The Oldie magazine

VILLAINS OF THE BLITZ – JOSHUA LEVINE MY DOOMED HERO BY JONATHAN MEADES

September 2020 | £4.75 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 391

Spitting Image is back!

John Lloyd and Norman Tebbit reveal all

Right royal mess – Harry and Meghan by Frances Wilson Ideal Holmes – Damian Thompson on Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock King of the Army – Elvis in Germany by Andrew M Brown

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Features 9 How to kill your wife and get away with it Gyles Brandreth 13 My work is much more fun than fun Liz Hodgkinson 14 A right royal farce – Spitting Image returns John Lloyd 18 Television’s best Sherlock Holmes Damian Thompson 21 Living with a stammer Nigel Phillips 25 The heroes – and villains – of the Blitz Joshua Levine 28 Elvis, King of the Army Andrew M Brown 30 The critical brilliance of Ian Nairn Jonathan Meades

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was the Sarge? David Platzer 12 Modern Life: What is the Royal Warrant Holders Association? John Shepherd 22 The Way We Live Now Dafydd Jones 32 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

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33 Country Mouse Giles Wood 34 School Days Sophia Waugh 34 Golden Nuggets Susan Hamlyn 35 Home Front Alice Pitman 36 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 38 God Sister Teresa 38 Memorial Service: Lord Bell James Hughes-Onslow 39 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 40 Readers’ Letters 43 I Once Met… Ghislaine Maxwell Harry Mount 43 Memory Lane 55 Media Matters Stephen Glover 57 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 57 Rant: Reeling ban Ferdie Rous 58 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

Sgt Presley reports for duty page 28

Books 45 Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Royal Family, by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand Frances Wilson 47 Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times, by David Kynaston Ivo Dawnay 49 The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, by Peter Hunt Emily Bearn 49 Diary of a Young Naturalist,

by Dara McAnulty Will Cohu 51 Mistresses: Sex and Scandal in the Court of Charles II,

by Linda Porter Hamish Robinson 53 Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, by Penelope Mortimer Cressida Connolly

83 My doomed love for the National Trust Lisa White

Arts 60 Film: How to Build a Girl Harry Mount 61 Theatre: Blueprint Medea Nicholas Lezard 61 Radio Valerie Grove 62 Television Roger Lewis 63 Music Richard Osborne 64 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 65 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

78 Staffordshire’s secrets William Cook 80 Overlooked Britain: Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland Lucinda Lambton 82 Taking a Walk: Bardney Limewoods, Lincolnshire Patrick Barkham

67 Gardening David Wheeler 67 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 68 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 68 Restaurants James Pembroke 69 Drink Bill Knott 70 Sport Jim White 70 Motoring Alan Judd 72 Digital Life Matthew Webster 72 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 74 Getting Dressed: Patricia Milbourn Brigid Keenan 77 Bird of the Month: Coot John McEwen

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The Oldie September 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 are closed – so buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be easy.

There are three ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for

£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; scroll down to the Special Issues section.

3. Buy a 12-issue print subscription for just £47.50 and receive a free book – see

page 47. And if you want to buy a 12-issue subscription for friends for as little as £8, see our special offer on page 7.

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

The Old Un was deeply sad to hear of the death of Dame Olivia de Havilland, the last surviving star of Gone with the Wind.

Dame Olivia, who died at 104, was our Oldie of the Year in 2016 – and was made a Dame – thanks to our TV critic, Roger Lewis.

Roger, working on his Richard Burton biography, tracked her down in 2015 because she’d worked with Burton in My Cousin Rachel (1952).

‘Olivia couldn’t stand the man,’ Roger remembers. ‘She hated the way he openly cheated on his nice wife, Sybil.

This was a decade or so before Elizabeth Taylor entered the scene. Olivia’s view was that he was an unscrupulous chancer, coarse, and she enjoyed the way, in My Cousin Rachel, her character got to poison his character.’

So Roger set about asking her to be our Oldie of the Year.

‘I conducted an interview with her by email that lasted weeks,’ he says. ‘When we sent her flowers, the water in the vase had to be Evian.’

Sadly Dame Olivia couldn’t make our Oldie of

the Year lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand.

‘She sent a recorded speech – very elaborate syntax, beautifully enunciated,’ Roger remembers. ‘It will be her farewell performance. My one good deed, once I’d helped remind people she was still about, was to get Olivia

nominated for her damehood, which was awarded with alacrity, thanks to the intervention of Michael Gove.’

Aged 102 at the time, she was the oldest person ever to appear on an Honours list.

‘Always with her Oscar statuettes on show in the background of any

Among this month’s contributors John Lloyd (p14) produced Spitting Image, Blackadder, Not the Nine O’Clock News, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and QI. He started To the Manor Born and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff.

Jonathan Meades (p30) has made over 50 TV shows. His book Pedro and Ricky Come Again is out in March 2021. He lives in Marseille, tends cacti, cooks and makes artworks he calls Treyfs and Artknacks.

Norman Tebbit (p16 and p40) was Employment Secretary (1981–83), Trade Secretary (1983–85), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1985–87) and Conservative Party Chairman (1985–87).

Andrew M Brown (p28), the Telegraph’s obituaries editor, has written obits of Elvis’s guitarist Scotty Moore, his doctor (‘Dr Nick’) and bodyguard ‘Red’ West (author of a lurid exposé about the King).

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’.

What a Dame! Olivia in 2016

photograph, Dame Olivia de Havilland, who also held the Légion d’honneur, her white hair and bearing immaculate, was more regal than most members of the Royal Family – she was like a duchess in Proust or a Russian princess whose Winter Palace none would dare storm,’ Roger says. ‘Which is to say she was every inch an actress, a star.’

Get your kicks on Route 50! Surely that should be Route 66? No, not since that road was removed from the United States Highway System in 1985.

Route 50 is one of the few remaining two-lane highways running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And David Reynolds, one of the The Oldie September 2020 5

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founding directors of Bloomsbury Publishing (publishers of Harry Potter), drove the whole way at the age of 69. He recounts his adventures in his new book, Slow Road to San Francisco (Muswell Press), and chats about everything from George Washington and Aaron Burr to Marilyn Monroe and the Eagles – and, of course, Donald Trump.

In Salem, Illinois, Reynolds spent the evening in a bar run by the American Legion, chatting to Trump supporters: ‘At the first mention of Trump, the bartender, a slim 40-year-old who looked like Reese Witherspoon, yelled, “I love him. I love Trump.”

‘Much later, her phone made a loud bing. And the man next to me said, “That’ll be him.” ‘ “Who?” I said. ‘ “Trump,” he said.

“Whenever he tweets, her phone does that.” ‘ “Blimey,” I said. “Doesn’t he tweet in the middle of the night?” ‘ “Yeah. She turns it off then.

Her hubbie isn’t so keen.”’

Poor hubbie is going to have to put up with an awful lot of loud bings over the next few months in the build-up to America’s next Presidential Election in November.

This autumn marks the 60th anniversary of the ‘Trial of Lady Chatterley’, a

‘Can you shift, Dad? I’m building the Ashford Lorry Park’

cause célèbre that not only ushered in the permissive society, but also added greatly to the gaiety of nations. When the unexpurgated edition of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1960, the publisher, Penguin, was tried under the Obscene Publications Act. Who can forget what the prosecuting counsel asked the jury: ‘Is this a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?’ To which, when the case was debated in the House of Lords, a peer responded, ‘I should not object to my wife or daughter reading the book, but have the strongest possible objection to it being read by my gamekeeper.’

Another peer complained that Lawrence had made the

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6 The Oldie September 2020

‘I wish someone would hurry up and invent “the spare”…’

whole thing up: ‘It never actually happened.’ But, as Lord Boothby reminded him, ‘That is the thing about fiction: it doesn’t happen.’

Then there was the Bishop who said in the witness box

‘You can’t tell me she hasn’t had work done’

that Lawrence’s intention had been to portray sex ‘as an act of Holy Communion’.

Nonsense, said John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls, who set out to prove, in the magazine Encounter, that, in point of fact, Mellors the gamekeeper had buggered Lady C. This prompted a witty journalist to rename him the Warden of All Holes.

The Old Un rushed out to buy a copy in 1960, never having read a word of Lawrence before then. He must admit he found it a bit heavy-going but he much enjoyed the rude bits.

Be careful what you don’t wish for. Last month, our columnist Mary Kenny opined that Dublin’s

statues were safe from assault by the woke tendency.

But then, lo and behold, at the end of July, the renowned Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin suddenly hauled down, overnight, four of its own statues, because of ‘what is happening in the world’.

The statues, which fronted the hotel’s porch at St Stephen’s Green and had been part of Dublin’s architecture

Irish eyes aren’t smiling: a Shelbourne Hotel maiden

since 1867, depicted four rather beautiful, young, black maidens, two being Nilotic princesses, and two their handmaidens – the latter now interpreted as an image of black slavery. The bronzes were sculpted by the French artist Mathurin Moreau at a time when all things Egyptian were in vogue.

There was some outrage that an American-owned hotel chain – the historic Irish hotel is now part of the Marriott chain – should have taken this decision so peremptorily.

The Irish Georgian Society issued a protest, and pointed out that planning permission had not been sought from Dublin City Council, although the Shelbourne is a listed

‘You can’t switch it off’

building. Senator Michael McDowell, an experienced lawyer and politician, announced in the Senate that it was an ‘unlawful and criminal’ act.

Edward M Kelly, grandson of Ireland’s national architect Oisín Kelly, said that his grandfather had regarded the Shelbourne statues as ‘particularly fine’, and that there was ‘no justification’ in depriving Dubliners of this element of their street heritage.

The legend that two of the statues were ‘slave girls’ appears in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1951 history of the Shelbourne, but another art boffin claims that the description was not accurate.

In 19th-century, ‘Orientalist’ art, slave girls were usually depicted nude, while these young ladies are draped and bejewelled.

Who would have thought that the horrible murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May would mean the removal of Victorian bronzes – depicting figures from a civilisation thousands of years ago – in Dublin hardly two months later? As far as we know, they were the only public statues in Ireland representing figures from the African continent, and had no connection with the slave trade. But, right now, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!

If you think festivals are just for human beings, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Dogstival – a festival for bitches and hounds – is returning on 5th-6th September to Burley Park in the New Forest.

Revelling Rovers will become glampers, with five-star comfort under canvas, including luxury showers to maintain their fur.

There’s a K9 Health and Wellbeing Tent, where experts will give advice on how to keep noses wet and paws dry.

In the evening, there’s a dog’s dinner in the Dog Pub, serving refreshments. Hot

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

White crab meat, cooked asparagus, lemon juice, grated fresh ginger and chopped chilli and coriander leaves

dogs and slush puppies, anyone? There’s a mini ‘chapel’, too, where canine couples can be captured for Instagram.

Talk about pampered pooches.

Eighty years ago, the Battle of Britain was raging over the country. Sadly, the Last of the Few is now down to one: Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, 100.

Plenty of other witnesses of the Battle are still with us, including writer Rachel Billington. Her new novel,

Clouds of Love and War, is about the Battle of Britain she witnessed as a toddler in war-battered Sussex and London.

‘I was born in 1942, a baby of the war,’ she says, ‘and grew up looking down at London bombsites and up at the sky. I still can’t see a wild buddleia without picturing jagged holes and fallen stones.

‘There were live bombs along the coast. Swims were thwarted by coils of barbed wire and glaring skulls and crossbones. The war was still present.’

‘On the other hand, it’s always people season’ The Oldie September 2020 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

How to kill your wife and get away with it

EVERETT/ALAMY

P D James and John Mortimer gave me tips for the perfect murder

Apparently, during the pandemic, a lot of people – married couples, especially, cooped up together for months on end – have had murder on their minds. I am here to help.

This is the centenary of P D James, one of my favourite crime writers (and one of my favourite people) and the mistress of the sophisticated murder mystery.

Thinking about her birthday and about how I might be able to advise any murderously inclined readers, I’ve been remembering the last time Phyllis James and I had tea together. It wasn’t that long ago: she died in 2014, aged 94. I loved her. She was small and twinkly, courteous, kindly, and sharp as cyanide.

‘Could I commit the perfect murder?’ she mused while pouring the Earl Grey into my cup. ‘Well, yes, my dear, I think that, very possibly, I could.’

‘What is the first rule of murder?’ I asked her.

‘Keep it simple,’ she said at once. ‘And the second rule is: don’t tell a soul. If you can keep a secret, you can get away with murder.’

‘How would you get away with yours?’

‘If I had an unpleasant husband with healthy life insurance, on Christmas Day I would take him to Beachy Head. There’s nothing quite like a bracing walk on the chalky cliffs of the Sussex Downs to clear the cobwebs at Christmas.’ In Who’s Who, P D James listed ‘walking by the sea’ as her favourite recreation. ‘We’d walk and we’d talk and we’d gaze out to sea, and I would make sure that no one was looking, no one at all, and then, quite suddenly, I’d push him over the edge.’ She gurgled with pleasure at the prospect.

‘Do you think you’d get away with it?’ I asked, incredulous.

‘Oh, yes. I’d say, “He simply went too near the edge. He always went too near the edge.” The police would have their suspicions, naturally, but they would have no proof. To prosecute successfully,

you need hard evidence. There would be no evidence. Can you see a jury convicting me? I don’t think so, my dear.

I don’t think it would even come to court, but if it did I’d be in safe hands. I would have Rumpole of the Bailey to defend me.’

I was lucky enough to know Rumpole’s creator, too. Sir John Mortimer QC died in 2009, aged 85, but happily Rumpole lives on. Repeats of his adventures on Radio 4 (with Benedict Cumberbatch as young Rumpole) and on Talking Pictures TV (with the great Leo McKern) have been helping to keep me going through the endless months of full and semi-lockdown.

As a QC, Mortimer defended a number of murderers in his time and he had rather a soft spot for them. ‘I found them touchingly grateful for any little thing you could do for them,’ he told me.

‘And they had a kind of serenity about them that was quite inspiring. The murder done, a sort of peace seemed to come over their souls. They had probably killed the one person in the world who was bugging them. Most murder goes on in the family circle, with people who know one another well. My murderers were landlords and tenants, best friends, husbands and wives.

‘I seemed to specialise in bathroom murders. Bathrooms are favourite places

Leo McKern (left) as Horace Rumpole, created by John Mortimer (right)

for couples to quarrel. You see the worst of your spouse in the bathroom. I knew several married couples who went together into the bathroom, but only one of them came out.’

Readers who remember Mortimer from his knockout turns at The Oldie lunches will know what fun he was.

When I quizzed him about the perfect murder, he licked his lips and beamed at me, revealing a mouth half-full of jagged, snaggled teeth.

‘As a rule, women are the great poisoners, although I do recall with pleasure the case of the gentleman solicitor in Wales who poisoned everybody in sight. He couldn’t stop himself. He was very genteel. He came up with the most memorable line in the annals of true murder. As he handed one of his guests a poisoned scone, he said, “Excuse fingers.”’

Had Sir John encountered the ‘perfect’ murder?

‘I did once defend a gangster who was accused of stabbing a man to death outside Kettner’s restaurant in Soho. He was seen kneeling beside the corpse, the murder weapon was found in his car and traces of the victim’s blood were discovered in his hotel bedroom. He was a Mafia man and gave his evidence in Greek. The translating lady fell deeply in love with him in the witness box. His story was that he happened to be passing, saw the body, knelt down to inspect it and took the knife away with him because of an inbred instinct to “tidy up”.

He was acquitted with no difficulty.’

Sir John chortled happily. ‘If you want to commit the perfect murder, that’s the way to do it, with blood on your hands, the knife in your car, and still you walk away scot-free.’

Gyles has written seven Victorian murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle detectives; the latest is Jack the Ripper: Case Closed The Oldie September 2020 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

My lockdown skill? Computer games

Some people learnt Italian or the harp. I got addicted to PlayStation matthew norman Long ago, when the plague was young, which of us didn’t plan to deploy the lockdown as the launchpad for a stratospheric journey of self-improvement?

On reviewing my own odyssey four months later, I find the results to be mixed.

On one side of the ledger, the capacity to speak Italian has developed to the tune of not uno word.

Neither have I have learned to bake, paint or play the harp, and I read precisely two books, both exceedingly short. Far from being transformed into a paragon of suburban neatness, the garden is currently auditioning for one of those post-apocalyptic TV dramas in which the streets are governed by mutant rats.

But hey, swings and roundabouts. On the plus side – and, in this, my pride cannot be overstated – I have, at almost 57, developed an addiction to PlayStation football.

Perhaps addiction is too strong. One seldom cares to melodramatise. For a while, admittedly, it did threaten to lurch out of hand. But thanks to iron self-control, I can now restrict time spent on the PlayStation 4 to as little as 14 hours a day.

Football and obsessiveness have never been strangers. A manager of the Argentine national team confessed in an interview that he could no longer go to weddings.

At the last one, he meekly watched the wedding party gather outside the church, until the photographer was about to begin. Then he heard himself screaming, ‘Wait, wait! There’s a gap. Put another man on the end of the wall.’

But while the pressure of steering Diego Maradona through a World Cup offers some licence for insanity, can the same be said for a middle-aged schlub, frantically pressing buttons on a PS4 controller in Shepherd’s Bush?

Which of the almost literally countless moments wasted playing PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) ranks as the most tragic is a tough one to call.

10 The Oldie September 2020

Obviously, the general squandering of time once earmarked for rereading Dickens is unquantifiably pitiable in itself.

Yet it’s the individual humiliations, each somehow more crushing than the last, that best capture the dismal flavour.

Taking the considerable trouble to change my team’s name from North East London (so called thanks to a rights issue) to Tottenham Hotspur briefly affected to be the zenith of quasi-adolescent idiocy.

Leaping from the sofa and violently punching the air in celebration of a last-second Harry Kane equaliser against Arsenal quickly trumped that.

On my retirement after a disastrous Champions League defeat at Bayern Munich, at what I presumed was approximately midnight, the discovery that it was almost 4am – PS4 time moves at casino pace – once again appeared the apex of moronic fecklessness.

And then, a few nights ago, came a gentle rap on the front door. A very sweet neighbour, deep into his 80s and recovering from a mild stroke, insisted he didn’t want to intrude. But he and his wife were concerned by the shouting, and wanted to be sure everything was OK. Everything, I told him, was very far from OK. In the dying embers of a crucial fixture at Anfield, with the game tied at 2-2, the referee had given Liverpool a quite ridiculous penalty. Mohamed Salah had duly slotted home from 12 yards.

‘Oh, I understand,’ he bemusedly

‘Here’s my card – please don’t ever call me’

muttered (the neighbour, not Mo Salah; the Egyptian was too busy being mobbed by teammates). ‘So it wasn’t a fight?’

What followed instantly joined the list of the self-inflicted embarrassments that flash to mind when I wake and induce that ritual howl of anguish.

‘No, not a fight,’ I said. ‘You’d best come and see for yourself.’

‘Um, it is late, and my doctor says…’

‘Come in,’ I reiterated, more an injunction than an invitation, ‘and see for yourself. Can I get you a Scotch?’

He made another reference to his GP, and gingerly took a seat.

Some minutes passed in the effort to fathom the replay feature, though at a pace less reminiscent of the blackjack table than of that first night in a Lubyanka interrogation cell.

‘I really should be going,’ he muttered several times. To these requests, understandable in the circs though they were, a deaf un was cocked.

Finally, I cracked it. The slow-motion replay showed Salah trapping a through ball and jinking to the left, before collapsing histrionically on being impeccably tackled by our Belgian centre-back, Jan Vertonghen.

‘Never touched him, did he?’ I said, rewinding and playing the footage from another angle.

The neighbour pursed his lips silently.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said, ‘you must see that’s an outrageous dive.’

‘Erm, if I’m honest,’ he said, ‘I reckon he caught him.’

‘You’re not serious? Vertonghen took the ball.’

‘He did, but I think he clipped his ankle first.’

‘Well,’ I said, rising, ‘it’s later than I suspect your doctor would think wise.’

‘You’ll be packing in for the night now, won’t you?’ he said at the door.

‘Of course,’ I reassured him. ‘Any minute now.’

who was the Sarge?

Stuart Preston (1915-2005) was the New York Times art critic from 1949 to 1965 and wrote an excellent monograph on Édouard Vuillard (1972).

But he’s most famous as ‘the Sarge’, renowned for the extraordinary social success he enjoyed in wartime London’s aristocratic bohemia 80 years ago. His nickname derived from his rank in the US Army as a sergeant.

His HQ was in North Audley Street, minutes away from Heywood Hill bookshop, turned by Nancy Mitford into a salon. The great hostesses Emerald Cunard and Sibyl Colefax begged him to adorn their parties – though Lady Cunard, herself American-born, complained that he never said anything memorable.

He stayed in the country, too, with such Edwardian survivors as Lady Desborough and Maurice Baring. More recently, it’s been suggested he was a counter-intelligence agent.

Tall and elegant, he was blessed with good looks that reminded Cecil Beaton of Gary Cooper, and his boyish enthusiasm was matched by erudition. His part in the liberation of France won him a Croix de

what is the Royal Warrant Holders Association?

The Royal Warrant Holders Association was founded in 1840 as the Association of Royal Tradesmen – a group of like-minded purveyors of products to the monarch.

Royal warrants themselves go back much further. In 1300, in the reign of Edward I, Reginald de Thunderley from London supplied 14 uniforms for royal valets and John the Fruiterer supplied apples and pears for the royal table, according to a document in the Public Records Office.

The idea of the Royal Warrant is as old as the institution of monarchy itself, and every monarch since has employed 12 The Oldie September 2020

Stuart Preston, darling of 1940s smart bohemia, by Andy Warhol, c1958 CREDIT: ANDY WARHOL, STUART PRESTON, 1950S THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH; FOUNDING COLLECTION, CONTRIBUTION THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. 1998.1.1663

Guerre, proving him a hero as a well as a social lion.

Evelyn Waugh caricatured him as the Loot (short for Lieutenant Padfield) in Unconditional Surrender. Meeting him in New York in 1950, Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford, ‘Sergeant Preston is as bald as an egg and very watery-eyed. I suspect he drinks.’

this system. At present, the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles are the three grantors.

In the reign of Queen Victoria, the granting of warrants expanded greatly (including, at one time, a warrant to a public house on Highgate Hill). There are now just over 760 companies that still hold the Royal Warrant – a list that comprises many illustrious names, including John Lewis, Fortnum & Mason, Asprey’s, Gieves & Hawkes, Twinings and Weetabix.

The warrant-holder, known as the grantee, is always an individual rather than a company, which means a personal touch in terms of service is key to maintaining the Royal Warrant.

Grantees are able to display the royal coat of arms at their premises. The holding of the Royal Warrant is reviewed

He appears too in James Lees-Milne’s first volume of diaries, Ancestral Voices (1975), a book that wounded Stuart.

