because of it, children who had never shouted, ‘Daddy, Daddy! Look, at me, Daddy!’ lined up, despite misgivings, to make up the deficit of attention, generous with their time and pre-loaded with the intimate connection Freud needed to make work: a virtuous circle, you could say.

The introduction of Feaver, as a person, doesn’t have the Boswellian effect of changing up the gear. He’s

already found the ideal voice for conveying Freud and he rightly decides not to change it now. It involves the apparent obliteration of his own personality, specifically in his dealings with Freud. While he has plenty to say about other painters and people – which is one of the elements that make this book so enjoyable – when it comes to Freud, he has no opinions or comment to make.

Like the analyst in the classic Freudian method, he imposes nothing of his own, allowing Freud’s singular speaking voice to echo through his chapters. That voice is itself a kind of mark-making process: an accretion of disjointed gossip, memories and pronouncements, notably devoid of similes, elaboration or logical progression. The impression you get is of someone who advances no clarification because he is talking chiefly to himself.

You get the charm, and feel the exasperation, that kept his sitters coming back. Feaver’s only permitted intervention is to juxtapose incidents – say, the

The Oldie October 2020 47

retraction of his Freud Estate royalties from his acknowledged children with, in the next paragraph, the purchase of a Savile Row suit.

In the first volume, Feaver was working from Freud’s memories. Here, he has caught up with events, and becomes a witness to what is actually happening. The principal impression one gets from this is how little age had mellowed or matured Freud. His world was still one of extreme loyalties and antagonism, of cars crouched opposite lovers’ doorsteps, and silent telephone calls in the night to people who, as he saw it, had slighted him or sold him short.

Nor did the comfortable wads of banknotes in his pocket ever staunch the fountains of his gambling debts.

Yet he did get older. There is a sense of time speeding up, as in life, as each new work, exhibition, liaison, sitter or drama takes up a smaller proportion of the sum of years. Feaver shows Freud facing off against the realities of his ageing body – a testing proposition for one whose gaze operated on an axis of respect, not compassion.

The self-portraits in old age were praised at the time for their ‘pitiless’ self-scrutiny but, as a matter of observable fact, he never looks a day over 48. As for the very late works, such as the picture of Kate Moss, with glossed Munnings flanks and a ridiculous little head like a squirrel peering over the edge of a bird table, Feaver does the decent thing when he describes them mainly by price.

With fame, Freud lost the thing he had most cherished – control of his own story. Books, plays, articles and intimate photographs ambushed his privacy from all directions and the funny thing was, he loved it; it made him feel alive. Nothing will keep him so much alive as Feaver’s monumental recreation of his subject’s own voice.

Fun of fungi FIONA STAFFORD

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

By Merlin Sheldrake Bodley Head £20 Books often carry dedications – to people and occasionally to nations or lost generations, but not very often to fungi.

Merlin Sheldrake bucks the trend by expressing ‘gratitude to the fungi from which I have learned’. If the word ‘fungus’ stirs memories of dank, mushroom-covered carpets, forgotten bread rolls transformed to green trolls,

‘He always had green fingers’

old tree trunks with swelling, blood-red organs or roof timbers reeking of dry rot, then this is the book for you. It may change your view of the whole world.

It’s not just that we need reminding about the positive face of fungus – the gustatory delights of mushrooms and truffles, the medical miracle of penicillin – though these are fascinating strands in this long, labyrinthine story. What this book demands is a new way of thinking.

We are challenged to think about what it’s like to be a fungus – not an individual with a defined sense of self and physical boundaries, but a life form existing in a network, intimately connected to other species and kingdoms.

We’re encouraged to consider the identity of lichens – not ‘like a package from IKEA’ with distinct components and an order of assembly, but rather ‘dynamic systems’. If we go back to the Devonian period, the earth was covered in Prototaxites, towering fungi which dominated for 40 million years (‘twenty times longer than the genus Homo has existed’). Not everyone will find this comforting but, once you get used to being unsettled, it’s a breathtaking ride.

Sheldrake is remarkable on the micro and the macro: both in his capacity to bring to light a vast, ancient, teeming, largely invisible world and in the presentation of details. Sentence after sentence erupts unexpectedly: ‘Pleurotus mycelium – a white rot fungus which fruits into edible oyster mushrooms – can grow happily on a diet of used diapers’; ‘I lay naked in a mound of decomposing woodchips.’

There are splendid anecdotes, such as the author’s truffle-hunting in Oregon with Charles and his ‘diversity dog’, Dante (for whom ‘God lives just below the surface of the soil’). There’s his midnight scrumping from the venerable descendant of Newton’s apple tree in the Cambridge Botanic Garden.

The book is packed with brilliant individuals such as Kate Field, who

recreates ancient climatic conditions to explain evolutionary mycorrhizal exchanges. Or Suzanne Simard, whose discovery of how birch and fir trees sustain one another with carbon led to recognition of the ‘Wood Wide Web’.

Then there’s the ‘fungal evangelist’ Paul Stamets, whose conversion occurred in a lightning storm when he was caught in a tall tree after ‘a heroic dose of magic mushrooms’. He makes money from fungal dog treats (‘Mutt-rooms’) and has helped save hundreds of besieged Syrians from starvation by inspiring the cultivation of mushrooms in their underground shelters.

You quickly become absorbed in the twists and turns of the great fungal saga, but there are tangles, too. Try as hard as you like to think like a fungus, if you want to share your thoughts with a fellow dynamic system, it means resorting to the human invention of language.

Biologists are troubled by the way language perpetually humanises the world, preventing us from understanding non-human organisms on their own terms. Darwin caused a rumpus by referring to the root tips of plants as their brains, not because the hypothesis was flawed but because of the idea that a plant has a brain.

Sheldrake’s lively mycological discussions frequently sprout musings on language. Mycorrhizal fungi and plants are described as ‘promiscuous’. Certain orchids are distinguished by their ‘take now, pay later’ habits. If the best way to explain the workings of an unfamiliar living system is through behaviour recognisable to the reader, our attempt to think like fungi is doomed. But it’s a heroic failure.

America the beautiful LUCINDA LAMBTON

Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean

By David Reynolds Muswell Press £14.99 What a book! What a joy of a book, plunging you straight away into the very body, bosom and blood of America. And, with its regular sprinkling of poison generated by the odious Trump, you are up to the last exhilarating minute.

Where shall I start? David Reynolds takes us on the terrific journey of driving from the Atlantic to the Pacific – from sea to shining sea – with triumphs of wildly diverse observations, both verbal and visual, great and small.

How delightful to read the evocative description of ‘the din of The Oldie October 2020 49

grasshoppers scraping their legs … the grass is alive with their constant hopping.’ I was also entranced by the architectural description of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington: ‘A delightful building … a place of high curving walls, long curving staircases, circles, semicircles, ovals and ellipses.’ I was so grateful to have the 2004 museum brought to my attention.

What, too, about the beautiful Maryland State House of 1772 in Annapolis? It is the oldest state capitol in the country in continuous legislative use.

It has the largest dome in all America, built of cypress wood without a single nail. Topped by a balustraded balcony, on an octagonal drum, it has a lantern capped by a lightning rod constructed and grounded to Benjamin Franklin’s precise specifications.

The Continental Congress met here, in its beautiful, recently restored, Senate Chamber, where George Washington resigned his commission as Commanderin-Chief, marking the end of the Revolutionary War and signalling the beginning of American democracy.

Let us now veer off to pastures new, to enjoy Reynolds’s detailed description of Patsy Cline, one of America’s greatest country singers, who, we read, initially worked in a meat-processing plant before becoming a waitress in a diner and then a ‘soda jerk’ in a drug store, while building her reputation by singing locally.

Going to her house in Winchester, Virginia, Reynolds sees the piano she played with Joltin’ Jim McCoy and the Melody Playboys. He hears of her breakthrough on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, watched on television throughout America, when three performers competed each week, with the winner being chosen by a clapometer. Thereafter her fame reverberated worldwide.

Reynolds relishes a tour of the white clapboard house where she lived as a child, with the furnished bedroom in which Patsy, her brother, sister and mother all slept. As her fame flourished, all Patsy’s clothes were still made by her mother, including a dress sewn with 3,000 sequins, made for a Carnegie Hall show.

On we drive, ‘meeting’ such luminaries as Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the first white men to cross the continent in 1805. Clark was accompanied by a slave called York and a young Indian woman called Sacagawea. She was the only woman, the only Indian and the only teenager to give birth during that great pioneering expedition. And she was a brilliant guide who, at one point, after

‘Yes, of course I will, Gerry, and I’ve got something for you, too’

their boat was upturned in a river, saved both Lewis and Clark’s diaries. Reynolds argues that without her the defining expedition would never have succeeded.

Obscure figures suddenly appear, such as Elijah Lovejoy, who Reynolds reads of beneath the great, stainless-steel-clad arch of St Louis. He was the printer and editor of the anti-slavery newspaper the St Louis Observer, killed for writing a fierce attack on a mob who had carried out a lynching. When the doomed abolitionist John Brown heard of his martyrdom, he said, ‘Here, in the presence before God … from this time, I consecrate my life to the abolition of slavery.’

There is more to be found in this book that makes me cry with pleasure, enfolding me, as it does, with the sheer magic of being able to be back on the road in America, where I have spent so many happy days.

Adam vs Eve

ROSIE BOYCOTT Men Who Hate Women

By Laura Bates Simon and Schuster £16.99 Until a chance conversation with Bates two years ago, I had never heard the word incel.

It means ‘involuntary celibate’ and it is now an umbrella term to cover men who define themselves as unable to find a romantic (or sexual) partner, despite wanting one. It is a broad spectrum, ranging from a young man who feels unattractive, lonely and unloved to the extreme hatred that has led to acts of incel-inspired terrorism, such as the case of Alek Minassian who drove a van into a busy Toronto street in 2018, killing ten and wounding 16.

He later told police that the attack was for years of rejection by women and that he was a member of the incel movement.

Bates tell us that at least 50 women have

been killed by men who claim they were inspired by the incel movement.

When online radicalisation results in a Muslim attacker’s driving into white pedestrians, media reports immediately make the connection. When men kill in the name of misogyny, the perpetrators are described as one-offs: angry, resentful and mentally ill, but not attached to a movement.

It is almost impossible to tell where the lines are crossed in a man’s journey through the ‘manosphere’. At the start, it is easy to feel sympathy with the isolated young man who wants advice on how to find a girlfriend. One site leads him to another, and the sequence might tell him that, to be successful, the man must be in charge; that he should tell a woman what to wear and what to say. Then that all women secretly fantasise about being raped. Or choked.

One online ‘pick-up guru’ insists that men should ‘interrupt what a girl is saying every ten words, to throw her off balance, undermine her confidence’.

Women, the message repeats, are responsible for all your ills. They have stolen your jobs, your authority and – in many cases – your children, too.

Bates says that people are complacent about the scale of this phenomenon: ‘At the time of writing, one of the most popular websites has over three million posts; two million messages.’

Furthermore, incels and men who hate women do not exist just on the margin. Nathan Larsen, a 37-year-old accountant and Congressional candidate from Virginia, called for the Violence Against Women Act to be repealed because ‘We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers, and later of their husbands.’ Another of his online posts declared, ‘A man should be allowed to choke his wife to death as punishment for cutting her hair short without his permission.’

In the UK, Bates singles out Piers The Oldie October 2020 51

Morgan for his misogynistic tweets and attacks on women. On the day of a women’s march, Morgan tweeted 163 times along these lines: ‘I’m planning a “men’s March” to protest at the creeping global emasculation of my gender by rabid feminists.’ He constantly criticises individual men for terrible crimes ‘like parenting’, famously lambasting Daniel Craig for daring to carry his baby in a sling, tweeting that James Bond had been ‘emasculated’.

And this is one of the problems. When we founded Spare Rib in 1972, our initial plan was to include men as well as women, but there was too much to do to try and change the glaringly unequal role women held in society. In the years since, we have redefined what it means to be a woman: mother or a prime minister, engineer or astronaut.

But men? The range of what society sees as ‘masculine’ has stayed horribly narrow. Men at the school gates at 3.15 in the afternoon still raise an eyebrow.

Stay-at-home dads come with a health warning. Young men today are regularly beaten to the top grades at school. Job prospects are poor. Confidence wanes and online messages find fertile ground.

Blaming women is a sure-fire way of venting frustrations with a system that still prizes financial success above almost everything.

Bates herself has been the victim of a mass of online abuse. She’s moved house twice, never reveals her address and has had to ask for police protection. ‘I’m scared of this book being published,’ she writes. ‘I’m throwing down the gauntlet … if they choose to deluge me with threats and abuse, they will be proving me right.’

As she says, we cannot tackle a problem unless we know it exists.

Nature girl CHARLES FOSTER Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays

By Helen Macdonald Jonathan Cape £16.99 Writing about the natural world is a dangerous, hubristic business.

Nature writers, to keep safe, have to adopt one of two strategies. Both have their parallels in the great religions.

The first is to appease by priestly acts, striving to present something clean, polished and perfect. Robert Macfarlane is the archetypal example. His prose is forbiddingly felicitous – the result of the most careful literary choreography. His books are immaculate liturgies, allowing

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, c1835. From Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits by Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones, Unicorn, £25

him and his readers to go into the Holy of Holies of the woods without being blasted.

And the second is Helen Macdonald’s way – to wrestle with the angel of the wild until it gives a blessing, but risking a serious injury in the process. In Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about, she says, the ‘quality of wonder’, all her awesome gymnastic skill as a writer wrestler is on display. And so are some of the awkward falls that come with the wrestling profession.

The book is more interesting and accomplished than the rightly celebrated H is for Hawk. It should silence those unkind critics who suggested that Macdonald is a one-book wonder. Vesper Flights establishes her as a penetrating analyst of the relationship between humans and the non-human world.

That makes her sound austere. She’s

not. She is splendid company, reflecting on nests and the meaning of home and place. She weeps when a meadow becomes a lawn, and observes that people live in skyscrapers for the same reasons they travel to wild places – to escape the city. She compares the freedom of migrating cranes to the plight of Syrian refugees, and watches a column of flying ants accompanied by a phalanx of herring gulls.

She fears that today’s children will learn to regard the constant disappearance of species as the ordinary way of the world. She observes that hides divide us from the natural world and encourage us to see animals and plants as spectacles.

Macdonald takes us to places I wouldn’t have the nerve to go to alone – to the comments appended The Oldie October 2020 53

to internet dashcam footage of deer being hit by cars, for instance. ‘Am I the only one who thinks it’s funny when they bounce off the cars?’ wrote one commentator. Evidently not. ‘Oh man,’ wrote another. ‘I haven’t laughed this hard at a compilation in a long time…’

Macdonald sat very still when she’d read that.

Often she is infuriating, but always stimulatingly. She notes that, with the aid of an Australian bird book, she has identified a waratah, a hairpin banksia and a New Holland honeyeater. ‘Now I know these things,’ she says. ‘A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.’

‘No!’ I want to shout. ‘To name them is to have less knowledge about them than you had before. To name something – to create a smug, self-referential abstraction – is always to diminish.’

But she has started a worthwhile epistemological conversation.

Sometimes she falls. It’s an occupational hazard of the wrestler.

Ideas and themes are shoehorned clumsily together in ways that obscure rather than mutually illuminate. But that’s because she’s so passionately engaged. Most of her connections fizz, showing relationship where we would never have expected it.

Macdonald’s main message is that we must be careful to ensure that our love of the natural world is not self-love.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Delicious Neapolitan JOHN LANCHESTER The Lying Life of Adults

By Elena Ferrante Europa £20

The first thing to say about Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is that it genuinely is a new novel.

When a translated author becomes suddenly famous – as Ferrante spectacularly did with her quartet of Neapolitan novels, published in English from 2012 to 2015 – there is a period during which her new books tend to be her old books. Untranslated early works get their moment as publishers catch up with the backlist. This can give a disconcerting impression of a writer regressing, moving sideways or abruptly switching tone and genre.

Ferrante’s oeuvre didn’t exactly do that, because 2016’s The Beach at Night and Frantumaglia are both interesting, but they weren’t new-new, and they were unlike her most celebrated work.

The Lying Life of Adults is, stylistically

‘It’s one of those impossible-to-put-down beach reads’

and thematically, much more continuous with the Neapolitan quartet.

Ferrante’s many fans will know what to expect from that: emotional intensity, Naples, a focus on female relationships, a deeply unenchanted view of men, a portrait of a society divided by class and language and ruled by multiple hypocrisies.

The narrator is Giovanna, born in 1979 and 13 years old at the start of the book. That puts the action in the early 1990s, though Ferrante isn’t much interested in the specific period – this being one of the differences between The Lying Life of Adults and the historic sweep of the quartet.

Giovanna loves her cultivated, calm, bookish father and her warm, gentle, accommodating mother but, as the novel starts, is on the adolescent cusp of seeing through them. A marriage that has seemed settled breaks up; what seemed inviolable truths are seen as provisionalities based on falsehood; people aren’t who they are said to be; feuds aren’t what they seem.

The agent of change is Giovanna’s paternal aunt Vittoria, a furious, embittered, alienated force of nature.

Giovanna’s father has cut Vittoria out of their lives, but lets slip, in a moment of rage, that his daughter sometimes resembles her. That’s enough to set Giovanna off on a mission to meet and become familiar with her aunt who, it turns out, is close to the diametric opposite of her brother.

Vittoria’s version of events is very different from the one Giovanna grew up with, and she finds herself being made complicit with her aunt’s vindictive rage.

A few words, focusing on an apparently small thing – a bracelet – precipitate a complete overturning of Giovanna’s world. She changes from a model daughter and pupil to an enraged adolescent, violently acting out.

‘Before going to school, I’d stand in front of the mirror doing my best to look like a crazy person – my clothes, my hair.

I wanted people not to want to be with me, exactly as I tried to let them know that I didn’t want to be with them.’

In the Neapolitan novels, time passes, and perspectives open out, as the moral vision of the novel expands from the personal to a vision of profound societal corruption. The new book is more focused: it concentrates on that teenage moment of fury and revelation. In essence, the question the novel asks is ‘What happened … in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?’

The mild-mannered, sensible British reader, schooled in Austen, Eliot and Anita Brookner, might think ‘worse than reptiles’ is a bit strong. But The Lying Life of Adults is wholly committed to its adolescent point of view – to Giovanna’s ‘sharp tones, aggressive outbursts, hostile silences’.

The writer it most reminded me of is the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers. Like Lawrence, Ferrante is a fan of teenage truth-telling, its painful acuity and its reckless, damaging insistence on selfperceived honesty at all costs. As with Lawrence, some work of distance and perspective is left for the reader: it’s not entirely clear whether the fearless, angry, truthful Giovanna actually knows herself, or anybody else, better than she did when she was living in her childhood cocoon.

Perhaps that is part of Ferrante’s point: the process of realising your parents are people too involves pain and loss, and the benefit of that isn’t always clear, except that the alternative non-realisation leaves us as children for ever.

Ferrante’s many admirers will love The Lying Life of Adults and will find it, as the internet says, ‘self-recommending’.

The first-time reader may find the Neapolitan novels a better place to begin their engagement with this extraordinary body of work.

The Oldie October 2020 55

Media Matters

No hope and no glory for the Beeb The Government and the BBC are in a fight to the death stephen glover

Has anyone noticed that the Tories are in the process of slowly killing off the BBC, and doing so very successfully? And that the BBC is trying its best to make it easy for them?

For as long as I can remember, the Right has been grumbling about the mandatory licence fee. When the issue last came up in 2016, some predicted that the Conservative Government would refuse to renew it or, at any rate, would do so for a shorter period. In the event, the then Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, although no fan of the Beeb’s, extended the fee for another 11 years.

Many thought the Government feeble.

In fact, the axe had already been surreptitiously wielded, the previous year. The Chancellor, George Osborne, forced the Corporation to take on the full financial burden of supplying free licence fees for the over-75s from 2020. By this year, the annual bill was £750 million.

The BBC decided to bear a third of the cost in terms of economies but, in order to claw back the remaining £500 million, it recently ended the scheme for all but the very poorest pensioners.

Why Tony Hall, who has just stood down as Director-General, swallowed this poison pill is a mystery. One of his predecessors, Mark Thompson, has claimed that when Osborne tried to impose similar terms on the BBC five years earlier, he began writing a resignation letter. The wily Osborne intended primarily to hack back Auntie’s £5 billion a year income. But he must surely have worked out that if the BBC passed on the costs to pensioners, it would incur widespread unpopularity.

And so it has. In one recent poll, two thirds of respondents said they wanted the annual £157.50 licence fee scrapped.

That’s a higher proportion than was commonly disclosed by polls a few years ago. There is also a growing dissatisfaction with the Beeb’s political

and cultural values. For example, more than half of those asked said they thought the Corporation too ‘politically correct’.

Cue the Government’s next move to weaken the BBC. As I write, it is reported that it intends to decriminalise nonpayment of the licence fee. The argument is that ten per cent of cases in magistrates’ courts involve non-payment, so decriminalisation would free up valuable court time. It would also blow a further hole in the Beeb’s finances. Most people will go on paying, but a significant minority might not. The Corporation reckons it could lose £200 million a year.

One way and another, the Government (with the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, plotting the course) is slicing back the BBC without formally ending the licence fee. The likely effect will be to encourage the beleaguered Corporation to explore alternative forms of funding. In the meantime, it grows weaker and less self-confident, while the Government escapes being portrayed as a brutal assassin as a result of moving stealthily and deftly under cover.

How they must have celebrated in Number Ten when Auntie primly announced that the allegedly jingoist words of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory wouldn’t be sung at this

‘You’re lucky it’s just lions. Last week some poor bastard was savaged by the media’

year’s Last Night of the Proms. That decision has been reversed by the incoming Director-General, Tim Davie – but not before the BBC suffered more self-inflicted wounds. In the poll I mentioned, 59 per cent of respondents said they agreed with Boris Johnson over his criticism of the Beeb for ‘cringing with embarrassment over our history’.

Mr Davie, supposedly a closet Tory, which puts him in a minority of about three among senior management at Broadcasting House, must be perfectly aware of what is being done to the BBC. Lord Hall was both more woke and not very astute. The new Director-General has said the Corporation must ‘represent every part of this country’. According to the Daily Telegraph, he wants to rein in Left-leaning comedy and panel shows – which means almost all of them.

Good luck to him, I say. Few of us would like to see the BBC reduced to a husk. My guess, though, is that its metropolitan and leftist character is so ingrained that Mr Davie will have very limited success in changing it. The Government will continue to squeeze air out of an institution it regards as overmighty. The two of them are engaged in what may turn out for the BBC as we know it to be a dance of death.

Philip Collins, whom I have never met, has long been one of my favourite columnists. He’s a Blairite, so our politics are not the same, but, having served as chief speech writer to the former PM, he knows more about the workings of government than most political journalists. He also writes clearly. A well-informed, lucid and balanced columnist. What more could one want?

You can imagine my surprise when I learnt that this paragon of my trade has been sacked by the Times, supposedly for being too left-wing.

The Oldie October 2020 57

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The joy of silly sign language

TOM PLANT

Language can sometimes give almost as much fun, albeit unintentionally, when badly used as when well used. The language of officialdom comes to mind.

Pompous officials think important messages deserve long signs, such as the request ‘Please use the handrail provided’ that I notice every time I go through Aberdeen airport. This, you may say, is not important at all. Indeed, it is unnecessary.

It might as well say ‘Please use the stairs provided’. Moreover, how could anyone use the handrail if it weren’t provided?

Such thoughts ease the strains of air travel.

Other officials think it’s cool to be crisp. ‘Take back control’ is said to have won the referendum for the Leavers.

Could its originator, Dominic Cummings, now running the country, also be responsible for ‘See it. Say it. Sorted’?

That moronic mantra is presumably aimed at those who, had they not been warned, would remain inert while gazing at a sputtering fuse without realising they had only to invoke some unnamed deity for the devilish device to be instantly disabled, allowing them to get back to their knitting and remain undisturbed until the next station stop.

In the same category is ‘Stay alert, control the virus, save lives’. This must surely win an award for inanity.

It’s tempting to think that things were

BOOK THIEVES There is often an uncomfortable moment when people come into our home for the first time and comment on how many books we have. Or, rather, the uncomfortable moment comes next, when we wait to see if they’ll try to take any.

Why, of all the things people have in their house, is it the books that guests feel are apparently acceptable to

better in the war, when ‘Make Do and Mend’ and ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ left no room for confusion. In truth, officials have always found it easy to cause bafflement, even when their words are short and their syntax impeccable.

Writing to the Times in 2016, Alan Bird cited the occasion when, as a soldier in Singapore, he was asked by a perplexed Malaysian colleague what was meant by a notice on the barrack-room door stating ‘Beds will be made up as laid down in standing orders’.

I think, though, that I’ve had more pleasure from foreign signs than from British ones. One that sticks in the mind could be found in the Domain, a wonderful park in central Sydney, in the 1980s: ‘No person shall climb any tree or jump over any seat or fence, or lie upon or under any seat’, it asserted – and, just as important, ‘No aircraft may land’.

That was at least explicit, even if it was no more useful than the signs that periodically alarm helpless drivers with their warnings of low-flying aircraft or the words ‘Caduta massi’, illustrated by huge boulders rolling down Italian hillsides.

A notice that used to give me pleasure in Paris was the injunction in the Métro to yield up one’s seat to ‘mutilés de guerre’, ‘familles nombreuses’ and ‘femmes enceintes’. I lived in hope that as I rattled

be made off with? No one has ever tried to leave with my cushions, or my plants. But I have had a friend stand in front of my shelves and say, ‘Now what can I have?’

The answer is usually an awkward ‘Nothing’. There is always a risk that they won’t come back.

I’m well aware that withholding books is, whichever way you look at it, an ethical failing.

A better person wouldn’t balk at the dissemination of ideas, knowledge and inspiration; they wouldn’t provoke the hurt surprise of avaricious friends.

In the 1930s when the Left Book Club was in its heyday, Sylvia Townsend Warner urged subscribers to lend as widely as possible: here was a

along towards Porte de Clignancourt the doors would open at the next station and in would spill a horde of mutilated soldiers, parents surrounded by countless children and a platoon of pregnant women.

I’ve seen plenty of signs in my travels exhorting support for the revolution, devotion to the regime and praise for the dictator du jour. The sentiment behind ‘Hurrah for President Tolbert’ on a banner across a street in Monrovia in 1971 was probably genuine, but did not endure long enough to bring salvation to Liberia.

The sentiment behind the ten-foothigh letters that I saw in the Russian city of Vorkuta 26 years later was, and probably always had been, completely absent among the locals: ‘Long Live Soviet-Bulgarian Friendship,’ it urged.

Not a main concern, I suspect, of the wretches who lived in this Arctic outpost.

A more considered message graced a banner I spotted in Congo in 1969, aimed at persuading Kinshasa’s drivers to resist the temptation to mow down pedestrians like wild animals: ‘Le piéton, est-il une bête à traquer?’ it asked. The authorities in Delhi in 1998 had a similarly reflective attitude: ‘Life is fast,’ read their banner.

‘Why not relax at a red light?’

Even better was the injunction on roadside signs in Texas in the 1980s: ‘Drive Friendly,’ they said. Still good advice.

crucial part of their political fellowship, she told them; even a means of putting a halt to fascism.

I could hardly argue that we no longer need to halt fascism, and yet I have been known to hide choice hardcovers before visitors arrive.