After leaving New York in 1976, he settled in Paris, where I came to know him. He lived in a small, book-filled flat in the rue Saint-Dominique. He had the look of a scholarly soldier turned monk.

Dressed invariably in a dark blue suit and a tie, he had an air of austerity which lightened when something amusing made him crack a playful smile.

I never saw him completely blotto, but he could be abrupt, ringing off without saying goodbye – a Bloomsbury affectation – and carelessly rude.

He enjoyed sharing his considerable knowledge of literary life, though. Harold Nicolson had introduced Stuart into literary London and Stuart was devoted to his memory. Diana Mosley was Stuart’s favourite Mitford. ‘A perfect person except for one thing – Hitler,’ he said. ‘There was something touching about Nancy.’ Nancy, despite her professed anti-Americanism, defended ‘Serge’ from Evelyn Waugh’s barbs.

The writer Francis King urged Stuart to write his memoirs, but he demurred.

Until the end, he retained the certain mystery that Harold Acton observed in him.

David Platzer

every five years and is subject to guidelines contained in the Lord Chamberlain’s Rules.

As the owner of the Chelsea food shop Partridges, I was granted the Royal

‘The Kitchen Islands dead ahead, Cap’n!’

Warrant in 1994 when we became Grocers to Her Majesty the Queen. In 2007, I had the honour of being appointed the 106th President of the Association since 1895. There are five regional associations – Windsor, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Sandringham and Highgrove.

In 2008, I was appointed 12th Honorary Treasurer. Very inspiring and educational roles they were, too. I travelled to warrant-holding companies to discuss and develop all sorts of initiatives.

In modern times, and particularly under the current stewardship of the Association’s CEO, former nuclearsubmarine commander Richard Peck, and that of his predecessor Christopher Pickup, the emphasis has shifted away from being a delightful dining club (although social events are still very important).

Royal Warrant of John Lobb Bootmaker, St James’s Street, London SW1

It is now an organisation focused not only on raising over £3m for the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Fund, which upholds traditional craftsmanship, but also on more community-centred projects.

There is a particular focus on sustainability, which is a key criterion for the granting of Royal Warrants. The Association has partnered with a number of leading organisations, including the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership, to promote and spread best practice.

Working with schools and introducing students to the world of work is another vital area the Association is involved in. It works closely, too, with education and employers. All in all, we are a charity that aims to inspire future generations.

John Shepherd

HOLMES GARDEN PHOTOS/ALAMY

My work is much more fun than fun Paul Ewart, an Oxford research physicist, recently won a landmark case. He wanted to be allowed to carry on working beyond the statutory university retirement age of 67. Ewart argued that, at 70, he still had important research work to do.

At his tribunal, the Professor swiftly demolished the standard objection that retirement refuseniks block the way for younger talent. He showed that, in academia at least, only two to four per cent more vacancies are created by the imposition of a statutory retirement age.

I’m with the Prof. If you do work that you enjoy, you never want to retire, as the buzz and excitement of interesting work cannot easily be replaced. Now in my mid-70s, I am truly grateful that I am still working and earning money, especially as my work has lasted longer than anything else in my life.

While husbands, partners, lovers, friends, homes, children and even grandchildren have come and gone, my work remains a constant, loyal companion, giving me a purpose in life and, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say, a reason to carry on living. In my youth, a career was considered optional for a woman. I’m so glad I persisted, as otherwise I would now be a lonely old lady pottering about aimlessly.

Some people, seeing me still at work, ask, ‘But why aren’t you just enjoying yourself?’ Yet, for me and for many others these days, my work is my enjoyment. Noël Coward said, ‘Work is much more fun than fun,’ and how right

he is. Work of the right kind gives a level of satisfaction and achievement than mindlessly ‘having fun’ never can.

In the arts and sciences, the age at which people retire keeps pushing back.

For increasing numbers of people, there never is a willing retirement age. If you’ve enjoyed a long career, you want it to go on for ever. You discover that as time goes on you still have plenty to offer.

Judi Dench, 85, is wowing audiences.

David Hockney, 83, continues to break new ground. Tom Stoppard, also 83, has just written a play, Leopoldstadt, that many critics believe is his best yet.

Not all of us can be famous actresses or world-renowned artists. Even at more modest levels, ever more people want to carry on working and make a contribution to society long after conventional retirement age is reached.

It’s becoming common for those forced to retire from their former jobs on reaching a certain age to retrain or take on new challenges, proving there is plenty of life in the old boy, or old girl, yet.

One friend, a former British TV producer, moved after retirement to Cambodia where he founded a film company. Now, at 75, he is still working full time as well as creating interesting new careers for many Cambodians.

Another friend who had to retire from the NHS at 65 is now a personal trainer and is in the gym every morning at 7am, putting clients through their paces.

As for me, I would rather pack up orders in an Amazon warehouse, if that were the only job I could get, than not be working at all.

Liz Hodgkinson The Oldie September 2020 13

As Spitting Image returns, producer John Lloyd recalls how the show was nearly banned

A right royal farce S

pitting Image debuted on Central Television in 1984. The title wasn’t mine: I wanted to call it Rubber News. But it transpired there’s a magazine for people who like that kind of thing, and we felt it would be wrong to raise their hopes.

At its peak, Spitting Image was number three in the ratings and getting 15 million viewers a week – 1½ million more people than it had taken to re-elect Margaret Thatcher to power in 1983. It ran for 13 years, and right from the start it ran into trouble.

Dear Sir, You are making a complete fool of yourself with your hideous caricature of our much loved and respected Royal Family they are very special to a lot of people but not to nig nogs like you. I am very surprised you are even

Donald Trump in the new Spitting Image, beginning this autumn

14 The Oldie September 2020

be allowed to show your rubbish on TV for which we are paying £46 licence a year for anyway the next time you make [a puppet] make it of yourself or your mother.

Disgusted viewer Sorry, I don’t watch [the programme] but we get the [Sunday] People.

This letter arrived after the second programme – there weren’t any royal puppets in the first one: the day before transmission, the channel controller had summoned us to his office and told us to take them all out. We were outraged and very nearly quit on the spot. But it turned out it wasn’t censorship. Prince Philip was to open their new Nottingham studios that week and they didn’t want to upset him. They let us put all the royal puppets back in for the second edition.

From the outset, Spitting Image caused so much worry at the highest levels that, for the first six shows, I had to go and defend it, frame by frame and line by line, to the Independent Broadcasting Authority at their HQ on the Brompton Road.

The first outing didn’t go well.

‘Now, John, you have here one of the dollies… Who is that?’

‘David Frost, sir.’

‘Ah, yes, so the Frost dolly says to the dolly next

The way they were: the Royal Family in the original series (1984-96)

to it – I think that’s Bernard Levin, isn’t it? Looks jolly like him! Er … the Frost dolly says, “Why did you become a journalist, Bernard?” And he says, “I think it’s because I was circumcised with a pencil sharpener…”

‘Now, do you find that funny, John?

You do? Well I’m afraid we don’t.

Goodbye.’

Clearly, I was going to have to be more cunning at getting stuff past them.

Most of you oldies will remember that

ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK

the kind of anti-hero of Spitting Image in those early years was Norman Tebbit, the then Employment Secretary, who in the programme was portrayed as a shavenheaded bovver boy in a biker jacket.

In episode three, his puppet was interviewed by the Robin Day puppet, and was asked what he proposed to do about the unemployment crisis. The semi-housetrained polecat replied, ‘If the unemployed are so hungry, why didn’t they eat their own bodies?’ He proceeded to demonstrate by grabbing the arm of a third puppet, liquidising it in a Magimix and drinking the pink soup that resulted.

Back I went to the IBA. ‘Now, John, John, John … [sigh] … the business of Mr Tebbit drinking a human body. Do you find that funny?’

‘Oh no, it’s not meant to be funny, sir!’

‘Not meant to be funny?’

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘It’s merely an homage to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal of 1729, where he suggests that if the Irish are short of potatoes because of the famine, there are plenty of babies to eat instead.’

‘Oh … oh, I see! Satire. Oh well, that’s fine, then!’

But the letters kept coming – in their hundreds. My PA divided them into two

roughly equal piles, nice and nasty. And, being BBC-trained, I read them all. The first kind were often heart-rending: ‘I’ve been unemployed for five years – I’m desperate and can’t stand it any more. I was going to kill myself, but I thought if I can just hang on till Sunday, I can have a last really good laugh, and it was so funny I decided to hang on for another week.’

The other sort took a more familiar tone – like the letter I quoted at the beginning of this article; in fact, I sometimes wondered if they were all written by the same person.

Later on, when things had The Oldie September 2020 15

I loved my puppet – by Norman Tebbit

STEVE BENT/ANL/SHUTTERSTOCK

The really important thing about my Spitting Image puppet was that he was always a winner.

Typical of that was a sketch where he was in the cab of a heavy lorry in which Margaret Thatcher and President Mitterrand were struggling with the steering wheel; he to turn left and she to turn right. My puppet produced his knuckle-dusters to rap Mitterrand’s knuckles and concede control to Margaret Thatcher.

It was that combination of being willing to use violence and emerging the winner that made him appealing to the bovver boys, typically the Milllwall football supporters.

When I was returning to London from Merseyside on a Sunday evening and discovered there was no dining car, even in the firstclass section of the train, I found myself in the buffet bar. It was packed with Millwall supporters returning from a match against Liverpool – which their team had lost.

I was recognised and there were cries of ‘Where’s your bike, Norm?’ and ‘Where’s your Spitting Image?’

At the time, John Major’s government calmed down a bit (well, insofar as they ever did), David Frost managed to get us a commission for four shows with NBC in the States, in which he would star. As a result, I had the honour to be asked to the very first of his famous celebrity-fuelled summer drinks parties.

I arrived at the same time as, of all people, Elton John, who was going through his brief straight period and had brought along his wife, Renate. We walked through the house and looked down into the garden. It was astonishing.

There weren’t that many guests, but absolutely all of them were household faces: world-class actors, half the Tory Cabinet and several members of the Royal Family. Elton John, whom I didn’t know, and have never met since, turned to me (as if to another nervous new boy) and said, ‘F*** me, look who’s here…’

I found myself alone in a corner of the garden with a distinguished-looking 16 The Oldie September 2020

was denationalising British Rail and some of them raised the matter.

I tried to explain that while BR needed huge investment, its demand would always be pushed out of the Government’s spending plans in favour of the NHS or defence. I was not winning the argument – until there was a great shout of ‘You’re right, Norm! They have just run out of beer. Only a nationalised pub would run out of beer on a Saturday night.’

I returned to my compartment with a half-bottle of BR red wine to while away the journey.

On arrival at Euston, as I began to walk across the concourse, I was surrounded by the Millwall supporters.

‘We will escort you to your car, Norm,’ one of them announced.

‘I haven’t got a car here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a cab.’

The chap was not to be put off. ‘Then we will escort you to the cab rank,’ he said, adding, ‘We’ve made up a song – In Praise of Norm.’

The effect on other travellers was remarkable. They scattered in all directions.

And I owed it all to my Spitting Image puppet. I am grateful to him. elderly gent. ‘Excuse me, sir’, I said, ‘but – apart from myself – you’re the only person here I don’t recognise…’

‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I’m the Duke of Norfolk.’

Things then took an alarming turn. An attractive, middle-aged woman bore down on me, quite distressed. She was Diana, the girlfriend, later wife, of the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan. ‘It’s so unfair!’ she said, ‘You’ve given poor Leon five warts on his face, and he’s only got three!’ At that point, the Home Secretary himself leapt out of a bush behind me. ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to

‘You were conviction politicians – and we were conviction broadcasters’

various specific areas of his anatomy, ‘Look! One, two, three…’

A couple of series later, the board of Central Television, somewhat nervously, invited Norman Tebbit and his wife for lunch. The reason these men – and in those days they were, of course, all men – were nervous was that it was well known that Margaret Thatcher was quite capable of taking away a television franchise if the holders weren’t behaving to her liking, and had in fact done so with Thames TV, over the programme Death on the Rock, about the SAS killing three IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988.

The lunch started well, if feeling a little restrained, and they got through the soup OK. But in the middle of the main course, there occurred one of those silences in which everyone in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same moment. And, in this silence, Mrs Tebbit was heard to remark, loudly and crisply, ‘Norman doesn’t like his puppet!’

Oh dear, this was what the Board had dreaded! The besuited gentlemen froze in fear. They sensed their livelihoods going right out of the window. Then the Managing Director, Andy Allan, who was braver than most, asked anxiously, ‘Ah … oh dear, I’m so sorry. Why’s that, Mrs Tebbit?’

‘Because Norman’s always wanted a leather jacket,’ she said, ‘and now he feels he can’t buy one…’

Decades later, I found myself interviewing Lord Tebbit on Radio 4 – not about politics, as it happens, but as a stand-in presenter on Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth. Off air, beforehand, I asked him how he would like to be addressed. ‘You may call me a semihousetrained polecat, if you wish,’ he replied (since his ennoblement, a polecat adorns his coat of arms). And afterwards, we got to chatting about Spitting Image.

He told me he was one of the very few politicians who genuinely found his puppet funny (as he writes, left). I admitted to having had a sneaking admiration for him in person, because he meant what he said.

‘I think we deserved each other, really,’ I said. ‘Because you were conviction politicians – and we were conviction broadcasters.’ Sadly, you don’t see much of either breed any more.

After 23 years, there’s a new series of Spitting Image in production. There are some hilarious bits, I understand, much ruder than any terrestrial channel would allow. But I’m deeply relieved they didn’t ask me to produce it. It nearly killed me first time round.

The new Spitting Image series airs in the autumn (BritBox)

Jeremy Brett, who died 25 years ago, captured the master sleuth perfectly, says Damian Thompson, an obsessive fan

Best Sherlock Holmes on TV? Elementary

AA FILM/GRANGER ARCHIVE/ALAMY

I

t is 25 years since the death of the definitive Sherlock Holmes. Jeremy Brett played the great detective in Granada’s big-budget versions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories from 1983 to 1994.

I remember watching the first episode and thinking: finally, here is a Holmes who has stepped straight out of The Strand Magazine. When I read Conan Doyle, this is the voice I hear; when I look at Sidney Paget’s illustrations (below right), this is the man I see.

Previously only one actor had managed the difficult trick of both looking and sounding like the great detective, and then only in two films.

Basil Rathbone starred in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, period dramas released by 20th Century-Fox in 1939, after which Universal Studios bought the rights. Poor Rathbone (subject of a new biography, David Clayton’s The Curse of Sherlock Holmes) had to play Holmes in a string of B-movies set in the 1940s.

In the intervening 40 years, countless actors donned Holmes’s trademark deerstalker. ‘Trademark’ is the right word – it was an invention of the Sherlock Holmes industry which sprang up in America.

Conan Doyle didn’t object, since he made a fortune out of the Sherlock Holmes play, starring the actor William Gillette, that saddled the detective with this inelegant country headgear. With only a few exceptions, Sherlock Holmes films and television series had him walking around London as if dressed for an Edwardian shooting party.

Brett never made that mistake. Nor did he smoke a swollen, curved pipe.

Fans of Peep Show may recall an episode 18 The Oldie September 2020

in which Mark, played by David Mitchell, takes a job doing London history walks but refuses to brandish ‘the mythical Meerschaum’ on the grounds that Holmes never smoked one. Gillette gave

him a calabash pipe, not a Meerschaum.

Indeed, Brett would have stormed off the set if the producers had suggested any sort of solecism. He had, after all, been educated at Eton, where he bore the more proletarian surname Huggins. (He took his stage name from the label of his first suit, made by Brett & Co. of Warwick.)

He was also a drama queen in more ways than one – he lived with two male partners in between his two marriages – and, while preparing to become Holmes, developed a full-blown obsession with Conan Doyle’s stories, demanding fidelity to the original text.

Granada found his nit-picking tiresome but it paid off, at least in the first couple of series. Brett’s Holmes captured the neurotic impulsiveness found in the stories but missing from other actors’ performances. And then, very sadly, it all went wrong.

Top: Brett in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988). Above: with Watson, by Sidney Paget.

Right: Benedict Cumberbatch in new stamps

‘TV Sherlock in Mental Home,’ shrieked the Sun in 1986. Brett had a nervous breakdown after the death of his second wife. In later episodes, he was on horrible medication. It is painful to watch the opening credits of the series, showing a debonair, rake-thin Brett, and then encounter a Holmes swollen by water retention and rendered breathless by heart disease.

You can spot a touching concern in the face of Edward Hardwicke, a close friend who became Brett’s second Dr Watson after the superb David Burke had to leave because of other professional commitments.

Holmes’s increasingly manic mannerisms also reflected the actor’s bipolar disorder. His death at 61 devastated his colleagues and audiences, for Jeremy Brett was a lovely man.

Every few years, I watch the entire Granada series. Even at its most unnerving, Brett’s portrayal grabs you by the throat. Also, Patrick Gowers’s score, a gigantic set of orchestral variations on his original theme tune, is the finest ever written for television.

Incidentally, Sherlock, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, started out as a truly brilliant updating of the stories.

Then they allowed Dr Who-style fantasy to intrude on the recipe and ruined it.

The series features on a new set of Holmes stamps (pictured bottom left).

I am a lifelong devotee of Sherlock Holmes – almost a ‘Sherlockian’, the name given to Holmes fans who pore over the so-called Sacred Writings as if they were Holy Writ. They aim to explain the hundreds of discrepancies with which Conan Doyle – who banged his stories out in a hurry – littered their pages.

Take Dr Watson’s wife. In The Sign of Four (1890), Conan Doyle has the good doctor marry the heroine, Mary Morstan, but then kills her off so Watson can return to Baker Street. Yet in The Blanched Soldier, a feeble short story dashed off in 1926 and set just after the Boer War, Holmes says that at the time Watson had ‘deserted me for a wife’.

The obvious explanation is that the elderly Sir Arthur had forgotten that Mary was dead by 1903. But for devout Sherlockians, Conan Doyle was merely the ‘literary agent’ of Dr Watson.

Everything in the stories is a historical event, and therefore this must have been another spouse.

The second Mrs Watson, then? Not necessarily. William Baring-Gould, editor of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes of 1967, examined all the references to Mrs

Watson and decided she must have been the third, since Watson refers to his wife in a story set before The Sign of Four.

Sherlockian scholar Trevor Hall concluded that Holmes’s companion must have married five times.

Perhaps Brett – two wives, two long-term boyfriends – should have portrayed the doctor. And, in fact, he once did: in a stage adaptation four years before the Granada series, he played Watson to one of the least definitive Holmeses of all time: Charlton Heston.

At the height of the Sherlockian movement, in the middle of the 20th century, scholars all over the world – including serious academics in other fields – were caught up in this game, particularly in America.

It was all a far cry from the actual origins of the conceit, which lay in a tongue-in-cheek mock exegesis of the Holmes stories in 1911 by Mgr Ronald Knox, whose intention was to parody liberal Protestant attempts to demolish the credibility of scripture.

In 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green, the

world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, was found dead in his Kensington flat, garrotted with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon.

An investigation by David Grann in the New Yorker showed that Green – locked in a furious dispute over the fate of Conan Doyle’s papers – staged his own ‘murder’ to incriminate a hated rival.

‘A mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes,’ said all the newspapers. But it wasn’t. If the tragedy illustrated anything, it was that when you create a character as utterly compelling as Sherlock Holmes, you also create dangerously obsessed fans.

And that certainly wasn’t Arthur Conan Doyle’s intention. No one was less interested in the fine print of the Holmes canon than the man who wrote it.

When William Gillette was writing his play, he wrote to Conan Doyle asking whether he minded if the detective got married in it. Back came a reply to chill the heart of any devout Sherlockian: ‘You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him.’

Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

The Oldie September 2020 19

Stammer blow A stammerer since childhood, Nigel Phillips enjoyed and endured a successful and stressful language-teaching career. Did anything help?

‘P

hillips, what’s your school number?’ barked the teacher taking the register. I pursed my lips, trying to reply, but the reply wouldn’t come: ‘W, w, www, www, w…’ Then I burst into tears of shame at my inability to pronounce the simple words ‘One, two, three.’

Fast-forward 75 years. ‘What’s your name?’ asks the friendly receptionist at the speech-therapy clinic. ‘N, nn, n…’

Again I am speechless. A whole lifetime since my schooldays, I am still stammering and still plagued by deep embarrassment and frustration.

Most cases of stammering, including mine, are now thought by psychologists to be ‘developmental’, originating in faulty brain development during the process of learning to speak.

Many children stammer for some time in their early years but about two in three of them grow out of it. Stammering can also, though comparatively rarely, be caused by head injury, stroke or other neurological problems. At least one in 100 adults stammers – and four times as many men as women.

Stammering differs from person to person and from one situation to another.

For me personally, the situation is helpful when I can speak with some authority, or am feeling relaxed, confident and free from pressure. I don’t stammer at all when singing – whether solo or in a group – or reading aloud to myself.

However, I can easily be thrown off my stride. A typical problem is being asked for a simple piece of information such as one’s name (or school

George VI gives his VE Day message, 8th May 1945

number – see above!). The expectation of a quick and easy response can be paralysing. Conventional exchanges such as greetings and farewells are fraught with similar pressures, and it makes one feel so dumb – in both senses – not to be able to respond. Group conversations feel impenetrable. Phone calls of any kind are extremely stressful.

One might think that the study of foreign languages held few attractions for someone with a bad stammer. As it turns out, my life has revolved around little else. At school, my headmaster steered me in the direction of Classics, which I went on to study at university. During my National Service, I chose to take the Russian course in the Navy. My next and final move was to SOAS, where I was to spend 30 years learning and teaching Malay and its sister language Indonesian, and writing a PhD on Sijobang, a story from West Sumatran oral tradition.

Speech disorder notwithstanding, I plunged enthusiastically into these new and exotic languages.

The path was not entirely smooth. My stammering was largely responsible for my poor final results at Cambridge because I ducked the essential but, to me, dreadful task of reading my essays aloud to my supervisor and fellow students.

Stammering was a daily torment while I was learning Russian. Meanwhile a brief speech-therapy course at Goldsmiths was useful – but no miracles occurred.

During my SOAS years, fascinating as they were in general, speech was still a battlefield, littered with failed therapies – hypnosis (useless for me) and the medication haloperidol (a rash experiment which triggered a clinical depression). My stammer insisted on accompanying me for life.

Indeed, a developmental stammer can’t be cured: at best, one learns from speech therapists how to speak more fluently. Some people manage their stammer very well with

techniques ranging from breath management and relaxation of the vocal apparatus to speaking emphatically, loudly or rhythmically. These speechtherapy approaches – and stammering itself – are well-portrayed in The King’s Speech, about George VI’s stammer.

A more recent and, at first sight, improbable therapeutic tool is deliberate (or voluntary) stammering. The aim is to get one’s stammer right out in the open.

By learning to stammer deliberately, the stammerer in time becomes less anxious about encountering involuntary blocks and experiences a greater sense of freedom and control.