Researching my own book about the Olivier sisters, Noble Savages, not long ago, I

SMALL DELIGHTS The satisfaction of adjusting my car’s wing mirror to just the right view HUD BANNON, NEWARK-ON-TRENT, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

had a moment of sympathy with the poet Rupert Brooke, whose friend Margery Olivier confessed to having left some books of his on a train. His reaction can be guessed from her reply: ‘You are right. I am not to be trusted and ought to be slain.’

The mishap was all the worse because the borrowed volumes were in fact already borrowed – from the University Library at Cambridge, where the two were students.

As a woman, Margery had less access to the collections; so arguably the real villain of the piece – as is so often the case – was the patriarchy. But, still, borrowers must recognise their responsibilities.

SARAH WATLING The Oldie October 2020 59

History

Sherlock Holmes’s elementary schools

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY

150 years ago, Board Schools first provided universal, free education david horspool ‘Schools are the best place for children’s education,’ the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, informed us this summer, while the Prime Minister talked about a ‘moral duty’ to reopen schools.

If that sounds like two statements of the blindingly obvious, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always so.

A century and a half ago, when the Elementary Education Act was passed, the idea that education should be free and open to all was not universally accepted. Elementary education had long been provided to those who couldn’t afford private schools, but in a piecemeal way, depending on church and charity, and usually requiring some payment.

In the mid-19th century, it was thought that as many as two million children received no education at all.

By 1870, other nations seemed to be doing it better. One candidate for the School Board in Marylebone called the Act ‘a step in the right direction and following in the wake of Germany, which, so far as the education of the people was concerned, was a model for the world’.

The Act, and the Board Schools which it gave every parish and municipality the right to create, heralded a change in attitude as well as a bit of administrative tidying up. No child between the ages of five and 13 would be left behind. Although the schools would still charge fees, the boards were empowered to pay for the education of those children whose families could not afford them.

There were worries right from the beginning about religion – as the schools were meant to be secular – and even about space. One correspondent to the Times wondered if ‘eight square feet per child’ would be enough. Fortunately, once the Board Schools began to be built, most were more ambitious than that.

Though there was no set plan for the buildings, a high-gabled, Queen Anne style prevailed, with an emphasis on light.

60 The Oldie October 2020

It is light that encourages the Board Schools’ most famous enthusiast, Sherlock Holmes. In Conan Doyle’s story The Naval Treaty, Holmes and Watson are on a train rattling into south London.

‘Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea,’ urges Holmes.

Watson gives the bathetic reply ‘The board-schools.’

‘Lighthouses, my boy!’ Holmes replies.

‘Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.’

By the time those words were published in 1893, the Board Schools were a feature of the British landscape.

Although their administration was changed again less than a decade later, the buildings remained brick beacons well into the 20th century, until different ideas of what children needed began to displace them. The Lavender Hill School in Latchmere Road, which Holmes and Watson would have espied from their train, was one of the first to be converted into flats, in 1993, exactly 100 years after it had been immortalised in print.

In a way, Holmes himself was the product of the Board Schools, though not

Watson and Holmes gaze at the school ‘lighthouses’ in The Naval Treaty

as a pupil (his education is never revealed, and is patchier than a Board School would have provided: ‘Knowledge of literature: nil,’ Watson notes). The Strand Magazine, in which his adventures first appeared, was a response to the great explosion of literacy and popular literature that followed the Education Act. Newspapers were another growth industry. The Daily Mail and the Daily Express both catered to a new reading public, to give them ‘all the news in the smallest space’.

There were always opponents of the schools: in Wales, they are associated with suppressing the Welsh language, although Welsh began to be taught more widely in schools from the 1880s. The schools were also the target of snobbery, intellectual and otherwise. The Old Etonian Aldous Huxley wrote, ‘Universal education has created an immense class of what I call the New Stupid.’

If opposition from that quarter seems unsurprising, the views of D H Lawrence, himself a prize-winning pupil at Beauvale Board School in Nottinghamshire, are harder to explain. ‘Let all schools be closed at once,’ he declared in Fantasia of the Unconscious. ‘Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by itself, out of its own individual persistent desire.’

His own school’s decision to name itself after Lawrence shows rather more sense, though one can hardly complain that they dropped it more recently.

But by the time Lawrence and Huxley were writing, mass education was a fact of British life. We have just emerged from a period when, for the first time in 150 years, educating children in schools was not possible or, at least, not deemed safe.

Holmes’s wiser, better England (Britain, we would insist now), still depends on our elementary lighthouses, even if they look very different today.

Let’s hope they don’t have to be switched off again.

Arts NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT DIRTY JOHN: THE BETTY BRODERICK STORY This wonderfully juicy series has all the elements of the most gripping murder – as laid down by George Orwell in his 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder.

There’s sex, money, a middle-class wife murdering a professional husband and, as Orwell put it, ‘the desire not to forfeit one’s social position by some scandal such as a divorce’.

This most compelling of American murders took place in 1989. That’s when Betty Broderick (a masterclass from Amanda Peet in how to play a woman scorned) shot dead her ex-husband, Dan Broderick (an understated, terrific Christian Slater), and his new wife, Linda (Rachel Keller). Now aged 72, Betty is living in the California Institute for Women on two counts of murder and is next eligible for parole in 2032.

Everything seemed so rosy when the Brodericks married in 1969. Dan Broderick, who had qualified as a doctor, then enrolled at Harvard Amanda Peet vs Christian Slater

62 The Oldie October 2020

Law School – and became a superpowered lawyer in the gilt-edged world of medical-malpractice law. These early scenes in the Brodericks’ life, as he studies and begins his legal practice, are sensitively inserted into the series as occasional flashbacks – though the real action comes in the later years, when the murder is imminent.

The Brodericks soon have five children and begin leading the ideal American life in the ideal American palace. Dan does so well – and becomes so pleased with himself – that he dubs himself the Count du Money. With his diminutive stature, full but uncertain smile, and his narrowed, 1,000-yard stare, Christian Slater is a picture of sly smugness and hidden insecurity as American Man Made Good.

The Brodericks’ American dream fell apart in the most predictable way. In 1982, a 38-year-old Daniel Broderick fell for his 21-year-old secretary, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant.

So far, so everyday. But then, even without the added spice of the murder, first came one of the most acrimonious divorces in American history.

If only Betty Broderick hadn’t killed her husband, she’d have been perfectly well off. And she’d also have had her place in legal history for her argument in Broderick vs Broderick.

She argued in court that her work as a Tupperware saleswoman and Avon Lady to support Dan during his professional studies entitled her to a better divorce settlement.

The courtroom scenes are particularly moving, with a naïve but determined Betty flailing against

her super-experienced, legal eagle of a husband.

Every time the naturally bright but completely unqualified Betty tries to outwit Dan, he uses his knowledge of the system to defeat her. The series is a subtle illustration, among other things, of the predicament of the Second-Class American Wife in the late-20th century.

So Dan stops her hiring the best lawyers; he gets custody of the children; he sells their house without her permission and uses abstruse law to cut the size of the settlement he owes her.

Betty proceeds to go stark raving nuts, in a way that makes your sympathy shuttle from her to Dan and back again – a rare thing in Hollywood, where baddies are out-and-out baddies, and goodies are angels. She drives her car into his front door, swears at him on the answer machine and breaks countless restraining orders. Her anger is wildeyed and extreme, but you can see her point in the face of her calm ex-husband, the cat that got the cream – and the hot young mistress and the children.

In Senna (2010), the documentary about Ayrton Senna, the tension was made strangely greater by our knowing the poor racing driver’s fate all along.

And it’s the same here: you know from early on in the series that Betty will kill Dan. Flashforwards from the murder trial are inserted near the beginning (don’t worry – it’s easy to follow). But that does nothing to take away from the steady, unrelenting adrenalin release the series provides.

That Orwell essay concentrated on nine infamous murderers, including Dr Crippen, between 1850 and 1925.

Orwell goes on to say that, at the time of writing, in 1946, murders ain’t what they used to be. With The Betty Broderick Story, though, we’re as happy as ever feasting on sex, money and professional murder most foul.

THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD KRAPP’S LAST TAPE/ THE OLD TUNE

GARY SMITH

Digital Theatre (digitaltheatre.com) One or two good things have come out of the coronavirus. One of them is that you can get to see this production online, for a miserly (when you consider the cost of a theatre ticket) £7.99. (Digital Theatre has many other productions available, and you can take out a subscription of £9.99 a month to see them all.)

I’d wanted not only to see this production but also to review it here.

However, it ran for only three weeks or so at the Jermyn Street Theatre, and by the time you’d read about it you wouldn’t have been able to see it. But now you can.

Krapp’s Last Tape, first performed in 1958, is Beckett’s most personal play.

Unlike Waiting for Godot and Endgame, it does not explicitly mention the philosophical travails of the very fact of being alive. Instead, it implies and enacts them. In Godot and Endgame, the space beyond the stage is suggested, as characters either peer into the auditorium or look out of the windows; here, there is no outside; the crushing dimension is time.

What we have, for those unfamiliar with the work, is an old man (not extremely old; the internal chronology of the play suggests a man in his sixties), who has been recording his diaries on tape. He listens to earlier entries and then makes new recordings, a scornful repudiation of the young man he was.

The younger self records love, and inspiration. The Krapp on stage is hollowed out. He is, we are strongly led to believe, a vision of the person Beckett would have become had he never become successful; a future that, until only too recently, had seemed hugely plausible. But it is more complex and universal than that, beneath its apparent simplicity.

Thanks to the stern vigilance of the Beckett Estate, the director of a play

by Beckett is subject to strict constraints; so Trevor Nunn’s options when it comes to putting his own stamp on proceedings are limited. At one point, Krapp crosses himself, and I’m not sure that’s in the original stage directions.

But what we have here is unimpeachable. James Hayes’s Krapp is spot-on, recalling visually Patrick Magee’s definitive interpretation (Beckett wrote the play with him in mind), if without

Krapp (James Hayes); Gorman (Niall Buggy) and Cream (David Threlfall) –The Old Tune

Magee’s distinctive rasp. But even if you didn’t know this, his appearance is striking: stubbled on the face, pate shining from a circlet of white hair.

Accompanied by his diary and his Bible-sized dictionary, he recalls, but for the reel-to-reel tape machine in front of him, a Renaissance portrait of Jerome, patron saint of archivists. He is an embodiment of desuetude. The peeled bananas he eats hang, for a moment, in his mouth like flaccid penises. If you think this is unwarranted, consider that Beckett’s self-translated title for his French version of the play is La Dernière Bande, which means ‘the last erection’, as well as ‘the last tape’.

The second play is Beckett’s very free and contemporary translation of Robert Pinget’s La Manivelle (The Crank), from 1960. It is, so to speak, Beckett humanised and naturalised. Again, the existential concerns are more alluded to than explicated. But, as with Krapp, the simplicity of the mise-en-scène is deceptive.

It looks and sounds like two old farts, Gorman and Cream, sitting on a bench, grumbling about the present and reminiscing about the past. They circle round, and don’t quite alight on, a matter of tragedy involving infant death. Beckett did more with this in his 1956 masterpiece All That Fall, which is, like The Old Tune, a radio play. It is one of his

slighter works; in a way, it is only barely one of his works at all, and he holds off putting his own stamp on it, except to change the original location from Paris to Somewhere in Ireland (presumably the Dublin suburbs). But Niall Buggy’s Gorman and David Threlfall’s Cream are impeccable. Gorman’s refrain, ‘When you think…’, is heartbreaking.

This production was originally a triple bill, with a version of Beckett’s TV play Eh Joe included. I particularly wanted to see this, as one of the cast (albeit offstage, recorded) is Lisa Dwan, who is incontestably the greatest interpreter of Beckett for the stage of our time. Well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE Sunday Worship (Radio 4) doesn’t often get a mention here – or anywhere.

In normal times, its formula takes us to a parish with a parson, a sermon and some hymns. But towards the end of summer came a different-sounding Sunday morning, subtitled The Inspiration of Listening, reminiscent of Mark Tully’s Something Understood.

It featured an engaging gay Northern Irish poet named Pádraig Ó Tuama in Fermanagh and the broadcaster Anna Magnusson in Glasgow. Each reflected on times filled with quiet, summer The Oldie October 2020 63

nights when you could sit outside hearing birdsong, and the intoxicating effect of the greening of the world in spring. A cue to hear Hopkins’s ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’. ‘The past became a country I dreamt about,’ said Padraig.

Anna had found, when clearing her parents’ house, old family audiotapes recorded at Hogmanays, weddings and funerals, where the Magnussons (Anna is the daughter of the late Magnus) sang songs of the past. We heard her and her sisters singing Dancing Cheek to Cheek, and the Katharine Tynan hymn All in the April Evening. Here the amateur rendition segued into the exquisite recording of the Glasgow Phoenix Choir.

Anna introduced a Bach organ sonata played by an Icelandic cellist, who said, ‘Bach’s always good to play.

No matter what’s going on around us, sad or happy, he stabilises things.’

(Just what Mrs Miniver – ie Joyce Maxtone Graham – said after a wartime Myra Hess recital: ‘Bach is so very all-right-making, isn’t he.’) Such a well-constructed programme.

Still in the God slot – Thought for the Day – the honeyed voice of the Rev Marie-Elsa Bragg caught my ear one fine morning. ‘In the last few months,’ she began, ‘six collared doves have nested under the roof of my closed local church.’

She had watched them feeding their young, white wings fluttering. But they had flown here over seas that contain thousands of tons of plastic garbage.

Could we please listen to Greta Thunberg’s warnings, and lead the way in rewilding and regenerative farming as Prince Charles urges, and remember Wordsworth’s words: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood /May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can.’ In that same poem, Tables Turned, ‘Let nature be your teacher,’ Wordsworth wrote.

There was a similar precept in Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights (Book of the Week – and reviewed on page 53): her curiosity about everything in the natural world – from the ways of swifts to the impact of a total eclipse – made her another companionable essayist at times like this.

It makes me think that though there have been home-based periods when radio has been just as relied-on for information, it may now turn us into a generation of contemplatives, finding solace in words and music.

Along with the new Bob Dylan, I replay Julian Bream’s Dowland album, which I bought in 1968. Michael Berkeley’s Last Word reminiscences of the amiable Bream were spot-on: he was indeed ‘full of bonhomie’, always 64 The Oldie October 2020

referring to his guitar as ‘the old box’, but he was ‘also a deadly serious musician’.

Among many welcome repeats, my greatest pleasure came from Ruth Rogers’s With Great Pleasure from 2018, which included the reading of a menu from her River Café. She fell in love with her architect husband Richard at 20, she said, ‘and I love him more and more and more’. Her account of their loss of son Beau at 28 touched the heart.

She invited her friend Ralph Fiennes to read – as he did perfectly – from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. Hours later, I was at the Bridge Theatre – first theatre visit for five months, face-masked and temperature-checked – watching Fiennes performing David Hare’s Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue. Hare’s graphic account of ‘a dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc’ started life as an item on Today, in April. Fiennes got a standing ovation.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS I see less television than T E Utley, the late political writer and telly critic, who was blind.

The wonders of coastal paths, snooker championships and garden makeovers with Charlie Dimmock – I find I avert my gaze. The Clovelly Lobster Festival, group therapy sessions in prisons, demonstrations of traditional sheepshearing methods and anything to do with rescue dogs – excellent subjects for documentaries, I am sure, but I prefer historical soaps about harlots and monarchs, as used to be presented by David Starkey. Well, he’s in the soup, or rather some Red China-style gulag, undergoing forcible re-education.

What I do enjoy are the many programmes about people selling up, moving abroad and thinking everything will be nicer in the sunshine. On one such

Fair Ophelia: Emily Reid runs around in her pyjamas in The Deceived

show, a Huddersfield couple ‘looked to build a new life in Spain’, and honestly who could blame them ?

It is a frightful delusion, however, as I know from extensive personal experience. I am currently renovating a place in southern Italy, where, such is the furnace heat, the red wine comes out of the fridge.

I thought I could be like Eric Newby, hiding in the hills from the Nazis. But, of course, noisy little cars have replaced donkeys, the traditional old ladies in black lace are getting harder to find, the wise peasants have mobile phones, and a way of life unaltered since medieval times is altering at top speed and out of all recognition.

Except some things are all too recognisable. In the out-of-the-way village cafés and restaurants I frequent, instead of a valve-driven black-and-white apparatus showing variety bills with Toto and the speeches of Mussolini, these days there’s always a big, flat-screen telly bolted high up on the wall. It is never switched off and pours forth loud and irritating cartoons, panic-stricken news bulletins about collapsing municipal infrastructure, peculiar cheap films about shark attacks, and lots of game shows.

It was only after a longish while that I noticed a marked similarity with our own game shows – the format, the editing, the stupid celebrity presenters and the gormless members of the public enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.

It was quite sobering – no mean trick after several litres of Montepulciano – to realise that in Italy, and no doubt in other countries besides, there are local doubles and duplicates of Leslie Crowther presenting OK, il prezzo è giusto!, which is what they call The Price Is Right. An Italian Noel Edmonds is at large showing off in Affari tuoi, or Deal or No Deal. The shag asking the questions in Chi vuol essere milionario? has even borrowed Chris Tarrant’s terrible suits. I don’t know what Simon Cowell’s clout is with Italia’s Got Talent, but they haven’t even bothered to translate it.

MasterChef was on, except Italian cooks can cook. There was a Strictly Come Bake Off equivalent, with Felliniesque grotesques easily standing in for our beloved Mary Berry, Jo Brand and the Eskimo woman Sandi Toksvig.

Funnily enough, though, there don’t seem to be moving-house or fleeingabroad shows – as why would anyone sane want to leave Italy? Were an Italian couple to relocate to, say, Merthyr Tydfil, they’d be giddy kippers indeed.

However, it must have happened at one time. In my part of South Wales,

Ed McLachlan

there were loads of Bernis, Sevinis, Risolis and Spinettis, who owned the chip shops – Victor Spinetti was a scion.

Back in Britain, it is already winter, if the chilly The Deceived was any indication – bare trees, spooky lanes, a rain-lashed haunted house, flames in the nursery and scary knockings emanating from empty cupboards and locked rooms. The main character is a freshfaced blonde called Ophelia – and Open University viewers will remember that, in Hamlet, Ophelia says she is ‘the more deceived’ as she thought the prince loved her, but he says he did not.

If the allusions were picked up, the mystery was at once solved. An extra point if you made mention of Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived.

Lovely Emily Reid runs about outside in her pyjamas, lies back in a petalbestrewn bath like Ophelia as painted by Holman Hunt, and for several episodes is made to feel she’s losing her mind and seeing things. We were in Ireland, and

folk songs in the pub did duty for Shakespeare’s mournful ditties.

Despite the Gothic trappings, however, which were superbly sustained, everything was prosaic at the finish: life-insurance diddles, plagiarism of a student’s novel and semi-accidental deaths, all planned by creepy husband Emmett J Scanlan, who was implausibly meant to be a Cambridge academic – though this did explain the terrible beard.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE COMPOSERS’ STATUES It’s been a bad year for statues, though, as the poet Shelley reminds us, statues often come to unfortunate ends.

Shelley imagined the shattered visage of Ramesses II, half-hidden in the desert sands. And, this summer, we’ve had that 1895 effigy of sugar trader and philanthropist Edward Colston, pet

project of Bristol publisher James Arrowsmith – friend of W G Grace and first publisher of Three Men in a Boat – ending up in the city dock.

No one has yet raised a statue to a critic, claimed Jan Sibelius, the gloomy Finn. But no one had raised one to a composer until 1738, when Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of London’s music-rich Vauxhall pleasure gardens, unveiled Louis-François Roubiliac’s statue of Handel sitting, as one poetaster put it, ‘marmoric in the vocal grove’.

The miracle of Roubiliac’s statue, now resident in the V&A, is that it’s a wonderfully true-to-life portrait of a great musician at ease both with himself and with the manners and dress of his adopted land. That mix of presence and informality anticipates such recent masterpieces as Martin Jennings’s bronzes of John Betjeman at St Pancras and Philip Larkin at Paragon Station, Hull. The superb 1994 Vito Tongiani bronze of Puccini is outside the composer’s birthplace in Lucca. The great man sits in a comfortable chair, enjoying one of his favourite (if subsequently fatal) Toscano cigars.

There were rumblings back in the 1990s when Aldeburgh Town Council declined to raise a statue to Benjamin Britten. As Ronald Blythe reflects in Word from Wormingford, it was probably the right decision. The John Piper window in Aldeburgh parish church, made by Patrick Reyntiens in his Beaconsfield studio in 1979, more than suffices. ‘The composer’s inescapable memorial,’ Blythe suggests, ‘is the sound the sea makes on the shingle, or up against concrete breakwaters, or as it sucks into the marshes.’

I rather wish Worcester City Council had shown similar restraint before commissioning the sadly anachronistic Elgar statue that sits at the top of the High Street, where Elgar’s father’s music shop was (until the council bulldozed the building in the 1960s). Pride of place, where Elgar is concerned, must surely go to Jemma Pearson’s witty yet affecting bronze in the cathedral close at Hereford, where we see the composer leaning on his treasured Sunbeam bicycle gazing up at the building. Is he thinking, perhaps, of cathedral organist George Sinclair and his bulldog, Dan, who both star in Enigma Variations?

The French hatched a plan in the 1720s to build an elaborate monument, Le Parnasse François, where the Arc de Triomphe now stands, in honour of the poets and musicians who had adorned the court of Louis XIV. It was never built, though Louis Garnier’s maquette The Oldie October 2020 65

delayed première of Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae, the opera that, at the time of its completion in 1940, Strauss thought would be his last.

The juxtaposition of a world at war and Strauss’s valedictory music – his farewell to the spirit of Greece, as he described it – made for a bittersweet experience. After he’d bade farewell to the Vienna Philharmonic (‘Perhaps we shall see each other again in a better world’), his stage director Rudolf Hartmann offered to accompany him to his hotel. Strauss accepted but asked if they could make a small detour, ‘so that I can see again the statue of my beloved Mozart’.

Odd things, statues; but they have their uses.

GOLDEN OLDIES CRAIG BROWN THE KING MEETS THE BEATLES

Donnish air: Mozart’s statue in Salzburg displays scenes from Don Giovanni

survives. It was not until the age of Beethoven – who else? – that the cult of the composer as hero took hold and, with it, the making of statuary once associated with monarchs and men-at-arms.

The Bonn Beethoven memorial, unveiled in 1840, was followed by statues of Mozart (Salzburg, 1842), Bach (Leipzig, 1843) and countless others over the next 60 years.

The joker here is Mozart. Long before anyone had thought of erecting a statue to him, he’d actually deployed a statue as a player in the doom-laden climax to his opera Don Giovanni. Viktor Tilgner’s 1896 Mozart monument, now in Vienna’s Burggarten, has scenes from the blasphemous Don’s fatal Last Supper carved in bas-relief on its plinth. I’m not sure what Mozart would have made of seeing himself petrified in marble, but he would have been amused by this typically ‘in’ Viennese joke.

Whenever I see Salzburg’s Mozart statue, I’m reminded of an occasion when the city was in lockdown.

It was August 1944, two months after the D-Day landings and not long after the attempt on Hitler’s life by the Von Stauffenberg plotters. With the war moving into its final phase, Goebbels had ordered the closing of all theatres, opera houses and places of entertainment.

(One knows the feeling.) Only one event survived: the ‘dress rehearsal’ (as it was strategically renamed) of the long66 The Oldie October 2020

Fifty-five years ago, on 27th August 1965, Elvis met the Beatles at his Beverly Hills home.

The Beatles and their entourage were led into a vast circular room, lit in red and blue. In a red shirt with bolero sleeves, Elvis stands in the centre of a ring of 20 people. His wife, Priscilla, stands beside him.

‘Her black bouffant towered above her head and she was heavily made up with thick black mascara, midnight-blue eyeliner, red blusher and Heartbreak Pink lipstick,’ noted Chris Hutchins from the NME, who was also there.

For a few seconds, silence falls as the English and American gangs face each other. Priscilla Presley senses their nervousness: ‘You could hear a pin drop when they walked in. I was amazed at how shy they were; they were speechless, totally speechless, truly like kids, meeting their idol. Especially John – John was shy, timid, looking at him. I mean, I

Come together: Elvis with a Beatles article in 1965

really believe he just couldn’t believe he was actually there with Elvis.’

Priscilla finds the atmosphere ‘a little bit awkward because they kept looking at him, not really saying anything and not really sitting down, just staring at him’.

She remembers Elvis saying, ‘Guys, if you’re gonna just stand around and stare at me, I may as well do my own thing.’ He sits down, and the Beatles sit crosslegged on the floor around him.

‘A chair for Mr Epstein,’ says the Colonel, his manager, and people rush forward with a selection of them.

They talk about touring; Epstein tells Elvis about their plane catching fire on their flight to Portland on Monday. Elvis says one of his aircraft engines once gave out over Atlanta. The two managers huddle in a corner; Epstein is keen to organise UK concert dates for Elvis, but the Colonel has a rule not to mix business with pleasure. Instead, he announces to the room, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis’s private casino is now open for your pleasure. Brian, let’s play roulette.’

The two managers go through to the casino as Elvis picks up a bass guitar and starts playing along to songs on his jukebox. A television is on, with its sound turned down. Occasionally he picks up a remote control to switch channels – the first remote control Paul has ever seen.

‘He was switching channels and we were like, “Wow! How are you doing that?” ’ Elvis calls for more guitars for the Beatles, and they join in. Paul chats to him about playing bass. Conversation is a little desultory, until John sharpens it up.

‘Why have you dropped the old rock stuff?’ he asks Elvis, adding that he loved his early records, but hasn’t liked the more recent ones.

Elvis says he’ll soon be making rock records again.

‘Oh, good,’ says John. ‘We’ll buy them when you do.’

Elvis is nonplussed: he has grown accustomed to everyone telling him what he wants to hear. Later, John says he spotted a slogan saying ‘All the Way with LBJ’. John regards LBJ as a warmonger.

Did this prompt his put-down of Elvis?

They all go back to their jamming; this time I Feel Fine. Ringo has no drums, and feels underused drumming on a table with his fingers, so he drifts off to play pool with the roadies.

John puts on a comical Clouseau voice, saying, ‘Zis is ze way it should be ... ze small homely gathering wiz a few friends and a leetle music.’

Elvis looks baffled. After a while, the songs run dry and they all join the others in the games room. John is amused by the Colonel’s swashbuckling stories of his

early life as a carnival showman: how he wrestled with a lion; how the dancing chickens danced only when he placed them on an electric plate.

‘He’s an amazing character, a real hustling showman,’ John tells Hutchins later. ‘But Elvis – what a total anticlimax HE was. He seemed to be completely out of his head. He was either on pills or on dope ... whatever it was, he was totally uninterested and uncommunicative.’

Colonel Parker signals the end of the party by handing out presents of Elvis records to one and all. He gives the four Beatles little covered wagons that light up when you push a button. He tells Epstein he is going to buy him a cocktail cabinet. Epstein says he will ask Harrods to send the Colonel a Shetland pony – a memento of his circus days.

As they are ushered out, Elvis says, ‘Don’t forget to come and see us again in Memphis if you’re ever in Tennessee.’

Still adopting a comical voice, John shouts back, ‘Zanks for ze music, Elvis!

Long live ze King!’ Then he asks Elvis to join the Beatles at their place in Benedict Canyon the following night.

‘Well, I’ll see. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make it,’ replies Elvis. On the way back, John describes the party as a total non-event: ‘I can’t decide who’s more full of shit: me or Elvis Presley.’

Once the Beatles are safely out of sight, Elvis goes back into the house and draws Larry Geller to one side. What really blew his mind, he says, is the state of their teeth. He can’t understand why, with all their money, they haven’t had them fixed.

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU National Gallery: Artemisia

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

3rd October to 24th January; booking open It’s easy to overlook the fact that Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) was one of the greatest baroque painters, because so much polemical baggage has piled up around her. She was a woman in a patriarchal society and a rape victim and she had an arranged marriage – so of course her work must have been unjustly overlooked.

Let us throw this baggage overboard at the outset. Although it was rare, she was not the first woman to have a successful painting career. If we discount female illuminators, Italian predecessors included Sofonisba Anguissola (c1535-1625), who went on to work at the Spanish court, and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614).

Even if her father, Orazio, suggested

Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as St Catherine of Alexandria, oil on canvas, c1615-17

that she become a nun, that was not necessarily in order to suppress her talent, as the career of her contemporary Sister Orsola Maddalena, née Theodora Caccia (1596-1676), shows. In fact, Orazio encouraged her and proudly promoted her work, in Rome and later in London.

Her rapist was convicted, and her husband was no hindrance to her; indeed he was friendly with her lover. At the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, she was paid three times the rate male colleagues received, and in Naples she was welcomed by men who drove out other incomers such as Reni and Domenichino.

She was no more overlooked post mortem than many men; even in the patriarchal 1840s, it was conceded that ‘in portraits, she excelled her father’.

‘So, if we’re anti-Christ, does that mean we’re pro-science?’

Here we see that she exceeded him even more in subject paintings.

Her subjects can cause arguments.

Lurid incidents of Old Testament and classical violence with strong female protagonists (often self-portraits) are feminist statements to some; others consider that it titillated male patrons to order sex and violence from a woman. In fact, it was fashion, and both male and female colleagues were painting Judiths, Jaels and the rest.

This show is a perfect size. The Gallery’s acquisition of the Self-Portrait as St Catherine of Alexandria has prompted the assemblage of 20 more Artemisias from around the world, together with one – a Judith – by Orazio and portraits of Artemisia.

There are recently discovered letters to her lover and, thanks to the COVIDdelayed opening, the transcript of the rape trial has been added. This reveals that her veracity was tested by torture with the sibille, cords tightened around the fingers, which she withstood triumphantly. It makes Pierre Dumonstier’s drawing of ‘the worthy hand of the excellent and skilful Artemisia’ holding a brush (British Museum) all the more poignant.

Yes, she was a wonderful painter and a remarkable person, irrespective of gender.

The Oldie October 2020 67

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER OCTOBER'S TRICKS AND TREATS Love him or hate him, Jack Frost is almost certain to make an appearance in northern European gardens this month.

If he can stay his hand for a few more weeks, October consigns to the garden a cornucopia of gilded riches. But not all is lost for, should he prove impatient, his crystal rime will beautify the plant world’s death and decay. Winners both.

When rising from the mercury’s lower depths where ol’ Jacko dwells, he wages immediate war on dahlias and chrysanthemums – turning their fat, still-to-bloom buds into soggy, beige pâté.

Most fuchsias dislike him, although some are tough enough to fight back. He wreaks havoc among late-season half-hardy and tender perennials – salvias, canna lilies, begonias, coleus, pelargoniums… He kills stone dead summer-long flowering annuals, bringing tears to the eyes as cosmos, tobacco plants, calendulas and tagetes perish in his icy caress. In short, he brings down the curtain on the year’s Act III: Autumn.

Yet, on his first and more clement visits, JF throws a magical, renegade gauze over the garden; something transluscent, fugitive, only mildly injurious and, with luck, brief – exiting stage right before the gardener’s midmorning coffee break.

Like March, the third month of the year, October, three months from the year’s end, is capricious.

It can proffer a few gloriously benign weeks of warm sunshine; an extension to the gardening season that sees a burnishing of stems and foliage, brilliantly splashed with dashes of sapphire and lapis lazuli, as blue hydrangeas continue to illuminate the shadows, and patches of autumnflowering gentians spread their upright

trumpets beneath trees and shrubs. Or it can be thoroughly mischievous – remember the Great Storm of 1987 that felled countless millions of trees in a swathe of south-east England that extended from Dorset to East Anglia?

And it is to trees and shrubs that I turn my attention during this month. There’s no better time to plant them: the soil is moist (some might say sodden) and it’s warm enough for fresh roots to develop, penetrate new surroundings and start to anchor themselves securely.

During lockdown, it was nigh on impossible to go nursery-hopping and even in recent weeks, now more used to staying – contented, perhaps, to stay – at home, I’ve found new ways to satisfy my acquisitive traits. As a late comer to Instagram (I still eschew Facebook and Twitter), I’ve discovered a world of private gardeners willing to share both knowledge and plants. Best of all, this kindly army of green-fingered beings stretches far beyond our own shores.

While respecting individual countries’ regulations about sending and receiving foreign plants and seeds, I have built a network of law-abiding swappers who have supplied my beds, borders, potting shed, greenhouse and propagating cases with a wealth of horticultural treasures.

Polite requests from an amateur like

Fallen trees in Kent after the 1987 storm

me or professionals employed by the large estates and botanic gardens are seldom refused. After all, we gardeners know that if we want to save a plant, we must give it (or, more realistically, its progeny) away.

Little envelopes filled with specks of seed is the adult gardener’s equivalent of a child’s excited pre-dawn discovery of a bulging Christmas stocking at the foot of the bed. I love, too, the accompanying little notes offering advice on how and where to sow, how to nurture, when to transplant…

And if any questions remain, there’s that social-media link whence further information can be gleaned. The smartphone has become an essential addition to the gardener’s paraphernalia.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD FIGS It has been a good year for figs, or so friends with fig trees tell me. We have a fine fig tree, brought here when we moved house nearly 15 years ago. It has since grown impressively in height and breadth and each year sports some wonderfully lush foliage with large leaves. But in only one year have we been able to pick a few ripe fruit.

The principal problem this year, in spite of plenty of sun in May, was a vicious frost over two nights, which in effect destroyed the fruit.

Plenty of new fruit have grown, but they were still green and small at the end of August. However, I think the real and continuing problem is that the tree is free-standing and its roots are not restricted, thus encouraging foliage at the expense of fruit.

The best advice is to grow a The Oldie October 2020 69

fig tree, fan-trained, against a southfacing wall or fence, and restrict root growth by lining the hole in which the tree is planted with slabs or bricks.

Alternatively, plant the fig tree in a tub or container and sink it into the ground. I have been told that the drum of an old washing machine is ideal for this.

Once the leaves have fallen, the base of the tree should be packed with straw or bubble wrap for the winter. Old branches may be removed but pruning is not necessary. If grown in containers on a garden terrace, figs should be overwintered in a frost-free place.

There is a difference of opinion over what to do with the fruit that have not ripened at the end of the season. Some gardeners tell you to remove the larger fruits but leave the little embryo green figs to ripen the following year.

However, a friend who grows a successful crop every year removes all the unripe fruit in the autumn.

I am ever hopeful for our fig tree next year, but we may end up merely admiring the palmate leaves and agreeing that Adam made an excellent choice.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD BARGEES' BANQUET

ELISABETH LUARD

‘There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ Wise advice from Ratty to Mole as they inspected the contents of the picnic basket while drifting among the willows in the wind.

Take a virtual drift along the canals of France with A Foodie Afloat, Di Murrell’s nostalgic memoir-with-recipes, with exquisite drawings by artist Kathleen Caddick. It’s a dedicated bargee’s account of a year’s intermittent chugging along the waterways that once linked the farmers and producers of southern Europe to the markets and industrial north. Those who piloted the great barges, pulled by shaggy-hooved horses along now-deserted towpaths, stopped for refreshment at every lock, a network of little pitstops where you knew just where you were from the menu du jour.

With the working waterways turned to recreational use – mostly by crazy Britishers – there are still pleasures to be had along the way.

Bargees’ tartiflette Reblochon is the ‘correct’ cheese for this potato-and-onion gratin from Savoie.

With nobody there to check for authenticity, feel free to make it with any of France’s smelly cheeses, including over-ripe Camembert or Brie. The 70 The Oldie October 2020

Steep the fruit in wine for about 48 hours then liquidise the mixture and tip it into a basin lined with a clean cloth. Tie the ends of the cloth together and squeeze the liquid into the bowl. Measure the liquid, tip into a roomy pan and for every litre, stir in a kilo of sugar. Heat gently, stirring regularly to dissolve the sugar crystals, until it feels hot to the finger. Continue to simmer at the same temperature, stirring every now and then, for two hours, until the liquid is reduced and looks a little syrupy. Leave to cool, then stir in the vodka (proportions 1:3 vodka to syrup), bottle and seal. Ready in a week. recommended potato variety is Charlotte, and sliced mushrooms can replace the bacon. Serves 4, or 2 hungry bargees 7-8 medium waxy potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced 50g butter 1 tbsp olive oil 2 large onions, thinly sliced 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped 300g smoked bacon lardons 4 good sprigs thyme 1 wine glass Noilly Prat or dry white wine 100ml pouring cream Salt and pepper 500g Reblochon cheese Cook the potato slices in boiling salted water until nearly soft.

Drain and pat dry. Melt the butter and oil in a roomy frying pan, and fry the onion and garlic till they start to colour.

Add the lardons and fry for a minute or two. Add the potatoes, lower the heat and cook all gently together for about 20 minutes till the potatoes are soft. Add the thyme, wine and cream and bubble up.

Preheat the oven to 220°C/Gas 7.

Slice the cheese into strips (remove the rind) and lay the strips over the potato. Bake for 20 minutes or so, until the cheese has melted into the potato, leaving a golden crust on top.

Serve, for perfect regional authenticity, with a salad of purslane (duckweed) gathered along the towpath.

Blackberry liqueur A ruby-red digestif adapted from a blackcurrant recipe in Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, explains Di, a writer always careful to credit her sources.

Serve neat as an aperitif or an afterdinner tipple; or dilute with fizzy water and ice; or add to poached pears. Makes about 1.5 litres 1kg blackberries 1 litre good red wine (a fruity Beaujolais) About 1.5k white sugar 750ml vodka

Elisabeth Luard’s Preserving, Potting and Pickling is published by Grub Street

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE The Limestone Hotel, West Lulworth, Dorset Barrafina, Soho, London W1 In August, we took a trip to Lulworth Cove, unfairly infamous in the dull minds of geography pupils who have visited on school trips. Where were they expecting to visit? The Grand Canyon?

We had little interest in its geology. A local taxi driver told me the Limestone Hotel did ‘top nosh’ and, as influencers go, I hold a lot of store by taxi drivers, given that they listen to the critiques of multitudinous passengers. They’re more reliable than Tripadvisor.

If I’m honest, it wasn’t even his tip that drew me; I have a passion for British seaside hotels, and I’m not talking about Olga Polizzi’s over-priced Tresanton.

My love affair is hereditary. In 1918, my spinster great-great aunt Nancy opened the Gables, in Swanage, with the certain conviction that Swanage would be the next Bournemouth.

This lowly ambition for the town and its magnificent bay was arguably never realised, in spite of the gastronomic efforts of her niece, my great-aunt Nancy, who merged the Gables with the neighbouring Wolfeton Hotel before the war. Her prowess was recognised in the 1955 Good Food Guide, in whose pages its editor, Raymond Postgate, allowed only 91 out-of-London eateries. He praised her chicken Marengo and Dover sole Cecilia.

I can only hope this accolade gave her some solace for her thwarted escape in the 1930s with a lady acrobat from the visiting Polish State Circus.

Sadly, Nancy sold up in 1964. So my only experience of such coastal grandeur was her rival, the Grosvenor Hotel, on the other side of the bay.

On my desk is the typed dinner menu of 15th August 1985 – its last summer before it was moronically demolished.

Starters include ‘various fruit juices’ and ‘soup of the day’, next to which Gaby, the waitress, has written ‘mushroom’.

The strident main courses include ‘roast duckling Montmorency’. And the puddings? Those ghosts of the sweet trolley banana split, lemon syllabub and sherry trifle. Price £7 for non-residents; wine by the glass for 80p.

Fast forward 35 years: the Limestone too has excellent duck – but where was Montmorency? My chilli crab was delicious, too, but there was no maître d’ in a dickie bow and burgundy jacket.

My son, Leo, and I ate out to help out at Barrafina a week later, as compensation for his aborted tour of quarantined Spain.

God, it’s good. I so hope Westminster Council will continue to allow Soho’s restaurants to have tables on the road, as well as on the pavement.

We had the sweetest, most succulent octopus of my 50-odd years; the courgette flowers were stuffed with goat’s cheese, and the eager waitress’s recommendation of the Pluma Iberica was spot-on.

Leo, a budding steak aficionado, fell silent – a 21-year-old’s equivalent of a standing ovation. But would any of it have rivalled the Grosvenor’s lobster thermidor? I bet that was worth every penny of the £5.50 supplement, in 1985.

The Limestone Hotel, Main Road, West Lulworth, Dorset BH20 5RL; tel: 01929 400252; www.limestonehotel.co.uk; three courses for £38 Barrafina, 26-27 Dean Street, London W1D 3LL; branches also in Covent Garden and Kings Cross; www.barrafina.co.uk; £50 a head including wine

DRINK BILL KNOTT MY ARMCHAIR ALCO-HOLIDAYS I loathe the word ‘staycation’ so deeply that I have been developing a new concept, one that doesn’t involve schlepping to an extortionately-priced cottage in Cornwall: the alco-holiday.

This involves theming an evening around a particular drink: a bottle of Aloxe-Corton with berets, boeuf à la bourguignonne and Edith Piaf, perhaps, or a night of vodka and Rimsky-Korsakov with borscht and blinis (and Cossack dancing if you like, although maybe forgo the swords).

It seems I am not alone. During lockdown, Waitrose’s sales of tequila rose by 175 per cent, a surge the company’s

spirits buyer attributes to ‘have-a-go’ home bartenders hosting Mexican-themed parties. Sales of triple sec have rocketed, too, so one suspects that margarita mania is sweeping the suburbs.

My first experiences of tequila were not auspicious, but that’s student parties and cheesy Tex-Mex restaurants for you.

I was sceptical about the drink’s merits even on my first trip to Mexico, until a barman in Guadalajara poured me a frosty shot of Herradura Blanco. It slipped down a treat, even at 46% ABV, and I was hooked: earthy and vegetal on the nose and palate, with a citrus-like kick as it washed the larynx.

In fact, sales of tequila and mezcal were booming even before lockdown, especially premium brands, designed to be sipped, not slammed. The most notable differences between tequila and mezcal are the species of agave – spiky succulents that thrive in Mexico’s semi-arid soils – and the way in which the heart (the piña) of the agave is cooked to release its sugars.

Tequila uses only blue agave, cooked in closed ovens so the piña effectively steams; mezcal can use as many as 30 species of agave, fire-roasted underground, lending mezcal a distinctively smoky edge.

Mezcal is produced all over Mexico, but Oaxaca is its heartland. Hundreds of small distilleries (palenques) are dotted around the hilly countryside; to the visitor, they are more like simple farm shops, selling mezcal from a trestle table by the road, decanted into old cola bottles, sachets of sal de gusano (agave worm salt) clipped to their necks.

Mezcal and tequila can both be aged in oak barrels – anything aged up to a year is called reposado; longer than that makes añejo – but almost every expert tells me that the best and purest expression of a mezcal or a tequila is its unaged ‘white’ version (often called blanco, plata, platinum or silver), untainted by wood. Avoid anything that says ‘gold’ or ‘oro’: these just have colouring added to simulate ageing.

I recommend Del Maguey Mezcal Vida (42%, 70 cl, £44.83 from masterofmalt.com), full of nutty, spicy flavours, or, for tequila, the aforementioned Herradura, although the UK version, called Plata, is a mere 40%: £38.99 from waitrose.com. All you need then are tacos, sombreros, and some music: Tom Lehrer’s In Old Mexico, for example. ‘The mariachis would serenade/ And they would not shut up till they were paid/ We ate, we drank and we were merry/ And we got typhoid and dysentery.’ Happy alco-holidays.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines, two whites and a red: a stunning white Burgundy from an exciting young domaine; a beguiling Alsace blend of every white grape variety in the region; and a beefy red from Portugal to take us into autumn.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Chardonnay Côtes Salines, Domaine Gueguen, Burgundy 2019, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 Pale and interesting white Burgundy with wonderfully pure, almond-scented fruit.

Gentil ‘Hugel’, Alsace 2018, offer price £13.50, case price £162.00 An exuberant blend of six grape varieties from the ever-reliable Hugel: bone-dry, aromatic and splendid with spice.

Mariposa Dão, Portugal 2016, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 Big, bold red in the Dão region’s modern style: rich damson and black cherry fruit, firm tannins and great length.

Mixed case price £155.92 – a saving of £24.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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The Oldie October 2020 71

SPORT JIM WHITE MIKE TYSON’S OLDIE COMEBACK In professional sport, you know when your time is up.

In rugby, it’s when you are no longer sharp enough to sidestep a rampaging lock. In cricket, it’s when you misjudge an outswinger because the ball’s getting a bit fuzzy. In football, it’s when you put your foot down to accelerate past a teenaged full back and the tank is empty. Chronology eventually catches up with the best.

Except in boxing. In the sweet science, you rage against the dying of the light.

The latest oldie to believe he can still do it is Mike Tyson, 53. In November he will make his comeback, 14 years after he retired. He will fight Roy Jones Junior.

And the only thing Junior about the 51-year-old Jones is his name.

It is no surprise Tyson has announced his intention to return to the ring. Since he retired, he has drifted aimlessly, bereft of point and purpose, spending his vast fortune, declaring bankruptcy and sinking into a trough of coke-addled despond. But video footage of him back in the gym suggests he has refound his mojo. He looks in extraordinary shape and seems to be relishing pounding the bags.

Because of their advanced years, the two men will face strictures when they fight. They will wear headguards, there can be no knockouts and the bout will be decided on points. This can’t but diminish the nostalgia value. What we remember of Tyson is the snarling ferocity, unbridled menace and brutal power.

He himself does not feel constrained by the conditions of his comeback. For him, this is the first step – a demonstration that he can still hack it. He wants to return to proper contests. He believes he can get back to the top of the game he once dominated. Indeed, the man who holds the record as the youngest-ever heavyweight champion has announced his intention also to become the oldest. His goal, he has said, is to overtake the record of George Foreman, who became champion at 45.

At which point, you have to cringe at the very thought. Tyson may look in ballistic form as he bounces around the gym. But, since retiring, he has lived a life of unrestrained hedonism. The reflexes that once powered him through have inevitably been fried. Remember why he retired in the first place. He could no longer mix it even with journeymen. A thin parody of the champion he had once been, back then he looked finished, drained and old. And he was only 39.

More to the point, if he wants to retrieve the belts he once considered his 72 The Oldie October 2020

‘The Baddest Man on the Planet’: Mike Tyson, Memphis, Tennessee, 2002

personal property, he will have to overcome the strongest heavyweight field in a generation. Slower, weaker and lighter, he will have to outshine Deontay Wilder, outpummel Anthony Joshua and, perhaps the most alarming thought of all, overwhelm the brilliant giant Tyson Fury.

Actually, that is a bout that can never be allowed to happen. It would be crazy for any 53-year-old to try to match a man of Fury’s scale and prowess. The warning is in the name. When his son was born, Fury’s dad was a huge fan of the then reigning world champion. So he named his boy after him. He called the lad Tyson. That was 32 years ago.

The very thought that the current champion might have to defend his title against the man he was named after should make all of us squirm.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD ALWAYS A BUYER'S MARKET ‘Like to see you in one, sir, like to see you in one,’ said the oleaginous salesman at the Mercedes dealership where I was loitering without intent.

None of the 77 cars I’ve owned was new and I wasn’t about to forsake a lifetime’s frugality for the fleeting pleasure of newness. But I was tempted.

Still am. Daily.

Given my relish for the second-hand – pre-owned, in marketing speak – people sometimes seek my all-too-fallible advice on buying. I recommend you start by knowing thyself.

What do you want a car for – the school run, commuting, shopping, dog-walking, out-of-town weekends or camping holidays? Where would you keep it – in a garage, on your drive or on the street? If the last, will you have to pay emission-based parking or use charges?

How many miles might you do a year (the fewer, the less fuel consumption figures matter)? Do you mind if it’s

expensive to maintain, tax and insure?

Does its age concern you? Is it important that you actually like it and enjoy driving it, or will any old set of wheels do?

Finally, how much do you want to pay?

Then there’s where to buy – privately, from a dealership, at auction, online or from a car supermarket? You should get it cheaper privately but you have no comeback if the gearbox disintegrates on your way home. Buying through the trade often gets you a warranty, but anyway the 2015 Consumer Rights Act protects you for up to six months against major faults present or developing at the time of purchase.

At auction, you reckon to pay trade price or not much more but it’s fast-moving, you can’t drive the car or change your mind after the hammer falls and you must be disciplined about what you’re prepared to pay (including commission and VAT).

If you have a car to trade in, then a dealer or car supermarket – where prices are usually competitive – is your best bet. If buying new or nearly new, you can get substantial discounts via online outfits such as drivethedeal.com or carwow.co.uk, though choice is limited to what is available on the day.

Outlets such as autotrader.co.uk and motors.co.uk – my latest favourite – show what’s available nationwide and give an idea of asking prices. If you want advice on particular makes, go to the excellent honestjohn.co.uk and look up its reviews section.

Remember it’s a buyer’s market, always. If you can’t get the deal you want, you’ll find it elsewhere. Dealers know that and are usually prepared to deal, if not on the asking price then on what they’ll allow on your trade-in, or by extending the warranty, fitting new tyres or whatever. Don’t be unreasonable – they have a living to make – but try to make the deal feel like a collaboration.

Instead of, ‘I’m not paying that for it,’ say something like, ‘I like it but can we sharpen our pencils a bit on the price?’

About 80-90 per cent of new or nearly new cars are bought on credit, most often by personal contract purchase (PCP). You pay monthly for three years or so, in effect hiring the car, after which you hand it back or pay the value remaining to buy it outright. Or you can get a loan or do it through hire purchase. Dealers like you to borrow because they get commission, but if you pay cash you can often negotiate a discount.

Overall, be clear about what you want, study the market, take a sceptical friend along for a reality check and always be prepared to walk away. Don’t be tempted by what you neither need nor can afford.

As I am, daily.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

If it tastes like spam, it probably is Who is sending you emails? It’s obvious, isn’t it? The address is at the top – so you know who it’s from, surely?

If only it were that simple. Making an email look as if it comes from an address that is not your own is one of the simplest ruses on the internet.

There is nothing sacrosanct about the ‘From’ address in an email; it can be set to anything the sender wants. By default, it is set to your genuine address, as it should be, but you can change that.

Sometimes there are good reasons for doing so; perhaps a club uses a third

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Spend virtually all day in a museum https://tinyurl.com/webster392 Another winner from Google Arts & Culture – explore the culture of the UK with over 140 institutions.

Family trees online www.genuki.org.uk GENUKI is full of genealogical information from the UK and Ireland.

Best of all, it’s free. First-time users’ guide here: www.genuki.org.uk/org.

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

party to manage memberships. In those cases, if you look into the guts of the email, you can see who actually sent it; but it’s not important, because the club that instructed it to be sent is plain to see.

However, that’s also exactly what the spamming scoundrels do, and they are also devious enough to alter the code inside the email and hide who they really are, or at least muddy the trail.

That’s unnerving enough; but how did they get my email address? Have I been ‘hacked’?

Relax; you probably haven’t been.

Email addresses come from all over the place. It might be because your email is public; mine is on the Oldie website, from which it is easily harvested by internet robots that scour the web. Or it might be from one of the many data breaches caused by a company that has, so to speak, left its customer list in the pub.

Well over ten billion email addresses have been revealed this way. You can see whether yours might be one of them at haveibeenpwned.com, which tracks breaches and has a gigantic database of the emails that have been exposed. It seems that mine has been involved in six such breaches.

But, you say, can’t the owner of an email address that’s used to send spam be traced and prosecuted? Not really, at least not if they take steps to hide.

This is how easy it is: create an account at Outlook.com, Microsoft’s free email service. All they’ll ask you for is your name, your country and your date of birth. That’s

it. You could put anything you want, and spammers do. So, even if Microsoft did want to give the authorities information about you, they don’t have any.

I’ve no doubt that behaving deceitfully like this is against the terms and conditions, and you shouldn’t do it, but spammers don’t care about that sort of subtlety.

It’s all to do with privacy, which is often a double-edged sword. I doubt you would want anyone who knows your email address to be able to discover where you live by asking your email provider. Even if they know it, they won’t reveal it.

The trouble is that this cuts both ways: the privacy that protects you is exactly what protects the spammers. A court order might help but, as we’ve seen, the provider may not have the information anyway.

Do not despair. First, remember that you are not alone in this fight. Your email service is just as keen to stop spammers as you are – probably more so – and will have sophisticated techniques to spot the rubbish and consign it to your junk folder. Most of the time, they are pretty good at this, but it’s a cat-and-mouse game; each time they refine their filters, the spammers refine their efforts.

Your best defence, by far, is cynicism; happily, that’s something I know Oldie readers have in good quantity. If it looks odd, it probably is. If it’s unexpected, tread carefully. If money is involved, tread very carefully indeed.

The delete key is always your friend.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The dangers of buy now, pay later Paying for your shopping weeks after you have bought it without any interest charges or, crucially, without any consumer-credit protection, is a widespread and fast-growing option.

Already around eight million people in the UK are buying this way.

The target audience is young people who like to buy lots of clothes. You can delay payment also for furniture, homeware, haircuts, beauty products, jewellery and dentistry.

74 The Oldie October 2020

The only age restriction is that you must be aged over 18, and the scheme is available for shopping at Marks & Spencer, W H Smith, J D Sports and Halfords among thousands of other retailers.

Several companies offer this scheme, including Klarna, Clearpay and Laybuy.

Their terms vary but the broad selling point is that you receive your chosen goods, decide which (if any) you want to send back and pay only for what you

keep. You spread the payment over several weeks but pay no interest charges or fees and can shop online or, if the retailer allows, in store.

You can see the attraction to people who ‘want it now’. Without buy-now-paylater, you have to pay for all your purchases upfront and claim a refund for what you return – which can take weeks to arrive.

The pay-later providers get away with not calling this credit because they do not

charge interest and collect repayments within a few weeks. Neither do they use the words ‘loan’ or ‘debt’.

As it is technically not credit, customers are not protected by the Consumer Credit Act, which says lenders must be transparent about the risks of debt, give cooling-off periods and check that borrowers can afford to repay – and it gives access to an ombudsman.

Customers are assessed before being allowed to delay payment. With Klarna and Clearpay, this includes a soft credit search. No marker is put on your credit record; so other potential lenders cannot see how much you are borrowing and your credit rating is not affected. Laybuy conducts a hard credit check.

There is nothing wrong with shopping this way, if you are careful. The danger and the expense arise if you fail to pay or to return unwanted goods within the timescale – and the timescales are often short. Then you can face late-payment fees and might be referred to a credit reference agency. With Marks & Spencer, you could face total late-payment penalties up to £36.