Of late I’ve benefited from this form of therapy and I strive to put it into practice.

Unfortunately, though, my speech is now as bad as ever because of the progressive effects of Parkinson’s disease, which I have had for 20 years. I also suspect that retirement, with the loss of my position as a teacher, has weakened my selfesteem and undermined my confidence in speaking. The growing loss of physical independence with age compounds the problem. All in all, I don’t expect ever to be free of anxiety and frustration when trying to make conversation.

People ask how a non-stammerer should behave in the presence of a stammerer. I would suggest neither ignoring nor overreacting to the stammer.

Bear in mind that for many stammerers, social situations are very stressful; so keep the atmosphere as relaxed as possible. Encourage the stammerer to join the conversation, and allow them plenty of time to do so – without putting them under undue pressure.

Stammerers differ as to whether they like having sentences finished for them.

Personally, I don’t. So ask the stammerer – and wait patiently for their answer as they struggle with their disability.

P.S. to stammerers: however discouraging your experiences of failure so far, don’t despair. Do get professional help and keep trying. Nil desperandum.

The Oldie September 2020 21

The Way We Live Now

Summer laughing Holidaymakers from London return to their beach huts. After foreign holidays were cancelled and quarantine 22 The Oldie September 2020

dafydd jones

restrictions were imposed, staycations have boomed. Bulverhythe, western St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. 31st July 2020 The Oldie September 2020 23

‘The milk will get through’ – Holborn, London, 10th September 1940. Photograph by Fred Morley

Eighty years ago, there was plenty of Blitz spirit, says Joshua Levine.

There was also lots of crime, terror and illicit sex

The heroes – and villains – of the Blitz

THE PRINT COLLECTOR/ALAMY

W

hen my family was quarantined recently, others happily did our shopping.

But when I was locked inside our local park after dark, a middle-aged man refused – for social-distancing reasons – to stop to check I was all right as I tumbled feebly over a spiked gate.

We’ve all been seeing a lot of good and bad in one another recently – perhaps because government restrictions have granted us an ironic freedom to follow our instincts. Had it not been for social distancing, the man might have felt impelled to stay and help – because 25 The Oldie September 2020

society expected him to. But the rules had changed.

Yet the same restricted freedoms were encouraging others to look beyond themselves. Selfless attitudes have been more evident across society than at any time since … well, since the Blitz.

How much can we really have in common now with then? In 1940, a human enemy brought us together. In 2020, a viral enemy keeps us apart.

But, as we reach the 80th anniversary of the start of the Blitz (which lasted from September 7, 1940, to May 11, 1941), one parallel holds true. Both can be seen as periods of unusual intensity that have

jolted us out of our rhythms and driven us to unaccustomed behaviours. We have behaved well and we have behaved badly.

Then, as now, life was complex and nuanced. It always is.

In 1940, Joan Varley was a young woman who spent her evenings studying at the London School of Economics (she later became a kingpin at Conservative Central Office).

One evening, she boarded a bus, climbed to the top deck and sat at the back. There was only one other person up there: a stranger, sitting at the front.

As the bus drove through Westminster, Joan heard a bomb

falling. The bus driver must have heard it, too: he made a sharp right turn.

Endless moments later, the bomb exploded elsewhere. But as it was falling, the stranger had walked down the bus, sat next to Joan and taken her hand.

‘Neither of us spoke a word,’ she remembers, ‘and once we were through the bomb area, he moved back to the front seat without a word being said.’

The story demonstrates the much fabled (and often doubted) Blitz spirit in its purest form. Bernard Kregor, an ARP messenger in east London, remembers

many ordinary, law-abiding citizens were turned into outlaws by the myriad new regulations that turned everyday activities (from turning lights on to owning a peregrine falcon) into punishable crimes. And sometimes the good and the bad behaviours could exist side by side.

Wally Thompson was a career criminal who described the Blitz as a golden time for lawbreakers. One night, during a heavy raid, he parked a stolen van outside a warehouse in London Bridge. With him was his gang of three

Wartime slump: a London bus sinks into a bomb crater, October 1940

life becoming much darker and more serious during the Blitz. That darkness, he says, amounted to a shared experience out of which rose real social unity.

But not everyone agrees. Bernard Kops was growing up five miles from Kregor. For him, the unity and communal spirit of the Blitz were little more than ‘forced humour’ in reaction to the fear and terror inspired by the bombing.

And some people refused to acknowledge any shared experience at all. Phyllis Warner, then a young teacher in London, remembers badges appearing on the streets saying, ‘I’m not interested in your bomb!’

But even as the Blitz was bringing some of the people together, so it was also encouraging them to break rules and exploit one another.

Opportunity was, after all, everywhere. Police were absent, lights were out and houses were opened up by bombs. Looting was widespread, and 26 The Oldie September 2020

accomplices – Batesey, Bob and ‘Spider’ – and together they planned to steal a safe from the warehouse office. At the appointed time, they broke in and began manhandling the safe through the front door – when nearby a bomb fell.

‘The ground heaved towards us like an uppercut,’ remembers Thompson.

Choked and blinded by dust, the burglars were thrown into the air, but all were unharmed, and three of them began to run.

Spider, however, had other ideas. A cat burglar by trade, Spider was adept at scaling walls. Spotting a young girl trapped in an upper window, he struggled up the wall to reach her. By the time he had her in his arms, a fire engine had arrived to bring them both down safely.

A policeman was so impressed by Spider’s courage that he asked him for his name and address. He wanted to recommend him for an award.

Spider declined and left the scene

quickly. The last thing he needed was public recognition.

In the flash of a bomb, a criminal gang had gone from stealing a safe to saving a life. The strange intensity of the Blitz could have no better illustration.

All kinds of behaviours changed beneath the bombs. Many people had love affairs they would not have had before the war.

‘As the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert,’ wrote 19-year-old Joan Wyndham in her diary.

‘If that’s really all there is to it,’ she subsequently noted, ‘I’d rather have a good smoke…’

For one man, an evening that began in the Fitzroy Tavern in London’s Soho led to his first homosexual encounter, in an empty railway carriage at Charing Cross station.

‘I thought: I may die tonight,’ he said years later. ‘I’m going to see what it’s like.’

The Blitz brought homosexuality closer to the surface of British society than it had ever been. It was a period described by Quentin Crisp as a ‘feast of love’ laid on by ‘Saint Adolf’.

For Peter Quennell, the bombing itself was an aphrodisiac. ‘All night,’ he wrote, ‘fear and pleasure combined to provoke a mood of wild exhilaration. The impact of a bomb a few hundred yards away merely sharpened pleasure’s edge.’

Afterwards, as Quennell and his lover, Astrid, lay in each other’s arms, they imagined themselves protected. Here was Blitz spirit in its most intimate form.

So how, in the end, did British people behave during the Blitz? Did they sing Roll Out the Barrel in communal shelters, shaking their fists at ‘bloody Adolf’, before cheerfully dodging the debris next morning on their way to work?

Or did they loot from bombed-out houses and fiddle their rations, while wearing badges telling others to mind their own business?

The answer is, of course, that they did both. Life was dangerous, hard and lived in the shadow of invasion and death. It was also exciting and shot through with optimism. People pulled together and helped strangers; they broke rules and exploited neighbours. They bonded with, and stole from, one another; they grew to understand and to dislike one another.

They tolerated without complaint and they complained without tolerance. They were scared and fearless; they coped and they cracked. They lost all hope – and they looked to the future.

They behaved, in short, like a lot of human beings. Just as we’re doing now.

Sergeant Elvis Presley finished his service in Germany sixty years ago – and became a greater singer, says Andrew M Brown

King of the Army I

t was John Lennon who said, ‘Elvis died the day he went into the army.’

Sixty years ago, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll completed his two years’ military service – most of it in Germany, learning tank gunnery, scouting and other skills as part of the Third Armoured Division, the fabled ‘mailed fist of Europe’, based at Friedberg. And it’s 60 years since one of his most popular films, GI Blues.

Lennon was one for the snappy soundbite (‘We’re more popular than Jesus’). But this was no throwaway remark. Elvis mattered to Lennon, with his radical-rebel image, absence of constraint and songs like Heartbreak Hotel.

So for ‘the Pelvis’ – sensual, wild and unpredictable (Elvis himself found the nickname disgusting) – to join the army must have seemed like a neutering of the ‘Hillbilly Cat’.

Elvis joined as a regular soldier, rejecting the blandishments of all branches of the armed services to be drafted as an entertainer – in the so-called Special Services – which meant not getting muddy.

He was a good soldier, and one of the boys. Patriotism and duty drove him: he

Singing Wooden Heart in GI Blues (1960); first army haircut, 1958; GI Blues soundtrack album (1960)

28 The Oldie September 2020

told the Memphis Press-Scimitar of his gratitude for ‘what this country has given me. And now I’m ready to return a little.

It’s the only adult way to look at it.’ But his mother, Gladys, cried for days when he got the draft.

For Presley’s greedy manager Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s service as a regular soldier, not an entertainer, came down to money. No one was going to get Parker’s sole client to sing free of charge.

His time in the service would bring new maturity, bookended as it was by two cataclysmic events. First was the death of his mother, aged 46, of alcohol-related liver disease in 1958, just before he shipped out to Germany. And secondly, he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of an Air Force captain stationed at Wiesbaden: Priscilla Beaulieu.

He was Gladys’s only child, and his grief at Gladys’s funeral was vividly described by a young reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal – Charles Portis, later the author of the minor masterpiece True Grit. Weeping uncontrollably over the coffin, Elvis cried, ‘Goodbye, darling. Goodbye. I love you so much. You know how much I lived my life just for you.’ Four friends prised him away and into a limousine.

A year later, he met Priscilla. He was living at Bad Nauheim, near the army base, with his father, Vernon, grandmother ‘Dodger’ and a few Memphis chums. Priscilla was 14 (Elvis was 24); their first date was on a school night, but Elvis still poured out his feelings to his ‘little one’ while munching his way through five mustard-and-bacon sandwiches.

The relationship was platonic. There was no question of Elvis’s getting into the sort of trouble that derailed Jerry Lee Lewis’s career when he married his 13-year-old cousin.

Elvis’s other life-changing discovery in Germany was drugs. Like his mother, with her puffy cheeks and panda eyes, Elvis was prone to podge. Grandma ‘Dodger’ would make sure he was fortified before morning exercise by a hearty breakfast of eggs, his favourite burnt bacon, and biscuits (like British scones).

To fight the flab without the need for extra PT, Elvis had asked his father Vernon to order alfalfa pills from a Memphis pharmacy, because he’d heard that they helped. But he quickly learned to rely on something much stronger – amphetamine pills, which he bought in

quart-sized jars from a pharmacist at the army-post dispensary.

Amphetamines were given to maintain heightened alertness.

A sergeant introduced Elvis to them on a training operation, and the King was ‘evangelical’ about their benefits, according to his biographer Peter Guralnick.

He was already taking barbiturate sleeping pills for insomnia. As Priscilla Presley relates in Elvis and Me, soon after Elvis welcomed her to Graceland, he gave her pills, on one occasion dosing her with enough Placidyl to knock her out for two days.

Elvis gave no public performances during his service, but he listened to a wide range of records and, every night, tried out songs on the piano.

Here his army friend Charlie Hodge played an important role. Hodge was much more than the lackey who later, during the 1970s concerts, handed scarves to Elvis for him to dab his sweating brow and toss to the screaming audience. In 1959 Hodge was an

experienced performer, and he helped Elvis to improve his vocal technique, moving him towards rich ballads.

One they tried was Caruso’s 1916 version of O Sole Mio: released as It’s Now or Never, it would sell 20 million copies for Elvis. Another was Are You Lonesome Tonight?, a hit for Al Jolson in 1927.

In March 1960, Elvis returned to the US in the rank of sergeant and, within days, he was the centrepiece of a welcome-home Frank Sinatra TV special, recorded in Miami with Sinatra’s Rat Pack, minus Dean Martin. It was exactly the sort of middle-of-the-road pap John Lennon would despise.

In fact, Elvis sailed – effortlessly cool – through the taping, in his dinner jacket,

‘It was after his spell in the army that Elvis became fully alive’

with shiny black hair done up in a sort of tower. Sinatra had once dismissed Elvis’s music as ‘a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac’ sung by ‘cretinous goons’. Now he had to welcome the younger man as a pillar of popular entertainment.

Elvis gives a respectful rendition of Sinatra’s Witchcraft. Sinatra belts out a self-parodying version of Love Me Tender. Elvis maintains his dignity and the show was a ratings smash, gaining a 67.7 per cent audience share.

Two further releases that year – GI Blues and a vibrant LP, Elvis Is Back – neatly encapsulate the opposing that forces pulled at Elvis for the rest of his career.

Elvis Is Back, recorded in April in Nashville, was pop laced with R ’n’ B: catchy, mildly suggestive songs such as Fever, Dirty, Dirty Feeling, Such a Night and The Girl of My Best Friend.

That recording session embodied the adventurous spirit that would drive the 1968 ‘Comeback Special’ – the raw, startling, original NBC television show with Elvis in a black leather suit, blasting away the memory of eight years of cheesy films and soundtrack albums.

At the same time, with the single release of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, he showed new confidence, injecting high drama into a sentimental ballad. He would develop this in dozens of country weepies through the 1970s.

As for GI Blues, released in November 1960, it’s a family movie: Elvis sings Wooden Heart to a puppet, babysits a toddler, strums his guitar on a train with grinning army buddies (Frankfurt Special) – and falls in love with Juliet Prowse’s Lili.

Hal Wallis, the legendary producer, visited Germany in 1959 to do location shooting for the film, and you can visit the locations and explore Bad Nauheim and Friedberg in a holiday offered by the Elvis Travel Service this October.

The film bears scant relationship to the daily grind of life as a GI, but it projects Elvis’s good-natured personality, and the camaraderie he had undoubtedly enjoyed: he made friends for life in the army, including Hodge, and Joe Esposito from Chicago who would be his right-hand man for the rest of his life.

Whatever pain Elvis had been through, and whatever artistic disasters and personal agonies were to come (the list goes on, with the death this July of his grandson Benjamin Keough), GI Blues is a happy film.

John Lennon got it the wrong way round. It was after his spell in the army that Elvis became fully alive.

The Oldie September 2020 29

Ian Nairn wrote brilliantly about buildings, made glorious TV – and drowned his sorrows too deeply, remembers Jonathan Meades

The critic who cared too much W

ere Ian Nairn to have been alive for his 90th birthday on 15th August, he’d doubtless have celebrated with yet another new liver and several gallons of beer.

But it wasn’t to be. He died a few days before his 53rd birthday in August 1983 – though he seemed all but dead when I met him the previous autumn in St George’s Tavern (pictured), a fag-ash pub in Victoria which he favoured because it was just a short waddle from his flat.

I entertained the vain hope of reviving his career, long since in desuetude – hardly surprising given the volume of liquid punishment he had inflicted on himself. He was a terrible sight. Folds of flesh hung from him as from a Brahman cow with oedema. He looked in need of some form of drainage.

The self-maceration had also done for his mind. He was incoherent and slow – maybe aphasic. He must have known that there was no future save the next pint, and the next, and so on till he swigged the final gulp. That lunchtime, he drank 14 joyless pints while we sort of discussed what he might write and both knew he wouldn’t.

He wasn’t immune to flattery; he simply didn’t acknowledge it. When I referred admiringly to various things he had written and filmed, he seemed mildly baffled, as though he didn’t recognise them. They had, after all, been the achievements of someone who no longer existed. He said he’d think it over.

When I told Tina Brown, for whose Tatler I was then working, about this singular lunch, she said that her husband, Harry Evans, referred to him as 30 The Oldie September 2020

‘the formerly talented Nairn’. There was a persuasive Sunday Times faction who believed that Nairn’s demise was caused

by Evans’s misunderstanding of him, and that poaching the greatest of British architecture critics from the Observer to turn him into a mere travel writer was bound to come to an unhappy end.

I used to be persuaded. But the more I have read about Nairn and written about him, the more I have reconsidered.

It seems more likely that he was burnt out. He never stopped working and he must have wondered what all the effort had been for. He suffered professional disillusion, which, given his emotional investment in his work, he felt personally as a betrayal. He cared too much: a mistake for a critic.

Nairn’s contemporary Kenneth Tynan famously wrote, ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.’ It was a neat slogan at

the end of a review to light up the exterior of the Royal Court. Had it been written

by Nairn, it would have been more than a slogan. It would have been an article of faith. He really felt the same way about beautiful buildings and the people who wished to see them. He should have stood back. Rather, such buildings affected him to the point that he considered himself to have been traduced by the architects who would rebuild Britain.

He had looked forward to a new Elizabethan age which never showed up.

It must be recalled that, in the mid-’50s, when he became parishfamous for his polemical rant against dismal sprawl, Outrage, and his coinage ‘subtopia’, the postwar building boom had hardly begun. Plans and perspectives are nothing more than idealisations, promises to be broken. Of course they are liable to promote optimism, which is

Opposite: Nairn, Westminster Abbey, 1956. Below: Outrage and Nairn’s London

always silly. It was not a mistake he’d make again.

By the mid-’60s, Britain was being transformed with a neophiliac frenzy which moved at a furious and careless pace. Nairn’s Britain’s Changing Towns comprised 16 essays written for the Listener between 1960 and 1964, to each of which Nairn added a postscript in 1967. In the introduction, he writes of his sadness ‘about the prospect of a proper modern architecture; even more about the capabilities of modern architects’.

He had already published in the Observer a no-holds-barred attack on Britain’s recent architecture: ‘a soggy, shoddy mass of half-digested clichés’.

The Royal Institute of British Architects was furious. Its president, the old fool Lord Esher, pulled rank and laughably ordered the paper’s editor, David Astor, to sack Nairn. Astor disobliged.

Ian Nairn was not opposed to modern architecture. Indeed, exactly a year after that Observer article he wrote in the

paper a marvellous hymn to the Tricorn in Portsmouth, the most sublime of all British Brutalist buildings, demolished by half-witted planners in 2004 with the connivance of English Heritage under Simon Thurley’s feeble leadership.

He wrote, ‘The great belly-laugh of forms is [as] completely natural as Vanbrugh’s fireworks at Blenheim … the rhino has got into the marketplace.’

Nairn’s London, published in 1966, abounds in weird similes and pithy metaphors. It is an imperious mongrel:

Through a glass darkly: Victoria, 1983

part vade-mecum, part polemic, part poetic contemplation, part deflected autobiography and part conversation with himself – wholly original. It is the testament of a man steeped in London.

Even though it is of a particular moment, it has dated no more than, say, Housman or Hardy, whose melancholy humours infect Nairn. It is a work of literature; not an architectural guide.

If we go looking in Ludlow for Terence Hearsay we don’t find him; the same goes for the tragic trampwoman on the Polden crest. They belong to a compact between writer and reader on the page.

Nairn’s writing is usually more compelling and adhesive to the brain than the places it describes.

The same formula but not the magic informs Nairn’s Paris (1968) – by any measure, a fine work though one of discovery rather than of profound immersion. Still, just as the London book may encourage us to seek out the former Agapemonite church off Clapton Common (where, in 1899, J H Smyth-Pigott declared himself Christ reborn), so will its successor encourage a trip to Buttes Chaumont, 50 years ago a forgotten monument to municipal neglect, concrete rocks all crumbling.

Nairn’s films were strange affairs. He worked at a time when television was not formulaic and had yet to be hijacked by morons; when some executives could actually read and write; when producers had great autonomy. It was a glorious moment in the history of the medium.

Nairn, like Ray Gosling, revelled in it.

He made no effort to be telegenic: he seldom smiled; he clearly didn’t care whether he was liked; he was true to himself; he never spoke down to his audience. He crossed and recrossed Britain in an open-top Morris Minor, railing at city engineers, comprehensive redevelopment (the precursor of ‘regeneration’) and louts who desecrated deconsecrated churches, but mostly praising. He got on a train and railed at boozers at Munich’s Oktoberfest.

The films were improvised, sloppy and poorly photographed and edited – but they were totally compelling. His voice was magnificent and utterly distinctive.

Cadences fell and fell down into the abyss. Every word signals the futility of life and every word celebrates kicking against that futility.

Two weeks after I had met him, I returned to St George’s Tavern. He was evidently on a regime. He drank only 11 pints. He muttered that he had often considered writing about Hawksmoor. I told him that would be ideal; go ahead.

He never sent it.

The Oldie September 2020 31

Town Mouse

Tales of the riverbank: five mice in a boat tom hodgkinson

As my distant cousin the Water Rat once declared to a certain shy and retiring mole in the early part of the last century, ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’

Before lockdown began, I visited the River Thames only rarely, despite living only a mile from Hammersmith Bridge.

Early evenings were for book launches and the like, weekends were for parental visits, and holidays were for getting up at three in the morning to stand in the absolutely hideous and soul-sapping Stansted Airport for two and half hours before squeezing on to an undignified easyJet flight to Italy.

When lockdown began, whole chunks of glorious time for doing nothing in particular opened up and, like many others, my Town Mice family dusted down our bicycles and headed out into the city.

At first we pedalled into town and marvelled at the beauty of the Mall and Trafalgar Square when freed from traffic.

Then we discovered the river and, once or twice a week, cycled along the towpath to Putney in one direction or fair Richmond in the other.

I noticed that the river looked pretty quiet, apart from the herons, moorhens, Canada geese, mallards, grebes and cormorants, all of whom seemed untroubled by the problems of the world.

Then, a few weeks ago, some friends, Mr and Mrs Vole, asked if we’d like to join them for a jaunt on a little rowing boat – equipped with outboard motor – they have a share in. We cast off at the lovely Georgian terrace of Strand-on-theGreen under a warm sun and chugged up the river past a small island covered in willow trees. We had cider and beer with us, as well as some proper French bread, runny cheese and artisanal crisps.

32 The Oldie September 2020

We were just congratulating ourselves on our good sense and good fortune in choosing to go out for an early-evening picnic on such a lovely day when it started pouring down with rain. Mr Vole, who works in marine insurance, cleverly manoeuvred the little craft under the willows, where we drank our beer and ate our bread, partially protected from the rain.

The downpour did not dampen our spirits. The Water Rat is perfectly right: messing about in boats is so worth doing that minor setbacks like rain won’t stop the fun. The rain ceased, the sun re-emerged and we took off again, buzzing down the Thames past various charming pubs

‘Clearly, travelling to work – if your job still exists – by boat is far more attractive’

which, despite having lived in London off and on for 50 years, I’d never seen before.

We went past the Bull’s Head, the City Barge, the Bell & Crown and the London Apprentice, and I made a resolution to spend long afternoons at these establishments once the little mice have all left home. They demand an awful lot of input at their late teenage stage.

Inspired by our riverside jaunt with the Voles, Mrs Mouse forked out on an inflatable canoe, which we took for a test paddle on a quiet stretch of the Thames near Oxford – Lewis Carroll Country.

We found it almost impossible to keep the thing in a straight line. I blamed our wobbly progress on Mrs Mouse’s inexperience with oars, but later discovered that we’d forgotten to install an important plastic fin on the underside of the vessel. The fin, I understand, keeps the craft more or less steady.

Despite our steering problems, we had a lovely time. While we did not spot a white rabbit with a pocket watch, we did see a pure white baby heron nestling in the reeds. There were plenty of other kayaks, canoes, pleasure boats and narrowboats, all chugging along at a snail’s pace, some with a glass of wine on deck, cheerily waving to one another. So unlike the motorway.

Being on boats combines doing very little with just enough activity to remove any guilt you might be feeling about doing nothing. There is just enough action to act as a condiment to the main purpose of the exercise, which is simple dolce far niente. I was reminded of being supremely happy on a ‘three men in a boat’ trip with two friends a few years ago. We hired a three-man boat in Oxford and spent the next few days rowing down the river and camping on the side, sleeping in the boat or retreating to a B&B. Bliss.

It’s all part of a glorious river renaissance. River taxis are coming back and even transport company Uber has taken an interest in the business, indicating there are vast profits to be made. Uber are rebranding an existing fleet of 20 Thames Clipper boats. Clearly, travelling to work, if your job still exists, via boat is a far more attractive – and probably safer – option than squeezing yourself on to the Central Line.

Here’s hoping we’ll see a much busier Thames, crammed with boats as it was in former days, as the slowed-down joys and practical benefits of water transport become obvious in a brave new – or should I say, old? – post-virus world.

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

Country Mouse

My obesity cure?

Nature’s green gym giles wood

COVID-19 left some silver linings in the wake of its carnage.

It seems that many normally slothful Britons are now ‘woke’ vis-à-vis the natural world. Forced to pretend that they wanted to take one hour of exercise outside as an excuse to leave the house under lockdown, they stirred their stumps and found they actually enjoyed it.

Capitalising on this new tendency, Boris has rolled out an Obesity Charter to get us all shedding our COVID stones. We must all take more exercise, he decrees.

And, this autumn, Environment Secretary George Eustice plans to milk even more out of the new nature-wokeness.

Since 1998, eight out of ten GPs in New Zealand have practised ‘Green prescribing’ for depressives. Now a UK trial will do the same. GPs will try diverting patients away from the surgery and medication and into the Great Outdoors. They will ‘prescribe’ walking and cycling as better means to raise the spirits.

Speaking personally, on leaving my own mini-demesne, I have to go at least five furlongs before I can un-shield my eyes and allow them to feast on anything that will raise my spirits.

First, I have to pass through a sinister prairie of corn-on-the-cob plants, each one taller than a man, standing in serried ranks like triffids and all being grown not for food – but for the generation of tiny amounts of electricity.

I am reminded of the words of the American naturalist Aldo Leopold – ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’

Where can we Britons find the Great Outdoors? Certainly not down south, where years of agricultural intensification have wrecked so many shire counties.

The lifeless monoculture badlands will

do nothing to allay depression and may indeed exacerbate it.

In the past, a walk in a country village might have done the trick, but what is it that makes people conflate land clipped and shorn to within a centimetre of its life, so it resembles the putting green of a golf course, with virtue? The Campaign to Protect Rural England and its well-intentioned – although now outdated – Best Kept Village competition, which originated in the 1970s, is partly to blame.

Old habits die hard: at a time when almost every gardening guru is declaring that the over-manicured look is not only passé but unecological, the delusion that it is praiseworthy persists. Hats off, incidentally, to Caring for God’s Acre, a conservation group that has been successfully publicising the potential of the ‘wild’ churchyard as a reservoir of biodiversi-lover and daisies.

Depressives would do best, prescribes Dr Wood, to seek out rough-land countryside for their walks. We can’t all go to Knepp Castle, the ne plus ultra of rough lands, but nondescript, overlooked bits and pieces abound.

I point to my own spinney, which is

‘Maybe it’s more productive to tell me what you’re not anxious about these days’

bisected by a public footpath. Bathed, as it currently is, in the heady scent of linden, it would certainly raise spirits.

Remedial effects can reliably be found on the South Downs, the heather moorlands of Shropshire and along our coastline. Riparian walks and canal towpaths usually pay dividends.

Also look out for abandoned fields.

Even a minimal relaxation of grasscutting regimes will increase insect pollinators looking for self-heal.

Last week, I was emboldened to lead a party of trespassers into a field of oilseed rape whose characteristic bad-egg smell was being pleasantly overpowered by an infestation of scented mayweed. Here was a display of bio-abundance to induce exhilaration as thousands of cabbagewhite butterflies wheeled pell-mell around our merry band.

This strange period we are living through has been described by scientists as the anthropause, meaning that we have temporarily paused the destructive power of the human juggernaut. This should not be confused with the andropause, which has to do with declining hormonal levels in older men – also known as puberty in reverse.

And even if the slowdown in human activity is only temporary, it has already had beneficial impacts. One minor example: more sightings of the usually shy stoat which, with its handsome waistcoat, has suddenly become an inquisitive extrovert.

But there has been absolutely no pause in anthro-activities beyond my garden gate where noises of strimming and mowing have quadrupled.

The Big House gardener was bemused to see his master mowing again, two days after he himself had mown to perfection.

The master explained that he was doing it to ‘freshen up the stripes’.

Perhaps the impulse to cut and slash long grass is epigenetic, based on a fear of lurking vipers. The Great Outdoors UK is not devoid of health risks. A snake bite presents a negligible risk, but a deer or sheep tick might turn into the increasingly prevalent Lyme disease. The bewildering array of symptoms leaves it difficult to diagnose and the recovery period lengthy and complex enough to rival that of COVID-19 itself.

I concede that the visible progress made possible by power tools may be irresistible, too. And there’s the noise. My father, Godfrey, had a habit of using a strimmer only at weekends – we suspected to signal to his nearest neighbours, who wouldn’t have been around to hear it on weekdays since they were out at work – that he too was a busy man.

The Oldie September 2020 33

Sophia Waugh: School Days

We’re all going on a sad summer holiday So the holidays are finally here.

But, this year, they have not arrived with their normal fanfare and the breathless excitement of anticipation. At least not for me.

Some of the staff seemed to try to recreate the heart-lightening of a normal break but, to me, it seemed hollow and slightly silly. Many of those texting had not been in school at all since March and, for those of us who have, it still felt like a hollow victory.

Just before the end of term, I began teaching again. The year tens having all been interviewed, most of them opted to come back to school for the little we could offer. Each student was offered one morning a week for the last three weeks of term – an hour each of maths, English and science.

The children were escorted into classes at different times and sat in the same places for the three hours they were taught while we circulated round the rooms.

It felt a little as I imagine teaching in a private school does. Only eight students, sitting in dazed silence, stared back at me.

The top set arrived on Tuesday. These normally confident children were shadows of their former selves. Not physically – quite a few had put on weight in lockdown – but mentally. They were not so much traumatised as stunned.

GOLDEN NUGGETS I love my brass coal scuttle – but what are its origins?

Until the mid-19th century, coal was kept in open boxes or buckets in drawing rooms.

Increasingly frowned upon, this led to a challenge to design a receptacle that would be commodious, decorative and lidded to conceal the filthy stuff.

34 The Oldie September 2020

They had spent the last three months working on their GCSE poetry; so we had decided to teach creative writing, which is altogether worth half their language GCSE. Until we know exactly what next year’s exams hold, we can feel confident that they will always be called upon to write. While they might have forgotten the names of the parts of speech, we hope they can still write – something.

Their silence should have been conducive to creative writing but somehow it wasn’t. And even those who did write were unwilling to share their work.

Within minutes, I was alas breaking all the rules – how could I not look at their efforts? Again and again, I found myself creeping away from my official place at the front of the class to stand behind them to read, comment and encourage.

Yes, I tried to hold my breath while I did so but, even so, I had to keep catching myself and moving back to the front of the room. We have been told not to mark work – but can the virus really be transmitted on a piece of paper? I told my students that I would mark anything they submitted – very few did.

With the mixed-ability classes (minus the cream), the sense was very similar.

Children who normally cut up rough also sat in stunned silence but, without the

encouraging pat on the shoulder, it was hard to get them writing. Or even thinking. I used all my tricks – energy, humour, anecdote and sternness – but it was like dealing with ghosts.

We long for perfect behaviour but, when I got it, I found that something was missing. At first, we congratulated ourselves – or the virus – on the new behaviour. One boy who has barely managed to sit through a whole lesson for the last year or so actually managed to sit through his allotted three. But the second week was not so positive; he stormed out halfway through his second lesson of the day.

So what are we going to face in September? In theory, we will have classes of 30, with one-metre distancing.

I’m not sure we have the room for that.

We have been told that attendance will once again be compulsory but how will that be policed? We will be operating a one-way system, and altering the day’s timings so that breaks happen at different times for different groups.

All that can be managed – but it is, as ever, the children I worry about. Not about their (or my) becoming ill but about how they will react to being back in class.

And how many of them will find it hard to think.

In praise of the coal scuttle Designers went into a frenzy of competitive activity, and the catalogue for the Great Exhibition in 1851 illustrates many remarkably diverse ornate coal ‘vases’.

For the rest of the century, innumerable shapes, materials and degrees of ornamentation went into the creation of elegant scuttles.

In the end, the open shape with which we are now familiar – based on a nautilus shell –

became the brassy norm.

Future generations will need an explanation of literary references such as ‘Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!’

Few of us now welcome a coalman who hoists onto his back the grimy jute sacks and skilfully tips the contents into our coal sheds without spilling a lump, leaving us to shovel a spadeful or two of the

black magic into our scuttles.

Those who visit shops selling bygones may no longer associate the strangeshaped, polished brass containers with coal.

But just as we use our Belfast sinks as garden planters, so our scoured and burnished scuttles can be reborn as curious receptacles for magazines or dried flowers – or even cigars.

SUSAN HAMLYN

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

Confessions of a lockdown hoarder It’s a minor miracle that full-scale war has not broken out at number 33 during lockdown.

This is partially due to a United Nations peacekeeping force (daughter Betty and dog Destry), who patrol the house, making sure Mr Home Front and I don’t come to blows.

There have been a few minor skirmishes during the period, but no Cuban Missile Crisis – although if he keeps leaving his shoes all over the house, this may change.

The domestic disputes have been largely confined to the usual areas of disagreement – whose turn it is to cook and empty the dishwasher, and who has control of the TV remote. Weekly hoovering was dropped after we embraced Quentin Crisp’s theory: after four years, the dust doesn’t get any worse.

The lockdown has also seen several new entries in the field of marital conflict.

First, the proposed pond. I want to ‘wild’ part of our garden and install a little pond to attract dragonflies and frogs.

Mr HF is so vehemently against the idea, you would think I’d suggested installing an underground nuclear bunker.

‘But you like looking at water,’ I told him, reminding him of all the times he’s been mesmerised by the fish in the River Mole.

‘We’re not having a f***ing pond. They attract rats.’

Secondly, who gets to answer the door when there is a package delivery? To be fair, this is a four-way fight, with everyone getting involved. It should be Betty, because she’s the one who orders the most online.

Recently, her parents have got in on the act, leaping on every item delivered like desert-island castaways on detritus washed ashore. The knock on the door is the highlight of our day – as well as of Destry’s: he lurches across the hallway with great excitement, his terrifying, baritone bark supplanted by tail-wagging geniality the moment the door is opened.

The recriminations are reignited over who bought what. The longer the lockdown, the more mildly deranged and downright useless our purchases.

Me to Betty: ‘Why do you need a maternity pillow?!’

Betty to me, as I sheepishly unwrapped a Beatles’ Yellow Submarine

T-shirt: ‘How old are you – seven?’

Me to myself when two large, heavy boxes of exercise weights arrived for Mr HF when he was out: ‘I want a divorce.’

Within days, most of the items disappear, returned or stuffed out of sight under the stairs. Included in this category are: Destry’s head collar to stop him pulling (he refuses to wear it); that pregnancy pillow, of little benefit to my 22-year-old non-pregnant daughter; my posture-corrector back brace, which made me slow-march round the house like Black Rod for two weeks. And the half-price floral armchair covers which made our living room look like the set of Terry and June.

Mr HF’s weights are still with us. He leaves them on the small sofa in his study as if they’re his friends. All weightlifting is done in the garden, where he huffs and puffs like Bernard Bresslaw in Carry On Camping.

‘Must you make those horrible noises?’ I asked him. ‘All that grunting.

Destry and I could hear it from the road.

What must the neighbours think?’

‘Oh, don’t be so lower-middle-class,’ he said.

Betty and I spy on him from an upstairs window. At the end of his last session, he suddenly dropped to the ground and lay flat out on the grass, starfish-style, for eight minutes.

‘What if he’s dead and we’re just staring?’ I said to Betty.

‘I was doing breathing exercises,’ he later explained, with barely concealed irritation.

He hasn’t pumped iron since. I hope the weights join Destry’s head collar and our other mad purchases in the Amazon graveyard under the stairs.

Meanwhile, the Aged P has finally ended her protest against the care home’s lockdown visiting policy. ‘Otherwise, I might never see you again. Can you bring salt and some gin?’

They wheeled her out of her room to the open bi-fold doors of the dining area, while I sat on the patio two yards away.

We hadn’t seen each other for nearly four months – so I was dismayed when the gardener chose that moment to start mowing the lawn directly behind me.

The Aged P started telling me about a Battle of Britain documentary she’d watched on TV. At least, that’s what I deduced over the roar of the mower’s engine: ‘Stood alone … Luftwaffe … Hitler … Churchill … never … human conflict … so many … few. Did you see it?’

A helpful member of staff had a word with the gardener.

In the end, we had longer than the allotted half an hour, which was lovely.

But it’s a sorry state of affairs, having precious time with our elderly relatives monitored.

‘It’s not what my generation fought the war for,’ said the Aged P as they wheeled her away.

The Oldie September 2020 35

Postcards from the Edge

The lady in Danny La Rue’s life

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny meets the costumier who loved him – and he loved her Danny La Rue, that most popular of drag queens, died 11 years ago. His memory is kept ever fresh, though, by the woman who cared for him in his last years: his costume designer Anne Galbraith, who lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Danny was born Daniel Patrick Carroll in Cork and enjoyed terrific success as an entertainer from the 1960s onwards – making a lot of money in his heyday. But he was swindled of his property investments by Canadian fraudsters, and in his pensionable years he had nothing left but the state pension.

Annie, a renowned costumier who fashioned many of Danny’s outfits, said to him, in 2004, ‘Would you like to come and live with me, love?’

Danny replied, ‘Oh, Annie, I thought you’d never ask!’

And so he lived with Annie in Kent in her Victorian house, which is filled with glorious theatrical memorabilia – and some of Danny’s most stunning frocks, standing silently on display dummies in a room set aside for them.

Annie, a single lady aged 77 and tremendously cheerful, isn’t sure what will eventually happen to all the posters, programmes, costumes, sequins, feathers, photographs, letters, albums and mementoes of everyone in showbiz from Shirley Bassey to Roy Hudd – not forgetting the Queen Mother (or Barry Cryer, who wrote gags for Dan).

Many of us can identify with this question of what’s to happen to our memorabilia when we depart this world, but I think it’s especially important that Annie find a home for artefacts that are part of British light entertainment’s history.

Danny’s health began to decline from about 2006 – though he still continued doing panto – and Annie drove him about, as well as helping him with his debts. In 2009 he was diagnosed with throat cancer and he died, aged 81, in May that year, in his cosy, theatrical 36 The Oldie September 2020

bedroom, holding Annie’s hand. He accepted the approach of death valiantly, telling the medics, ‘My only sadness is that I can’t take Annie with me. But I’ll talk to the Top Man about her when I get up there!’ Danny had been an altar boy at St Patrick’s, Soho, when young, and remained religious.

Annie still feels his presence around her. ‘I never stop telling him I just love him for ever.’

He was a gay man, and yet it’s obvious from the many happy photographs of Dan and Annie with their arms entwined that this, too, was a love story.

Of all the airports I have known, Manston, near Ramsgate, provided one of the most unforgettable landing experiences.

You approached Manston circling over a glittering panorama of the English Channel, with the undulating downs of Kent and Sussex rolling behind the White Cliffs of Dover – and the White Cliffs of Calais standing sentinel on the water’s other side.

But Manston struggled to survive financially as a passenger airport during the 2000s, and finally closed in the spring of 2014, after which Kent had effectively no airport for scheduled flights.

Now, in a kind of Brexit bounce, there

are plans to reopen Manston, initially for cargo: if Britain is doing more global trading, there’ll be a need for more cargo-facility airports. It’s hoped that passenger flights will also resume when the airport reopens – maybe in 2023.

Manston was a military airport from the First World War until 1999, and a key location for the Battle of Britain 80 years ago. It has a long (and wide) main runway of over 9,000 feet: Barnes Wallis used it to test his dam-bouncing bombs.

(There’s a statue of Barnes Wallis at nearby Herne Bay, though there are a few cranky complaints about honouring ‘a weapons expert’.)

I’d love to fly out of Manston again.

After obligatory staycations this summer, I’d love to fly out of anywhere again!

Now that the Washington Redskins football team are changing their name for reasons of racial sensitivity, more names and words could be in line for deletion.

The Scrabble authority NASPA (North American Scrabble Players Association) is contemplating banning the word ‘culchie’ from the Scrabble board. It is deemed to be a slur towards rustic Irish people, familiarly known as ‘culchies’.

Yes, it can be mildly disparaging – especially when used by Dubliners about those who are ‘up from the country’. But ‘codding’ and ragging are part of Irish society, and usually nobody minds. Moreover, the ‘culchies’ call Dubliners ‘jackeens’, usually dismissively, as in ‘Sure, what would you know about agriculture, and you only a Dublin jackeen?’

If Native Americans are distressed by the historic tag of ‘Redskin’, then that is a reason to respect their feelings. But most Irish ‘culchies’, so far as I know, are proud of their status. There are ‘culchie’ stand-up comedians who delightedly trade on the sobriquet. Let’s hope the NASPA shows a sense of proportion about these matters.

sister teresa

The Samaritan was good – at first aid Why aren’t boys and girls intelligently taught elementary nursing while they are still at school?

Perhaps they are now – but when I was in the sixth form, we pointlessly injected oranges with hypodermic syringes and wound bandages round make-believe dislocated shoulders. It was quite fun, but anyone in real trouble being treated by us would have been in a worse state as the result of our attentions.

I have had to learn basic nursing the hard way, practising on the seriously ill to their discomfort until eventually getting things right. Anybody should know how to support someone while they eat and drink in bed; move arthritic limbs so as to involve minimum pain; rub skin with protective cream; and place painful feet correctly on the steps of a wheelchair.

One also needs to have the sense to open or close a window, the ability to remove a chamberpot without making a fuss and the capacity to offer a few kind words without bothering the patient with unnecessary chatter.

Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta by Goya, whose life was saved by the doctor (1820)

Visiting the sick features in Matthew 25:36 in the context of the last judgement. One of the strangest things about this Gospel passage is that both sheep and goats were unaware of the opportunities they either used or ignored.

Do we visit the sick with fitting frequency? Our solicitous presence is far more precious than an expensive bunch of flowers and can sometimes be much more of an effort to give.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), the lawyer’s original question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ can be seen as the wrong question. He should perhaps have asked, ‘To whom can I be a

neighbour?’ The evangelist is at pains to show that this self-righteous man is determined to catch Jesus out.

Jesus very neatly avoids the trap by telling a first-rate short story. It is wonderful that the Samaritan should have stopped at all, but that he knew exactly what to do by way of soothing and bandaging is equally impressive. After immediate first aid, he looks after the stranger until the following morning.

This combination of expertise and kindness shows us what being an active Christian is all about.

Few of us, I imagine, would know how to treat a total stranger who had been so badly beaten up that he had been left half-dead. And perhaps some of us, even if we had remembered the parable, would have passed by, either because of revulsion or simply because of ignorance.

In these days of COVID-19 and other horrors, any attempt at rescue could be highly dangerous, but a reassuring presence until the emergency services arrive shouldn’t be beyond any of us.

Memorial Service

Lord Bell (1941-2019) Top Tory Michaels – Heseltine, Howard and Portillo – were at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, to celebrate the life of Margaret Thatcher’s first spin doctor, Tim Bell. Bell is often said to have won the 1979 election with his Saatchi & Saatchi slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working’.

Former Bishop of London Lord Chartres gave the bidding at the start of the service, and a blessing at the end.

‘No one could tell me where the label “spin doctor” originated, but my research confirmed that he was the very first,’ said another peer, Michael Grade, former Chairman of the BBC. ‘To Guardian readers it was an insult, but to Tim it was a badge of honour. He was so proud to be the first spin doctor. Many have followed; none has surpassed.

‘He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in 38 The Oldie September 2020

his mouth. He was blessed, however, with a silver tongue and he made full use of this gift, as we all know. He talked his way from his first job as an office boy at the old ITV television company ABC … through various advertising and marketing companies to a job in the new Saatchi agency.

‘He enjoyed the good life, fine food, fine wine and fine food and fine clothes, but in the early days didn’t have a salary that matched his tastes. So he bought his clothes in shops that sounded like restaurants and put them on his expenses. Eventually he was summoned by the finance director who said, “Mr Bell, I see you have eaten a mohair suit at Herbie Frogg.” ’

Grade continued, ‘He was a superb raconteur and once told Norman St John Stevas he must stop name-dropping. “I quite agree,” said Stevas, “as I was telling the Queen Mother only this morning.” ’ David Young, former Secretary of State for Employment and later for Trade and Industry, said he got to know Bell when Young became Keith Joseph’s special adviser at the Industry Department: ‘I was in the front line on the political issue of the day [unemployment]. Almost immediately, I got into trouble and turned again to Tim. He had an intuition, a real gift, for knowing what would persuade.’

Bell’s son Harry, daughter Daisy and stepdaughter Tigony read his favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s If – also Margaret Thatcher’s favourite.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Theodore Dalrymple: The Doctor’s Surgery

50% OFF THE OLDIE

Man’s bite is worse than his bark If cats and dogs were pills, they would probably have been banned a long time ago because of their side effects.

The World Health Organisation estimates that there are tens of millions of dog bites annually worldwide. There are 4.5 million in the United States alone, 885,000 of them requiring medical care, and 30,000 needing plastic surgery to repair the damage. Between 3 per cent and 18 per cent become infected. There are 59,000 deaths from rabies in the world a year and more than 58,000 from dog bites. Imagine a pill like that!

In Italy, one in about 5,000 people annually is bitten by a cat. In the US, about 16 per cent of people bitten by a cat (of whom there are 400,000 a year) attend hospital emergency departments.

Apparently, women are more likely to be bitten than men, presumably because women fondle cats more. Surely cats can’t be misogynists?