Critics complain that the terms are not spelled out clearly and that buying before paying is sometimes the default option at

checkout. This can get customers into a payment plan without their realising; particularly anyone who is disorganised with their spending.

The pay-later companies make their money by taking a percentage of each sale. Clearly they hope customers will be tempted to buy more than they otherwise would. Similarly, participating retailers

need to see their sales improve sharply to justify paying a lender.

Buy-now-pay-later will appeal to people who have difficulty budgeting and who might not understand that they are building up debt and that debt, sooner or later, has to be repaid. Just ask yourself: if I cannot afford it today, will I be able to afford it in a month?

The Oldie October 2020 75

Getting Dressed

Magician who made East meet West

Interior designer Alidad combines Iran, Islam and Austria in his look brigid keenan

DAFYDD JONES

The interior designer Alidad is so well known in his field that he doesn’t need a surname. For the record, it is Mahloudji.

He is master of the sumptuous interior, blending East and West in glorious ways. The late Min Hogg, founder of World of Interiors magazine, called him a ‘magician’. She was among the first to ‘discover’ him, back in the early ’80s, at an exhibition of British Interiors for which he had designed his first room.

He says, ‘It was a time of chintz and frills and bows, and my room was red and gold and the most masculine thing you’d ever seen. This wasn’t deliberate; it was just what I was doing in my own flat.’

His flat subsequently appeared over 12 pages in World of Interiors, and he was well and truly launched.

Alidad, now 66, was born in Tehran. When his industrialist father developed chronic asthma, doctors advised the family to move to Switzerland, where they lived for a year – until his father decided to move to London.

By then, Alidad was 16. ‘It was the worst possible time for someone of my age… I didn’t speak English, I was trying to do O levels when all the others were doing A levels. I couldn’t do anything that involved writing much English. So I did mathematics, statistics and computer science and then, like a good boy, got a degree at London University, even though by now I hated science and wanted to do something more arty.’

His parents agreed to let him enrol in an art course run

by Sotheby’s auction house for Jacket by Dschulnigg, trousers

by Hackett, tie by Brooks Bros, shoes by George Cleverley 76 The Oldie October 2020

18- to 22-year-olds. When it ended, he was one of a handful of students offered a job. He worked at Sotheby’s for eight years, becoming their youngest-ever departmental director for Islamic art and antique textiles.

He says, ‘It was wonderful! My eye was being trained every day – it gave me a whole different world to live in. But then I wanted to do something on my own and earn some money because Sotheby’s paid a ridiculously low salary.’

His first idea was to furnish his flat and offer everything for sale. ‘But when people came in and said, “I like that picture – how much is it?” or “I love that commode – how much is that?” I thought, “Oh, no! I can’t sell that.” It was a hopeless idea.’

Instead he became a designer.

‘I was good at putting things together and had a great grounding in Islamic art and textiles and, strangely, having no specific ‘design’ training helped enormously because I was ignorant in a way that allowed me to dare to do my own thing, without worrying.’

Over the past decades, Alidad has worked his magic for royalty, oligarchs and billionaires.

Alidad: The Timeless Home (by Min Hogg, Sarah Stewart-Smith and James McDonald) shows some of the beautiful places he has created around the world.

In Britain, he is particularly proud of his meticulous restoration of the Burne-Jones room at Buscot Park in Faringdon, Oxfordshire (National Trust).

Classic & conventional: Alidad, mid-’80s

His projects are always flamboyant, but Alidad himself was brought up ‘conservatively’, dressed in navy or grey – until, in London, aged 17, he rebelled and splurged out on bright yellow and shoes with high heels. His mother never said a word – she even shopped with him – and quite soon he grew bored and reverted to classic colours and conventional suits.

Then everything changed again.

Alidad has always been a fan of the annual Salzburg Festival and found himself buying two or three Austrian jackets in different fabrics on every visit.

‘I love them and my whole wardrobe is Austrian now. I keep my clothes in a walk-in cupboard, which I have to go into sideways now because it is so packed.

I tend to choose three things and wear them to death – and then another three.

‘I don’t really buy much these days, but if I pass a shoe shop, I have to freeze myself because I love good shoes. I always wear a tie – it is just a discipline I have – and my hair is cut by Kian Chabokki in a simple barber’s shop (www.scissorsandguys.com) near my office in Chelsea. He just happens to be from Iran!

‘When I was young, I was incredibly slim – but I put on weight. So when lockdown came, I thought, it is now or never – I can put on 10 kilos or lose them. I lost them by just eating less.’ www.alidad.com

The redwing

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Gerry Cambridge’s poem of the ‘Scandinavian thrushes, almost always together’, talks of the redwing (Turdus iliacus) and fieldfare (Turdus pilaris).

In the poem, preference is given to redwings, the lesser in size and character of the two migrants: The slimmer sidekicks with the rust-red stain like a wound on their flanks. I hear their high thin see-ap! These nights, up in the starry emptinesses, over the lit sandstone of the church in Bothwell chiming its human hours. Notes in the night air, over the gantried pubs; over me too, out to the shop for milk and bread on the snell pavement; and see-ap!

– reminder of the planetary migrations, the succour of a different scale of time.

From Turdus iliacus & Turdus pilaris The redwing comes to Britain from September to April. It is as gentle as its ‘see-ap’ call suggests, in contrast to the ‘chuckchuck’ of its burlier fieldfare cousin which abandons the countryside for urban parks and gardens only during extended periods of freezing weather.

One sunny 1st November, W H Hudson, on a ramble between Wells-next-the-Sea and Stiffkey on the north Norfolk coast, had his day made memorable when a redwing perched close by. ‘He is, I think, the most charming of the thrushes… There is a wildness, a freshness, in the feeling he always gives me,’ he wrote (Adventures Among Birds).

Hudson was particularly flattered because redwings were ‘exceedingly shy’.

Worms are their food of choice, which makes them more field than hedgerow birds. They are the most vulnerable

thrush to glacial winters. In 1962/63, almost the entire British migration was thought to have perished.

As Gerry Cambridge’s poem recalls, they are memorably nocturnal in passage. On 13th November 2019, Pete Morris, a Birdquest tour guide, and a spotting group reckoned 22,100 came in at nightfall to roost in woodland on Longbridge Fell, Lancashire.

In his memoir, A Diplomat Off Duty, Sir Francis Lindley described the redwing from the perspective of Norway, where he was British Minister (1923-29).

The earliest to arrive in the ministerial

garden was on 14th March. For him, it was the redwing that symbolised the Norwegian spring. ‘All day, and nearly all through the light night, he keeps up a monotonous chant of three or four loud notes on a rising scale, repeated at intervals of a few seconds. You hear him … inside or outside the town, wherever there are trees.’

He wondered why the species, considering it likes a temperate climate, did not live in Britain the whole year.

At the last count, in 2017, only 24 pairs stayed to breed, all in Scotland’s far north.

The Oldie October 2020 77

Travel Realm of bright water Sixty years after Gavin Maxwell published his Scottish classic, Kevin Pilley visits Eilean Bàn, the island home of the writer and his otters

‘A

black sheep led me to the wee island under the Skye Bridge,’ says Katia Auvity, who looks after Gavin Maxwell’s bewitching island house.

Katia should have celebrated her 60th birthday this year by spending her summer working as a volunteer warden and tour guide on Eilean Bàn.

That’s the six-acre last home of author, painter, aristocrat, naturalist, crackshot, racing driver, Scots Guard, social renegade and black sheep Gavin Maxwell. His classic memoir Ring of Bright Water was published 60 years ago.

Katia is from Clairac, near Bordeaux.

Skye is her second home. In France, she works at a cat-rescue centre. Formerly, she was a veterinary lab assistant.

‘Maxwell is unknown in France,’ she says. ‘I first saw the film about him in 2007 and was immediately fascinated.

I read everything I could. My love for animals made me naturally receptive to his work. On my first visit, opening the gate into Eilean Bàn was like entering a different world. I applied for a job.’

This should have been her third summer on Eilean Bàn. But, thanks to

78 The Oldie October 2020

coronavirus, she’s had to wait till this October to return and for tours to start up again.

‘It’s an amazing place,’ she says.

‘Not many people have a lighthouse in their office!’

Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969) spoilt his house guests – his adored otters. He fed them live eels for breakfast and allowed them to share his bed and nibble his earlobes. Once, so that one pet otter would be allowed to share his overnight sleeper compartment from London, he described it as an Illyrian poodle.

Maxwell and pet otter in Sandaig, which he named Camusfearna, in the 1950s

Maxwell was always surrounded by animals: a springer spaniel called Jonnie, a cocker called Judy, Giddy the pony, a heron, a blind vole, an owl called Andrew, Jackie the jackdaw, five Greylag geese, three deerhound (two called Dirk), a lemur, a wildcat kitten, a water rail, a herring gull, a hedgehog, Gus the Pyrenean mountain dog, a rescued Manx shearwater, a bush baby called Hitchcock, a Slovakian gull, Mary the cockerel and a goat called Alftruda.

And several otters – Chahala, Mijbil, Mossy, Monday, Tibby, Edal and Teko.

His ‘thraldom to otters’ made them all famous.

Gavin’s father was killed in 1914, three months before Gavin was born, in one of the first offensives of the First World War. So Gavin was brought up by his mother and maiden aunts. One of them ran the world’s largest rabbit fur farm and another, Aunt Moo, was a zoologist who fostered his ‘preoccupation with lesser animals’. She specialised in water-flea parasites.

Maxwell’s birthplace, Elrig (deer run), on the mainland, is the beginning of Scotland’s Maxwell Trail. In this clachan

JOHN LIGGINS/ALAMY

Gavin Maxwell’s last home: lighthousekeepers’ cottages on Eilean Bàn

(or hamlet) in Dumfries and Galloway near Port William, the family house, now in private ownership, was built in 1912 by his father – Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bt, heir to a 17,000-acre Scottish estate – and his mother, the fifth daughter of the Duke of Northumberland.

With his brother and sister, they ‘wintered drearily in England’ (Alnwick Castle and Surrey) when the estate was let for shoots. One of the children’s governesses also looked after Ian Fleming.

‘Wearing kilts of black and white shepherd’s plaid’, in Maxwell’s memory, the children grew up among ‘an infinity of rock pools’, grass cliffs (‘heughs’), ‘marram-grown dunes’ and ‘the wild shouts of lapwings’.

He wrote at Seil Sound on the west coast of Scotland, with its ‘wheeling gulls’ and ‘pale satin sea’. In his Highland seaboard cottage near Skye, at Sandaig (called in the books Camusfearna, Gaelic for Bay of Alders), he used fish boxes as furniture. He lived there for eight years without plumbed water.

After Stowe and Oxford, during the war Maxwell served with the SOE and trained to be a secret agent. He was due

to be dropped into France before injuring himself in parachute training.

Then, in 1945, he bought the Hebridean island of Soay, to open a shark fishery. This resulted in his first book, Harpoon at a Venture.

His writing career lasted until he died in 1969. Last September was the 50th anniversary of his death. The memorial ceremony was witnessed by Katia.

‘Maxwell touches minds and hearts,’ she says. ‘It was a kind of pilgrimage for many. I have met people who knew and worked for him. Former otter keeper David Wright’s daughter was in tears when I showed her the watch given to her father.

‘I love spending time in the hide on the north end of the island, watching the different sunsets and skies over the Cuillins. Eilean Bàn is magical under a dying sun. It is full of soul.’

Katia likes to spend time alone in the house’s Long Room, among Maxwell’s paintings and personal belongings, such as his binoculars. ‘There was a phone box facing the house. He loved watching people phoning him to ask to visit him.

He described them and told them to stop picking their nose.’

Virginia McKenna, who starred with her husband Bill Travers in the 1969 film of Ring of Bright Water, restored the room. Her Born Free Foundation saved Maxwell’s home after the Skye Bridge, which connects Eilean Bàn with Skye and the mainland, was built in 1995. She turned the house into a museum.

‘Forget the bridge. Ignore it,’ Katia tells visitors. She shows them Maxwell’s desk, his passport, his pistol, a desert rose (he wrote about Morocco in Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956, published in 1966) and the handwritten first page of the manuscript of Ring of Bright Water. The book’s title comes from a poem by his platonic lover, Kathleen Raine. He wrote two sequels, The Rocks Remain (1963) and Raven Seek Thy Brother (1969).

A large boulder with a slate plaque marks where Maxwell’s ashes lie. It’s on the site of the study in his ‘weather-worn cottage’, ‘a stone’s throw from the sea’, which burnt down in 1968. The waterfall (‘the enduring symbol of Camusfearna’) and rowan tree (reputedly cursed) are still there – as is the memorial to his beloved Edal (1958-68). The otter – at one time the most famous animal in the world – died in the fire. Cows now use Edal’s memorial stone as a rubbing post.

After the fire, Maxwell converted two lighthouse-keeper’s cottages to live in. He planned a zoo and an eider-duck colony.

Maxwell donated geese to Sir Peter Scott’s Slimbridge Wetland Centre.

Looking out to Loch Duich, Castle Moil and the Five Sisters of Kintail, Katia talks otters. She tells you Mjibil came from Basra, Edal from Nigeria, Tibby from Eigg and Teko from Sierre Leone.

Teko is Old English for ‘otter’.

She adds that Castle Moil is the ancestral home of the Mackinnon clan, named after a Norwegian princess nicknamed Saucy Mary, who took tolls from ships using the sound and bared her breasts as a thank-you.

Do visit Teko’s memorial stone and the 70-foot 1857 Stevenson Lighthouse, once lit by sperm-whale oil and decommissioned in 1993. Then brave ‘the hustling wind’ or, from the heatherthatched hide, watch for rorquals, porpoises with their ‘bonhomous faces’.

You can spot seals basking there. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll see Maxwell’s beloved wild otters among ‘the tideswung sea tangle’.

For more information about visiting, go to www.eileanban.org The Oldie October 2020 79

Overlooked Britain

My elegy for a country church memorial

PA IMAGES/ALAMY/JOHN BOWLING

lucinda lambton The poet Thomas Gray is buried in Stoke Poges by a monument inscribed with his greatest poem

A surprise of considerable distinction is to be found two miles north of Slough.

It’s down a woodland path, arranged so that the approach seems somewhat theatrical, adjoining the churchyard of St Giles’s, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire.

Suddenly you come upon it: a huge, neoclassical, fluted stone sarcophagus, rearing its beauty high into the sky. Its corners fly forth with acroteria, atop a 22-foot-high rectangular plinth faced with yellow Bath stone.

Four inset panels in dazzlingly contrasting white Portland stone are inscribed with graceful classical lettering honouring the poet Thomas Gray (1716-71). Considered by many to be the greatest lyricist of the mid-18th century, he was a forerunner of the romantic poets.

His most celebrated work, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, was reputedly based on the graveyard here at St Giles’s, which survives to this day – albeit rather too tidied up for comfort with standard roses.

The poem was to be a sensation from the start; imitated, pirated and liberally quoted, as well as translated into both Latin and Greek. In 1759, during the Seven Years’ War, before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to one of his officers, ending with the words, ‘I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow.’

Three of Gray’s works blaze forth on the monument, as well as his epitaph, written by John Penn – who also proposed the monument – from the famed local family. His grandfather founded Pennsylvania and he himself was a friend of the poet, as well as being a distinguished scholar in his own right.

He commissioned the Gray memorial to stand as an eye-catcher – and, my goodness, how it does catch the eye – from Stoke Park, his neoclassical mansion nearby. It was designed by Robert Nasmith, assistant to the renowned architect Robert Adam 80 The Oldie October 2020

in 1789. Seven bays wide and plastered shining white, it was to be enlarged by Penn’s friend the similarly famed architect James Wyatt between 1793 and 1798. He added a commanding dome and four pavilions, screened by colonnades of innovative-for-their-day-on-domesticarchitecture Greek Doric columns.

Stoke Park later became Britain’s first country club, in 1908 – and, in 1964, it found fame in Goldfinger, as the golf course where Auric Goldfinger cheated and yet still lost to James Bond.

This was all set in motion after Penn’s return from America in 1789, when he also commissioned various other architectural eye-catchers to be designed by Wyatt. They were set down amidst swathes of landscaping by Humphry Repton, the last great English landscape designer.

This came after the American Revolution when Penn reaped the enormous rewards garnered by his grandfather, John Penn. Thanks to an annuity from the Pennsylvania Assembly and another from the British Parliament – both in compensation for the loss of his American lands – he was to settle in affluent splendour in Buckinghamshire.

Hence the glory of the great house,

Fore! Oddjob at Stoke Park Golf Club in Goldfinger (1964)

along with the extravagance of the sarcophagus, which, by the way, was based on Nero’s tomb!

The curfew bell tolls the bell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

So, most beautifully, begins Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which moves on to the lyrically gloomy verse: Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The poem was recognised as a masterpiece, with many of its phrases entering the common English lexicon.

‘Far from the madding crowd’ was used

by Thomas Hardy. ‘Celestial fire’ was another of Gray’s terms in the Elegy, as was ‘kindred spirit’. And the sentences ‘Ignorance is bliss and ‘ ’Tis folly to be wise’ were written by Gray in Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

He was considered to be one of the ‘Graveyard Poets’ a group characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality.

They were often seen as the precursors of the Gothic genre.

Gray himself had a modest view of his poetry, once writing that his collected works would merely be ‘mistaken for the works of a flea’! When offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1757, he declined the honour.

As well as finding fame as a poet, he was a classical scholar and a Cambridge professor. He was of modest beginnings – his father was a scrivener and his mother a milliner. The

Far from the madding crowd: Thomas Gray’s monument, Stoke Poges, with lines from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

fifth of 12 children, he was the only one to survive infancy. A delicate, shy and scholarly boy, he was educated at Eton – living with his uncles, who both taught him there – leading to Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

There he befriended Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who would later say of his poet friend, ‘He never wrote anything easily but things of humour.’ Certainly his mock elegy, Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub

of Goldfishes, is a delightful triumph: Her conscious tail her joy declar’d; The fair round face the snowy beard, The velvet of her paws, The coat, that with the tortoise vies, Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She saw; and purr’d applause.

Walpole later kept and treasured the china ‘tub’ in which the goldfish lived, in his famed and full-of-treasures house at Strawberry Hill.

Although he reached the heights of renown as a poet, he wrote only the astonishingly few 13 poems, amounting to fewer than 1,000 lines in all.

He was buried in the churchyard he had made internationally famous. He was commemorated by a stone plaque.

What with John Penn, Thomas Gray and James Wyatt, as well as Humphry Repton, it was a distinguished group who were involved with the creation of this enclave of beauty at Stoke Poges.

The Oldie October 2020 81

Taking a Walk

Messing about on the River Dart

GARY WING

patrick barkham

‘When you say “explore”, you mean walk,’ said six-year-old Ted accusingly.

It was a Sunday in the depths of the summer holidays and the children were being dragged on a wholesome excursion. Nearly six months of no school had imbued them with a deep contempt for adult authority and its schemes.

I tried to combat their mutiny by warning them that their whinges could appear, in writing, in The Oldie.

‘Write about a walk? That’s the most boring thing ever,’ scoffed Milly, eight.

The children did not yet know that this was no common-or-garden country park excursion, however – this was the prince of walks.

A wander from the (very old) Newbridge in Dartmoor, through ancient woods in the steep valley gouged by the River Dart, one of the most charismatic bodies of water in the country.

Its name derived from the Celtic for ‘the river where oak trees grow’, the Dart’s water was ‘liquid dark’, wrote Alice Oswald in her epic poem Dart.

It may be barely 20 miles long but the Dart collects the outpourings of some of England’s wettest moors and hurtles them downhill, along with kayaks, salmon, froth and spume. Walking beside 82 The Oldie October 2020

this river after a downpour, as we were, was like trotting with a tiger, or strolling beside a phalanx of speeding F1 racers. The Dart cleared its throat, roared and threatened to pounce but mostly just pounded every rock foolish enough to lie in its path into smooth, round submission.

The children were not submitting to this river’s mighty charisma as we walked through sessile oaks dripping with the memory of rain, a woodland filled with as many horizontals as verticals, and mossy logs resembling amputated green limbs.

The path teased the river, drawing close and darting away up the river cliff.

The Dart’s peaty water was the colour of crème brûlée as it dived into a hole in the rock. It swept over round stones looking like slicked-back hair.

‘Can we just go back now?’ asked Ted, 20 minutes into the walk.

‘How much further?’

‘I’m so tired.’

Limbs flopped as though they were discarded puppets.

I told them we would walk to find ‘the fairy pool’ which attracted the kind of derision that children of my generation reserved for a particularly eager-toplease supply teacher. I offered £1 for the first one to spot a dipper bobbing beside

the river, its white bib reminiscent of an obsequious waiter. But the incentive failed to elicit any enthusiasm, and I soon won my own prize.

Incentives are unpredictable things.

Winning encouragement was eventually supplied by another walker, who told us that a sausage dog named Bruno was waiting by ‘the pool’ and would be eager to meet our lockdown pup, Betty. The children became animated for the first time that morning.

At last we reached the pools, to be greeted by an enthusiastic Bruno and some children who were having the loveliest time in the frothy, bubbly, peaty-orange Dart. Our children forgot to moan and we adults made doubly sure to obliterate any further whining by submerging ourselves in the river and filling our ears with water.

Tingling and beaming with the magic of cold water, we turned for the easy trot home. ‘Why will the walk back feel shorter?’ asked Ted, suspiciously.

‘Because it always does,’ I said.

At last, the children ran ahead, swinging coats, chattering, their imagination switched on by the oaks’ fabulous beards of moss and lichen and the whole spirit of the woods by the water.

‘I can hear a giant running his bath,’ said Ted, as the Dart raged beside us.

It felt as though the giant picked us up and flung us home; we reached the car park so quickly. I like to think I resisted the urge to gloat to the children about the unbearable rightness of being Dad – about the wonders of this walk, and how they’d enjoyed it in the end – but I didn’t quite manage it.

Park at Newbridge car park, TQ13 7NT (£2 all day; arrive before 11am to find a place). Cross the old bridge, turn right onto riverside path that follows the western bank of the Dart, upstream. Sharrah Pools are beyond the waterfall, two miles from the car park. Walking quite rough and steep at times. OS Map: OL28 Dartmoor

On the Road

Opera’s prince of Wales Bryn Terfel loves golf, speaks in operatic German and Italian – and is the King of Bardsey Island, he tells Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

For the first 15 years of my career, my golf clubs. Then I lost three sets.

So I tend not to sleep on aeroplanes. I keep off the champagne and wine. I’m not one who worries about the voice, or getting a cold.

Is there something you really miss?

The three sets of golf clubs because I felt I was playing the best golf ever.

What’s your favourite opera house?

I have to be very careful here. The Welsh National Opera would undoubtedly be my favourite place to perform at home – and I can read my daughter a story before she goes to bed. But my favourite of all is the Royal Opera House, and I do constantly ask my agent what I’m next singing there.

Do you travel light?

With the family there’s absolutely no way, but by myself I’m a very light traveller.

What’s your favourite destination?

Australia, which I associate with golf, wine and culinary experiences.

And your earliest childhood holiday memories?

I was born on a farm in North Wales, and holidays were rare within agriculture. My first recollection of going abroad with my parents is of a trip to Menorca in late October and the weather was terrible.

What has been the effect of coronavirus on your schedule?

The virus puts everything into perspective and I don’t see myself singing now until after Christmas. So I’m in the same boat as everybody, worrying about the next tax bill that’s coming, and I can’t see my next pay cheque. I might have to start singing on the street…

You spend a lot of time in America. Where?

Chicago – and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, especially, for my kind of warbling…

Do you normally travel as a family?

Whenever I’m travelling the world, the boys do come and visit. I did a recital in Bordeaux and we had lunch in the Mouton Rothschild winery which was absolutely amazing.

How do you look after your voice when travelling?

Usually when you arrive, opera houses think you’re ready to work the next day.

Your favourite concert hall?

The Seiji Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood.

Your favourite composer?

That’s a very cheeky question. In the lockdown, I started looking at Schubert’s Winterreise – listening to Hans Hotter while doing my 50 minutes of walking. I hope that by the end of this period I’ll have learnt it.

Your favourite part of Wales?

The Llŷn Peninsula has a special connection because I’m from that area.

Why does Wales produce so many singers?

Most probably because of the language – we have seven vowels, tremendous history in hymn-writing, congregational singing, brass bands, male voice choirs, female choirs. It’s one of the reasons I started singing; my parents loved to sing.

The strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In Vancouver, in a Chinese restaurant – chicken feet.

Your best experience in a restaurant when abroad?

In Chicago in the late ’90s, Renée Fleming and I were singing in The Marriage of Figaro and we were invited to Charlie Trotter’s restaurant – the most amazing culinary experience.

Do you have a go at the local language?

We speak Welsh and English, and I speak operatic German and Italian, which tends to lead one into rather useless conversations.

Biggest headache?

Smoking – even though I enjoy a cigar now and then. Some of the best operatic singers in the world have smoked, such as Luciano Pavarotti and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?

I did a Schubert song cycle on Bardsey Island and we stayed in an old Victorian house with toilets at the end of the garden. I was once asked to be King of Bardsey Island. It was between me, Prince Charles and Tom Jones.

Do you like coming home?

When I see ‘Welcome to Wales’, I miss a beat.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

We went to this beautiful hotel in Canyamel, Mallorca.

Top travelling tips?

I’ve lost my passport a couple of times when it was in my luggage, so I’d say: have your passport on your person.

Are you brave with different food abroad?

Not as brave as Hannah, my wife – in Japan, she was eating fishes’ eyes. But I do like the food of different countries.

Is there anything you’d like to plug?

Absolutely nothing – except, because we’re all in the coronavirus at the moment, the people in the front line. I have huge admiration for them.

The Oldie October 2020 83

Genius crossword 392 el sereno You may come across an author and a few of his characters. Please highlight them Across 1 King Rat will be upset and offended for the most part (6) 4 One who renounces a job hates losing protection (8) 10 Just who in France must be accepted by English board (9) 11 A partner for a stallion so without love (5) 12 Unfortunately Ascot has no cold food for a stallion (4) 13 Cover international trial involving shooting (6,4) 15 Gold (Au) should be mixed with Sulphur 16 Call from chopper sees doctor in row (6) 19 Model does South American port city (6) 21 This may be on brother’s head (7) 23 A measure of pressure found in a most unusual leaderless province (10) 25 Depression discovered in Golden Triangle (4) 27 Prospect of victory before one’s expression of gratitude (5) 28 Popular instrument and case of theme that’s untouched (9) 29 Comment written about one group’s small piece of meat (8) 30 First appearance of express after a day (6)

Down 1 Mass of tissue helps, hugging daughter one upset (8) 2 Rely on enjoyment, beginning to dig for money put aside (5,4) 3 Capable of leading, stood regularly (2,2) 5 School authority may be absolute if resistance is dropped slightly (7) 6 Creature transforming a man - one in bishopric (3,7) 7 An entrance in stone (5) 8 Fake reporting of school tests under heads of English and Religion (6) 9 Count on this support mainly in Australia (6) 14 Shuts road after hospital’s near disaster (5,5) 17 List last of people with ability at maths (9) 18 Behind strike for feature of road safety (4,4) 20 Person who won’t believe a thief’s first robbery (7) 21 Trio will finish early, accepting four, and bloom (6) 22 Bible kept by principal character (6) 24 Language used when in post, mainly (5) 26 Crossing on behalf of Germany (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 14th October 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 392 Across 1 Objective (4) 4 Exclusive; sumptuous (6) 7 The day before (3) 9 Inquires (4) 10 Tall mice (anag)(8) 11 Lennon’s wife, Yoko ___ (3) 12 Rude child (4) 13 Something enormous (8) 16 Living quarters (13) 19 Chaos (8) 23 Prayer leader (Islam) (4) 24 Flightless bird (3) 25 Troublesome (8) 26 Post (4) 27 Current unit (abbrev) (3) 28 Nasty experience (6)

Genius 390 solution 29 Horde; MC (4) Down 2 Barriers (12) 3 Former Basutoland (7) 4 Release from Army (abbrev) (5) 5 Door lock (5) 6 Woody part of plant (5) 8 Reference books (12) 14 Call to mind (5) 15 Subdivision of aeon (3) 17 Spoil (3) 18 Notable success (7) 20 Smell; reputation (5) 21 Motivation; impel (5) 22 Majestic (5)

The theme was Music, and the undefined clues are 9,10,22,26, 3, 7 & 14 Winner: Beatrice Reid, Ipswich, Suffolk Runners-up: Peter Spink, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire; Storm Hutchinson, Dulas, Anglesey

Moron 390 solution Across: 1 Mars, 3 Turkey (Master key), 8 Frantic, 9 Ample, 10 Limit, 11 Outpost, 12 Ducked, 14 Modest, 18 Rancour, 20 Trace, 22 Plumb, 23 Chimera, 24 Orator, 25 Edgy. Down: 1 Muffled, 2 Realm, 3 Tycoon, 4 React, 5 Explode, 6 Statue, 7 Vent, 13 Conquer, 15 Obtain, 16 Therapy, 17 Grocer, 18 Ripe, 19 Orbit, 21 Ahead.

The Oldie October 2020 85

Competition TESSA CASTRO Two players in different partnerships were discussing their evening’s duplicate (online, naturally, these days).

‘How did you do on Board 13?’ said one to the other.

‘Fine – I knocked out ♥A, then tested diamonds. When they split I had my 12 tricks. Bit of a lucky 6NT to make, really.’

‘Wow – I didn’t even make 3NT … though admittedly I was playing for overtricks.’

A deal on which 6NT succeeds at one table yet 3NT fails at another is almost always noteworthy, especially (as here) when the opening lead was the same on both occasions.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable North

♠ KJ632 ♥ K Q 10

♦ K Q 10 West ♠ 9754 ♥5 ♦J96 ♣J 10 4 3 2

♣8 5

East ♠ 10 ♥AJ9763 ♦ 10 7 2 ♣Q 7 6

South ♠ AQ8 ♥842 ♦A543 ♣A K 9

The Bidding South West North East pass 1 ♠ pass 1 ♦ 2NT pass 3NT/6NT pass pass pass At the table where North punted 6NT, declarer won West’s ♣3 opening lead to East’s ♣Q. At trick two, he led ♥2 to dummy’s ♥K and East (weakly) won ♥A. He won East’s ♣7 return, then crossed to ♦KQ and led ♦8 to ♦A. If the opposing diamonds had not split 3-3, he would have had to play ♥4 to ♥ 10, in the hope that West held ♥J. In fact, the even diamond split enabled him to cash ♦5 and follow with five winning spades and ♥Q – 12 tricks and slam made.

At the table where North had – more conservatively – raised 2NT to 3NT, declarer also received ♣3 lead to ♣Q. Winning ♣K, he also led ♥2 to ♥K. However, at this point the play diverged. East smoothly played low, letting ♥K hold the trick (good defence).

Expecting – perhaps naïvely – West to hold ♥A and hungry for overtricks, declarer crossed to ♠ A and led ♥4. West did not follow suit, whereupon the roof fell in – East beat dummy’s ♥10 with ♥J, cashed ♥A felling ♥Q, and followed with ♥9 7 6. One down in 3NT. ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 258, you were invited to write a poem called Fruit. It was a fine harvest. Tim Lloyd’s lines depicted a seductive lady banana. Mary Hodges took a different view: ‘My legs are like bananas./My face looks such a mess/ My COVID mask improves it./I’m too fat for my dress.’ Joe Cushnan turned a prune back into a plum with his Mum’s antiwrinkle cream. Hilary Adams pictured bottled fruit in Kilner jars. Dorothy Pope went happily blackberrying and Jon Sims resentfully, angry at the out-of-reach fruit. Commiserations to these and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the fruity bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to Con Connell.

Two strong policemen harvested the fruit From the big sycamore above the bridge.

Someone called from a house across the road To tell them what it was and where it hung.

As our lives creep towards ripening autumn Our bodies mutate into fruity nightmares.

Men, as they age, take the contour of apples And women, it seems, take the outline of pears.

These spinning wings are now the only fruit that dangles from the spreading sycamore.

The branch is barren now, but I still see a swinging shadow sometimes when I pass.

Ann Drysdale

Nature, in planning this unnatural harvest, This metamorphosis of waistline and hips, Delights in the prospect of wreaking such havoc On wardrobe and vanity, buttons and zips.

Minds, once so blossoming, start to seem wilted, Withered, it seems, like the grape on the vine.

Skin that once glistened begins to look russet – Could a brisk rubbing soon bring back its shine?

Perhaps we will soon wear numerical icons Showing how we’ve become sharper or sweet, Whether we’re more fit for stewing and baking When once we were tempting and luscious to eat.

Con Connell The durian’s an Asian fruit Of rather dubious repute.

Although its flesh is said to taste Of custard or of almond paste With subtle notes of sherry wine, The smell, alas, is less benign; It’s been compared to manky towels, Decaying veg and emptied bowels.

Perhaps it really is a treat, But I can’t bring myself to eat A food whose soi-disant perfume Has echoes of the smallest room.

Rob Stuart

In the wrong order, flowers followed fruit; Great swathes at first, as strangers came to stuff Cellophane-wrapped concoctions in the crotch Of the dark branch that held him as he died.

One day all traces of the fatal fruit, Soiled ribbons, slug-obliterated cards, Were stuffed in bags by surly young offenders Serving their time on litter-picking duty.

Monet’s Still Life with Melon shows you fruit Posed for a family photo: clustered grapes, Peaches piled up as if tumbled down a chute, A rich variety of rounded shapes.

Even the sundered melon slices seek Their globular original aspect By dint of strenuous huddling, like a clique Of furtive plotters or a prayerful sect.

The glowing hues of this scenario Are offset by the frigid blue and white Of Delftware and the blank, unfolded snow Of napery, all rendered by north light.

The painter’s ingenuity has caught The made and the organic in a game, A classic exercise in nature morte; A still life full of motion, all the same.

Basil Ransome-Davies COMPETITION No 260 For obvious reasons we’ve been distanced one from another recently. A poem, then, please, called Shoulder to Shoulder. 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 260’, by 15th October.

The Oldie October 2020 87

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The Oldie October 2020 89

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The Oldie October 2020 93

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Avoid widow’s pique

Q

There’s nothing helpful in your ‘To the barricades…!’ comment (Zoom and gloom, June issue), in answer to the widow who’s upset about not seeing anyone during lockdown because she’s old. What this miserable woman needs is to contact Age Concern or Silver Line. It seems she obliterated her sense of self in her marriage and became ‘wife of’ and ‘mother of’. She needs to be told that the world will not come to her door, especially if she’s a ‘pity me’ person. Au contraire, folk will stay away.

Life as an older widow is damned difficult – I know as I’m one myself – and the little-old-lady act doesn’t work. Yes, there will forever be bleak moments; they come with the territory.

I am not a churchgoer but, even if she’s not, maybe she should pick herself up and go to a coffee morning or something. I reread her letter and it’s almost as pathetic as your answer.

And tell her to think of the person her husband fell in love with and put what’s left of that to good use.

Anonymous – and cross!

The problem with advice like yours is, in my experience, that it makes the sufferer feel worse.

Some people are so depressed they can’t summon up the energy to fight. If you’ve never felt like that, it can be hard, I know, to feel sympathy. But believe me, I’ve been there. Being told that you’re not alone and that you’re part of a group of people who feel just the same can at least take the edge off the appalling loneliness and misery. My answer was designed to kindle some of the anger in her about the situation – anger that you, clearly, have found so helpful!

A

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94 The Oldie October 2020

Third time very lucky

Q

Widowed nine years ago (my second widowhood), I was resigned to a lonely (and sexless) old age at 75. I have plenty of loving friends, whom I appreciate wholeheartedly, but still…

A couple of years ago, a close friend introduced me to a lovely, long-divorced man. He has a good chum who pitches up regularly to stay with him, and the four of us got on really well, and had a series of great evenings. One night my girlfriend said, ‘I think he fancies you!’

Then, suddenly, the spark between us flared into a flame. Not much social distancing, I must say, but a wonderful love affair has developed. I am so happy.

So is he, and we keep pinching ourselves and saying, ‘I can’t believe this is real!’

And, by the way, the bedroom department is marvellous. So, to all those who think suicidal thoughts, as I did for many years: don’t lose heart!

Deborah, Cumbria I love to hear news like this! The lesson to be learnt from your life is, whatever happens, keep mobile – not so much physically, though that helps, but socially as well. You can’t find unless you look. And if one’s looking for love, although one may not be as lucky as you’ve been, one may well find the wonderful solace and love of friends instead which one may, because of one’s age, cherish and appreciate more than one ever did in the past.

A

Baby steps to better sight

Q

My elderly father is driving me to distraction. He wears specs to read but his prescription is way out of date. I am sure he is close to losing

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his sight, because he needs everything in his house to be in a certain place and gets extremely agitated if the smallest thing is moved even a few centimetres.

My sister and I continually nag him about having an eye test, but he refuses to do so, insisting, ‘They can’t do anything to help.’ His hearing is going too and he also refuses to have a hearing test ‘because I don’t want anyone fiddling around with my ears’. How can we persuade him that these things are sensible and for his own good?

F Barker, Derbyshire His fear is of change. This is why some people are terrified of getting married; applying for jobs at which they think they might fail; getting a mortgage.

Though it’s absolutely right to feel these anxieties about having a baby, say – that really is a life-changer, or should be – none of these others is. You can always get divorced; you might not even get the job you apply for and even then, if you were to be offered it, you needn’t take it; a mortgage can easily be shed by selling the house, giving back the money you owe and remaining fancy-free.

What you need to do is try to persuade your father simply to visit a hearing and sight specialist, insisting that if any improvement is offered, he doesn’t have to go along with it. He can refuse hearing aids or glasses. Just get the advice; see what they say. Surely there’s nothing frightening in that? Even if he were to get new glasses, say, he wouldn’t have to wear them. Sometimes, in baby steps, people can be persuaded this way.

A

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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Review of Books Round-up of the reviews

Lucy Lethbridge on travel diaries William Cook – Jennings v Just William Emily Bearn on books for children Biography & Memoir History Fiction Natural History Current Affairs Paperbacks Autumn 2020 | www.theoldie.co.uk

Look and learn Review of Books Issue 53 Autumn 2020 Not forgetting…important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Royal Family by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times by David Kynaston The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice

by Peter Hunt Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty Mistresses: Sex and Scandal in the Court of Charles II by Linda Porter Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

by Penelope Mortimer Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill by Andrew Adonis The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication by Alexander Larman

Politicians have been taking a battering over their response to coronavirus, so I suppose it’s no surprise to learn that they have been accused of curating their bookshelves to appear more intelligent during lockdown television appearances.

I reckon most of us have been guilty of this to some extent – there has definitely been a lot of tidying up in my study before Zoom meetings, although not an actual rearranging of books.

At the end of the first week of lockdown, when Matt Hancock revealed he had the dreaded virus and was self-isolating, the health secretary gained several plus points from me at least for definitely not tidying his bookshelves. The style police were not impressed, though. But maybe he felt too ill? Poor man. Michael Gove got a bashing too for the number of books about dictators he had on his shelves as well as one by the Holocaust-denier David Irving. This time, the thought police were not impressed.

The Times recently asked several politicians about their holiday reading.

Apart from rereading the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the Prime Minister chose Brendan Simms’s Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Co-operation as well as Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement and the novel Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart by William Boyd. Rishi Sunak included Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Jacob Rees Mogg Glastonbury, ‘The Mother of Saints’, Her Saints AD37-1539 by the Rev Lionel Smithett Lewis (first published in 1927), Michael Gove Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman who Shaped Modern Britain by John Campbell (reviewed here); Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, picked The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. No startling responses there. Shame.

Most bookshops have now been open for a while but going inside them still seems rather weird: face coverings, social distancing, hand ‘sanitiser stations’… and quarantining books seems even odder. It’s fine if you know what title you are after but browsing feels distinctly uncomfortable. Clearly, the answer is to know what you want – so where better to look for ideas than inside this supplement.

Liz Anderson

4 HISTORY

Talking Until Nightfall: Remembering Jewish Salonica 1941-44 by Isaac Matarasso

15 NATURAL HISTORY

Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton

COVER ILLUSTRATION: BOB WILSON

The Sandpit by Nicholas Shakespeare

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA Editorial panel: Liz Anderson, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Harry Mount, James Pembroke Editor: Liz Anderson Design: Lawrence Bogle Reviewers: Liz Anderson, Michael Barber, Kate Ehrman, Claudia FitzHerbert, Sam Leith, Lucy Lethbridge, Deborah Maby, Christopher Silvester, Nigel Summerley, Maureen Waller Publisher: James Pembroke Advertising: Paul Pryde, Melissa Arancio, Kami Jogee For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or 7093 For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk

8 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

17 THE TRUMPS 18 CURRENT AFFAIRS

13 CHILDREN’S BOOKS

20 FICTION 23 DIARIES

Lucy Lethbridge on travel journals

14 FORGOTTEN AUTHORS

William Cook on Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings

24 MISCELLANEOUS 30 PAPERBACKS The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 3

History BATTLE OF BRITAIN

THE PILOTS AND PLANES THAT MADE HISTORY

SIMON PEARSON AND ED GORMAN Hodder and Stoughton, 221pp, £20, ebook £13.99

Portrait of Ferdinand III by Jan van den Hoecke, c.1643

THE HABSBURGS

THE RISE AND FALL OF A WORLD POWER

MARTYN RADY Allen Lane, 397pp, £30, ebook £12.99

‘There’s no strong ideological thread or chain to follow,’ wrote Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph, for ‘unlike the Romans or the British, the Habsburgs did not create a single social order or rule of law throughout their empire. Even if their instincts were Catholic and conservative, they largely sustained their authority through bureaucratic management and propaganda rather than fanatic persecution or aggressive warfare.’

Spanning a millennium, Rady’s history of the Habsburg dynasty impressed Christiansen immensely.

‘Rady maintains unerring poise as he steers through the depths and complexities of his material. His erudition seems effortless, he never gets bogged down in detail, his prose is pellucid, and he spices the narrative with delightfully dry asides and telling anecdotes... Did you know that Princess Stephanie of Belgium invented and patented the hostess trolley? And how intriguing is Anna of the Tyrol, “a kindly woman of exceptional girth… whose skill at the 4 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

clavichord was matched only by her dedication to penitential selfflagellation”.’

Paul Lay, in his review for the Times, reckoned that ‘in less able hands this complex tale could be mired in convolution, but Rady, a professor of central European history at University College London, is a lucid and elegant writer – historians are advised to follow his model of economy and concision. It is impossible to imagine a more erudite and incisive history of this fascinating, flawed and ultimately tragic dynasty.’

In the Evening Standard, Julian Glover found the book to be ‘deeply informed, elegantly written and a joy to read. It also shows the Habsburg world to have been even more bonkers than I had thought... It is all dotty behaviour, insane ceremony accompanied by threat of random execution. Rady’s book is a serious traditional history from the top down – the mass of people only come into it in order to revolt from time to time, usually only to be appropriately repressed. But don’t think that makes it boring. The author scatters asides as treats to keep us gripped, most of which could be books on their own...

It would take a great book to tell this unbelievable tale. Fortunately, Rady has written it.’

The authors realise that this is one of many books on the Battle of Britain, but justify publication by arguing that ‘our purpose, on its 80th anniversary, is to bring to life the pilots and planes involved through the stories of 18 airmen – nine from each side – and 18 different aircraft’. ‘The characters of the airmen somehow reflect the aircraft they flew,’ wrote Sonia Edwards for the NZ Books website.

‘All the fliers chosen exude an enjoyment of the purity of being free in the air – in spite of the dangers – or maybe because of it. Their sense of invincibility does not always last.

This is easy reading, outlining operations undertaken, and missions impossible tasked. There is a strong sense of discipline to overcome fear and remain alert.’ One theme is how some aircraft were developed before World War II. ‘I was astounded,’ says Edwards, ‘by the importance of the combat experience gained during the Spanish Civil War as pilots’ own skills counterbalanced any flaws in their aircraft.’

‘All the fliers chosen exude an enjoyment of the purity of being free in the air’ The only review in the British press thus far came from Gerard DeGroot in the Times. This ‘little book’ gives ‘deserved attention to the ordinary men and unsung machines that aren’t usually included in the dramatic narrative... including the less glamorous bombers that hit airfields and the seaplanes that rescued downed pilots... The planes are lovingly described in a way that will delight aircraft geeks... Pearson and Gorman allow these young men to tell their own stories; they don’t intrude with overblown prose. That’s as it should be; there’s no need to embroider tales already incredible.’

History ENEMY OF ALL MANKIND

A TRUE STORY OF PIRACY, POWER, AND HISTORY’S FIRST GLOBAL MANHUNT

STEVEN JOHNSON Riverhead, 304pp, £23.99, ebook £11.99

Devonshire pirate Henry Every pulled off ‘the heist of the 17th century’, wrote John Gapper in the Financial Times, when in 1694 he captured a 15,000-ton ship, the Ganj-i-Sawai (Persian for ‘exceeding treasure’), which belonged to India’s Mughal emperor and was carrying a cargo of gold, silver, jewels, ivory and saffron worth £20 million in today’s money. Also on board were women making their pilgrimage to Mecca,

Woodcut of Captain Every from A General History of the Pyrates (1725)

who became the victims of ‘brutal mass rape’, one of whom was the emperor’s granddaughter.

Threatened with expulsion from India ‘amid outrage’, the East India Company ‘turned its crisis into an opportunity by pledging to guard the seas against pirates’, and thereby ‘an English pirate’s violent robbery led the way to his country’s seizure of a continent’. Although several of the pirates were eventually hanged, Every was never caught.

As Adam Higginbotham noted in the New York Times, Johnson is ‘less interested in the story of Henry Every than in its implications, and its part in a wider meta-narrative. As a result, we are treated to often fascinating digressions on the origins of terrorism, celebrity and the tabloid media; the tricky physics of cannon manufacture; and the miserable living conditions of the average 17th-century

seaman. At times, this approach proves a hindrance to being swept away by the tale of the world’s “most wanted man”, and is complicated by the thinness of the historical record and disagreement about what really happened and to whom: much of the book is given over to debate and conjecture about what did occur.’

MUSSOLINI’S WAR

FASCIST ITALY FROM TRIUMPH TO COLLAPSE 1935-1943

JOHN GOOCH Allen Lane, 576pp, £30, ebook, £12.99

In his review for the Financial Times, Tony Barber reminded readers that ‘between 1935 and 1943, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime went to war in Ethiopia, Spain, Albania, north Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, France, Greece, the dismembered territories of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and finally the islands of Italy itself’. In this ‘authoritative account of the dictator’s reckless adventurism, John Gooch asks how far Italy’s total defeat should be ascribed to the Duce, how far to military commanders and how far to the state’s longer-term weaknesses’.

Gooch ‘draws on a fuller range of official Italian military sources than most previous accounts. He makes relatively light use of other material, such as soldiers’ diaries and letters and secret police reports on morale.

But his narrative is lucid, his analysis is perfectly judged and the result is a thorough, readable account of a series of pointless wars that

Mussolini as Italy’s Commander in Chief

did Italy nothing but harm.’

Saul David, in the Daily Telegraph, thought that while ‘Gooch – an obvious Italophile – is keen to dispel the cruder stereotypes of Italian military incompetence... the finger of blame for Italy’s humiliation is firmly pointed at Mussolini.’ If Gooch’s book ‘lacks a little colour and atmosphere, that is often the price to pay for a work of such meticulous scholarship’. For Caroline Moorehead in the Guardian, it was ‘hard to imagine a finer account, both of the sweep of Italy’s wars, and of the characters caught up in them. That Mussolini’s soldiers fought for so long, against such odds, often with such tenacity and courage, is what really stands out.’

THE NEXT FIFTY THINGS THAT MADE THE MODERN ECONOMY TIM HARFORD Bridge Street, 344pp, £20, ebook £12.99

The economist and FT columnist Tim Harford made a splash with his modishly listy 2017 book Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy – based on a radio programme and podcast of the same name. Now he expands his list with a follow-up.

Writing in the Times, Tom Knowles found that ‘this latest book follows a similar pattern to Harford’s ten-minute podcast episodes, breaking inventions into bite-size chapters of five or six pages, detailing how they have affected the world we live in’.

And what irresistible bites. Who knew about the ‘Wardian case’ that allows plant seedlings to be transported without soil or fresh air and allows us to enjoy tea, gin and tonics or bananas? Or about the roguish life of the inventor of the sewing machine, an ‘incorrigible womaniser’ who fathered at least 22 children? Or how Nazis accidentally invented CCTV? Or that ‘the invention of the mail-order catalogue, in which a company could offer more than 200 completely different items, seemed so implausible to the Chicago Tribune in 1873 that it initially told readers it was a scam’ – and yet it inadvertently improved both the postal service and roads in rural America?

Knowles did grumble that some of The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 5

History the entries, though fun, were short on detail, ‘as if they had been written for a rush-hour commuter who could only get in snatches of reading on the way to and from work’ and said that ‘often the chapters feel like a verbatim write-up’ of the podcast: ‘a missed opportunity to give existing fans something extra’. Still, here is ‘a lively introduction to some of the most ingenious, yet often overlooked inventions that have changed the way we live’.

And as Marcus Berkmann summed up in the Mail: ‘Harford is a fine, perceptive writer, and an effortless explainer of tricky concepts.

His book teems with good things, and will expand the mind of anyone lucky enough to read it.’

best book acknowledgement I’ve ever read: “Sorry, Michael, that I caused the loss of your index finger on the circular saw.”’

NOVEMBER 1918

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION

ROBERT GERWARTH OUP, 329pp, £20

THE GREAT IMPERIAL HANGOVER

HOW EMPIRES HAVE SHAPED THE WORLD

SAMIR PURI Atlantic, 384pp, £20, ebook £12.99

THE STONEMASON

A HISTORY OF BUILDING BRITAIN

ANDREW ZIMINSKI John Murray, 336pp, £20, ebook £12.99

As a schoolboy, Andrew Ziminski discovered a fascination for ‘the material aspects of the past, the tangible remnants’. As an adult, he has become a master stonemason – concerned with repairing and reconstructing some of the country’s most notable and most ancient structures with their original materials.

He shares his passion in a book that the TLS’s Emma Wells said ‘merges history and place-writing with memoir to create a wistful sense of nostalgia punctuated with humour (his description of a youth’s job on the volute pointing of Bath’s Royal Crescent: “as though a chimpanzee had been let loose on Audrey Hepburn’s face with a lipstick, in the dark”).’ In the Telegraph, Robert Eustace named Ziminski as a ‘ministering angel to the crumbling monuments of western England’.

Writing in the Spectator, Harry Mount of this parish called Ziminski ‘the man who rebuilt the West Country’ and professed himself thrilled at the depth of knowledge that Ziminski brings to everything from Stonehenge and West Kennet Long Barrow to Salisbury Cathedral spire. Here is a book in which you’ll learn why ‘oolitic limestone’ is ‘the best building material of all’.

He added: ‘Ziminski also has the 6 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

own right... Weimar democracy would not have survived several attempts by the extreme left and right to seize power from 1919-23 unless it had genuine popular support, Gerwarth convincingly argues.’

Gerwarth’s account ends with Hitler’s abortive Bierkeller Putsch in 1923.

Nonetheless, Gerwarth ‘can’t quite dispel the air of doom hanging over the republic’.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1902

This ‘deeply researched and concise book deals with what brought the Second Reich to its knees’, explained Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph, ‘but then describes the strange revolution that took place in Germany in the six months after the war, and the hopes – sadly unfulfilled – for the new republic that grew out of defeat’. Once defeat was inevitable, the Kaiser abdicated and a new republic was formed.

‘But this was an unconventional revolution, and certainly unlike the one that had happened a year earlier in Russia. The traditional ruling caste hardly put up a fight, and some of them turned tail – notably the Kaiser, who went into exile in Holland. Thus the politicians took over, in retrospect almost seamlessly: it was almost as though the German people were too stunned by defeat to cause trouble, at least to begin with.’

Despite poor editing and proofreading, Heffer found that ‘Gerwarth’s scholarship cannot be faulted’.

Martin Ivens, reviewing it for the Times, admired Gerwarth’s ‘polished narrative drawing on the eyewitness testimony of famous writers and thinkers that Weimar was not “the doomed republic” of legend, a hopeless 14-year interval between a warmongering kaiser and Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship, but a success in its

Puri, a British-born adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, looks at the histories of empires around the world and ‘how their very different narratives linger in modern geopolitics’. ‘Of course if one sets out to look for imperial legacies, one will start seeing them everywhere,’ wrote Alex Von Tunzelmann in the Spectator. ‘While there may be traces of imperial hangover in some of the phenomena Puri investigates – Brexit in Britain, the rise of Narendra Modi in India – it is not the main cause of them, and arguably not even a significant one. This may be the danger of trying, through the lens of a hangover, to reconstruct the events of the night before. Perspective can be muddled.’

Puri claims that ‘if empires had not existed, then it would have been necessary to invent something like them’, which struck Dominic Sandbrook, in the Sunday Times, as ‘promisingly unfashionable’ and ‘the kind of thing that can get an author into trouble... Puri’s book is unlikely to be so controversial, however, not least because his following chapters are so dull...

‘So the first chapter offers a 36-page summary of how the United States expanded across the North American continent and became a world power. The second chapter offers a similarly brisk account of the British Empire’s rise and fall, from Agincourt to Brexit... His potted histories are scarcely more than encyclopaedia entries, and his judgements are so inoffensively bland that no intelligent reader could conceivably be surprised by them.’

Biography and Memoir GALILEO AND THE SCIENCE DENIERS MARIO LIVIO Simon & Schuster, 304pp, £20

President Trump in the Oval Office: John Bolton’flounced out of the administration’

THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED A WHITE HOUSE MEMOIR

JOHN BOLTON Simon & Schuster, 577pp, £25

For Lloyd Green in the Guardian ‘John Bolton’s near-600-page tome is the most damning written account by a Trump administration alumnus, the one that stands to haunt the president come November.’ Trump was fearful enough of its contents that he tried to have publication blocked on national security grounds, but failed in court and resorted to attacking it on Twitter instead.

‘Bolton’s prose is lackluster. But that’s a relatively minor shortcoming.

More egregious is the book’s title, which is lazy and self-aggrandising.

Bolton has ripped-off Lin-Manuel Miranda and compared himself to Alexander Hamilton, founding father and first treasury secretary. Talk about overreach.’ Nonetheless, the book is ‘the best opposition research dump. Ever.’

Gerard Baker, in the Times, thought that ‘much of the picture Bolton paints of this singular presidency is a very familiar one: the turmoil, turbulence and turpitude.