Bites are not the only hazard to health represented by dogs and cats. Dogs can spread worms, sometimes with serious results – as can cats – and they’re a reservoir for leishmaniasis.

And humans can catch toxoplasmosis from cats – particularly unfortunate if a woman is pregnant, with a small risk of abortion and stillbirth, and a smaller risk still of neurological problems such as hydrocephalus, microcephaly or mental retardation, as well as retinochoroiditis leading to blindness. Are domestic cats worth running the risk of even a single such case?

Let us not forget, either, cat scratch fever. Half of all cats carry the causative organism, Bartonella henselae, on their claws and in their mouths. The official

figure for annual incidence in the US is 22,000 a year, but this is probably a considerable underestimate because the disease is often not recognised or tested for. The disease is not usually serious and is self-limiting, though untreated it may cause two months’ fatigue as well as lymph-node swelling.

However, in the debilitated and the immunocompromised, cat scratch fever can be serious. The National Library of Health in the US recommends that to avoid it one should not play roughly with cats. Surely this is illogical? To avoid it, one should not have a cat in the first place. This will obviate all risk, as well as preserve the birds in the garden.

During the confinement caused by COVID-19 – or should I say caused by governmental reaction to COVID-19? – the demand for cats and dogs worldwide has increased greatly, again according to the WHO. This is because humans easily grow fed up with one another and seek a being more on their wavelength; but it might mean, in turn, an epidemic of, or at least an increase in, dog and cat bites, not to mention all the other possible hazards to health.

I took an online test recently about dog and cat bites. Despite loving dogs and having had one for many years, I was surprised at the extent of my own ignorance. I did not know that the most frequent kind of dog-bite injury is a crush injury, because dog jaws are capable of exerting a very great pressure.

And to think that I used to play with my dog by letting him pretend to bite my arm! But at least I knew that the antibiotic to give in case of damage was ampicillin and clavulanic acid.

Let’s get things in proportion. In the US, there are an estimated 250,000 human bites a year (with men more at risk), and a quarter of all hand infections are caused by human bites. Human bites are bad because the human mouth is so full of bacteria and viruses.

My advice is to wash your mouth out with soap and water before you bite anyone, just as you do after you swear.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Embargo and Other Stories

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Norman Tebbit on The Few SIR: I was saddened to read The Oldie’s article on the Battle of Britain, which left so much unsaid.

After all, many of us oldies lived through that battle, watching the aircraft fighting over our heads.

In 1954, RAF flying officer Tebbit escaped from a burning Meteor by breaking open the cockpit canopy

It was intended by Hitler and Goering to be the battle in which the RAF would be destroyed, giving the Luftwaffe control of the skies as the German landing craft ferried the Wehrmacht invasion army onto the English beaches.

All told, 2,918 Allied airmen flew in the battle, in which 544 died. Of them, 2,335 were British, 145 Poles, 126 New Zealanders, 99 Canadians, 88 Czechs, 33 Australians, 29 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 French, 11 from the Republic of Ireland, three Rhodesians and one Jamaican.

There was no doubt that the Luftwaffe was in the ascendancy as the RAF casualties mounted. The RAF was simply running out – not of aircraft but of pilots, as we flung inexperienced men, just out of flying school, into the air against the battle-hardened Germans. Then, only just in time, the equally battleexperienced Poles arrived to reinforce the RAF, wanting nothing but revenge on the Germans who had ravaged and occupied their homeland.

Without the Poles, the battle would have been lost and the German invasion craft would have been able to cross the Channel before the autumn gales, bringing the Wehrmacht to massacre the Allied survivors from the Dunkirk evacuation. And the Second World War would have been won by Hitler’s National Socialist regime.

Norman Tebbit, Bury St Edmunds 40 The Oldie September 2020

‘Have you finished?’

Churchill’s mystery date SIR: I have just read Michael Cole’s excellent article (July issue) about Alec Guinness in the play Ross, which he saw in 1961. I also saw the play; I was with a friend who served in the WRAF with me in Folkestone in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

We were up in the gods and used the glasses provided to look at the posh people in the boxes. In one, there was a rather elderly old boy, accompanied by a much younger lady in a low-cut dress and sparkling jewellery. We whispered some rather salacious comments to each other; then, after the interval, were amazed to see Guinness bowing low to the old boy in the box.

‘I’d forgotten it was “take your daughter to work day” today’

Then a great roar came from the audience and we realised it was Sir Winston Churchill. The gorgeous lady was his daughter Mary. Friend and I had rather red faces, needless to say.

Mary Clark-Glass, Hillsborough, Co Down

I once met Ian Carmichael SIR: I lived in the same village as Ian Carmichael in East Yorkshire. And, yes, his dry humour and tomfoolery were evident off screen as well as on.

One day when I was in Browns, the Hull bookshop, he came in and bought a small rubber from the stationery department.

‘Would you like it wrapped up, sir?’

‘Oh, just send it by rail.’ He waved airily and breezed out of the shop.

I didn’t know his father was an optician: most of the family ran the exclusive Carmichael’s jewellery, silver and china store – as a sort of northern replica of Thomas Goode – where we all had our wedding-present lists and gazed at the antique jewellery.

I can still spout reams from the script of I’m All Right Jack – such clever lines from those brilliant character actors of the ’50s. Humour today has somehow completely lost that subtlety.

Yours faithfully, Angela Lynne, Shropham, Norfolk

How many people mused over to whom ‘moron’ applied?

John Gullidge, Saltdean, East Sussex

Joy of galliards SIR: I was delighted to see your item on the galliard (July issue). For some time, my friends here in France have been a bit dismissive of an 86-year-oldie struggling with a C descant recorder. Lockdown, however, has given me a chance to go at it in peace.

Imagine the thrill when I discovered that your YouTube recommendation led me to a Phalèse galliard which turned out to be one of my favourites – and, more importantly, I am making a pretty fair fist of it, as we say in the recorder world.

Very many thanks.

Michael Fairey, Pouzolles, France

Indestructible air ace SIR: I write regarding Air Commodore Al Deere. Further to the letter by Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns (August issue), I was playing golf at Ashridge with Al Deere when he was struck by lightning. He was knocked to the ground, got up and brushed himself down. We then continued with our game. As I said to him at the time, ‘Well, the Germans couldn’t get you and now God has missed. You must be very good!’

Yours faithfully, David Greenway, Anna Valley, Hampshire

Where angels trod SIR: I too met E M Forster – once, in 1961.

I was pushing my tray towards the till at the Arts Theatre Buffet in Cambridge, when it clashed with the one in front. As we both apologised, the person in front of me turned round – and I realised that I had spoken to, and been addressed by, the greatest living English novelist.

Somehow the words ‘I’m so sorry’ seemed utterly appropriate.

I realised a few minutes later that the date was 6th December, Founder’s Day at King’s, and I have often wondered why EMF stayed away from the Founder’s Feast in his college, just across the road.

Yours etc, Ralph Hawtrey, Cambridge

Vera Lynn’s songwriters

‘No, that’s also a surveillance satellite’

toiledau in Welsh instead of toilets – from the French; biscedi in Welsh instead of biscuits – from Old French.

Sad also that he should have suggested that Wales’s ‘somewhat retarded’ economic growth might have been the result of its bilingual policy. Nothing to do, then, with its former reliance on coal mining and steel production, the decline in which has brought equally retarded growth to many areas in the north of England.

Luckily for the south, Giles’s artistic daubs have apparently saved that region from an equal decline.

And, lastly, my name, Alwyn: Welsh, you think. No, from the Anglo-Saxon al wine, friend to all – but not, sadly, to wooden-headed Giles.

Alwyn Jones, Llandudno

Morons at The Oldie SIR: How many people tried to do the Moron Crossword 390 (August issue) by completing clues and making their own grid? I tried, but failed.

How many people checked through their collection of Oldies to see if the correct grid was used in a previous issue?

Can Boris tie his bow tie?

SIR: Grahame Jones (Letters, August issue) is quite wrong to say that Boris Johnson is shown sporting a clip-on bow tie in the photograph taken at the Christ

Dandruff shaker

Church Ball, Oxford, in 1985 (The Way They Lived Then, July issue). The fastener that’s showing enables the neckband on the tie to be connected in a loop and would not be seen when the collar is turned down.

A clip-on bow tie has no neckband and is pre-tied with two clips to be fastened under the two sides of a folded-down collar.

Whether Boris Johnson’s bow tie – worn with a winged collar – is pre-tied or not is another matter altogether.

Yours etc, Malcolm Watson, Ryde, Isle of Wight

Return of the Fattypuffs SIR: I squeaked with joy to see reference (July issue) to Fattypuffs and Thinifers.

I had a copy as a boy. I have been muttering the title for some years – but under my breath, for fear of being thought of as an -ist of some sort and have opprobrium rained upon me.

Now I can speak it out loud. Thank you.

Simon Larter, Northend, Oxfordshire

Giles wails about Wales SIR: I found it ironic that Giles Wood should mock the Welsh language for borrowing from the English to bolster its vocabulary. The English language has always benefited from foreign borrowings, as the samples he chose nicely illustrate: sgitsoffrenia in Welsh instead of schizophrenia – from the Ancient Greek;

SIR: Should we also remember those who composed the music and especially the lyrics of the songs that Vera Lynn sang so movingly?

The White Cliffs of Dover was written

by Walter Kent (music) and Nat Burton (lyrics). We’ll Meet Again was written by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles.

S Burlington, Gloucestershire

‘This here’s a stick-up. And, luckily for you, a hygienic one’

More letters on the Oldie App See page 6 The Oldie September 2020 41

I Once Met

Ghislaine Maxwell In 2005, I’d just arrived in Manhattan, aged 33, as the Daily Telegraph’s New York correspondent.

I was short of friends and a little lonely when an old British friend, a New York journalist for years, asked me if I’d like to go to a party at Ghislaine Maxwell’s house.

‘I’d love to!’ I said.

At that stage, no one, apart from a small inner circle, knew about Maxwell’s former relationship with – by then, friendship with – the unspeakable paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

All I knew was that she was the 43-year-old daughter of crooked press baron Robert Maxwell. So it was with the nosy newsman’s hat on that I entered Ghislaine’s house that night.

And what a house it was – a narrow, red-brick, five-storey mansion with a porch wrapped in Ionic columns. It was in the ritziest part of town, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, not far from Central Park and the Frick Collection.

If I’d dug a little deeper, I’d have realised there was something fishy going on. When Robert Maxwell died, massively in debt, Ghislaine Maxwell

was left with an £80,000 annual income from a trust fund. A lot of money – a lot more than I earned. But I lived in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. And here she was in a mega-schloss – with 12 rooms, eight fireplaces and a lift. It was sold for £12m in 2016. It’s since emerged that Jeffrey Epstein bought the house in 2000.

I knew nothing of this as I bounded into the hall with my friend. He likewise knew nothing of Ghislaine’s shady associations with Epstein.

As we walked into the hall – immaculately decorated in a spick-andspan version of English Georgian, like the house’s exterior – Ghislaine stepped forward; thin, pretty, in a couture dress that put my newshound’s blue, linen, battered jacket to shame.

My friend introduced us.

‘Oh, the New York correspondent for the Telegraph!’ said Ghislaine, her eyes wide open, alive with excitement, her smile broadening, as if I were the most dazzling person she’d met. She peppered me with flattering questions that pointed to an intense curiosity in my not very exciting life.

‘You live in Greenwich Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

Village? How thrilling! And you’ve been here for only three months? What a treat!’

You can see that same look in the party pictures of her before and since her arrest for the alleged crimes. She is rarely speaking in the pictures; more often, she’s listening or smiling, her body language dedicated to making the speaker think they’re the most gripping person alive.

Since the scandal emerged, you can see why she turned into that person.

Given some of life’s most coveted gifts as a child – money, looks and education – she was also given a devil for a father: a brute who alternately bullied and spoilt her, and got her into Oxford University by endowing a Maxwell scholarship at her college, Balliol, that she then took advantage of.

Hence the strange combination of being ultra-well-connected while being fundamentally unsure of herself, along with the desperate desire to stay in with the great, the good and the rich. Hence the curiosity and charm with a shy, new Brit in town. Hence the willingness to live in a house bought for her by a monster.

If she’s found guilty of those alleged crimes, though, mere circumstance of birth cannot explain them away.

Harry Mount

My Blitz nights in a cupboard

Eighty years ago, in 1940, I was four years old. My father was at RAF Dover and we lived in Folkestone, where we suffered the nightly shelling and watched the dogfights over the Channel.

Some nights, we slept in the Anderson shelter in my grandparents’ garden. At other times, we slept in the cupboard under the stairs – supposed to be the safest place if the house collapsed.

In 1941, my father was posted to RAF Uxbridge and we lived in a house opposite the main gates. When he finished night duty, he would bring us warm doughnuts from the NAAFI for breakfast.

I had just started school when I caught scarlet fever.

I was immediately put into the local isolation hospital (the site is now part of Brunel University).

I was in a ward with about 20 children. There was no special medical equipment or medication. You just waited for the infection to take its course.

I could not see anyone, other than medical staff, for

four weeks. My parents could look at me from afar, through a small square window, once or twice a week.

After finally being declared fit to leave, I was given a bath and scrubbed all over with carbolic soap, which stung like mad. When I got home, the house had been

disinfected and all my toys thrown away.

This all took place at the same time as the Blitz. Our road was a hill, and we used to climb to the top at night and watch the dreadful bombing over London and see the fires everywhere.

Very frightening.

However, somehow we all survived. My father’s next posting was to Burma which he managed to survive as well.

By Janet Thorogood, London SW2, who receives £50

Fire-watching: London, 1940

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie September 2020 43

Books Windsors in the soup FRANCES WILSON Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Royal Family

By Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand

GARY WING

HQ £20 What on earth will Diana-in-Heaven be making of this mess?

It is, after all, her script that the wretched couple are following. Even Meghan’s complaint, quoted by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, that ‘I gave up my entire life for this family’, is plagiarised from the Squidgygate tapes, in which Diana said ‘after all I’ve done for this f***ing family’.

Finding Freedom, with its subliminal echoes of Finding Nemo, Finding Neverland and Nelson Mandela’s Walk to Freedom, should really be called The Autobiography of Harry and Meghan.

This is clearly the version of events the Sussexes have agreed between themselves. As one of the book’s many ‘sources’ explains, ‘Harry and Meghan like being in control of their narrative.’

And what a baffling narrative it turns out to be: no one else could have come up with such a mix of self-pity, selfexoneration, self-delusion, selfimportance, specialness, bitterness and revenge – and all in the name of earning a privacy that they have already won.

When the Duke and Duchess left for North America at the end of March, they had been given exactly what they asked for: a fresh start, the Queen’s blessings, plus an open door should they wish to return. With Finding Freedom, thrown together while the rest of the world was grappling with the devastating effects of a pandemic, that door has been bolted.

Don’t get me wrong – books should present challenges, and the best books have the power to change the world. But

if Diana: Her True Story (1992) contained a series of controlled explosions, Finding Freedom is like a kid running around with a water pistol.

Scobie and Durand are so busy writing down everything Harry and Meghan tell them that they forget to add any logic to their argument. It is therefore unclear whether Harry already felt trapped by Royal privilege when Meghan showed him the walk to freedom, or whether he and Meghan didn’t feel themselves privileged enough: they were placed, we gather, on ‘the back seat to other family members’ and Meghan felt ‘aggrieved’.

Is it because Kate didn’t, we learn, go shopping with her one day on Kensington High Street, or because she was mocked for putting air-fresheners in St George’s Chapel (in fact, the book argues, the Diptyque Baies-scented air-diffusers were ‘approved by all parties involved’)?

Or did the behaviour of Meghan’s own family members make her new situation untenable? On the one hand, the couple argue that their popularity threatened

to ‘eclipse’ the rest of the Royals; on the other, they bleat about their increasingly negative press. And so it goes on: they felt ‘alone’ among the Royals, but never alone enough ‘to operate as an actual family’, whatever that means.

Either way, the couple’s suffering is depicted in military metaphors: they arrived in Canada last Christmas ‘shell-shocked’; they left the UK, ‘battered and bruised’; Harry likened the process of separating himself from The Firm to ‘standing in front of a firing squad’.

The Sussexes are, Scobie and Durand suggest with wearing inevitability, ‘victims’.

What becomes clear in these pages is that we are being yoked into the usual battle between the zero-tolerance snowflake generation, with their Cancel Culture and radars for detecting ‘micro-aggressions’, and the dinosaurs who expect you simply to get on with whatever it is you are being paid a shedload of money to do.

So what was it exactly that left the Duke and Duchess as wounded as First World War soldiers? This is the book’s great

The Oldie September 2020 45

‘How can we be sure it’s not an asymptomatic carrier?’

revelation. When Harry met Meghan, William apparently suggested that rather than rushing into anything with ‘this girl’, he take his time. It is hard to believe that a former party-loving, big-gamehunting Turbo Sloane like Harry could find snobbery embedded in the term ‘this girl’. So we have to assume that it is Meghan who explained that she, and therefore he (they had by now become one person), was being insulted and William had to be what is known as ‘called out’.

Because Scobie and Durand say nothing about the power distribution in the relationship, this is just my guess. It could equally be that Harry had felt patronised for years by William, and this comment was the final straw.

We are left at the end with the question we began with: who calls the shots? Is it Harry, with his deep loathing of the press and desire to fulfil his mother’s legacy? Or is it Meghan, who, in one of her most priceless remarks, mournfully concedes that ‘the powers [of the institution] are unfortunately greater than me’?

Crazy football fan IVO DAWNAY Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times

By David Kynaston Bloomsbury £16.99 Middle-class football fandom is said to date back to Arsenal obsessive Nick Hornby’s 1992 memoir, Fever Pitch – thus the tease that Arsenal fans now eat takeaway sushi at half-time.

David Kynaston’s more than slightly bizarre new book – a diary centred on his 60-year support for Aldershot FC – goes one further in de-haut-en-bas-

upmanship. His team is a non-league club with an average weekly attendance of just 1,700.

No one could dispute his credentials.

The author of the magisterial three volume Modernity Britain, a muchadmired social history of post-war Britain, was born within sight of the ground. But one does wonder why his agent didn’t plead with him to abandon the project.

Shots in the Dark traces the author’s interior life through the football season of 2016-17 both as a fan of Aldershot Town FC and as a fully paid-up member of the liberal elite, reeling from the Brexit referendum result. Not surprisingly, it is bit of a misery memoir. It’s grim down south, too, it seems.

The idea is, at least in part, to explore themes of loyalty, identity and affiliation at the micro-level while the same great political forces battle it out on the grander stage of national and international politics. For if the name Aldershot (or ‘The Shots’) is the most frequently used in the book, the second is Trump – his rise and eventual victory in the US presidential elections providing a parallel narrative thread.

This is not, after all, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’s suburban Aldershot – all sundrenched tennis courts and afternoon tea. Rather it is furnished and burnished by sheeting rain and bacon butties in the meanly appointed stands of the Rec, the home of the non-league football club.

Kynaston’s passionate love of The Shots is clearly key to his sense of belonging; a vital ligament connecting this half-German public-school and Oxford graduate with the working-class Britain whose history has been his life’s work. Yet one of the many frustrations of the book is his failure to explore why many intellectuals also have an atavistic need to surrender emotionally to the irrational demands of fandom.

Instead, in a nine-month-long diary, he drags us with him on his endless Saturday trips to far distant away games from Macclesfield to Southport. All of them? Yes, it seems he must, with almost every one of the 40-odd games of the season given its own match report, scorers named and missed chances listed.

At least a third of the book hauls us around the country like bolshie teenagers, desperate to get back to our laptops, muttering, ‘Don’t you get it?

We just don’t care.’ The more readable stuff comes in between games as his thoughts meander like lost team buses through the psychology of the white-van suburbs to the hand-wringing of the metropolitan media and back again.

Football, it seems, is Kynaston’s anchor in working-class realities.

Moreover, he is honest in acknowledging his own chauvinism, loathing the big-money internationalism of the top Premier League clubs with their foreign managers, owners and players.

‘For all my instinctive fear & dread of nationalism,’ he writes, ‘I am Little Englisher [sic] enough to feel strongly that England football & cricket teams should 100% comprise Englishmen/ women – & that applies to their coaches/ managers also.’

In the very same diary entry, while castigating the remoteness, arrogance and virtue-signalling of the liberalminded classes he also says he would still sign up to their values.

If this all sounds rather heavy-duty – a bit The Rime of the Ancient Remainer – then wait till Donald Trump makes his entry. Yet, between the goalless draws, the chants and the rants, there are more surprising passages too: occasional vicious pen portraits of public figures, retracted a few days later; a love affair with the work of Leonard Cohen; or miscellaneous diversions into everything from Philip Roth to the disposal of dog-poop bags in the Lake District.

Kynaston’s own verdict is that the diary aims to reconcile his despair at identity politics with his own, contradictory, need to support ‘an obscure, small-town football club’.

One, he adds, where the great majority of supporters ‘almost certainly’ voted for Brexit. If it fails, he concludes, he has at least learned that ‘tribalism and decency are not necessarily incompatible.’

For Kynaston fans like me, I suggest a Ronaldo-style ‘step over’ might be appropriate – unless, of course, you happen to be a fan of the Shots, too.

The Oldie September 2020 47

Wonderland revisited EMILY BEARN The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice

By Peter Hunt Bodleian Library £15 This book promises us ‘a fresh look’ at Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – a prospect that always makes the teacups rattle.

Since its publication more than 150 years ago, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become one of the most debated texts in the English language, generating an inexhaustible torrent of intellectual theories. It has been read as an allegory on drug culture, a parable of British colonialism and a satire on the War of the Roses.

It’s been argued that Alice has an eating disorder, and that her extending neck is symbolic of an erection. Or, if we are to believe the late William Empson, Alice is ‘a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid’.

Oh, help. Do we simple souls really need a ‘fresh look’ at Wonderland?

But Peter Hunt does not set out to shatter the china. It is a sign of Wonderland’s durability that successive generations have read their own preoccupations into the text. Hunt’s approach, however, is more archival.

Carroll’s mind, he writes, was essentially that of a ‘contradictory mid-Victorian’, who loaded every sentence of his fiction with ‘multiple meanings, multiple jokes [and] coded references to matters intellectual, political and personal’.

This highly entertaining book is an attempt to unravel those references – showing Carroll as a pugnacious satirist, whose stories became a boxing ring for the author’s unsettled scores.

Among Carroll’s most famous targets was Alfred Tennyson, whom he had known and photographed since 1857.

Evidence of their subsequent fall-out can be found in Through the Looking-Glass, where Carroll ridicules Tennyson’s poem Maud, in which a lover waits in a flower garden (‘She is coming, my own, my sweet;/ Were it ever so airy a tread’). In Carroll’s version, Alice and the flowers are listening for the Red Queen: ‘ “She’s coming!” cried the Larkspur. “I hear her footstep, thump, thump, along the gravel walk.” ’ Dozy readers among us might also have missed the swipe at Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence, in which the narrator meets a leechgatherer ‘on the lonely moor’. (‘ “How is it

that you live, and what is it you do?”/He with a smile did then his words repeat…’)

In Carroll’s version, the tone is notably less lyrical: ‘ “Who are you, aged man?” I said./“And how is it you live?”/His answer trickled through my head,/Like water through a sieve.’

But while such examples are well documented, in other areas Hunt is more speculative. He refers to his subject as Charles Dodgson, rather than by his pen name, Carroll – preferring the name of ‘the man, rather than the name of the mask’. But it is the mask that scholars are stuck with – and, like any book about Wonderland, this one asks more questions than it answers.

Does the face of the boisterous puppy Alice encounters in the White Rabbit’s garden represent the young Charles Darwin? And is the rest of the dog Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ – or could it be Charles Kingsley, whom Thomas Hughes (the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays) described as being like a Newfoundland puppy?

Some of the ‘what if’s sound worthy of the Mad Hatter. We know, for example, that Thomas John Prout (the Rector of Binsey, known for dozing off in college meetings) might have been the model for the Dormouse. But ‘whether Alice knew’ that the rector ‘might have been the model for the Dormouse’ is not certain.

Where Hunt stands firm is in his view that there is no nonsense in Wonderland, but rather ‘almost every sentence, every action … has a perfectly sensible root’.

Take, for example, Alice’s struggle with her times tables: ‘Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh

‘Sorry, but I’ve completely forgotten what I came up here for’

dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!’ The logic, apparently, is perfectly clear, writes Hunt: ‘If Alice continues in the progression to ‘twelve times twelve’, the usual end of the times table, the final number is 19.’

I’m glad no one tried to explain this to me when I was nine. But thanks to such stimulating observations, I shall never read Wonderland in quite the same way again.

Nature’s child WILL COHU Diary of a Young Naturalist

By Dara McAnulty Little Toller £16 Dara McAnulty is a teenage lad from Northern Ireland who has become a leading light among young environmental activists. Over the last few years, he’s built up a large following on social media, and the passion of his writing, broadcasting and public speaking has been championed by Chris Packham and Robert Macfarlane.

This book is a diary of a year in his life (it doesn’t explicitly say which year but, from the events described, it sounds like 2018-19), during which his family moves from County Fermanagh to County Down, he changes school, and his public profile expands – he finds himself both addressing marches on Downing Street and hobnobbing with the Prime Ministerial team.

It is an emotional rollercoaster, because McAnulty is young and autistic, and his conviction and confidence are shadowed by an inner life that oscillates between ecstatic encounters with the natural world and an excruciating loneliness magnified by social contact.

With nature, he can just be; with humans, he is ‘always looking for nuances, facial expressions, intonation’, as he struggles to decode relationships.

The only people he is wholly comfortable with are his family, who with the exception of his father are also autistic.

The timeline of the book is adorned with richly detailed descriptions of the seasonally changing landscape and natural world around Enniskillen and the Mourne Mountains near Castlewellan.

McAnulty is especially happy describing birds – he won the RSPB medal for conservation – and has the knack of catching a moment amid the flurry of wings. He describes a fulmar ‘like the Buddha in a trance’; a ‘monochrome mutiny’ among razorbills; puffins ‘like sleepwalkers’; and a goshawk chick like ‘an autumn forest rolled in the first snows of winter’. He seems to feel a The Oldie September 2020 49

particular affinity with the hen harrier, ‘a talisman of delight, giver of silvery inner light’.

But the seasonal and geographical journey is accompanied by a thumping heart. Standing ‘in an extraordinary and beautiful place’, he feels a ‘terrible angst rising in my chest’. Melancholy and ‘heart-racing anxiety’ are never far away: even as he describes a spring evening with a sedge warbler in ‘dappled and sepia light’ that makes his ‘insides explode, words ricochet inside out’.

Fame does its fickle thing: ‘Wellmeaning people tell me how inspirational I am. How my tweets lift their day. How my blogs, campaigning, talks are “just amazing” or “fabulous” … I hate it.

Honestly, I feel like an imposter.’

But it’s more complex than that – and he is more honest. After filming with Chris Packham, he is painfully aware of the criticism as well as the praise on social media and recognises that he seeks ‘attention and validation’.

This is a densely emotional, deeply affecting book which sometimes feels crowded with detail and abrupt changes of mood. McAnulty writes revealingly that at the point of an encounter, he scarcely notices what he feels. He absorbs detail: ‘I only know I’ve experienced it when I’m writing it all down later. The intensity gushes out and I feel everything again.’ Here, writing is the reverse of experience recollected with tranquillity.

It’s the point at which the author actually has the encounter. It is not necessarily framed for the reader.

During the year, things do change for the better and a welcome ease emerges.

He was dreadfully bullied in his old school and expects more of the same when they move. It doesn’t happen, and there’s even a neighbouring boy with whom he looks at beetles. The single happiest moment seems to be when he is showing his sister’s young friends the plumage of a goldfinch – when, as a teacher, he rediscovers an instinctive love and feels a simple ‘glow’.

What will become of a special talent like McAnulty’s? How will he be mentored? He is so emotionally connected to the natural world that its degradation feels like a personal wound, and that intensity is a useful advocacy tool.

But we should fear the X-Men syndrome; it’s convenient to think that the insight and passion of neurodivergent young people like McAnulty or Greta Thunberg will save us, but they have no superpowers. We all own this mess.

As McAnulty’s account shows, it is enough sometimes for him to get through another day, let alone a year.

Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent. From Derek Jarman: My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon, Garden Museum exhibition catalogue, £25

In bed with the king HAMISH ROBINSON Mistresses: Sex and Scandal in the Court of Charles II

By Linda Porter Picador £20 In 1676, Honoré Courtin, the French Ambassador in London, excused his involvement in the raucous social life of the court. He wrote to his boss, Louvois, ‘One must be homme de plaisir in England or not come at all.’

In contrast to what he called the ‘affectation de gravité’ in France, the tone of the English court rings out in the words that greeted the aged Duchess Mazarin when she met two other mistresses of Charles II: ‘Fancy we three whores meeting like this!’

The Earl of Rochester wrote of Charles II, in a satire that led to his banishment from court, ‘Restless he rolls

from whore to whore,/A merry monarch, scandalous and poor,’ before describing the efforts required to rouse the jaded king.

Linda Porter provides an expert and entertaining guide to this lost world by relating the lives of the most prominent and persistent of the king’s lovers.

The first significant mistress, and the only one to create a dynastic strain as mother of the Duke of Monmouth, was Lucy Walter, a scion of Welsh gentry. The exiled prince encountered her at the court of his sister Mary at the Hague in 1648. She had been the mistress of an officer in his retinue and passed smoothly into the royal embrace. Both were 18.

The brevity of her tenure – a matter of nights, according to Porter – was a reflection of the degree to which the young prince, as a guest of foreign powers, was not his own master.

Charles acknowledged the child, and Lucy received a pension, but her behaviour became an embarrassment.

She drew attention to herself, The Oldie September 2020 51

quarrelled with other lovers, reacted with very public fury at an attempt to kidnap her son, and even tried to return to Republican England – only to be ejected after a spell in the Tower. Just before she died in Paris in 1658, royal servants succeeded in extracting the nine-year-old boy. Though healthy and intelligent, he couldn’t read or count beyond 20.

Charles’s involvement with Barbara Palmer followed the Restoration. The wife of a conscientious Oxfordshire gentleman, Roger Palmer, she had long been the mistress of the Earl of Chesterfield, who was close to the king.

She became pregnant by the king almost immediately. This was only the beginning: physically robust, she had a string of further children without relinquishing her hold.

According to Gilbert Burnet, who described her as ‘of great beauty, but most enormously vicious and ravenous’, the King, while in her thrall, was ‘not master of himself nor capable of minding business’. Roger Palmer found himself raised to the Irish peerage as the Earl of Castlemaine, and Barbara later became Duchess of Cleveland in her own right.

Brazen in her acquisitiveness and sexuality alike, she enjoyed upstaging the childless queen, Catherine of Braganza, and excited the court wits to pinnacles of obscenity.

Nell Gwyn has lingered longest in popular memory. As ‘the Protestant whore’, she sparred with her more aristocratic rivals and showed a sharp wit.

In 1660, Charles had overseen the re-establishment of London theatres and introduction of female players. Nell, who rose from orange-seller to leading actress, received rewards on a modest scale: jewels, a pension and a house on Pall Mall in which she entertained the king and his friends. Her eldest son was created Earl of Burford. ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ Charles is supposed to have told his brother from his deathbed.

Louise de Kéroualle, later Duchess of Portsmouth, had been a maid of honour to Charles’s sister, Henriette d’Angleterre, before crossing the Channel to serve Catherine of Braganza in 1670.

Although half Charles’s age, she came nearest to being maîtresse-en-titre. She kept close to the King, who found her company relaxing, and her lavishly decorated apartments in Whitehall became a court within a court.

Some thought Louise baby-faced and, being French and Catholic, she was not popular. But Charles, who called her ‘Fubs’ – an allusion to her girth – named a yacht after her and showered her and her children with pensions and titles.

The woman whom Porter calls Charles’s last mistress, Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, niece to the cardinal, was famous in her own right as an adventuress. Although her connection with the ageing king was fleeting and remains hard to substantiate, she deserves a book of her own.

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Portrait of marriages CRESSIDA CONNOLLY Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

By Penelope Mortimer Daunt Books £9.99 I used to think that John Updike had written the best short stories about marriage going wrong. But Penelope Mortimer may just be better.

With Updike, it’s always adultery that causes the rot to set in, but Mortimer is purer than that: in her stories, it’s the growing apprehension of plain and simple dislike that makes the marriages falter.

In real life, she was herself married for many years to the writer and barrister John Mortimer, who later left her for a younger woman, also called Penelope.

The first Mrs Mortimer brought four children into the marriage and then had two more with John Mortimer.

In her most successful novel, The Pumpkin Eater (1962), a nameless wife is married to a successful scriptwriter, who persuades her into an abortion and hysterectomy when she becomes pregnant for the nth time. In hospital, she is visited by the husband of her husband’s mistress, who tells her his wife is pregnant with her husband’s child.

Years later, it came out that John Mortimer had been having an affair with the actress Wendy Craig while Penelope Mortimer was having an abortion, and that Craig was herself pregnant by her lover.

Penelope always mined her life for her stories. She evidently started young. In her memoir, About Time (1979), she describes how her father, a vicar who lost his faith, made passes at her when she was growing up. Three of the best stories here centre around this bizarre character, whose longing for absolutes saw him embrace, variously, Marxism, Methodism, vegetarianism and a nudist colony in Edwardian Eastbourne.

Abuse is not mentioned, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine all sorts of horrors concerning this dreadful, angry and self-important little man.

In the strongest – and oddest – story,

The King of Kissingdom, he dresses up in blackface and enacts a strange sort of ceremony, in order to flirt with a mousy little schoolteacher. His young daughter looks on, coolly, a writer in the making.

Of the dozen stories here, five concern unravelling marriages. All but one (Such a Super Evening) are absolute gems.

Penelope Mortimer is brilliant at describing children; like that other Penelope, Fitzgerald, she is not remotely soppy about them. A daughter is: ‘skinny and spiteful and clever, with a great burden of love inside her, a heart too passionate and heavy for her flimsy little body. Her lank, whitish hair was held back by a pink plastic slide.’

Children are trying, manipulative, bossy. Even fiendish: one little girl throws a live rabbit from a tenth-floor flat in Bayswater. Yet Mortimer is acutely sensible of any unkindness towards them, on the part of their stepfather in particular. Some of the most agonising moments occur when the wife figure observes the casual brutality of her husband to her children, and his favouritism towards his own. The title story charts just this.

In A Second Honeymoon, the couple visit Rome in an attempt to perk up their marriage. In their hotel, the couple ‘moved about the room as languidly and pointlessly as fish in a small tank’.

Much of the trouble seems to be caused simply by the wives getting older.

They outgrow their use, becoming ‘incredulous but hopeful, like a woman who, in late middle age, gets her foot trodden on under the table’.

The best-observed of all is I Told You So. A visit to an East Anglian beach begins to go wrong as soon as the wife jumps off a little ledge onto the sand: ‘Her jump irritated and saddened him.

They weren’t children, to be throwing their bodies carelessly about as if they were of no value. They weren’t young, for God’s sake.’

Later, when the children have annoyed the husband by disobeying him, the wife thinks, ‘ “Oh Geoffrey…” She felt trapped with him on the huge beach.

Could it be possible that, even here, with the great light sky and the sea that stretched, she vaguely believed, to Russia, he could make her feel as though they were in a small city room – doorless, windowless, the only air in the warm, wasted breath of their quarrelling? She turned as though to ask him this.

‘He mistook her look of despair for love, for contrition at making him so unhappy. He grabbed at her arm.

“Laura,” he said.’

Ouch.

The Oldie September 2020 53

Media Matters

Arise, Lord Dacre? No way

The Daily Mail editor backed the Tories but slammed Boris’s morals stephen glover Boris Johnson’s recent creation of 36 new peers, including his younger brother Jo, has rightly earned him some flak from those who don’t like to see honours bestowed on friends and favourites. But I don’t believe anyone has pointed out one startling omission.

Who was the editor who did more than any other journalist to bring about Brexit? The man who edited the Daily Mail for 26 years, during much of which time he conducted himself as though he were the paper’s proprietor? The person before whom City ‘fat cats’, slippery politicians and other ne’er-do-wells used to quail? Step forward Paul Dacre.

The Prime Minister’s list rewarded several prominent Brexiteers, including former Labour MPs Frank Field, Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey. A peerage was found even for former Brexit Party MEP and regular on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze Claire Fox. Johnson’s failure to include Nigel Farage, who did more than any other politician to bring about Brexit, was shocking, but this is a media column and need not concern itself with such matters. Dacre, though, is our meat and drink.

Johnson doled out peerages to three media personalities who might be considered less successful in the journalistic field. Charles Moore, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Johnson’s erstwhile boss, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s distinguished biographer, was certainly a worthy recipient, though I doubt any more deserving than the former Mail supremo.

Veronica Wadley, also ennobled, is a protégée of Dacre’s and a former editor of the London Evening Standard. She was an arts adviser to Johnson when he was Mayor of London, but her life’s work has been that of a journalist. One of her much respected and long-serving predecessors as editor, Charles Wintour, was considered to be worth only a CBE.

The third media figure is Evgeny Lebedev, controlling shareholder of the Independent and ailing Evening Standard, in which tens of millions of his father’s money have been sunk. (Lebedev senior used to work for the KGB.) Evgeny is a society gadfly and supporter of charities, but his greatest admirer wouldn’t claim he has been a successful newspaper proprietor. He is, however, a generous host, and has on numerous occasions invited Johnson to stay in his villa in Italy.

If these three can be fitted for their ermine robes, why should it still be plain Mr Dacre? (I should mention, by the way, that I served as a foot soldier in his army, and still write a column for the Mail.)

The answer is, I suggest, that Johnson doesn’t like him.

To be precise, he resents the way in which the Mail during Dacre’s editorship harried him over several extramarital flings. The paper left it to the red-top tabloids to bring these excursions to the public’s notice, but once they had done so it was not slow to tell its readers what it thought of Johnson.

The best evidence for the Prime Minister’s feelings about the former editor came in a column Dacre wrote for the Spectator last July. Having reminded readers of Johnson’s infidelities, and been rude about his latest ‘bedwarmer’, Carrie Symonds, he referred to his own ‘several emotional dalliances’ with the new Prime Minister.

In particular, he recalled ‘a lachrymose lunch (his tears not mine) with Johnson bewailing that the Mail was destroying his marriage, while

‘I implore the Prime Minister to set aside personal rancour and recognise the man’

confiding that, anyway, monogamy is just a bourgeois convention’.

It is surely not stretching the facts to suggest that the Prime Minister nurses a deep well of hatred against the former editor which these reminiscences will have done nothing to dispel. Just as Farage cannot be honoured for his efforts in bringing about Brexit because Johnson dislikes him, so the leading journalistic standard-bearer for the cause cannot be rewarded on account of his having given Johnson a hard time (though scarcely unjustifiably) over his private life.

Isn’t this rather petty? Johnson is a bigger man than this. There is talk of another honours list this autumn. I implore the Prime Minister to set aside personal rancour and to recognise the man whom many journalists (including even some on the Left) acknowledge as the outstanding editor of his generation.

He would, as it happens, contribute more to the House of Lords than almost anyone on Johnson’s recent list. Bring on Lord Dacre!

Despite losing hundreds of millions of pounds over the years, the Guardian is sitting on a £1 billion cash pile which is the envy of other newspapers.

So eyebrows were raised last April when the paper announced it was furloughing at least 100 non-editorial staff owing to the pandemic. Couldn’t it have dug into its ample pockets and spared the hard-pressed taxpayer?

Now the Guardian has said that it will cut up to 180 jobs, including 70 in editorial, as a consequence of falling revenues. Some of its journalists are asking why the paper isn’t using its cash pile to rescue itself.

Don’t they have a point? If the Guardian were writing about another company behaving as it has done over recent months, it would chastise it for greed, ruthlessness and stupidity.

The Oldie September 2020 55

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

The singular complexity of plurals

TOM PLANT

You might not think it possible to get worked up about plurals. Yet a surprising number of people, when confronted by a plural, get their knickers in a twist.

The sentence you’ve just read is an example of the strange ways English treats words that relate to several and those that relate to just one. First, why does ‘knickers’ have an s at the end and take the plural? Yes, knickers come in pairs, like trousers, shorts, pants and tights, but only grammatically: each pair is a single piece of clothing, in the same way that a jacket, shirt, blouse or bra is single – though grammatically singular.

In the clothing department, only garments worn below the waist are treated as plural in this way – and, oddly, the only sub-waistline garments that are genuine pairs, such as shoes, socks and stockings, come in both plural and singular.

And then, if we go back to the opening sentence, what about ‘a surprising number of people … get’? Why isn’t it ‘a surprising number of people … gets’?

After all, ‘the number’ – whether of twisted knickers or of anything else – generally takes the singular.

It’s tempting to think we’re in the realm of collective nouns here, but we’re not. Collective nouns, words like ‘government’, ‘crowd’ and ‘team’, look singular but describe groups – they used

REELING BAN Lockdown has stopped us Scottish dancing.

With all the blood, toil, tears and sweat, it’s not exactly social-distancingfriendly. Before lockdown, you could reel up to four times a month in London.

Now reelers are twiddling thumbs, waiting for a return to saner times.

Every Scottish ball, of

to be called nouns of multitude – and are often treated as plural.

That practice seems to be waning, perhaps because Americans don’t care for it. The ‘government’, for example, is usually singular for Americans, whereas the British tend to make it plural.

Americans also say ‘the staff is on strike’ and ‘a married couple doesn’t pay inheritance tax unless its estate is over $10.9 million’. It’s all a matter of idiom – and idioms change.

The biggest change on both sides of the Atlantic may now be the adoption of ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’, and of ‘their’ in place of ‘his’ or ‘her’. This has brought countless sentences such as ‘Anyone who ever crosses their fingers for luck has had a taste of obsessive-compulsive disorder,’ and even ‘No ambitious man should grow a beard if they want to be taken seriously.’

This change may turn out to be no more difficult than the junking of the secondperson singular, with its associated ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s. That has saved modern English-speakers all the anguished decision-making of, say, the French when uncertain whether to tutoyer or not.

Still, things aren’t getting easier. The Times recently reported that ‘BBC staff have been told to use non-binary pronouns when addressing gender-fluid or transgender employees to ensure that

which there are dozens every summer, has been cancelled.

The next ball that I know of is in May next year at the Palace of Versailles.

Scottish dancing (reeling to the initiated) has been called a cross between Jane Austen and rugby. The high tempo of the music has its adherents sweating like pigs as they fly down the lines, clutching at outstretched hands and spinning fellow dancers like tops.

Reeling finds its roots in Gaelic dancing. It became popular in its current form in richer circles after the Jacobite Rising of 1745, when the Bonnie Prince was seen off by the Duke of Cumberland and all things Scottish were in vogue.

There was a wobble in the

the corporation does not develop a “heteronormative culture”. The policy means that BBC workers will be encouraged to refer to non-binary colleagues as “they” or “them”, rather than “he” or “she”.’ Unfortunately, the gender-neutral heteronormative culture already has me tied up.

On reading recently that ‘an artist who invited the public to deface her portrait of Boris Johnson is locked in a £100,000 legal row with a neighbour over the right to park in their front garden’, I was baffled. Who owned the garden? Was it the artist? Or the neighbour? It turned out to belong to them both.

The British love the plural. We’re not so good at ‘criterion’ and ‘penny’, often plumping for ‘one criteria’ and ‘one pence’, and even the Financial Times thinks ‘The performance of smaller companies is a worldwide phenomena’.

We tend to believe ‘biceps’, ‘forceps’ and ‘militia’ come only in the plural, while we breezily add an s to Lyon and Marseille.

And now psychobabble brings us ‘behaviours’, ‘harms’ and ‘learnings’.

‘Geographies’ are cropping up, too. Ye gods. It’s time to retire – to The Cedars, The Gables, Greenacres, The Hollies, Oaklands, Pippins, The Squirrels, Treetops. Perhaps to a mews – but that’s a word for another day.

1920s when many feared Scottish dancing would die out, but it was saved by the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, founded in 1923.

Though the dancing is Scottish, it has a huge following south of the border, particularly in London. Begun under Queen Victoria, the Royal Caledonian Ball has hosted upwards of a

SMALL DELIGHTS Finding just enough gin in the bottle for one more G & T. JAMES SMITH, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

thousand dancers yearly at Grosvenor House.

Since I returned to London from university three years ago, Scottish dancing has been my favourite hobby. And I’m seriously bitter about being robbed of it.

Apart from being an exceptional substitute for going for a run, Scottish dancing is sociable by nature and is a more than necessary cure for the neurosis-inducing madness of isolation.

It takes time to get the hang of Scottish dancing, and there are those who’ll bark at you like a prison warder if you, even to the slightest degree, cock it up. But it is worth it.

Enough of this socialdistancing farce, Boris. Give me back my reeling!

FERDIE ROUS The Oldie September 2020 57

History

Medieval fashion victims

Rules on masks are nothing compared with Edward III’s clothes laws david horspool We’ve got used to restrictions on our personal liberty over the past few months.

Ordering us to wear face masks seemed like another unprecedented intrusion during a year that has been full of them. Do British governments really do things like that?

Not recently, admittedly. Even during the Second World War, when carrying a gas mask is usually said to have been compulsory, there was never, according to the Imperial War Museum, any legislation behind the advice.

Compliance was ensured by peer pressure, with offices and cinemas sending employees home or refusing entry to those who didn’t have their mask. By the way, to anyone tempted to dig out a wartime mask, don’t: the filters are made from asbestos.