But the overwhelming impression Bolton leaves is a peevishness that he didn’t get his hawkish way on most issues he cared about.’ As ‘the quintessential Washington infighter and a veteran of four Republican administrations, wrote Sunday 8 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

Times Washington bureau chief Josh Glancy, Bolton ‘knows how to stick the knife in. Having flounced out of the Trump administration in disgust last September, furious that his hawkish advice on Iran was being ignored, the moustachioed

‘Much of the picture Bolton paints of this singular presidency is a very familiar one: the turmoil, turbulence and turpitude’ Marylander delivers his revenge here with sadistic relish... You will search in vain for anything in the way of doubt in this protracted piece of self-promotion. In Bolton’s telling, he was the only real adult in the room, the true conservative who understands just how tough America needs to be to navigate the shoals of a dark, fallen world. What really radiates from this memoir is just how much Bolton loves the game of politics, being in the bloodstained arena and suiting up for battle...

‘There is no honour here and there are no heroes in this book. Just boundless ambition, lust for power and yet another damning portrait of a reckless and mercurial president.’

‘Is there room in the crowded canon for a new biography of Galileo Galilei?” wondered Alison Abbott in Nature. ‘Astrophysicist Mario Livio is betting so. His Galileo and the Science Deniers aims to stand out by placing the original Renaissance man and his discoveries in modern scientific and social contexts. In particular, he argues, the charges of heresy that Galileo faced for his scientific claims in the 17th century have their counterparts in science deniers’ condemnations today.’

Abbott found the ‘nonchronological zigzagging of the book... hard to follow’, but thought it allowed Livio ‘to focus on themes, such as Galileo’s polymathy’, such as his ‘lifelong study of the great Italian poets Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto’. Although ‘the parallels he draws between Galileo’s trial and contemporary science wars feel thin, and there’s a frustrating lack of examples to demonstrate the continuity of denialism through the centuries’, Livio has nonetheless ‘added to the canon an accessible and scientific narrative, in which a profound love for Galileo shines through’.

Another reviewer who found Livio’s claim of modern parallels ‘rather strained’ was Stephen M Barr in the Washington Post. ‘Nobody today has been tried and punished for defending the ideas of evolution or global warming, or coerced into recanting them.’ But Livio’s

Galileo by Justus Sustermans, 1636

Biography and Memoir ‘occasional straying into the didactic, not to say homiletic’ does not ‘diminish the value of the rest of his book, which tells the story of Galileo in a perceptive, illuminating and balanced way’.

THE CHIFFON TRENCHES A MEMOIR

ANDRE LEON TALLEY Fourth Estate, 304pp, £20, ebook £9.99

In the Observer, Rachel Cooke wondered at Talley’s lack of selfawareness. ‘For all his plaintiveness, he seems to have not even the dimmest sense that if you spend your life creeping to those who only respond to toadying the people involved are probably not very sincere, and your relationship with them probably not very real.’

But in the New York Times, Rebecca Carroll saw a victim: ‘In America if you are black and aim higher than the reach history has set for you, the white gaze will try to leech your spirit of its racial identity.’

neighbourhoods safer and to transform the lives of those we live alongside. Eye-opening, courageous and moving, Crossing the Line is a book that will change the way you see the world around you.’

COMING UNDONE TERRI WHITE Canongate, 256pp, £14.99

CROSSING THE LINE

LESSONS FROM LIFE ON DUTY

JOHN SUTHERLAND W&N, 278pp, £16.99, ebook £8.99

Terri White’s harrowing memoir is not, wrote Frieda Klotz in the Irish Independent, ‘about how White escaped from a horrific childhood in a Derbyshire village to the bright lights of New York city’. In fact, it is about how one can have a bright and successful exterior as the editor of Time Out, New York, while falling apart inside and drinking to oblivion.

Cathy Rentzenbrink in the Times applauded a ‘stunning memoir’.

White ‘writes like a blood-stained angel and captures Derbyshire and New York so well that you can taste the cheap lager that she starts drinking when she is not yet as tall as the mantelpiece and then the ice-cold martinis that fuel her disintegration.’

In Good Housekeeping, Anna Bone thought it an ‘exceptionally brave and brilliant memoir’ and in the online magazine, the Arts Desk, Markie Robson Scott was also moved

by White’s honesty and impressed by her determination and resilience: ‘She decides she’s not an alcoholic, she just wants to die. “Until I wish to live, nothing will change.” In the end, living means leaving New York, hard as it is to accept that “an envied life” is not enough, and that she’s too needy, too exposed and brittle for the city.

‘The last page, in which she “leaves herself behind” as she speeds towards JFK in a cab seems a little glib, but nevertheless, her courage and her story are remarkable.’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 9

MARCO+VITTUR

André Leon Talley’s memoir of betrayal, bitchiness and food addiction at the court of couture was a guilty pleasure. Formerly the devoted bag-carrier for Anna Wintour at American Vogue, Talley, now 70, was cast out after years of loyal service: this book is his revenge.

Reviewers squirmed at the horror of the world he depicts but thrilled to it too. As Lisa Armstrong put it in the Telegraph: ‘It is brimful of toxic behaviour and noxious values.’

Raised by his grandmother in North Carolina and damaged by sexual abuse in childhood, Talley dreamed of escape by reading Vogue, ‘a world where bad things never happen’. He became a lynchpin of the fashion world, his 6’ 7” frame costumed outrageously in kaftans and capes. As Armstrong writes, however: ‘Most of his friendships seem highly conditional on him acting as a striking, childlike aide-de-camp [to] Wintour, the ultimate small, great, white woman.’

A secret overeater, he ballooned: ‘If I felt sad, I would eat and keep on eating until I felt better.’

John Sutherland, Richard Morrison reported in the Times, has written ‘an entire book about the unremitting frustration of being a police officer in a society full of problems that the police can do absolutely nothing about’. And, he added, Sutherland ‘knows whereof he writes’. A former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, Sutherland left the police after a seven-month nervous breakdown – which he described in his first book Blue: A Memoir.

This follow-up volume ‘looks at the same problems, but from a more analytical perspective’: arguing that policing is so frustrating and demoralising because the force is dealing with the consequences of decades-long social malaises and unable to tackle the causes of criminality at root.

‘Without being sensationalist or sentimental, he lifts the lid on that underworld of despair, degradation and needless death,’ said Morrison.

‘It’s a read that should shame anyone with a conscience.’

The anonymous critic who reviewed Sutherland’s book for Police Life was similarly impressed, calling it ‘deeply revealing’: ‘Tackling ten of the biggest challenges facing society today – from alcohol abuse, drug addiction and domestic violence to knife crime, terrorism and sexual offences – we are introduced to people who have been pushed to the limits and beyond. In doing so, we gain a clearer sense of what needs to be done to make our

Biography and Memoir

1934 (relief) by Ben Nicholson

CIRCLES AND SQUARES THE LIVES AND ART OF THE HAMPSTEAD MODERNISTS

CAROLINE MACLEAN Bloomsbury, 320pp, £30, ebook £20.99

The author, Dorothy Parker, quipped that the Bloomsbury Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’. Frances Wilson, reviewing Circles and Squares for the Times, borrowed her idea; the Hampstead Modernists ‘lived in minimalist cubes and loved in Venn diagrams’. This is a group biography of artists, architects and writers flourishing in North London in the 1930s. They shared the belief that art has the power to change the world as the world began its descent toward war.

Lucy Davies in the Telegraph, found Maclean ‘recreates beautifully the strange mix of buoyancy and instability that characterised the decade’. It is a ‘hugely enjoyable and well-plotted book’, said Kathryn Hughes, in the Guardian. It begins with the love affair of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Into their story come, among others, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, and Walter Gropius and Piet Mondrian, whose arrivals signal the sweeping changes taking place in Europe.

For Catherine Taylor in the FT, it was a book that ‘fizzes with the creative energy of the times’.

Maclean charts the rise of architectdesigned communal living, the 10 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

growth of modernism, the clash with surrealism. She depicts overlapping friendships, professional alliances and love affairs. She is ‘the perfect biographer — self-effacing, nonjudgmental, unobtrusive. Her style is clipped, efficient, curiously of the period.’

For Monica Bohm-Duchen, writing in the Ham and High, a sense of the wider political context of the 1930s was missing. This meant that ‘even the most amusing and revealing of anecdotes seems rather inconsequential’.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF LOVE GAVANNDRA HODGE Michael Joseph, 320pp, £14.99, ebook £9.49

Gavanndra Hodge was named for her father, Gavin, a working-class hairdresser turned heroin dealer from Bromley who paid his daughter’s school fees by selling drugs to his aristocratic clients around the King’s Road. Gavanndra was 14 when her younger sister Candy died suddenly of a rare airborne virus on holiday in Tunisia in 1989. The family fell apart and Gavanndra began a double life – working hard at her Latin while bringing her schoolfriends to her father’s salon to be corrupted. The double life continued when she went to Cambridge and then embarked on a successful career in journalism; but an encounter, through work, with the grief counsellor Julia

Samuel made her realise that she never mourned Candy’s death.

Instead she ‘adapted to it, like a sapling growing around a metal spike, making it part of who I was’.

This memoir describes how she uncovers and confronts her repressed grief, while at the same time painting a vivid portrait of her family and the druggy, chaotic Chelsea milieu in which they lived.

Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian admired the ‘extreme candour’ and ‘verve’ of Hodge’s writing while wishing that she ‘could have brought herself’ to condemn her father ‘in less equivocal terms’. Marcus Field in the Standard described the junkie hairdresser as ‘the roguish but lovable anti-hero of the piece’.

Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Guardian wondered if we would see more ‘memoirs by the offspring of narcissistic boomers, a generation that seems to like being immortalised as ravenous rogues and hedonists’.

MISS ALUMINIUM SUSANNA MOORE Weidenfeld, 228pp, £9.99, ebook £5.99

Before she became a bestselling author with her 1995 erotic thriller In the Cut, Susanna Moore was a Sixties model and a behind-thescenes figure in Seventies Hollywood, working as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and marrying production designer Richard Sylbert. This is her memoir of those years.

‘It’s a tale of shimmering, glamorous surfaces that conceal something darker and more painful,’ wrote Katie Rosseinsky in the Evening Standard. ‘Moore doesn’t try to frame her experiences through

Susanna Moore: model and author

Biography and Memoir The book ‘bursts with brilliantly gossipy titbits, recounted with wry understatement’ the lens of #MeToo and Time’s Up, inviting us instead to fill in the gaps.’

Moore’s ‘descriptive writing is a joy,’ said Laura Pullman in her Sunday Times review. ‘The pianist Oscar Levant is “gray all over, with peeling, deeply creased skin, and apparently no spine. He looked as if he were about to slide from his chair onto the floor and then die.” While he is swimming naked with [Art] Garfunkel, [Jack] Nicholson’s penis is “as small and pink as a nestling”.’

For the Guardian’s reviewer, Fiona Sturges, the book ‘bursts with brilliantly gossipy titbits, recounted with wry understatement, from James Stewart’s use of a toupee to the story spread by the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale – he of the department store – that he “liked to sit in a custom-made high chair in baby clothes and a bib while she threw cold pablum [baby porridge] at him”.’

While Moore’s ‘tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz... the real story is the ripple effect of grief, a woman’s self-invention and the awful deeds of powerful men.

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY A DIARY OF SURVIVING

MICHELE ROBERTS Sandstone Press, 288pp, £14.99, ebook £7.19

Michèle Roberts is a novelist whose latest book has been rejected.

Negative Capability is an account of 12 days, spaced out in the year which follows, as she rewrites her ‘difficult, experimental’ novel with its unfashionably ‘unrelatable’ characters. Most of the entries are about writing, and cooking. Friends creep in, and neighbours, and French farmers on tractors, and unsympathetic agents and publishers. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian found the journal ‘a radiant and absorbing account of her day-to-day life in her basement flat

in Walworth, south London, and in her tiny, damp house in the Mayenne, in north-west France’.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman acknowledged ‘parts that are intriguing and parts that are lyrical and melancholy’. But he wondered ‘whether or not it would have been better to leave it in a drawer for a century or so, as it might then be read as a fascinating social document about the life of a writer in the early years of the 21st century… A problem with contemporary diaries is an awkward sense of voyeurism.’

Tristram Fane Saunders in the Telegraph slotted the book into a dismaying new hierarchy – ‘autofiction beats imaginative fiction; memoir beats autofiction. This baffles me, as wonderful novels are so often written by pleasant but dull people.

Roberts – by wide consensus a wonderful novelist – has here written a pleasant, dull book about her pleasant, dull life… it is very likely to outsell her last few novels’ – this conclusion made him ‘want to bury my head in a bucket of sand’.

HALDANE

THE FORGOTTEN STATESMAN WHO SHAPED MODERN BRITAIN

JOHN CAMPBELL Hurst, 616pp, £30

As Liberal Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912, Richard Haldane reformed the British Army and founded the Territorial Army.

Thereafter he served as Lord Chancellor from 1912 until 1915, when he was expelled from the government for perceived German sympathies – actually an admiration for German science and culture – by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, formerly his best friend. He later re-emerged briefly as a Labour Lord Chancellor in 1924.

‘Haldane is among the most remarkable and admirable figures to have graced Britain’s body politic,’ wrote Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. ‘Campbell’s book is not a biography, but rather an act of homage to a man for whom he asserts lifelong admiration.’

(Campbell is a 72-year-old City financier, not the established biographer with the same name.)

Haldane was a philosopher, an

Richard Haldane: maverick

educationist who helped found the London School of Economics, the first man to bring Albert Einstein to Britain, a QC and an MP whose ‘bachelor status enabled him to sustain a volume of work, social life and sybaritic dining that would have sufficed for 10 lesser and thinner men: he made John Buchan seem lazy and unambitious’. Campbell’s ‘intelligent book’ shows us how ‘the supreme seriousness of Haldane’s career emphasises the triviality of his modern successors’.

Writing in The Critic, Andrew Roberts explained that Haldane was ‘too much of a maverick to fit happily in any one party, yet not quite enough of a magnetic personality to form a group of admirers who would revere him after his death’.

THE FRAGMENTS OF MY FATHER

A MEMOIR OF MADNESS, LOVE AND BEING A CARER

SAM MILLS 4th Estate, 400pp, £16.99

This is a memoir which mixes the author’s experience of looking after her schizophrenic father with the lives of two other carers – Leonard Woolf and F Scott Fitzgerald. She admires the first and is afraid of becoming the second as she grapples with her parent sliding into a state of catatonia, ‘as though his mind and body had said goodbye to each other’. She revisits a childhood shadowed by her father’s frequent absences in hospital, and describes her reluctance to accept the label carer after the death of her mother who had dealt with her husband’s The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 11

Biography and Memoir illness while earning to feed her family and shielding her children from the extent of his breakdowns.

The passages devoted to Woolf and Fitzgerald are interspersed with accounts of how the mentally ill have been treated at different times and glimpses of her father, perhaps attempting to give a frame to his voices by immersing himself in the bible. Mills herself describes reading and writing as her ‘daily drug’ and explores the conflict between caring and creating.

Mills is the author of several YA novels and Kate Saunders in the Times observed ‘her creative imagination never leaves her, even at her lowest’. She hailed ‘a brave and original book filled with all kinds of glittering fragments…’

Joanna Pocock in the Spectator admired the memoir’s ‘interweaving of stories, both historical and contemporary’ in ways which display ‘the complexity of the bonds of familial and romantic love and how they can enrich one’s life and work if we allow them to’.

THE INEVITABILITY OF TRAGEDY HENRY KISSINGER AND HIS WORLD

BARRY GEWEN Norton, 448pp, £22.99

clever chancer, lucky not to be dragged down by the Watergate scandal that consumed so many of the Nixon crew? Did he always serve, as he claims, the national interest?

Did he fundamentally change the course of history? Gewen’s book misses many targets, but he does at least remind us of a very interesting and complex personality... If we want the evidence for and against him to be properly weighed, I fear that we will have to wait until Niall Ferguson has turned in the next volume of his epic biography.’

Lloyd Green, in the Guardian, was a little more charitable. Gewen ‘treats Weimar’s collapse as the formative event in Kissinger’s life.

‘Gewen’s prose is mellifluous even if his judgement of Kissinger remains debatable’ The book’s central premises are that democracies do not necessarily hold and that nations may be forced to choose from menus that offer only rancid dishes... Gewen’s prose is mellifluous even if his judgement of Kissinger remains debatable. The reader is drawn into the book’s telling, regardless of possible disagreement. More often than not, the author gives Kissinger the benefit of the doubt – even as the bodies pile up.’

THE PEER AND THE GANGSTER

A VERY BRITISH COVER-UP

DANIEL SMITH History Press, 256pp, £20

It used to be said of the relationship between President Nixon and his Secretary of State that Kissinger had better not die because then Nixon would become president. ‘It’s legitimate, then, to ask about the origins of his world view,’ wrote Roger Boyes in the Times, but Boyes didn’t think that this book by former editor of the New York Times Book Review, has come up with the answers. ‘Was Kissinger just a very 12 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

In 1964, the Tory peer Bob Boothby sued the Mirror for an item that alleged (without naming either) a homosexual affair between a member of the House of Lords and an East-End gangster. As Boothby knew, he was likely to be identified as the peer in question, and Ronnie Kray as the gangster.

He had a point: as Peter Parker noted in the Spectator, ‘the Mirror’s mistake was to have suggested that there was a homosexual relationship between the peer and the gangster’.

A young Bob Boothby

But Boothby, who retained the ferocious lawyer Arnold Goodman, also had a cheek: ‘Kray was instead acting as a procurer of young roughs for Boothby, whose sexual tastes he shared.’

And in support of his case he offered the ‘outright lies’ that he had never been homosexual and that he’d met Ronnie Kray on only a handful of times to discuss business.

Nevertheless, the Establishment closed ranks to shut him up; the opposition leader Harold Wilson, for instance, knew that if he sought to make capital out of the scandal his own MP Tom Driberg, ‘a frequent guest at Ronnie Kray’s sex parties’, would soon come under scrutiny.

Smith argues that the cover-up set a precedent for the handling of later scandals such as those involving Jeremy Thorpe and Cyril Smith and, said Parker, his ‘lively and engrossing book’ offers ‘the clearest and most comprehensive account yet of this extraordinary saga’.

In the Mail, Roger Lewis delighted in ‘a sensational item or allegation on every page’. In the Times, Richard Davenport-Hines was more cautious, finding some of the book’s sections ‘a fluently written hotchpotch of old, discredited press stories, deliberate Soviet misdirection and overexcitable guesswork’. Nevertheless, he said, ‘there are excellent contemporary resonances’ and ‘in the year of lockdown, it is good to read Smith’s indictment of political smartypants who fancy themselves exempt from the rules’.

Children’s books EMILY BEARN picks her favourites The sorrows of lockdown have inspired some of the most joyful picture books this year, with an increasing emphasis on themes of love and separation. While We Can’t Hug by Eoin McLaughlin (Faber, 32pp, £6.99) tells the heart-warming story of a hedgehog and a tortoise who must learn how to show affection while social distancing. ‘Hedgehog and Tortoise were the best of friends. They wanted to give each other a great, big hug. But they weren’t allowed to touch,’ the story begins – in a scenario with which many grandparents will be all too familiar. With enchanting illustrations by Polly Dunbar, this is a story that will be read long after hugging is allowed again. And Pug Hug by Zehra Hicks (Hodder, 32pp, £6.99) is the highly engaging story of a friendly pet pug, who cannot find anyone to return his affection. Cat doesn’t like hugs, Rabbit is too busy, and Hamster is too quick. ‘I’ll give you a hug,’ says Crocodile, whose surprise appearance provides the perfect balance of comedy and suspense.

The Longest, Strongest Thread by Inbal Leitner (Scallywag, 32pp, £12.99) tells the touching story of a little girl who is moving with her parents to a new country and is worried about leaving her grandmother behind. ‘Grandma can’t walk all the way to my new home. So I am making her an aeroplane she can fly with.’

Meanwhile Monsieur Roscoe on Holiday (Hodder, 32pp, £12.99), by Jim Field, is the perfect present for any toddler who made a lockdown resolution to learn French. In this action-packed picture book, an accident-prone dog tours France on his summer holidays, learning some vital vocabulary along the way. And in children’s poetry, The B on your Thumb (Frances Lincoln, 80pp, £9.99)

by Colette Hiller and Tor Freeman is a collection of masterful rhymes, intended to help young readers learn to spell.

‘Q met U/ while in a queue/ waiting for/ a bus,’ begins a romantic ballad about Q and U. ‘“How I love U,”/ announced the Q … “I love Q too,”/ replied the U./ “I’ll be your queen forever.”’

In chapter books, old-fashioned

adventure stories have dominated the market for readers of seven-plus.

Fans of Enid Blyton will love Jack’s Secret Summer (Hodder, 224pp, £6.99), a debut novel by the actor Jack Ryder. In a story inspired by the summer holidays of his own childhood, this absorbing drama features an ivy-clad house, whose mysteries are guarded by a girl with no memory. And in another

outstanding debut, The Island That Didn’t Exist by Joe Wilson (OUP, 256pp, £6.99) tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, who is plunged into mishap when he inherits a remote island. As with Jack’s Secret Summer, this is a nostalgic adventure story, with a satisfyingly modern twist.

For slightly older readers, Sky Pirates (Simon & Schuster, 3524pp, £6.99) is a wonderfully inventive debut novel by Alex English, recounting the adventures of Echo,

From top: While We Can’t Hug, Monsieur Roscoe on Holiday and The Big Book of Blooms

who has grown up imprisoned in the kingdom of Lockfort, and dreams of exploring the world. Her chance comes when an eccentric professor crash lands his airship outside her bedroom window. And Death Sets Sail (Puffin, 400pp, £6.99) is the much-awaited final instalment in Robin Stevens’s bestselling detective series Murder Most Unladylike, in which the author combines 1930s schoolgirl high-jinx with crimes worthy of Agatha Christie. In their ninth adventure, our intrepid heroines Daisy and Holly must rise to the rescue during a holiday in Egypt, when a passenger on their cruise ship is found stabbed to death in her cabin.

One of last year’s most exciting debuts was The Umbrella Mouse by Anna Fargher, about a young mouse called Pip, who is orphaned in the London blitz. In this summer’s highly satisfying sequel – Umbrella Mouse to the Rescue (Macmillan, 256pp, £6.99) – we find Pip in France, fighting for the resistance.

And don’t miss The Midnight Guardians (Walker, 400pp, £7.99), the new WWII fantasy by Ross Montgomery, author of Max and the Millions. In Montgomery’s most ambitious book to date, a young boy discovers a world of magic when his imaginary friends come to life, and join him in a race to save his sister from Blitz-bombed London.

This has also been a bumper year for books about the natural world.

The Big Book of Blooms (AVA, 64pp, £15.26) is the latest in the artist Yuval Zommer’s sumptuously illustrated Big Book series, whose subjects have so far included Bugs, Birds, and Beasts. With an introduction instructing children on all the skills needed to be a botanist, this latest volume answers vital questions about everything from the diet of a Venus fly trap, to the strength of a giant water lily. And no budding scientist should be without When Darwin Sailed the Sea by David Long (Wide Eyed Editions, 80pp, £12.99) – a concise and beautifully illustrated biography of Charles Darwin, published to mark the 200th anniversary of the launch of the HMS Beagle.

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 13

Forgotten authors WILLIAM COOK believes Anthony Buckeridge’s prep school hero Jennings is a worthy runner-up to Richmal Crompton’s William When I was a schoolboy, in the 1970s, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books were just as popular as Richmal Crompton’s Just William. Yet while William remains a familiar figure, Jennings has virtually disappeared. Why? I’m not quite sure. Of course Buckeridge’s quaint and charming prep school stories belong to a bygone age, but then again so does William. And though William deserves first place in the comic pantheon of unruly schoolboys, JCT Jennings is a worthy runner-up, and well worth a second look.

Anthony Buckeridge was born in 1912, in Hendon, Middlesex. His father, a bank clerk, was killed in action during the First World War (his war lasted half an hour and his death achieved nothing, observed his only child). The Bank Clerks’ Orphanage fund subsequently paid for Buckeridge to attend a boarding school in Sussex called Seaford College, where he met a boy called Diarmaid Jennings, who inspired his greatest creation.

When he left school Buckeridge became a bank clerk, like his father, but banking bored him. Instead, he drifted into acting, and then into teaching, working at various provincial prep schools. To get the boys to settle down for bed, he told them stories. The tales he told about Diarmaid Jennings were especially popular, prompting Buckeridge to write a radio play for Children’s Hour. That BBC play became a series, and the series spawned a set of books, enabling him to give up teaching and write full time.

Buckeridge didn’t enjoy his schooldays much (‘No music, no drama, no art – and I remember always being hungry’). Conversely Linbury Court, where Jennings goes to school, is a warm and happy place. Buckeridge was aghast that so many of his young fans were so enamoured by his escapist stories that they implored their parents to send them away to boarding school, but you could hardly blame them (I was one of them). Linbury Court was the sort of prep school that every boy would love to go to – a place where 14 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

the masters and the boys are kind, and every day is full of drama.

Like all the best comic fiction, each story follows a tried and tested pattern. A prepubescent Don Quixote, Jennings has an insatiable yearning for adventure, but his escapades inevitably end up in a hopeless muddle. His Sancho Panza is a shortsighted vicar’s son called CEJ Darbishire, who usually foresees the flaws in Jennings’s hairbrained schemes, but is

far too timid to dissuade him. ‘Why do these frantic hoo-hahs always have to pick on us to happen to?’ he wails. Together, they cause chaos, for themselves and all around them – but their scrapes and japes are harmless, and it all works out in the end. Jennings’s nemesis is Mr Wilkins, a teacher full of bluster. His redeemer is Mr Carter, a wise old owl who invariably saves him from disaster.

The thing that makes these stories sing is their daft and joyous

‘Together they cause chaos, but their scrapes and japes are harmless, and it all works out in the end’

wordplay. The dialogue is adorned with schoolboy howlers and absurd malapropisms, but Buckeridge never sets out to mock or sneer. He cares about his characters and wishes them no harm. What’s so moving about rereading these jolly, gentle tales is what a reassuring little world this is, so safe and yet so thrilling. In these troubled times, they make you yearn to be a child again.

You might think Jennings would have no appeal beyond the British Isles – a purely British pleasure, like warm beer and pantomime. Well, you’d be wrong. He was a big hit in France and Germany. In Norway he became a boy called Stompa. Like PG Wodehouse, Buckeridge created a cosy nirvana which was unique yet universal. ‘Absent minded aunts ranked high amongst the problems of modern times to which there was no real answer,’ reflects Jennings, ruefully. It could almost be Bertie Wooster talking.

So what became of Diarmaid Jennings? He became an engineer and ended up in New Zealand, where he turned to farming. Only when he was an old man did he discover he’d been the inspiration for JCT Jennings. He became pen pals with Buckeridge, whom he hadn’t seen since their prep school days, and of whom he had no recollection whatsoever. He died in 2009, at the grand old age of 96, five years after the man who immortalised his name.

Jennings wasn’t Buckeridge’s only literary creation. He also wrote a few books about Rex Milligan, a boy at Sheldrake Grammar School. As a grammar school boy myself, by rights I should have preferred these books, but I didn’t like them half as much, and it seems my reaction was fairly typical. These stories didn’t sell nearly so well, even though they were just as good. It was the idea of boarding school which attracted me, and countless day boys like me. For oiks like us, this was a world elsewhere. Eventually my parents gave in, and sent me away to school.

They were glad to see the back of me, but I was sorely disappointed. It was nothing like Linbury Court, after all.

Natural history THE MULTIFARIOUS MR BANKS

FROM BOTANY BAY TO KEW, THE NATURAL HISTORIAN WHO SHAPED THE WORLD

TOBY MUSGRAVE Yale, 327pp, £25 and ebook

In 1771, on his return from his round the world trip on the Endeavour, Joseph Banks was the most famous man in England. Yet nowadays, everyone remembers his companion Captain Cook and no one remembers Banks, the botanist whose discoveries in the terra incognita of Australia led to the creation of the botanical gardens at Kew. Stupendously wealthy, bumptiously jovial and the heir to a Yorkshire baronetcy, Banks, with his many and varied enthusiasms, was dismissed and lampooned by many (perhaps enviously) as a mere jack of all trades. Reviewing garden historian Toby Musgrave’s ‘cleareyed and highly readable’ biography in the Spectator, Peter Parker noted that ‘When Banks announced that he

‘Banks was dismissed by many as a mere jack of all trades’ intended joining Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. “Every blockhead does that,” Banks replied.

“My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.”’ In the Literary Review, Patricia Fara praised the ‘exemplary thoroughness’ of Musgrave’s coverage of Banks’s early years of intrepid botanising but was disappointed that his final 20 years, just as innovative in their own way, get only short shrift.

John Carey in the Sunday Times also noted that by 30, Banks, by then a close friend of George III, was already regarded as an ‘eminence grise’. He was dead by the age of 50.

Carey found the book ‘illuminating’ not least because it demonstrated that although he is now forgotten, Joseph Banks can justly claim to have changed our world. Not only did he ‘help to lay the foundation of what was to become the British Commonwealth, at a more domestic

Illustration of Palmacea, the Palm Tribe, from Palace of Palms: Tropical Dreams and the Making of Kew by Kate Teltscher (Picador, 400pp, £25)

level he changed our gardens. The flowers that fill them are mostly not natives but the legacy of collectors often employed and financed by Banks.’

BLOOMING FLOWERS A SEASONAL HISTORY OF PLANTS AND PEOPLE

KASIA BODDY Yale, 256pp, £14.99, ebook £6.99

Kasia Boddy’s book about flowers is less a manual for gardening than a miscellany of stories, culture and symbolism. Reviewing Blooming Flowers in the Sunday Times, Richard Eyre reflected on his own horticultural meditations: ‘I’ve had the RHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants on my breakfast table as my household bible and studied a page or two a day like a monk in a refectory, so a book with the title Blooming Flowers ought to be my perfect companion. And in some ways it almost is.’

Publishers Weekly in the States also enjoyed the book’s ruminations.

‘The flowers, divided among the four seasons they represent, include old standbys (such as roses and lilies) as well as unusual varieties (such as almond and cotton flowers). In a meandering, essayistic fashion and with a flair for aphorisms (“Autumn is spring’s alter ego”), Boddy touches on origins, popular associations, and ceremonial and medicinal applications in countries around the world (including China, Japan, Mexico, India, and Iran).’

What Eyre missed in the book was ‘a sense of wonder’: ‘Look into the face of a bearded iris and I defy you not to marvel at its preposterous beauty and the miraculous complexity of its invention.’ In the Spectator, however, Peter Parker enjoyed Boddy’s connections: ‘In discussing roses, she refreshingly highlights the flower’s sexual, rather than traditionally romantic, associations, from “the virginal promise of the closed rosebud” in 16th-century poetry to gonorrhoea being dubbed “Saigon Rose… the prickliest rose of all” during the Vietnam war.’ Parker thought it ‘a garland of delights’.

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 15

The Trumps TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH

whisper it, not very interesting.’ The Washington Post’s Jane Eisner disagreed. ‘Reinvention may be an American trope,’ she conceded. ‘But as described in this book, Melania repeatedly stretches and even abandons the truth if it’s inconvenient for her, and her alone … She and Trump are cut from the same shiny cloth.’

HOW MY FAMILY CREATED THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS MAN

MARY L TRUMP Simon & Schuster, 240pp, £20

On publication day this indictment of Donald Trump by his niece Mary, a clinical psychologist, sold a recordbreaking 950,000 copies. She says Uncle Donald was always a wrong ’un, like his father, Fred – ‘a highfunctioning sociopath’ who believed that nice guys finish last. According to Fred, lying and cheating, in public and private life, was not only permissible, but praiseworthy.

Everything Donald has done, says Mary, has been directed at an audience of one, his hardboiled, tyrannical father. Hence her description of the President as ‘Fred’s Monster’.

Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jnr, died young, having turned to drink when it became clear that he lacked the killer instinct demanded of a male Trump. His daughter is made of sterner stuff. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green said she ‘lacerates multiple sets of vital organs, her pen a stiletto’, and described her book as ‘salacious, venomous and well sourced’. In the Sunday Times Josh Glancy summed it up as ‘a ghastly tale laden with profound dynastic anguish; something like Succession crossed with Bleak House’.

The Financial Times’s Edward Luce also invoked Bleak House, but cautioned that ‘even in the darkest of Dickens’s novels, no family comes across quite as mendacious, grasping and avaricious as the Trumps. At times the reader will feel sorry for the young Donald. Who among us could cope with an upbringing like that?

Then one remembers that he inherited $413 million and calls himself self-made.’ Trump’s ‘desolate childhood’ could well account for his behaviour, agreed Leo Robson in the New Statesman. Dysfunctional American dynasties like the Kennedys and the Gettys suffered from the same fateful combination of ‘privilege and neglect’.

And what did the President think of the book? Interviewed on Fox News, he acknowledged that his father ‘liked to win’, but strongly denied that he was a ‘psychopath’

THE TODDLER-IN-CHIEF WHAT DONALD TRUMP TEACHES US ABOUT THE MODERN PRESIDENCY

Trump at NY Military Academy, 1964

(sic). ‘That book is a lie,’ he said. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

THE ART OF HER DEAL THE UNTOLD STORY OF MELANIA TRUMP

MARY JORDAN Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £20

Melania Trump was once asked if she would be with Donald if he were not rich. ‘If I weren’t beautiful,’ she replied, ‘do you think he would be with me?’ There’s no answer to that, as the great Eric Morecambe used to say. But is there more to Melania than meets the eye? Mary Jordan, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, believes there is. As Dwight Garner rather caustically noted in the New York Times, ‘the author bends over backwards so far to be fair to her subject that, at times, you fear she might need chiropractic help’.

Humbly born in Slovenia in 1970, Melania was photogenic enough to become a second-tier model, first in Europe, then America, where in 2005, six years after they met, she became Trump’s third wife. Unlike her loudmouth husband, Melania is tight-lipped – ‘I am not an attention seeker,’ she told Jordan – so speculation that long before he became a candidate she encouraged his Presidential ambitions has never been confirmed. Unsurprisingly, Mary Jordan’s copious research included only one interview, by phone, with her subject. The book was, she admits, ‘an unprecedented challenge’.

But is this ‘elegant accessory’, as she’s been portrayed, worthy of a biography? In the Times, Justin Webb was unconvinced: ‘Melania Trump is,

DANIEL W DREZNER University of Chicago Press, 282pp, £12

Until 63 million credulous Americans voted for him, very few Britons had heard of Donald Trump, a coarsegrained property magnate best known as the host of America’s version of The Apprentice. Now, every day, his temper tantrums, short attention span and other infantile antics make headlines, hence Daniel Drezner’s title. Like most other toddlers, says Drezner, Trump is ‘bad at building structures but fantastic at making a mess of existing ones’. And being a toddler, he expects others to clear up the mess.

In the New Statesman, the historian David Reynolds praised ‘this crisp, witty and highly readable philippic’, which echoes what Trump’s allies and aides have admitted: that the President acts like an immature child whom ‘they have to “manage” like “babysitters”.’ For instance he gets most of his information from television, which he watches for at least four hours most days. This is what prompts his notorious Tweets, ‘which is why aides often try – like responsible parents – to limit his screen time.’ But in the end, Reynolds quotes Drezner as saying, ‘the most important check on the Toddler-inChief will have to come from the American people’ at the next election.

In the Times, Justin Webb pointed out that egregious American Presidents are nothing new. Look at Nixon. But he described as ‘eerie’ this minatory sentence from the final chapter, which was written before the coronavirus pandemic and the trade war with China: ‘The idea of Trump coping with a true crisis – a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, a great power clash with China – is truly frightening.’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021 17

Current affairs innovation were justified. ‘He can tell us only that “innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity” and “we abandon it at our peril”. But it is unclear who would actually advocate such an absurd position.’

BEZONOMICS

HOW AMAZON IS CHANGING OUR LIVES, AND WHAT THE WORLD’S BEST COMPANIES ARE LEARNING FROM IT

BRIAN DUMAINE Simon & Schuster, 325pp, £20, ebook £9.99

Laproscopic surgery robot

HOW INNOVATION WORKS

AND WHY IT FLOURISHES IN FREEDOM

MATT RIDLEY 4th Estate, 416pp, £20, ebook £9.99

Where does human innovation emerge from? Is it a flash in the pan or is it slow-cooked over generations of patient research? As Matt Ridley puts it in his new book, ‘Innovation is the most important fact about the modern world but the least understood.’ In the Sunday Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs ran with the baton: ‘There may be no better time for a book on innovation than the middle of a pandemic,’ she wrote, citing Zoom calls as well as urgent vaccine research as products of the crisis. ‘But then Ridley lands an exciting blow: there is almost an eerie inevitability about innovation – as if it were directed by invisible cosmic law.’

Ridley himself observes that ‘innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance.’

In the Spectator, Rory Sutherland thought the book ‘wonderful’ and enjoyed the ’ranks of nameless collaborators’, the ‘unsung heroes’ who were namechecked. And in the Sunday Times, Luke Johnson praised a range beyond Silicon Valley: ‘This is a much more sweeping and thoughtful analysis, covering a wide range of human endeavours.’ Only Jon Gertner in the Washington Post was left unconvinced that Ridley’s concerns about the future of 18 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2021

Is Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, a villain or a visionary? Reviewing Bezonomics in the FT, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson wrote: ‘his fans will never agree, but one thing is clear to both: Amazon’s growth, from selling its first book in 1995 to joining the elite club of trillion-dollar companies, is one of our era’s most compelling business stories.’

The Scotsman’s Emma Newlands was blown away by the Amazon epic: ‘An addictive read – one of the most compelling business books I’ve ever read.’ Dumaine outlines, wrote Newlands, ‘how Bezos has created a 21st century algorithm for business and societal disruption, shaken retail to its foundations, is rapidly dominating cloud computing, media and advertising, and now has his sights trained on a wealth of new areas – including healthcare and financial services’.

Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard was gripped by the stats: ‘51 per cent of Americans go to church and 52 per cent have an Amazon Prime account.’ Curtis thought it ‘painstakingly even-handed’ but for Edgecliffe-Johnson it was ‘overwhelmingly flattering’.

In the Times, Hugo Rifkind was interested in Dumaine’s theory that Amazon’s success was built on the ‘flywheel’ idea developed by leadership guru Jim Collins. ‘First, understand Amazon as a cycle, with a better customer experience leading to more traffic, which leads to more sellers using the service, which in turn leads to more products, which itself leads back where we started, to a better customer experience.’ Rifkind reflected that Bezonomics at the time of writing had no reviews on Amazon, but the first one would be worth a lot more than a review in the Times.

THE LAST PRESIDENT OF EUROPE

EMMANUEL MACRON’S RACE TO REVIVE FRANCE AND SAVE THE WORLD

WILLIAM DROZDIAK Little, Brown, 256pp, £20

This account of how President Macron has bounced back after his bruising encounter with the Gilets Jaunes is, said Ben Hall in the Financial Times, ‘a tidy primer on Mr Macron’s sophisticated world view’.

For Kirkus Reviews it was a ‘slim but pertinent on-the-ground narrative’.

Macron is unpopular in France, where his views for increasing solidarity in the Eurozone and on reducing the French dependence on a bloated state are viewed by many with hostility. Hall thought that the pandemic (which happened after publication) changed the global picture – ‘It is, as the president put it in a recent televised address, “a chance to reinvent ourselves, me first of all”.’ Drodziak, expert in European politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, is a Macron admirer but his title ‘The Last President’ suggests that his project to drive the re-energisation of Europe via reform in France may fail. In the Washington Post, Benjamin Haddad had his doubts. ‘After a decade of crises, the EU seems like it will emerge from this moment more vulnerable, and the risk of a new upsurge in Euroscepticism is high.’

Simon Nixon of the Times, praising a ‘readable, balanced and insightful analysis’, put Macron in a nutshell. ‘No other contemporary world leader has commanded such attention, other than Donald Trump.

Like the US president, Macron fascinates because he is a disrupter, a political neophyte who smashed the old party system on his path to an improbable victory. But whereas Trump is an America First

President Macron: internationalist

Current affairs isolationist, Macron is an internationalist who believes that European civilisation is at stake in a crumbling world order.’

FLASH CRASH

A TRADING SAVANT, A GLOBAL MANHUNT, AND THE MOST MYSTERIOUS MARKET CRASH IN HISTORY

LIAM VAUGHAN Wm Collins, 272pp, £20, ebook £9.99

LORIE SHAULL

From his bedroom in his parents’ modest house near Heathrow, Navinder Sarao, a 42-year-old stock trader, made tens of millions of dollars trading stocks – and was implicated in causing the ‘flash crash’ of 2010 when the US stock markets lost almost $1 trillion in value in a matter of minutes. He was, said Phillip Delves Broughton in the Telegraph, ‘the face of a revolution in stock trading’.

Liam Vaughan’s account of Sarao, his arrest in 2015 after a long international hunt and his part in the ‘flash crash’ was widely praised by reviewers. Many were impressed by how Vaughan teased out the many complicated moral questions around Sarao’s actions, and his interesting personality traits. Delves Broughton wrote: ‘He displayed a rare combination of high intelligence and extreme emotional control. “You’ve got to make your mind strong,” he told a friend. “Make your self-esteem high. Make yourself feel like you’re deserving of the money!”’

John Arlidge in the Sunday Times was impressed by the way Vaughan ‘makes you sympathise with a trader who on a good day clears £700,000 – almost 30 times more than the average Briton makes in a year. That’s because it turns out that Nav is not your typical vulgar show-me-themoney trader. Quite the opposite. He has no interest in getting filthy rich to lavish gifts on himself or others.

‘Material stuff is pointless,’ he says.

In the Spectator, Jay Elwes was also gripped by ‘an extremely well-researched and clearly written book which is also a reminder of the sheer oddity of the world of cuttingedge finance’. Sarao ‘disrupted some of the biggest, wealthiest and best politically connected financiers in the world, some of whom he regarded as cheats’. Elwes concluded that the reader couldn’t help but end up with

some admiration for how Sarao ‘out-cheated the cheats’.

THE DECADENT SOCIETY

HOW WE BECAME THE VICTIMS OF OUR OWN SUCCESS

ROSS DOUTHAT Simon & Schuster, 258pp, £20, ebook £11.99

Columnist Ross Douthat is the last conservative voice left at the New York Times. The newspaper headlined its review by Mark Lilla, ‘Ross Douthat has a vision of America. It’s grim.’ Douthat argues in this book that, as Daniel Oppenheimer put it in the Washington Post, we are living through a period of ‘profound exhaustion in the cultural, political and economic life of the modern West… Douthat calls this state of civilisational low energy “decadence”.’

Douthat dates the beginning of

Riots in Minneapolis, 2020

decadence to the 1969 Apollo moon landing, a moment he thinks the ‘pinnacle of hubris’. Since then it’s been downhill all the way: plummeting birthrates, stagnant innovation, institutional sclerosis, online porn and a culture that can only recycle rather than create.

Martin Ivens in the Times called him ‘a soft-hearted Catholic’ so it is not perhaps surprising that Douthat sees hope for renewal in a revival of the importance of the transcendent. He sees signs, for example, of a Eurafrican religious renaissance in the impressive figure of Cardinal Robert Sarah.

Oppenheimer hailed Douthat as ‘the best opinion columnist in America’, the tension between his religious faith and his American patriotism making him excitingly ‘unpredictable’, but wondered

whether his skills at synthesis were ‘limiting flaws’ in a long-form argument. Ben Sixsmith in Quillette had some issues with some of his examples but he applauded Douthat’s ‘moral seriousness, argumentative rigour and avoidance of cheap, attractive yet simplistic solutions’. But in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joseph Hogan sniffed that his ‘middlebrow assessments’ of popular culture were, ultimately, ‘immaterial’.

PRINCE ANDREW, EPSTEIN AND THE PALACE NIGEL CAWTHORNE Gibson Square, 304pp, £20, ebook £14.99

When Prince Andrew returned from the Falklands War, aged 20, the handsome HRH was dubbed ‘His Royal Heartthrob’. Four decades on, following stories of unwise romances and sleazy finances, his reputation has collapsed amidst accusations of sex with an under-age girl and his notorious friendship with convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. Author Nigel Cawthorne wonders, how did Buckingham Palace allow this to happen?

Henry Mance, writing in the FT, reflected whether the fundamental problem for Andrew was that his career stalled with the birth of Prince William, making him no longer second in line to the throne. As his position slipped, Andrew had to find new ways to contribute to the world, and to finance a private-jet lifestyle.

But Mance was disappointed by the book; it is ‘not very readable or original’, and it ‘shows no access to Andrew’s inner circle and shines little new light on the accusations’, though it did raise questions about the size and modus operandi of the British monarchy.

‘What’s so powerful in this book are the details,’ said Rosamund Urwin in the Times; ‘even a fervent royalist would be left thinking that Andrew is an egotistical oaf.’ Jenni Frazer in the Jewish Chronicle agreed. This is a ‘meticulously researched book’. It is a ‘punishing but probably necessary read’, with a ‘forensic analysis of a particular form of wickedness’.

Sandra Callard in the Yorkshire Post felt the same: it is a ‘dirty story’, but ‘one of massive importance and interest to the people of England’.

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 19

Fiction

THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY ELEY WILLIAMS

LAWRENCE BOGLE

Heinemann, 288pp, £14.99

The Liar’s Dictionary is a first novel from a writer who received huge praise and prizes for Attrib. and Other Stories, a finely crafted linguistically playful collection of shorts. The novel has two story strands, which converge – one concerns a Pooterish lexicographer working on the ‘S’ section of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in 1899 who is emboldened by love into inserting new words of his own invention. The second strand concerns Mallory, an intern at Swansby’s a century later, who has been given the job of rooting out the fake entries – known as mountweazels. She thinks about the writer in the past, he thinks about the future reader. Mallory has a girlfriend and mixed feelings about coming out.

Alexandra Harris in the Guardian described this as a ‘not-quite-plot strand’ and hailed ‘a warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence…a book of big ideas in a minor key’. Stuart Kelly in the Spectator confessed to cantering through the book and welcoming its ‘distraction during lockdown’, but also acknowledged ‘enough hidden jokes and cunningly disguised rabbit holes to make one want to return to it’. He described it as a novel of ‘lists, alliterations, allusions, swirling meditations on language, dictionaries, gender, puns, linguistic jokes… even the author’s own neologisms’. But Dr Johnson’s 20 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

definition of the novel, ‘a small tale, generally of love’, is never lost sight of

by Williams, who ‘deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight.’ Jay Gilbert in the Literary Review praised Williams as ‘an assured and satisfying writer, her language rich and intricate and her characters rounded enough to be sympathetic and lampoonish enough to be terribly funny. Her writing owes something to Wodehouse but more to Waugh in his most amusing of disgruntled humours.’

EXCITING TIMES NAOISE DOLAN Weidenfeld, 275pp, £14.99, ebook £7.99

Many reviewers suggested that Ava, the wise-cracking self-hating twentysomething narrator of Naoise Dolan’s debut novel exciting times, belonged in Sally Rooney’s milieu, described in the Telegraph as made up of ‘young artistic types who have feelings, and belong in Dublin, wherever they are’. But Ava is darker and funnier than Rooney’s heroines

Craig Brown described the first half as containing ‘comic writing at the highest level’

and has travelled further – all the way to Hong Kong where she works as a TEFL teacher and lives and sleeps but doesn’t go out with a buttoned-up banker. The banker returns to London for a stint, leaving his non-girlfriend to fall in love with a Chinese-born Cambridge educated female lawyer. This leads to Ava having to make a choice which she appears, for most of the novel, incapable of doing.

In the Guardian Holly Williams praised the sharpness of the writing ‘but there are places where it feels overly cynical’. In the Literary Review John Maier took a generally dim view of Ava’s ‘infernal internal monologue’ but suggested that some readers would feel ‘recognised’ by the novel, and enjoy it for that reason. In the Mail on Sunday Craig Brown described the first half of the novel as containing ‘comic writing at the highest level’ and compared exciting times to Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. But then something palled.

‘The gaps between jokes grew longer and longer… Ava’s self-lacerating cynicism, once so funny, lost its wit and became claustrophobic. Themes of colonialism and gender politics which had, up to then, been bubbling beneath the surface, began to be placed in the forefront…When satire jettisons its humour, it curdles into agitprop.’

UTOPIA AVENUE DAVID MITCHELL Sceptre, 576pp, £20

It soon becomes clear that this is a book of two parts: the first is a straightforward feelgood narrative about an eponymous Sixties rock band, while the second part is more complex in a weird and selfreferencing classic David Mitchell style. Sarah Perry in the Guardian summed it up as arriving ‘both as a distinct book and as a further chapter in the ongoing “metanovel” that constitutes Mitchell’s work to date’.

The first aspect was welcomed by James Walton in the Spectator, who found it ‘bristling with pleasures from the more traditional side of his palette’. Perry loved the time and place: ‘It is London, 1967. Here is Foyles, here is the Pillars of Hercules pub… There is LSD in the clubs and sex to be had in bedsits.’ Alex Preston in the Observer described how the

Fiction Jonathan Dee found the selfreferencing ‘empty of meaning or grander purpose’ book is ‘arranged into three separate “albums”, with every “track” written from the perspective of a different member of the band’, each representing a stratum of society, with, as Walton pointed out, the drummer from Hull and bassist from Gravesend, while the middle classes are served by the ‘female folkie’ Elf and ‘guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet’.

Interweaved are real musicians, such as Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, a device which Jonathan Dee in the New Yorker found ‘mortifying’.

For Preston, the self-referencing was ‘empty of meaning or grander purpose’, while Mathew Lyons in the Quietus noted that ‘In Utopia Avenue, everything reflects back on itself, even the guitar solos.’ Lyons nevertheless described it as Mitchell’s most heartfelt novel yet: ‘If the book captures the hope of the Sixties… it does so in a way that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental but warmly embodies the message that everything dies… It is how we live that matters.’

THE MOTION OF THE BODY THROUGH SPACE

always a coherent novel’.

Allan Massie, in the Scotsman, enjoyed it. Shriver ‘writes bold and fearless comedy and delights in slaughtering the sacred cows of the stupid times we live in’. For him, ‘Lionel Shriver is an exuberant novelist, fertile in ideas, robust in argument and disdainful of economy.’

And in the New York Times, Joshua Ferris described the book as ‘no wilting lily. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds.’ Typically of Shriver, Serenata is an unattractive, unsympathetic character; ‘her refusal to extend sympathy to anyone but herself makes generosity toward her a very hard sell’. Alfred Hickling in the Guardian observed that Shriver’s inspiration for this ‘scabrously funny novel’ may have come out of her realisation that she had herself become more dedicated to taking exercise than to writing.

SUMMER ALI SMITH Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, £16.99

This is the last volume in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, sparked by the Brexit vote and each of them written at breakneck speed. (The first, Autumn, was published in 2016, just four months after the referendum.)

Parts of Summer are set in the weeks

before lockdown began – there is talk of a virus waiting in the wings and a Chinese family is abused in the shops.

Characters from previous volumes appear in a story that centres around divisions within the Greenlaw family in Brighton. Politically opposed teenage siblings live with their mother, and next door is their father and his new partner – the ‘arrangement clearly chimes with Smith’s interest in borders and schisms’, noted Sarah Ditum in the Literary Review. But the present is never a confining affair with Smith who here pulls off all her usual tricks of including other texts – A Winter’s Tale, David Copperfield being two of many.

Cal Revely-Calder in the Telegraph was struck by the angst beneath Smith’s playful surface – ‘the style seems so exuberant – until you pause, and the silence is not’. This is partly to do with the digital lives of Smith’s young protagonists – ‘the poison of life online has spread across this quartet’. Alex Preston in the Observer welcomed the much-anticipated completion of ‘a complex interrelated collage of reflections on the way we live now’. He recommended reading the four books together and was confident that future generations would read to understand ‘what it was to live in these fraught and febrile times, and how, through art, we survived’.

LIONEL SHRIVER

LAWRENCE BOGLE

Borough, 352pp, £16.99, ebook £7.99

A couple, Serenata and Remington, are approaching their twilight years.

Serenata, formerly a fitness fanatic, now has destroyed knees, while Remington, her previously sedentary and redundant husband, chooses this precise moment to take up exercise and compete in a gruelling triathlon.

This is the story of a marriage, an obsession and betrayal. Within it, Shriver interweaves bugbear themes of diversity, cultural appropriation and political correctness.

Christian Lorentzen, writing in the FT, described it as a ‘satire on fitness zealotry with a side-serving of culturewar intrigue’. There are ‘poignant insights about ageing’ which are delivered ‘inside a novel that goes down like a sour pill’. For him, it is ‘an obstacle course of a book’, that makes for ‘a diverting spectacle, if not

Sign of the times: ‘there is talk of a virus waiting in the wings’ in Ali Smith’s novel The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 21

Fiction THE GROUP

It was broadly agreed that Pilgrims did not live up to English Passengers, let down mainly by the lack of variation in the voices whose ‘accounts overlap and contradict one another’ (Merritt), meaning, concluded Adams, that they lacked ‘strength and resonance and left the story feeling languid and obscure’.

LARA FEIGEL JM Originals, 336pp, £16.99

Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (1963), about eight Vassar graduates in 1930s New York, seethed with sex, ambition and botched contraception.

Her intellectual friends sneered but the novel sold and sold. Decades later it was the inspiration behind Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City. Will Lara Feigel’s version of McCarthy’s novel have anything like the same impact?

It is set now, in London, and concerns a group of middle-class women who met at Oxford 20 years earlier; one is a doctor while the rest work in the arts if they work at all; most are in rocky relationships and have young children.

Melissa Katsoulis in the Times was firm that there is ‘nothing sexy about The Group, even though everyone in it shags nonstop. The bedroom scenes are so sad and dry that they cast a pall over a book already lacking human warmth.’ She acknowledged Feigel’s deftness with ‘feminist social theory’ but ‘it’s not enough that a novel understands the world. The cold facts of life need to be kindled with clever plotting, artful imagery or... humour.’

Eleanor Halls in the Telegraph was similarly underwhelmed – ‘something about these women left me cold: the tininess of their worlds, the monotony of their thoughts and the ghost of a friendship that was never really there’. But Johanna Thomas-Corr in the Guardian saluted Feigel for being ‘prepared to court dislike in her pursuit of the emotional truth of these women’s lives’. She detected shards of Woolf and Cusk and Ferrante in the mix, and couldn’t remember the last time she ‘consumed a novel so hungrily’.