Safety provides the excuse for modern government clothing rules. In the Middle Ages, it was that far more reliable British obsession – class. Sumptuary laws governing what people were allowed to wear and how much of it were first passed in the reign of Edward III, whose Act of Apparel stipulated that only knights could wear fur (I picture the parfit gentil ones dolled up like Zsa Zsa Gábor).

But the impetus was not all from the top. Later in Edward’s reign, a Commons petition of 1363 lamented that ‘grooms wear the apparel of craftsmen, and craftsmen wear the apparel of gentlemen, and gentlemen wear the apparel of esquires’. It was answered by the first full set of English sumptuary laws.

This initial sign of popular concern with what not to wear came in the wake of the Black Death. It had killed so many and left the remaining members of the labouring classes more economically powerful, and therefore more threatening to their ‘betters’. And, despite the revocation of the initial Act only two years later, Commons petitions continued to arrive, requesting its 58 The Oldie September 2020

Velvet revolution: James I

reinstatement, addressed to Edward and his successors, Richard II and Henry IV. While dynasties rose and fell, Parliament was still getting its hose in a twist.

Henry tried the laissez-faire Boris Johnson approach, telling his subjects they should ‘govern themselves in their array, each one according to his degree’.

This wouldn’t wash, and the next petition introduced a moral element that would become a staple of sumptuary debate.

It suggested not only that the statute should be put back on the books, but that the punishment for contravention should be excommunication. It’s worth pausing to consider what this meant in an age of religion: wearing the wrong thing should result in the jeopardy of your immortal soul. Henry did not take up this helpful suggestion.

The topic re-emerged in the reign of the first Yorkist king, Edward IV. Never mind the fact that he won the throne only after the bloodiest battle in English history. Two years after Towton, the real threat to the kingdom was the subject of yet another petition, and Edward duly passed an Act that addressed it: ‘The commons of this your said realm,

both men and women, have worn and daily wear extravagant and inappropriate clothing, to the great displeasure of God, the impoverishment of this your said realm, and the enrichment of foreign realms and countries, and the complete destruction of the husbandry of this your realm.’ Again, worries about economics and social standing were causing moral panic.

From then on, for the next hundred years and more, successive Acts were passed to try to shore up the rules about ‘wollen cloth made out of this Realme … except in Bonettes only’ – that was from Elizabeth I, a stranger to wool herself.

There were rules on who could wear velvet, satin and damask – from James I who, in various portraits, was no stranger to any of these fine materials.

Scholars still argue whether the repeated issue of these Acts demonstrates that they were more honoured in the breach, or if loopholes were being tightened on legislation that was generally observed.

Certainly, some fines were issued and offenders could end up in the pillory.

Though sumptuary laws, with their concerns about luxury and excess, died out, that was not the end of government interference in dress. The most wounding came in the reign of George II, after the second Jacobite rising of 1745, when Highland dress was banned as part of a series of measures to stamp out the culture of opposition to the Hanoverians in Highland Scotland. Tartan itself was not, strictly, forbidden, and Highland dress was converted from a badge of belonging into a costume. The most famous raider of that dressing-up box, under the tutelage of Walter Scott, was George IV. That was the last, and rather effective, occasion on which our masters told (some of) us what we should wear. If the current measure has anything like the same success in achieving its aims, it may be worth it. At least we can’t say it hasn’t been tried before.

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT HOW TO BUILD A GIRL Amazon For those who don’t read her columns in the Times or her books, Caitlin Moran is the Dorothy Parker of the West Midlands – and this is her thinly disguised, autobiographical novel of the same name, revamped as a film drama.

Moran, born in 1975, is the daughter of ‘the only hippies in Wolverhampton’.

Her father had been a psychedelic-rock drummer in the ’60s, his pop-star dreams destroyed by osteoarthritis. She was educated at home from the age of 11.

And from this hardscrabble, bohemian upbringing emerged a teenage wunderkind, working on Melody Maker at 16 on the way to becoming one of Britain’s leading writers.

It is an extraordinary story – literally extra ordinary. As the pop star she falls in love with (subtly played by Alfie Allen as a low-key, melancholy figure) says, ‘It's a miracle that anyone gets anywhere from a bad postcode.’

Bowled over: Beanie Feldstein is a delight

60 The Oldie September 2020

It’s a miracle, too, to have a film set in the West Midlands (whose beauties are nicely captured by William Cook on page 78). And it’s a miracle in the film world that a female lead (Beanie Feldstein playing the Moran character, Johanna Morrigan) could be played by a short, tubby, jolie-laide actress.

Feldstein is a delight, perfectly capturing the innate comic qualities of the Brummie accent and the agony of being a precociously clever fish out of water in her brief spell at school.

Moran spent three weeks at Wolverhampton Girls’ High School, and Morrigan lasts barely much longer at the film version. In a neat little trick, the posters of her unconventional heroes – Sylvia Plath, Sigmund Freud and the Brontës – come to life on her bedroom wall and boost her spirits in the face of her dreary bullies and the official ‘cool’ brigade. While the trendy teenagers in her class worship Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Morrigan bravely prefers Little House on the Prairie.

When the young Morrigan starts working on a music magazine, you sense her pleasure in the great thrill of journalism and the access it allows her to her pop-star heroes. In one of Moran’s very good Dorothy Parkeresque lines (she co-wrote the screenplay with John Niven), Morrigan says, ‘My future turned up early.’

Moran also has a good memory for a lost era when pop songs were everything. At one moment, a pop star drops the line ‘I was born in a crossfire hurricane’ into conversation, expecting

Morrigan to get the Jumpin’ Jack Flash reference instantly.

Still, there’s a problem when journalists turn into screenwriters. They become too writerly, particularly if the film is about a writer. At times, the screenplay reads like one of Moran’s newspaper columns. On several occasions, Morrigan is at her typewriter, tapping away – hardly an action scene. At one stage, a journalist reads out her freshly written copy as it emerges from the typewriter.

That’s one of the limitations of film: how can you broadcast long reams of prose? In the masterly 1981 Granada Television production of Brideshead Revisited, producer Derek Granger (still with us, happily, at 99) overcame the problem by rewriting John Mortimer’s script and getting Jeremy Irons to read out tracts of Evelyn Waugh in that elegiac voice-over.

Director Coky Giedroyc doesn’t pull off the transfer from page to screen as well as Granger. And there are clunking, am-dram bursts of trashy rags-to-riches sentiment. But they are only minor – imagine how Hollywood would have dunked this story in a warm bath of triumph-over-adversity sentiment.

This film could not be other than British, as it revels in the comedy of snobbery – at times, Caitlin Moran is Alan Bennett, 40 years on. Like Bennett, she is good at bathetic lines. At one point, Morrigan’s brother (an agreeably grumpy Laurie Kynaston) attacks her for thinking she’s ‘frigging Superman’ when all she is is someone writing the word ‘jangly’ – that’s a spot-on description of plenty of journalists I can think of with too high an opinion of themselves.

How good that cinemas are starting to reopen. During lockdown, new films have had to undergo a tricky test – are they worth watching on the small screen?

This one is.

THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD BLUEPRINT MEDEA

GARY SMITH

Finborough Theatre/YouTube (until 2nd September) You all know the plot of Euripides’s Medea, right?

Medea, Princess of Colchis, and wife to Jason (of Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame), mother to his children, gets the hump because he’s ditching her for a fancy Corinthian princess, and so kills him and their children.

Julia Pascal, the veteran playwright and director, updated the play last year for a production at the Finborough Theatre, and now you can see it on YouTube.

Medea (Ruth D’Silva) is an ex-PKK fighter for Kurdish freedom, who enters the UK on a dodgy passport (how she manages this, given that the passport is spotted as fake at the border, is not made clear). Working as a cleaner at a gym, she meets the young Iraqi British Jason (Max Rinehart), originally called Mohammed, who is doing the Knowledge.

They fall in love, despite her extremely rudimentary knowledge of English, and have twins. Then Jason’s father (Tiran Aakel) puts the kibosh on the union and, after a brief struggle, persuades him to abandon Medea and marry his wealthy cousin, Glauke (Shaniaz Hama-Ali).

The production is about as low-tech as you can get – be warned. And be forgiving, and grateful that the Finborough filmed this at all. They weren’t to know, setting up their fixed single camera, that this would be the only way we’d be able to watch theatre.

But in a way it recreates the theatre experience quite well. Outside ambient noise trickles through, or at least I think it does; I’m assuming the police-car siren we heard was zooming down the road outside and not part of James Peter Moffatt’s soundscape. But it could have been.

Later on, we get recorded sounds of emergency vehicles, but this time we are having a flashback to the chaos of Medea’s past. At least I think we are. The scenery doesn’t change, and at times the jumps between past and present – we get quite a few flashbacks – can be confusing.

But then that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it embodies how past traumas can live on for ever. Let’s call it ‘raw’.

Medea is a peach of a role: Sarah Bernhardt, Diana Rigg and Maria Callas have played her, and you can imagine how they would have handled it; Ruth D’Silva, despite her military history, comes across as rather a drip – sweet and dignified, but still a drip – and you have to wait until the end before she gets her

Hell hath no fury like a princess scorned: Medea the murderer (Ruth D'Silva)

revenge. Unlike in the original Euripides, you don't realise from the very outset that Medea is as mad as a wet hen at Jason’s forthcoming nuptials and on the warpath.

‘A committed portrayal,’ said one critic about D’Silva’s performance, which sounds a bit faint-praisey to me, commitment being one of the first things you might expect from an actor, as opposed to, say, wandering out of the theatre halfway through the play to meet a friend for a light meal.

Pascal ticks a few boxes, such as the plight of the modern asylum-seeker, the patriarchal nature of Muslim families and the whole rat’s nest of antagonisms in the Middle East. But these seem perfunctorily addressed, and one is left asking questions such as what does Medea bring to the story of the PKK, or of asylum-seekers?

And what do the PKK, and asylumseekers, bring to the story of Medea?

I’m struggling with this, to be honest.

Well, you wouldn’t want to mess with either Medea or a Kurdish freedom fighter. That’s about the only point of contact I can think of.

Oh, there are others, but they feel a bit shoehorned in: Pascal’s Medea’s grandfather is called a ‘king’, but I suspect the term is used more as an honorific than an actual title; and she’s also a dab hand with unguents. The scene in which she kills her rival, Glauke, is a little confusing. For a while, I wondered whether they were going to run off together to form a lesbian collective – there is some business where

Medea teaches her how to ‘relax’ so that losing her virginity will be pleasurable.

‘I’ve never felt this way before,’ says Glauke in a dreamy, sexy way, which I gather from internet research is the kind of thing that gets said on such occasions, but, shortly after that, she is killed. How, exactly, is a little vague, unless you know your Euripides.

‘What have you done?’ she cries, and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself. The murder of the twins is represented by Medea screwing up two pieces of paper each bearing the picture of an infant and making a face. I don’t think Sarah Bernhardt would have done it like that.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE You can get away with any old scribble in a newspaper column.

Working-at-home hacks need not even get up from their chairs, engage with another human being or make any effort at all.

The Twittersphere takes over newsprint.

The sky is so blue, they might write. I made some sourdough. My hair’s gone grey. My cat’s gone missing. I’m wearing dungarees.

Over-confessional men boast of their domestic uselessness; their female counterparts share recklessly (‘I’m looking for a sperm donor in lockdown’) as COVID gives free rein to Phil Space and Polly Filla. Who reads such stuff?

Well, I do, of course – omnivorously.

But when I cast aside the papers The Oldie September 2020 61

and switch on my radio, I expect evidence of some graft. Not since Howard Jacobson’s A Point of View, when he grumbled for ten minutes about having to fold plastic bags into pocket-sized squares so as not to appear unmanly when plodding ignominiously to the supermarket, has narcissism been indulged on Radio 4.

Listeners demand solid info, riveting stories and bizarre facts – even from a half-hour feature. The effort needed to plan, pitch, research, record and edit such a programme – and then get it scheduled and broadcast – is prodigious and ill-rewarded. (And its chances of being heard are fleeting – so hooray for Pick of the Week and Sounds.)

Example: Life, Death and the Foghorn, presented by Jennifer Lucy Allan. It was inspired by Lisa Autogena’s unforgettable Foghorn Requiem, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2013 from South Shields, that seaside paradise at the mouth of the Tyne. My childhood bedroom, less than a mile from the South Shields lighthouse, would be invaded every 15 minutes by its searchlight, and its haunting, yearning foghorn groan would soothe me to sleep, secure and protected.

But the foghorn blares no more. No longer does it warn ships off rocks and keep safe those in peril on the sea. Now they have satellite guidance, giving out puny beeps.

Ms Allen, ‘foghorn-obsessed’ and having done years of research, found fellow enthusiasts across the globe: in Vancouver, Northern Ireland, Australia – who collectively mourned a future where nobody will remember the foghorn and the lives it saved. The producer was Jack Howson, for the enterprising indy company Reduced Listening.

Simon Schama’s The Great Gallery Tour proves you don’t need pictures on radio. Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado: ‘The best picture ever made, many people think,’ he said. ‘Take an hour, or three.’ And Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei: ‘You will never see a woollier lamb. It lies there in the empty darkness, its little feet bound, seemingly resigned to its fate. The emotion is intensely poignant.’ His description of Picasso’s Guernica somehow was somehow more telling than the visual version on BBC2 the same week, when it featured in Portillo’s Madrid (Great Continental Railway Journeys).

Take How They Made Us Doubt Everything, on the tobacco companies’ cover-up of the lung-cancer threat. Or The Moral Maze on what will be left of city centres, post-crisis – can we be rid of the unbearable bits like people-jams, and keep some of the 62 The Oldie September 2020

benign green calm? Solipsism is absent from such programmes.

And from Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, Jonathan Freedland’s The Long View, Matthew Parris’s Great Lives, and Polly Vernon’s The Patch – in which Polly takes a random postcode and unearths a story therein. World Service features are the equivalent of a New Yorker ‘long read’. The one on War and Peace, hosted

by Bridget Kendall, was superb. No twittering allowed here.

PS Oldies will appreciate the latest Martin Jarvis production. Remember I Love Lucy, the 1950s TV sitcom with Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz?

Jarvis’s new drama serial for Radio 4, Desi Loves Lucy, has uncannily convincing performances and includes Jarvis & Ayres Productions’ stars – Alfred Molina, Stacy Keach, Mike McShane and guess who, playing I Love Lucy’s creator, Jess Oppenheimer?

Bafta-winning Jared Harris.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS My mother-in-law, 88, fully believes a woman’s place is in the home, where she should be icing cakes and dusting the bric-a-brac. That my wife got on with having a career and only seldom ran the church fête was a great moral crime.

On the other hand, there’s my own mother, 85, still to this day seething that she was shoved in the kitchen, expected to do the laundry and the shopping. Her volcanic intelligence had no outlet – despite her passing the 11-plus and going to grammar school, her father made her leave early, saying, ‘There’s no point educating women, as all they do is have babies.’

These differing fates are the subject of Mrs America (BBC2), in which to well-groomed matrons ‘equality for women’ is anathema. Mrs Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, quite

Australia's Mrs America: Cate Blanchett

accepts the patriarchal way of doing things, and if women are ‘kept in their place’ it is only for their own good. They are not level-headed. They are not equipped to earn a living. It is their privilege to swap muffin recipes, bake bread, raise the children and put up with bad sex on demand from boorish husbands – all in the name of ‘the traditional American family’.

The scene is set in 1971, the era of orange and brown furnishings, big hair and bigger spectacle frames. Songs from Hair are on the radio. Revolution is in the air.

Feminism is getting going – there are 40 million ‘homemakers’ who might not be as keen as Mrs Schlafly on ‘dirty diapers and dirty dishes’. Women, if questioned, if offered a choice, may quite enjoy being ‘liberated from men and housework’.

The Republicans view such a notion as unpatriotic. In any event, the ‘libbers’ are simply frustrated old bats, easily ridiculed. ‘No one likes feminists,’ we are told. ‘They’re no fun.’

Furthermore, if the Equal Rights Amendment came to pass, this would mean, says Mrs Schlafly on talk shows and in her newsletters, that no alimony would be payable, widows’ pensions would be scrapped, women would have to serve in the armed forces, and there’d be a mushrooming of day-care centres and unisex lavatories. Furthermore, how comical it would be, when the genders are equal, to see men looking after babies, pushing prams.

Women can function, runs the traditionalist argument, only because they receive the ‘love and protection of men’.

It is simply not possible to be single and have a good life – you’ll be a bitter spinster.

It doesn’t quite help, in this series, that the opposing ‘feminist totalitarian nightmare’ is populated by actresses like Tracey Ullman, who portrays Betty Friedan like a character in a Woody Allen film. Margo Martindale in a little red hat is also comical. At least Rose Byrne looks like Gloria Steinem.

But it is Cate Blanchett’s show.

Smiling like a razor, she has always been very good at witches and bitches, from Queen Elizabeth I to Cinderella’s stepmother. Phyllis Schlafly joins this band – and the paradox is that she was a bright woman, an expert on military matters and the Soviet threat, who ran for Congress and had her own political career. Her secret to having it both ways? In the background, a rich, compliant husband, and black maids to run the household.

One of the ways the ‘institution of marriage is being eroded’ is legalised abortion, or what Gloria Steinem

Ed McLachlan

‘Mind if I use your toilet?'

euphemistically calls ‘reproductive freedom’. The compelling series The Secrets She Keeps (BBC1) shows the sheer madness procreation (or nonprocreation) can induce. Laura Carmichael, as a stalker and babysnatcher, is intense and evil, carrying out her elaborate plans – disguises, murder, theft, endless lies and deceit.

In an attempt to curry a bit of sympathy, there are flashbacks to her own terrible upbringing: paedo rape by Jehovah’s Witnesses, road accidents, enforced adoption – the usual. Her sorry life is contrasted with lovely Jessica De Gouw’s, who is having a fling with her husband’s best friend; so questions arise about who the biological father of the new (stolen) baby might be. The husband, not to be left out, is banging an estate agent. It is set in Sydney, which looks as dingy as Skegness.

I recommend a documentary on Amazon Prime, Love, Marilyn, based on readings (by Glenn Close and others)

from Monroe’s diaries and letters. Used as she was by overbearing men, the two main villains in her life were Lee Strasberg, who intentionally broke down her spirit, made her dependent on him and sent her to psychiatrists – all that Fifties belief in pills and electric shocks – and Arthur Miller, who could see she was good for his career.

Yet Monroe wasn’t really an actress (hence her driving directors to distraction) but a sort of hummingbird in flight.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE EMBARRASSED TO BE BRITISH The depth of the crisis that has engulfed the performing arts in Britain in recent months has been an accident waiting to happen.

In 1982 William Rees-Mogg, newly installed as chairman of Arts Council of Great Britain, was entrusted with initiating a root-and-branch reform of

the system of state funding of the arts that had existed since the Council’s founding

by John Maynard Keynes in 1946.

Margaret Thatcher was no Keynesian, but she valued the high arts – knew more about them, indeed, than many imagined. She was proud of the fact that London had become one of the world’s great cultural centres; in music, the cultural centre. And it mattered to her that it should remain so.

So what happened? ‘Nowhere,’ she later wrote, ‘were the proper limits of what the state should do more hotly disputed than in the world of the arts.’ By her own report, she took a middle way. In reality, she wanted the private sector to become ‘the new Maecenas’ – Emperor Augustus’s famously wealthy patron of the arts – ‘raising more money and bringing business acumen and efficiency to bear on the administration of cultural institutions’. By the time she left office in 1990, it was already a busted policy – and worse was to follow.

One earthquake, in the late 1990s, was the collapse of the classical-record industry, on which our mainly freelance London orchestras relied for a significant part of their income. Nowadays an unsubsidised orchestra such as the LSO needs a near-capacity audience – impossible in current circumstances – merely to break even, where the subsidyrich Berlin Philharmonic does not.

The tectonic plates were shifting elsewhere, with major shocks to the banking system causing newly emboldened lobby groups to drive long-serving sponsors of the arts – Shell, BP and other easily targeted benefactors – beyond the pale. As Max, the engagingly unrepentant Marxist don in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play, Rock ’n’ Roll, wearily reflects, ‘If capitalism can be destroyed by antiracism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice, and every special interest already covered by the Social Democrats, is there a lot of point in being a Communist?’ Or remaining in England at all, asks one of the play’s émigré Czechs.

Which brings us to 6th July 2020. The performing arts are on their uppers and, lo, there appeared a certain Oliver Dowden bearing funds – £1.57bn, to be precise. Spokespersons for the arts expressed themselves overjoyed, as it’s politic to do when your jailer unexpectedly brings you a crust and a cup of water. Indeed, the scene in Act 1 of Beethoven’s Fidelio, where the prisoners briefly hymn the morning air, instantly came to mind.

The Daily Telegraph was cock-a-hoop.

Here’s a package, their man reported, The Oldie September 2020 63

of the Proms, according to the Radio Times, is around £10m, of which £5m is normally recouped in ticket sales. That’s small change (19p per licence fee) to an organisation that, only the other day, managed to find down the back of the sofa £100m with which to fund a new emergency ‘diverse-talent’ target.

The Salzburg Festival, 100 this year, is currently running half of its 200-event programme to 80,000 socially distanced ticket-holders. The BBC’s strapline for the Proms, ‘The World’s Greatest Festival of Classical Music’, suggests that it’s in the Salzburg league.

‘World-beating!’ as our verbally incontinent Prime Minster would no doubt exclaim. Except that it isn’t. Not by a long chalk.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON NICK CAVE, ALEXANDRA PALACE

CHRISSTOCKPHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY

Eyes front: BBC Proms rehearsal at London's Royal Albert Hall

that bests those naysayers who claim that the Johnson government has no care for the arts, while trumping ‘even Germany’s €1bn bail-out’.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. That particular €1bn, from Angela Merkel’s long-serving and widely revered culture minister, Monika Grütters, was simply last month’s addition to the €50bn – yes, €50bn – emergency fund she had announced in March.

Not to German theatres, orchestras, opera houses and the like – a high proportion of their outgoings are already paid for by the state – but to small businesses and freelancers, ‘including those from the cultural, creative, and media sectors’ – that same freelance community the Johnson government has studiously ignored.

There’s one British institution, of course, whose musicians are fully funded. Which raises the question, what happened to the first seven weeks of the BBC’s nine-week Proms season? This at a time when concert halls and the occasional opera house have been opening in Europe, broadcasting from behind closed doors or with reduced audiences.

The BBC owns its orchestras and choirs, has enough cameras, microphones, producers and presenters to cobble dogs with, and has at its disposal the Royal Albert Hall, one of the world’s largest concert arenas, currently standing empty and itself in financial difficulty.

Money can’t be the problem. The cost 64 The Oldie September 2020

Despite the ongoing turmoil in my inky trade, a crack cadre of rock and pop critics still clings on to leaky hulls like barnacles until our various ships go down.