PILGRIMS MATTHEW KNEALE Atlantic, 343pp, £16.99, ebook £8.99

‘Matthew Kneale, novelist, historian and son of Judith Kerr [who knew?] has set his new novel in 1289, following a group of English pilgrims on their journey to Rome,’ Francesca Carington told us in the Telegraph.

Matthew Adams pointed out in the Spectator this was a similar theme to his first, award-winning book English Passengers, in which ‘he captured the 22 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

THE WEEKEND CHARLOTTE WOOD Weidenfeld, 275pp, £14.99, ebook £7.99

Taking a break: woodcut of pilgrims eating and drinking on their journey

sensibilities of a group of 19th-century seafarers bound for Tasmania in search of the Garden of Eden by chronicling their voyage in 21 singular, vibrant voices’.

Kneale’s cast this time, Stephanie Merritt told us in the Observer, ‘is a collection of 13th-century penitents travelling to Rome to seek absolution for a colourful variety of sins’. Chief protagonist is Simple Tom, a ‘raggedy

‘Linguistically, he treads lightly, with a modernised version of medieval English’ bondsman walking to save his cat from purgatory’, wrote Carington, going on to describe the others as a knight who punched an abbot, a mother convinced God is punishing her affair by making her son sick, a tailor and his daughter, a sexy noblewoman and her intended next husband and two women with a not-quite-mysterious past.

All very Chaucerian, and leavened by the fact that ‘Linguistically, Kneale treads lightly, with a chatty, modernised version of medieval English that slips down easily,’ wrote Justine Jordan in the Guardian.

Adams described the narrative as ‘broadly comic in spirit’ as Tom and his cohort ‘conclude their great expedition with easy fellow-feeling and a collective inability to master their desires’, adding that ‘Some of these are sexual; some involve nuns.’

The Weekend is an Australian novel about the relations between three seventy-something friends and a missing fourth, who has been dead a year. The remaining three have arranged to spend Christmas together, cleaning out the beach house of the dead one as an act of kindness to her grieving (female) partner. Along with the rubbish which they clear out they revisit old quarrels and discover a secret which makes them question their friendships with one another.

Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times hailed it as a ‘quietly radical tragicomedy’ and described herself ‘shocked by how unusual it felt to spend 275 pages exclusively in the company of older women’.

Notwithstanding some melodrama in the plot, and some ‘automatic overwriting’ in the prose, Lowdon admired the surefootedness with which Wood ‘packs 50 years into one weekend’.

Susan Wyndham in the Guardian described The Weekend as a playful and moving feminist fairytale which would surprise admirers of The Natural Way of Things, Wood’s best-selling novel about a disparate group of young women imprisoned in the Australian desert to protect their sexual abusers. Sara Collins in the Observer also noted that The Weekend was ‘rooted in more quotidian realities’ than the previous book but added that it was also ‘steeped in symbolism’. This is mainly provided by the elderly dog which ‘totters in and out of almost every scene: feeble, befuddled and incontinent’.

What Sara Collins really admired, though, was that ‘each of its protagonists is still adamantly (often disastrously) alive, and still less afraid of death than irrelevance’.

Diaries The craze for keeping a personal record of foreign travel began in earnest in the 19th century, as LUCY LETHBRIDGE discovers

LAWRENCE BOGLE

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently rummaging through various archives in pursuit of the private travel diaries of 19th- and early 20th-century tourists on the Continent. And I’ve been struck by how extraordinarily similar are the reactions that seem to be elicited by the sight of foreign places. Hours and hours and pages and pages have rolled by before I’ve come across a diary that makes no reference to dawn (or sunset) over the mountains or the lakes or to the eccentric peasantry. Sometimes these diaries went on to be published in book form with titles involving scampers, peregrinations, pilgrimages, and rambles.

Anna Brownell Jameson, a former governess, nailed the type in 1826 with her novel, written in diary form, of a young girl dying of love while travelling through Europe. Diary of an Ennuye captures the daily observations of foreign life and its promise of erotic personal transformation.

What young lady, travelling for the first time on the Continent, does not write a ‘Diary’? No sooner have we stept on the shores of France — no sooner are we seated in the gay salon at Dessin’s, than we call, like Biddy Fudge, for ‘French pens and French ink’, and forth steps from its case the morocco bound diary, regularly ruled and paged, with its patent Bramah lock and key wherein we are to record and preserve all the striking, profound, and original observations – the classical reminiscences – thread-bare raptures – the poetical effusions – in short, all the never-sufficiently-to-beexhausted topics of sentiment and enthusiasm, which must necessarily suggest themselves while posting from Paris to Naples.

It was ‘honest Jack Letts’, a London stationer, who in 1816, started the craze for diary keeping. In 1815, the Continent had re-opened for tourist traffic after the Battle of Waterloo, and following the popular publication of both Pepys and John Evelyn, there was a new interest in the idea that private life and daily observations might be of public interest. Letts began by selling series of small ruled and dated notebooks,

for the purpose of recording day-today experiences and transactions – the first commercially produced diaries in the world. By the time of his death ten years later, Letts & Co were producing 28 different variations of their basic diary, in all sizes, from pocket editions to foolscap-sized.

Early editions assumed that the user would account for a six-day week and excluded Sundays. Most also included columns ruled to note down cash accounts and expenditure and also informational sections such as tide tables for sea travel. They were angled at the business traveller rather than the personal pleasure-seeker, less of a journal than a memory prompter. It marked an entirely new concept of diary keeping: for the first time, the diary was viewed as a project into the future, rather than a meditation on the past.

By the 1850s, Letts & Co (now run

by John’s son Thomas) had expanded into the nations of the empire; and in 1858, in a brilliant early marketing endorsement move, Letts offered Dr David Livingstone, then just about to embark on an ill-fated expedition to the source of the Zambezi River, a lifetime’s supply of diaries which he gratefully accepted (by the 1870s, lost in Zambia, he had run out of ink and the diaries are written in the dark juice of a local berry). The diaries began to include advertisements for useful equipment: luggage, digestive tonics, travel-sickness pills, collapsible bathtubs and ventilating walking boots.

But for many tourists, the purpose of the diary was the recording of innermost thoughts. They were secured by the Bramah lock but

written with a discerning reader in mind. Some diarists vented their suspicion for all things foreign, like the anonymous girl, visiting France in 1821, who maintained a vivid commentary on French inadequacy. The Louvre was disappointing, French soap smelt disgusting, the vines were straggly, the pigs too long-legged, the babies over-swaddled, the ladies wore clashing colours and the Seine was filthy.

The anonymous diarist of a trip to Ischl in 1876, was shocked by the sight of Sunday trading, confiding, ‘Miss Carr and I think we were a little proud that we belong to England.’

Others, like Robert Hudson in 1819, fill their pages with minutely itemised expenses. A notable number of English diarists compare the grandeur of the Alps to the highest peak in their experience: Box Hill.

But there is something about foreignness that defeats description because it is almost too familiar.

Typical is the teenage boy who can only report that Leyden is ‘very thoroughly Dutch’. Even Dickens failed to meet the challenge when in Italy: ‘We began, in a perfect fever, to strain our eyes for Rome, and when, after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance, it looked like – I am half afraid to write the word – like LONDON!!!’

The 19th century saw a profusion of travel books in diary form, full of deep ponderings that indicate the author’s effortless superiority of insight. EM Forster spoofed the type in Miss Eleanor Lavish, the lady novelist who exhorts the mere tourist to throw away her Baedeker. But the reader learns far more of the life of the past from the unpretentious observer who looks about.

My favourite among those I’ve read is John Haygarth, an indefatigable commercial traveller of the 1830s, more interested in new technologies and manufacturing than exploring his response to the sublime.

From him we learn, for example, that Le Havre was the centre of the parrot trade and hundreds of thousands of them, squawking and fluttering, greeted the incoming steamers from across the Channel. Who knew?

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 23

Miscellaneous experiment.’ And Clement Knox in the Daily Telegraph loved it: ‘The Biggest Bluff is a brilliant book mostly because Konnikova is a brilliant writer, but also because she is a brilliant observer of the weird world she has immersed herself into.

Her pithy descriptions of casinos in Las Vegas, Macau, and elsewhere (she refers to Vegas perfectly as “an adult playground on a lifelike scale”) captures the seedy charm of these airless, dream-filled tombs.’

THE AGE OF ISLANDS IN SEARCH OF NEW AND DISAPPEARING ISLANDS

ALASTAIR BONNETT Atlantic, 229pp, £16.99, ebook £9.99

Maria Konnikova at Idea Festival 2013

THE BIGGEST BLUFF

HOW I LEARNED TO PAY ATTENTION, MASTER MYSELF, AND WIN

MARIA KONNIKOVA Maria Konnikova, 4th Estate, 354pp, £20

C C CHAPMAN

Writer Maria Konnikova has written a book about how learning to play poker taught her about life and luck.

Dominic Maxwell in the Times set the scene: ‘Her mother and husband had lost their jobs. Her grandmother had died. Konnikova had developed “a bizarre autoimmune condition” that made her allergic to almost everything. What was going on? How could she seize control of her life?’

Praising a ‘fascinating’ book in the New York Times, Michael Paterniti wrote that it asked the question: ‘What if we could see through the ups and downs, the glories and tragedies – our own winning and losing streaks, really – to the underlying grid of chance and self-determination that guides all of life, including issues of love, health and money?’

In the Spectator, Hermione Eyre found it refreshingly free of swashbuckling: ‘This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a hand of poker in her life. She has read, re-read, dissected and annotated poker textbooks. This is a swot’s progress, a fish-out-of-water 24 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

Who doesn’t love the idea of an island? Preferably a private one, blessed with constant good weather, discreet mod cons and abundant fresh water. Alastair Bonnett’s new book looks at islands new, old and man-made; some of them newly emerging, others rapidly submerging because of climate change. James Hamilton-Paterson in the Literary Review enjoyed a ‘knowledgeable world tour of different types of islands, much enhanced by selfdeprecating accounts of his own often shoestring visits’. Bonnett (a professor of physical geography) is, he thought, ‘particularly good on geophysical explanations for why and how they can surface suddenly, like Surtsey off the coast of Iceland, or bob up and down, like Graham Island between Sicily and Tunisia, which has appeared and disappeared several times since the mid-19th century’.

Mark Mason in the Daily Mail found the accounts of man-made islands the most interesting. ‘They’re nothing new: the Lau fishing people built about 80 of them in the Solomon Islands by paddling out, every year, for centuries, and dropping lumps of coral into the water. Their islands were refuges from attack by farmers on the mainland.’ In the Sunday Times, James MacConnachie was struck by Bonnett’s ‘unsettling’ tour of the ‘megalomaniac’ artificial island resorts now sprouting from the waters round Dubai and pondered that the reason we love islands is that they allow us a fantasy of total control.

FEEDING THE PEOPLE

THE POLITICS OF THE POTATO

REBECCA EARLE Cambridge University Press, 306pp, £20

This ‘wide-ranging, imaginative book joins a growing body of food writing that isn’t just concerned with what food is, but with what it means,’ Orlando Bird wrote in the Telegraph.

‘And just as potatoes have been turned into everything from vichyssoise to vodka, so their significance has evolved too.’

‘Feeding the People is ostensibly a book about potatoes, but in truth they are only the side dish,’ Gerard DeGroot noted in the Times. ‘This book is actually about how governments use food to manipulate citizens.’

When first introduced from America in the 16th century, a Spanish physician warned that ‘the new vegetable caused flatulence – and, somewhat counter-intuitively, lust.’ Yet by the 18th century, when governments needed large armies and a more productive workforce, potatoes were promoted as nourishing – at minimal cost.

‘Spuds offered “fiscal invisibility”’ because they grew underground, DeGroot noted, ‘safe from the prying eyes of landowners and customs inspectors’. Potatoes normally provided a defence against starvation, but after the Irish Potato Famine a Treasury official decided that in future the Irish should buy their food rather than grow it.

Bird felt that the ‘prose can be testing’ and that ‘Earle’s style of argument often veers between the donnishly tentative and the bludgeoningly insistent’.

DeGroot agreed, finding the book ‘fascinating’ but ‘too formulaic ... she needs to let her lighter side surface more ... there are not enough laughs in this rather po-faced book’.

THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL THE TURBULENT BIRTH OF ECONOMICS IN TWENTY EXTRAORDINARY LIVES

CALLUM WILLIAMS Profile/Economist Books, 277pp, £20

Callum Williams has written a brief tour of 20 important names in the economists’ hall of fame. As the senior economics’ writer of the Economist,

Miscellaneous Williams could hardly be more qualified as a guide to these figures of the ‘classical school’, the founding fathers of modern economics. They were all born before 1900 and most of them, as Phillip Aldrick in the Times remarked, ‘are believers in laissez faire’. Aldrick went on: according to Williams, although his 20 thinkers often disagreed with each other, they ‘were a coherent body in a methodological sense... Unlike their modern successors, they rarely used complex mathematics to express their theories or empirical data in a rigorous way; they were philosophers, not scientists, but they were asking common questions, about how markets work or what value is.’

Aldrick enjoyed how Williams pointed out his subjects’ ‘bad mistakes’ as well as their brilliance: ‘He is a scholar, but the journalist in him can’t help pricking bloated egos.’

The Economist’s reviewer summed up this ‘colourful glimpse’ of the influence and character of these early titans of the discipline. ‘The chapters are brief – fewer than ten pages each – beginning in the 17th century and concluding in the early 20th with the death of the father of neoclassical economics, Alfred Marshall. The contributions of these thinkers are tied together by the author to offer a picture of the beginning of economic thought.’

AU REVOIR, TRISTESSE

LESSONS IN HAPPINESS FROM FRENCH LITERATURE

VIV GROSKOP Abrams, 256pp, £17.99, ebook £10.39

EDMUND S. VALTMAN

As John Walsh observed in the Sunday Times, Viv Groskop’s new book joins a ‘small but growing literary genre that presents works of literature as, essentially, forms of medication or manuals of self-help’.

Groskop applies some liberal doses of her own autobiography to her reflections on 12 novelists who embody a ‘swagger’ she sees as enviably French, or at least not horribly English. It all started, according to the Observer’s Hepzibah Anderson, when the teenage Groskop saw Françoise Sagan on telly in the 1980s.‘The novelist embodied an elusive feeling that the English teen was

determined to claim for herself.’

Caroline Sanderson in the Bookseller enjoyed a ‘blend of memoir, philosophy and literary criticism’ and thought Groskop’s reflections on novels by, among others, Colette, Camus and Zola, ‘construct a convincing case for the love and elan to be found in such works’. Over in the Irish Times, Sara Keating was similarly inspired: ‘Groskop will happily offer you her wisdom without the expectation that you should ever read any of the books she discusses. I, for one, however, will be dusting off the cover of my school copy of Flaubert to see what wisdom Madame Bovary has to share with me these days.’

John Walsh conceded that the book was an ‘enjoyable, chatty, wildly repetitive, often downright silly introduction to French writers’, but he thought the ‘“lessons in happiness” are never really identified’.

HOW TO FEED A DICTATOR

SADDAM HUSSEIN, IDI AMIN, ENVER HOXHA, FIDEL CASTRO AND POL POT THROUGH THE EYES OF THEIR COOKS

WITOLD SZABLOWSKI, TRANS ANTONIA LLOYDJONES Penguin, 272pp, £14.99, ebook £9.49

‘Maybe you can’t see monstrosity in its full monstrousness when you’re making breakfast for it every day,’ Jennifer Reese ruminated in the Washington Post. For this ‘fascinating’ collection of essays Szablowski ‘tracked down the cooks who baked birthday cakes and roasted goats for a rogues’ gallery of tyrants’, she continued. ‘The cooks themselves are just as interesting as they tell their life stories and reckon with – or refuse to reckon with – the role they might have played, however small, in abetting tyranny.’

‘Szablowski is a limpid and gently brilliant storyteller,’ Wendell Steavenson enthused in the Financial Times. Iona McLaren in the Telegraph found the book Idi Amin

‘riveting’. ‘Since their lives were dependent on a faultless grasp of their masters’ moods and appetites, these cooks knew the tyrants ... inside out.’

Mr K, chef to Enver Hoxha and too terrified even 35 years later to reveal his identity, prided himself on ‘the sugar-free desserts he concocted for his diabetic boss’. ‘I knew how to improve his temper ... Who knows how many people’s lives I saved that way?’

As for Idi Amin’s alleged cannibalism, his chef Otonde Odera swears, ‘I never saw any meat of unfamiliar origin, or that I hadn’t bought myself, in the fridges and cold stores under my charge.’

Saddam Hussein liked to barbecue meat for his friends and then smother it in Tabasco to see if anyone would complain. His chef Abu Ali remarked without irony, ‘Saddam was the only good person in the entire al-Tikriti family ... I don’t know how he survived among them.’ Pol Pot’s party-line-toeing cook Yong Moeun ‘denies the Khmer Rouge leader hurt a fly’. Fidel Castro, addicted to dairy, would eat up to 20 ice creams a day.

‘This book tells all that we know about the power of good suppers, whoever they are fed to,’ Rose Prince concluded in the Spectator.

‘Dictators’ stomachs offer few clues to their souls,’ opined James Marriott in the Times. ‘But that doesn’t stop this epically well-researched book being a lot of fun to read. Just enjoy it with a pinch of salt.’

SEX ROBOTS & VEGAN MEAT

ADVENTURES AT THE FRONTIER OF BIRTH, FOOD, SEX & DEATH

JENNY KLEEMAN Picador, 368pp, £16.99

This book is ‘a tour of the lurid fringes of the tech world,’ Ben Cooke wrote in the Times. ‘These ventures seem outlandish now, but they are perhaps the first signs of a sea change in how we eat, have sex, procreate and die.’ It is ‘a compelling and thoughtful attempt to understanding where such inventions might lead us’, Fiona Sturges added in the Guardian.

Eleanor Halls in the Telegraph declared the book ‘an epic exercise in concision’, but regretted that only in the epilogue did Kleeman make the point that ‘all these entrepreneurs are The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 25

Miscellaneous men’ and women ‘will be disproportionally affected by the technologies’.

And so we have hyperrealistic dolls complete with custom-made hair, nipples and vaginal inserts, who can moan during sex and whose vagina has its own heating and lubrication systems. Do such toys ‘encourage male owners to see women as property?’ Halls wondered. Wouldn’t therapy sessions for men who cannot relate to women be preferable?

There will be chicken nuggets grown in vitro from a biopsy of starter cells taken from a living chicken. Why not just change our diet? Tom Chivers suggested in the Spectator. ‘Men and women will never be truly equal until the reproductive burden is shared, which is where the biobag comes in,’ Halls noted. Currently used for premature babies, it could replace pregnancy altogether and ‘could revolutionise equality for gay men and trans women’.

Finally, there is the ‘Elon Musk of Assisted Suicide’, the inventor of the 3D coffin cum death machine that self-administers painless asphyxiation, ‘thus bypassing the legal quandaries of assisted suicide’.

Kleeman infers these new technologies are bad, Chivers concluded, yet the ‘history of humanity is full of the creation of new technologies which often have downsides, yet generally improve our lives. Kleeman doesn’t do enough to convince me that these will be any different.’

THE WORLDS OF JRR TOLKIEN

THE PLACES THAT INSPIRED MIDDLE-EARTH

JOHN GARTH

Tolkein’s fiction was rooted in his experiences at the Battle of the Somme

‘As with the journeys [of Bilbo and Frodo],’ Hand continued, ‘some of the most memorable passages describe hiking through wilderness.

Garth recounts a nearly month-long walking tour in the Swiss Alps by Tolkien in 1911. This reveals the roots of Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, Caradhras, Dunharrow and the Dwimorberg.’

And Vanessa Thorpe in the Observer hailed ‘a key discovery’ by Garth, ‘an ancient battlescape that reappears across Tolkien’s writing. It has its basis in the earthworks at Maiden Castle in Dorset... best known to readers in the contours of the atmospheric Barrow-downs in The Lord of the Rings.’

Hand noted: ‘The palimpsest of real and imagined, ancient and modern, urban and bucolic, mythic and historic, gives Middle-earth its powerful singularity – the “tremendous sense of perspective”, as Garth puts it, so “vital in making us feel Middle-earth was not intended for the story, but existed before it”.’

THAT WILL BE ENGLAND GONE

Frances Lincoln, 208pp, £25

THE LAST SUMMER OF CRICKET

‘Ostensibly it’s about the landscapes that inspired Middle-earth,’ said Tom Chivers in the Times, ‘but it’s also, unavoidably, a history of the man and his ideas.’ He went on to call the book ‘irresistible’.

Elizabeth Hand in the Washington Post agreed: ‘Tolkien’s fiction, far from being donnish fancy, was rooted in his experiences at the Battle of the Somme and observations of an irrevocably damaged world. “If Tolkien has a message,” Garth writes, “it is simple. Modern life tends to blind us to the true value of things.”

MICHAEL HENDERSON Constable, 296pp, £20, ebook £12.99

This is ‘a book ostensibly about cricket, but really a threnody for a vanished and possibly mythical England’, said Sebastian Faulks in the Sunday Times. ‘[Its] aim is to celebrate the counties of England, their geography and people, as well as their cricket teams.’

Daniel Rey in the Spectator agreed: ‘Englishness itself, as much as cricket, is the main theme... The title

alludes to Larkin’s poem Going, Going, and the last summer was 2019, when Henderson took a journey around the cricket grounds of his past.’

‘Last’ because 2020 saw the prospect of ‘a jazzed-up, short form of the game called The Hundred... aimed at the non-cricketing public’, Rey explained, recording the author’s horror at cricket’s current status: ‘Cricket,’ writes Henderson, ‘is now ranked the eighth most popular sport in English secondary schools, behind football, rugby, swimming, athletics and – this takes some believing – basketball, netball and rounders.’

Rey said Henderson is ‘quick to criticise today’s cricketing bureaucrats, and doesn’t spare the failings of two prime ministers – Thatcher and Major – who oversaw the loss of more than 10,000 school playing fields. The Fall of Albion’s green and pleasant land – and its most evocative pastime – is not a recent phenomenon. But there’s a chance [The Hundred] will kill traditional cricket – and with it, Henderson implies, Englishness itself.’

Originally scheduled for this year, the new format was postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic. As Faulks said, ‘The silver lining is that Henderson could yet be spared The Hundred.’ And he concluded, ‘An over-romantic and conservative view of England can easily slip into self-parody and its own idiolect.

Henderson flirts with danger (“training shoes” for trainers), but does not succumb until the acknowledgements, where an “ale” is “toothsome” – but a man is entitled to loosen his tie at this late stage, after stumps, among friends warmly thanked.’

The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020 27

Books & Publishing

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Paperbacks John le Carré’s latest novel, Agent Running in the Field (Viking, 384pp, £8.99), is set in 2018 and is, according to his editor, ‘incredibly prescient, and a very emotional book in terms of how connected le Carré feels to the history of Britain and Europe. There’s no looking away, he addresses the very current political crisis.’ Robert McCrum in the Guardian agreed: ‘Ever since he was propelled into spy fiction by the cold war division of Europe… le Carré’s de facto muse has been the zeitgeist.

Publishing such a thriller at the age of 88, a feat of imaginative stamina

John le Carre: incredibly prescient

that surpasses the tenacity of his idol Graham Greene, le Carré confirms his place at the head of his profession. Not many writers half his age could so successfully put Goethe and Sting into the same sentence.’

The book ‘is as ingeniously structured as any of le Carré’s fiction, skilfully misdirecting the reader for much of the time,’ enthused David Sexton in the Evening Standard.

‘The novel has been trailed as an anti-Brexit, anti-Trump book, and it is indeed that… But it goes beyond that,’ wrote Allan Massie in the Scotsman. ‘Le Carré’s subject has always been corruption – corruption of the intellect and the spirit, the corrupting influence of power and money. “Radix malorum est cupiditas,” and the irresponsibly selfish and unscrupulous rich occupy one of the lower circles in le Carré’s Inferno,’, but Massie believed this was a ‘warmer’ novel than many of his others.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Penguin, 544pp, £9.99) 30 The Oldie Review of Books Autumn 2020

is Bill Bryson’s latest book. As Richard Morrison in the Times explained, the author ‘isn’t a medic, biologist or psychiatrist, but that’s what makes his exploration of the human body, all seven billion billion billion atoms of it… so readable and useful…. He asks all the questions a layperson doesn’t dare to ask for fear of exposing humiliating ignorance, then answers them in witty, jargon-free prose.’

Most reviewers plucked some startling facts from the book: in the Washington Post, for example, Alexander C Kafka noted that ‘You grow 25 feet of hair in a lifetime. You host 40,000 species of microbes, and when you kiss you transfer some 1 billion bacteria to your beloved.’ Ceri Radford in the Independent discovered that we ‘shed half a kilo of skin flakes every year’. Gavin Francis concluded his review in the Guardian: ‘For all Bryson’s encyclopedic reading, his brainpicking sessions with medicine’s finest minds, the ultimate conclusions of his book could stand as an ultimate prescription for life: eat a little bit less, move a little bit more.’

Molly Case is a ‘spoken word artist’, writer and nurse born and brought up in south London. She currently works at St George’s Hospital in London as a cardiac nurse specialist. In How to Treat People: A Nurse at Work (Penguin, 288pp, £9.99), Case has structured her memoir ‘around the ABCDE assessment used by nurses – airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure,’ explained Alice O’Keeffe in the Guardian. ‘This allows Case to roam widely across different aspects of her experience as a nurse, writer and daughter (her

Molly Case: an eloquent advocate

father was treated on the cardiac ward where she worked)… Her patients inspire her most compelling material. While doctors tend to describe the people they treat as a

collection of symptoms, as a nurse Case has the advantage of working intimately with them and their families, sometimes over long periods of time... She shows us that the unique role of a nurse is to understand and care for people both physically and emotionally. Nursing may not have the cachet of brain surgery but it’s an essential profession and, in Case, it has an eloquent advocate,’ O’Keeffe concluded. ‘It’s a youthful, vibrant, cynicism-free book, which gives it great charm,’ Melanie Reid wrote in the Times. ‘May she inspire her contemporaries to join her in a vital job.’

Clarissa Farr was high mistress of St Paul’s Girls School for some 11 years, during which time her pupils achieved extraordinarily good exam results. The Making of Her: Why School Matters (Wm Collins, 320pp, £9.99) ‘shares the wisdom she deployed there and the lessons she learnt. It is about the importance of good teachers and the influence a school community can have on the lives of children,’ wrote Sian Griffiths in the Times. In an interview in the Standard, Farr explained that ‘The world is full of people desperate to reinvent education. My abiding feeling is there are a limited number of ways you can improve on a fantastic teacher.’ In the TES, Gwen Byrom, herself a headteacher, thought it ‘a warm and witty book, which raised a number of wry smiles of recognition, and is full of hard-earned wisdom and affection for our schools and all that goes on in them’.

In her Times review of Jo Baker’s thriller The Body Lies (Black Swan, 288pp, £8.99), Siobhan Murphy set the scene: ‘Baker’s protagonist is recruited to the creative writing department of a northern university. Fear has driven her here – she was attacked on the street in London.’ In the Guardian, Sarah Moss thought there was ‘some good campus satire: since one of the writing professors is on research leave and the other off sick with stress, our heroine finds that she is the creative writing department.’

‘The book’s clout,’ believed Murphy, ‘is in the sexual politics behind its contrast of the fictional depiction of violence against women – as written in the postgrads’ work – and the stark, isolating reality.’