We’ve been cooling our heels for months in the annus horribilis of 2020.

No live music. No concerts. No more trying to make out a tiny Mick Jagger on a huge screen. No more lusty, dusty, mass gatherings in the gloaming, wondering when to find the long and winding road to the stinking dyke of Portaloos.

What if our like will never hear live music again? No more Glasto, Latitude or Port Eliot? The thought makes me miss it all already – even that Freddie Mercury tribute act in the O2.

All I have to bring to the table, then – and it really is the best of a bad job, for

the reasons I don’t need to enumerate here – is Nick Cave’s solo gig at Alexandra Palace – called Idiot Prayer – which wasn’t a gig at all.

The set-up was simple. It was 21 songs, one after the other, in the hangar-like space, with a funereal and lanky Nick Cave accompanying himself on a Fazioli grand piano. No band. No light show. No girls in summer dresses. It was streamed by the excellent Dice app, and I shelled out £16 to watch it on my laptop.

It was strangely hypnotic and beautiful. ‘This is the last song,’ I’d tell myself, as the sombre baritone rumbled away for hours. ‘Then I’ll watch the Murdoch doc.’ But, somehow, I didn’t.

Cave occasionally shuffled a page of lyrics onto the artful pile on the floor, fanned around the Fazioli. I waited for him to sing Into My Arms, the elegy he wrote after the death of his son, and it was worth the wait. He held me.

Of course, I wanted my money’s worth but, in any case, it repaid watching in full.

The entire exercise bore out my theory that the mark of an artist’s worth is to sustain a book, film, concert or album that has been months or years in the making for consumption in one sitting, without feeling the joins or seeing the working. For 90 minutes, I watched a man in black, alone, called Cave.

It was the very definition of 2020, and I hope never to see its like again. I would frankly prefer to die or move to somewhere sensible like Sweden than carry on like this. But, as a surviving colleague on the Independent, Fiona Sturges, judged stoutly, ‘If this is the gig of the future, Cave is the man to show us how it’s done.’

Definitely music to slit your wrists to!

Dark Cave: the sombre, elegiac spirit of 2020

Clockwise from top left: works by Ann Dowker, Vanessa Gardiner, Linda Ryle, Władysław Mirecki, Stephen Chambers and Michael Kane

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU SIX PAINTERS SELECTED BY ANDREW LAMBIRTH Browse & Darby, Cork Street, London, 10th September to 8th October I should say at the outset that Andrew Lambirth is a confrère – not a colleague, since we have never worked together – whom I have long admired as art critic, biographer and curator.

Our tastes do not always coincide, but they are similar. Life would be sad if one could not write about people and things that one approves of.

The six artists he has chosen for this online and actual exhibition, five British and one Irish, are all, in a loose sense, figurative painters, but their styles, subjects and approaches are different enough to give those hanging the physical show several interesting challenges.

Each painter is showing six to eight works, all of them new. This has extended the range of subjects, since the postmodern Stephen Chambers (who is

unafraid to offer beauty) has spent his lockdown painting flowers in Berlin, while Ann Dowker calls up recent visits to Egypt, where she stayed for a time at Luxor.

Dowker deserves at least three cheers for her remarks that ‘Good painting is always optimistic’, and ‘I feel very strongly connected to my “artistic heritage” for, if you do not acknowledge and value the past, how can you possibly connect with the present, let alone the future?’

Vanessa Gardiner, who lives in Dorset, paints the shores of the West Country, conjuring a solid reality from

‘It’s been months now, Edna, but I still can’t see any improvement. I’m just worried you might not be getting anything at all out of this class’

the geometric blocks of cliff, sea and sky – clean, crisp and evocative, in Lambirth’s words.

Michael Kane, born in Dublin in 1935 and the oldest of the group, is highly regarded in Ireland, less familiar in the London art world – although this may change with the publication of a twovolume autobiography, which is unlikely to be dull. His boldly coloured expressionist paintings certainly aren’t, and take the show closest to abstraction.

Władysław – ‘Waj’ – Mirecki was born in Chelmsford, and Essex remains his home. He runs the Chappel Galleries, Colchester, and has made a leitmotif of the great Chappel Viaduct. Here he travels further, to Salisbury, where he pays worthy homage to Constable, and also to Barnard Castle, where he looked closely at a 14th-century bridge.

Mirecki is self-taught, and evidently a good teacher.

Linda Ryle ‘survived the prevailing fashions for Abstract Expressionism and Constructivism at Goldsmiths’ and has found a very individual voice. It is gentle, and sometimes melancholy. Here her dog-head-handled stick leaning in a corner suggests that it is waiting for Hammershøi to take it for a walk.

The Oldie September 2020 65

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER GRASS MENAGERIE Lockdown travel restrictions have robbed me (and thousands of others) of visits to gardens throughout most of the year.

I now hanker to see Neil Lucas’s Knoll Gardens on the edge of the New Forest.

It’s five years since I last wandered their sinuous gauzy paths, but memories remain fresh as the proverbial daisy.

I was a late convert to ornamental grasses, finally won over at Graham Gough’s nursery, Marchants Hardy Plants – a Sussex destination with the same pulling power as Glyndebourne (another loss this year) just a few miles away. Music and gardens. Glyndebourne has them both, but Graham too has music in his heart – his impromptu outburst of (unaccompanied) Schubert songs at an outdoor lunch for his 50th birthday a few years ago still rings in my ears.

Both Neil and Graham use grasses inspirationally, sewing them into borders where late-flowering perennials – goldenrods, rudbeckias, asters and a host of other so-called prairie plants – reach their peak, looped at this time of the year with gossamer cobwebs strung with crystal droplets of early-morning dew.

Should you find yourself close to the glorious South Downs, there’s a yet grander grassy fix to be had at Paul and Pauline McBride’s Sussex Prairie Garden where, intriguingly, over several flat acres, tension between formality and informality creates theatrical storms of animated colour.

Animation seems key to this kind of scheme. The meanest breeze will stir and twitch these mostly lanky-stemmed plants, delightfully blurring for a few seconds any sharp view of individuals.

Piet Oudolf’s name comes to most people’s minds when there’s talk of ornamental grasses and prairie flowers.

He works internationally – most famously planting New York City’s High Line, a redundant stretch of elevated railroad extending now for almost two miles from West 9th Street to 34th Street. Oudolf’s own garden and plant nursery at Hummelo in the Netherlands is a showcase of personal inspiration.

But you needn’t venture across the water to see this Dutchman’s work. His signature is writ boldly in this country: in the old walled garden at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire, the Millennial Garden at Pensthorpe Natural Park in Norfolk, Trentham Estate in Staffordshire and in the grounds of Hauser & Wirth’s contemporary and modern art gallery in Somerset.

Should you venture that far southwest, make a day of it and visit the Newt – formerly Hadspen House – nearby. An altogether different and eye-opening gardening experience.

But back to Dorset, to Neil Lucas’s Knoll Gardens, right next door to the famed Trehane Nursery – first call for anyone wanting camellia or blueberry plants, and none too distant from Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, as resplendent as Neil’s garden at this time of the year.

In his book, Designing with Grasses

Neil Lucas's Knoll Gardens, Dorset

(2011), Neil demonstrates the use of these ornamentals in various situations: borders and containers, dry and wet gardens. Such devotion to them triggered the Knoll Gardens Foundation in 2008, a charity he dedicated to refining and promoting a wildlife-friendly, naturalistic gardening style, using his garden as a showcase and base for experimentation.

The charity also seeks to provide advice and education in helping gardeners avoid wasting valuable long-term natural resources on shortterm horticultural effects. By promoting the use of sustainable gardening practices to protect wildlife habitats, reduce water usage and encourage biodiversity, the Foundation aims to ensure the long-term health of green spaces to benefit future generations.

It’s an admirable ambition and, knowing Neil as I do, admittedly less well than I’d like, I believe he’ll score triumphantly.

Bring on the grasses, short or tall.

Converted I am. Converted I remain.

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD OKRA The coriander has been growing so prolifically here this summer that I have been thinking of oriental vegetables.

An aubergine plant is showing healthy fruit in the greenhouse, and I hope for a crop of the Japanese mooli radish during September.

On my list of new vegetables to try next year is okra, also known as ladies’ fingers, which might offend those of uncertain gender. More worryingly, I learn that during the American Civil War slaves had to grind okra seeds to make a coffee substitute for Confederate soldiers. In today’s woke culture, could this mean that, with its tenuous historical link to slavery, okra may become unacceptable? Perhaps we had better start growing our own.

The Oldie September 2020 67

Okra is best grown in a greenhouse or polytunnel, in a temperature that should not fall below 15°C. The seeds should be soaked in warm water before sowing in early spring and, in the absence of a heated greenhouse, they can be germinated in the airing cupboard.

When grown in larger pots or in grow bags, under cover or possibly on a warm, sheltered terrace, the plants can be treated rather like cucumbers or melons, requiring plenty of water in summer. As a member of the mallow family, and related to hibiscus, the okra plant has most attractive creamy-coloured flowers with a dark red centre.

When the okra pods start to form – they stand upright on the plant – it is important to pick them small – about three inches long – before they become stringy and tough. But beware the short hairs on the plants, which can irritate bare skin.

The plants may grow up to four feet tall, and pods can continue to be picked from July until the first frosts.

Varieties include Clemson’s Spineless, Pure Luck and the red-podded and red-leaved Burgundy.

Most of us will be familiar with okra only in Indian restaurants, where it is called bhindi, or in the Louisiana dish gumbo. The seeds within the pods are also edible when baked and are full of health-giving minerals – even though they may not make very good coffee.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD HOME ON THE ITALIAN RANGE The Italians are fiercely regional. That’s evident from the way they build their cities and towns: castellated and crenellated, with a population ever ready to drop the drawbridge and pour boiling (olive) oil on invaders.

This me-first attitude has ensured that Italian home cooking, cucina della donna, has survived the fads and fashions popular elsewhere, and provides the raw material for Elizabeth Romer’s new memoir with recipes (remember The Tuscan Year, back in 1984?).

An account of life and cooking in the venerable Italian city where she and husband John have lived for more than 50 years, Beppina and the Kitchens of Arezzo is the result of a happy coincidence: the purchase of a 1900 edition of Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina with a bundle of handwritten recipes by the original owner, Beppina, tucked in the back. This is the starting point for the narrative.

Recipes are discursive rather than 68 The Oldie September 2020

evenly). Add abundant grated Parmesan, sprinkled throughout the bowl and over the top. The sauce is just as delicious combined with tagliatelle, farfalle or penne.

prescriptive – such a relief. Apologies to the author for the need to cut her illuminating asides for reasons of space – a good reason to buy the book.

Pappardelle with duck sauce In Arezzo, the author notes, the correct pasta for pappardelle all’aretina is a home-made all-egg dough rolled to appropriate thinness, cut into 8cm squares or long strips about 6cm in width. To serve four: One duck, a little olive oil,100g prosciutto crudo, one celery stalk, one carrot, one shallot (raw ham, celery, carrot, shallot together make up the classic Italian flavouring base), a few sage leaves, a small bunch of basil and another of parsley, one glass of white wine, 700g chopped tomato, grated nutmeg, salt, freshly ground black pepper, 400g pasta, abundant grated Parmesan.

Wash, dry and quarter the duck, pepper and salt the pieces and let them brown in a large pan with a little olive oil.

When the duck is golden on all sides, add the prosciutto, celery, carrot, shallot, sage, basil and parsley, which you’ve chopped together to make the usual trito or battuto.

Turn the duck so it takes on the flavours. After a few minutes, tip out of the pan any excess fat (likely with a farmyard bird; unlikely if the duck is from the wild).

Pour on the white wine and let it sizzle and evaporate. Add the tomato and a good sprinkle of grated nutmeg, salt and pepper. Cover the pan and let it cook over a low flame for about an hour and a half till the duck is tender. Remove the duck pieces from the pan and reserve in a warm oven. Stir the remaining sauce well and make sure it remains hot.

Cook the pasta in salted boiling water till it is al dente; drain it well. To serve, take a large warm bowl and, in it, mix the pasta into the sauce with the aid of two forks (essential to distribute the sauce

Torta di mele al burro For this buttery apple cake, you will need 300g self-raising flour, 150g butter, 200g sugar, 2 eggs, 4 Rennet apples or ripe Coxes, peeled and diced. Cut the butter into the flour, rubbing it well with your fingertips till it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Pour the sugar into the eggs. Add to the flour and mix to a fairly stiff dough, adding the diced apple as you go. Roll out to fit a buttered baking dish.

Bake at 180°C/350°F for 50 minutes.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE WHEN IN NAPLES...

The time is nigh for UK newspapers to introduce an extra column, alongside Cases, Deaths and Deaths per Million, in their woeful world coronavirus tables.

And it’s Humbuggery: the propensity for a nation’s citizens to tut or, even, denounce one another for often imagined virus infringements. I fear the UK would retain its pole position – and right at the bottom would be the former Kingdom of Naples, whose people have never lost their belief in the capricious gods.

Defiant Naples, the only city that mounted a successful insurrection against the Nazis, is short of tourists and money but it’s awash with smiles.

The city might well be twinned with Havana, considering the neglect of its Spanish glories and the similarities between the pervasive authority of Castro’s Communism and that of the Comorra – not least in its rubbish and graffiti.

The buzz of its street life puts Rome in the shade. Its citizens are famously proud of being Neapolitans first and Italians second. In the 1990 Italian World Cup, Maradona went on TV to appeal to Neapolitans to support Argentina against Italy in the semi-final, in their own stadium. The next day, the city was bedecked with Argentinian flags.

We have just spent three very happy days at the delightfully cheap and friendly Duomo House overlooking the duomo. Not 100 yards from the hotel is Pio Monte della Misericordia, whose altarpiece, The Seven Works of Mercy, was painted by Caravaggio, in 1607.

Naples comes closer to competing with Rome in gastronomic, archaeological and artistic wonder than any other Italian city south of Florence.

The star of the Neapolitan baroque

pageant is the 18th-century Cappella Sansevero, the mausoleum built by Prince Raimondo di Sangro, which houses Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ.

The miracle of this extraordinary prone sculpture, at which even Bernini would have marvelled, is that one is tempted to lift the shroud that clings to His corpse as they look like separate entities. This was the only queue we saw. (Book online ahead.)

Two hundred yards away, calm can be found in the cloisters of Basilica di Santa Chiara, which were converted in the 18th century from a kitchen garden into a series of walkways adorned with majolica tiles and frescoes.

Naples thrives on dough and fried food, and it’s best to wallow at least once.

Our best find was Pizzeria Donna Sofia (Loren, of course) on Via dei Tribunali.

Not just pizzas and arancini but frittatine, the Neapolitan fritture. This will give you strength for the world-class National Archaeological Museum, home to the mosaics of Pompeii and the monolithic Toro Farnese, restored

by Michelangelo.

We were very lucky to have restaurant tips from Naples guide Sophia Seymour (www.lookingforlila.com), who led us to the pretty terrace and antipasti of Taverna del Arte, near the university, and the fish dishes of La Stanza del Gusto, just by lively Piazza Bellini.

If it all gets a little hot, head up to the Royal Palace of Capodimonte with its Titians and the best view of Vesuvius, the bay and islands. Or take a ferry to Procida, where Il Postino was filmed, and enjoy a swim and linguine allo scoglio at the Lido La Conchiglia. Summer is far from over.

The Duomo House, 133 Via Duomo, Naples; tel: 0039 393 645 2966; houseinnaples.it/the-duomo-house

DRINK BILL KNOTT VINTAGE WINE BARS When I was a student in early-1980s London, my drinking haunts depended largely on the state of my finances.

At their lowest ebb, that meant 30p happy-hour pints of Courage Best in the student-union bar, but any small windfall would tempt me to pricier places, often the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, where I would nurse a pint of Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter, leaf moodily through a slim volume of poetry and fail dismally to attract the opposite sex.

If, by some miracle, I did manage to secure a date, the classiest affordable venue was the Warren, a wine bar behind a Tottenham Court Road hotel. As well as

the usual trappings – old Mateus Rosé bottles caked with guttered candle wax, fake Tiffany lamps, Spandau Ballet on the stereo – the Warren was notable for its rabbit-themed décor: most apt, as the shiny-suited sales managers and their shoulder-padded secretaries, flirting over their Parma ham-wrapped monkfish, were unmistakably interested in pursuing the activity for which rabbits are famed.

There was a wine bar of similar vintage called Vats, on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Vats survived in its time-warp bubble until five years ago, when it was bought by Mark Andrew and Dan Keeling: Andrew had worked for ten years at Roberson wine merchant, in Kensington, while Keeling was the MD of Island Records.

The pair bonded over a love of Burgundy, then founded a wine magazine called Noble Rot and, a couple of years later, decided to open a wine bar and restaurant.

Also called Noble Rot, it was quickly populated by throngs of eager Rotters, as Noble Rot’s disciples have become known. There was a stellar wine list, of course, while their masterstroke was employing as executive chef Stephen Harris, the much-lauded chef/proprietor of the Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent.

One early dish in particular stole the limelight: turbot braised in prematurely oxidised Bâtard-Montrachet 1998 – a tragedy with a happy ending.

Their second venture, Noble Rot Soho, on the site of the famous old Gay Hussar, opens this autumn; meanwhile, the prolific pair are about to release The Noble Rot Book: Wine from Another Galaxy.

The book is split into two sections.

The first covers such thorny topics as how to buy, serve and match wine, how to build a cellar, and how to order wine in a restaurant without fear, as well as a tongue-in-cheek remodelling of the wine-taster’s flavour wheel: imagined aromas include public convenience, Austrian anti-freeze and Sigourney Weaver.

The second section is a series of essays describing the authors’ travels around the vineyards of Europe: an admittedly small corner of the galaxy, but one populated with extraordinary characters.

From the maverick, Pink Floyd-loving Mâconnais winemaker Jean-Marie Guffens to Glòria Garriga, who once sold agro-chemicals for a multinational and now makes natural wines in Penedès, via dozens of others, Andrew and Keeling’s love not just for great wines, but for the single-minded people who craft them, is palpable on every page. Wine from Another Galaxy is a new jewel in Noble Rot’s already sparkling crown.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines, two whites and a red: a refreshing and delicious Portuguese green wine; a Sicilian white that shows just how impressive the islands wines have become; and a classic claret at a very friendly price.

However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Vinho Verde Vale do Homem, Portugal 2019, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 A fresh, clean white with a hint of spritz, made from the gently floral Loureiro and Arinto: perfect summer drinking.

Bianco Organico, Fabrizio Vella, Sicily 2019, offer price £8.50, case price £102.00 Plenty of complexity and zestiness in this organic Cattaratto: citrus and herbs, with a long, crisp finish.

Château Le Lion d′Or, Blaye Côtes de Bordeaux 2015, offer price £9.45, case price £113.40 Mature claret from a fine vintage, 100% Merlot, from the underrated right-bank appellation of Blaye. Terrific value.

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The Oldie September 2020 69

PA IMAGES/ALAMY

SPORT JIM WHITE ROWING THE EXTRA MILE This is the blue-riband distance of rowing – the length of an Olympic course – and to do it at full pelt is to suffer horribly.

Every piece of documentary footage ever shot of British Olympic rowers tackling the distance invariably ended with them tumbling out of the seat at its conclusion, collapsing to the gym floor. And that was Steve Redgrave and James Cracknell.

In the four years since Moe Sbihi’s 2016 record, no one else had touched it. Even he himself had not come close to his simply astonishing time of five minutes 40 seconds.

But then, several weeks into lockdown, Sbihi’s colleague in the GB eight Tom George trimmed a couple of seconds off his record. Working in the garden of his parents’ home in Wiltshire, George finished the distance in 5:39.8.

As his machine was connected up to the data analysts at GB Rowing, his record was soon recognised. This gave Sbihi, a man to whom the term competitive barely does justice, the incentive to go for it. And, late in July, he in turn broke back George’s record, finishing the gruelling distance in 5:39.6, a magnificent tit-fortat, record-breaking splurge.

Not that he was satisfied. When I talked to Sbihi about it, he said, given that the world record held by an Australian called Josh Dunkley-Smith is an eyemelting 5:35.8, it was about time a Brit started to put in some decent times.

Sbihi was not sure whether it would be he who, in the future, challenged Dunkley-Smith. It was not so much that, at 32, his record-breaking days are soon to be behind him. It was more, he said, that he hoped once COVID protocols allowed he could get out on the water and row in a boat, rather than on a machine. Magnificent as it was, his record, he insisted, was entirely a consequence of lockdown.

The truth was that there was nothing else to do. Stripped of the chance of going out on the water, he was stuck on the machine. Ultimately, he reckoned, breaking this record was insignificant.

And the question he couldn’t answer was whether the fact that two members of the British eight had smashed indoor rowing records this summer will have any effect on their chances of winning gold in Tokyo next summer.

‘If I was from another country, I’d look at what we’d done and say, “Yeah, OK, but let’s see how you get on out on the water,” ’ he said.

Across the world – across all sports – lockdown has prevented athletes from 70 The Oldie September 2020

Front row: champion Mohamed Sbihi

following their usual training procedures.

Endlessly resourceful, the enterprising have adapted, found new challenges and discovered different ways to push themselves.

But they know the only time they will discover whether the new way of doing things will have any effect is the moment they leave the start line in Japan, a full year after they expected to be there. Only when the gun sounds will they find out.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD EMISSION IMPOSSIBLE By the time you read this, it will be too late: the closing date for the public consultation launched by the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) was 31st July. But ministers will be considering its findings – so there is still time for a swelling chorus of warning against well-intentioned harm.

The intention is to advance the ban on new internal-combustion-engined (ICE) cars and vans from 2040 to 2035, or even 2032. The harm is in assuming that the public and the motor industry could, within 12 years, seamlessly and affordably transfer from 2.5 per cent EV (all-electric vehicle) sales to 100 per cent.

No problem in principle, of course – who is against cleaner air and slower global warming? But is it practical? And, in environmental terms, is it desirable?

Practical consequences include serious damage to our motor industry – and yet more unemployment than we already fear thanks to COVID-19.

Car-makers need to plan models and production facilities about three car generations in advance (18-20 years).

A 2040 date is therefore feasible, but forcing seismic change within 12 years, while they struggle to co-ordinate with overseas suppliers and markets with differing requirements, will be deeply disruptive. We should also anticipate a collapse in new-car sales from the late

2020s as buyers opt for nearly-new ICE and hybrid models they can afford rather than the more expensive EVs they can’t.

Not to mention our hotchpotch charging infrastructure. Vehicle cost apart, this is the most significant disincentive for most drivers to go electric, especially those who travel long distances.

Charging needs to be as efficient, quick and easy as our current fuel supply, but it won’t happen under the present free-for-all market arrangements without government co-ordination and regulation. Even if we get that, how confident could we be that a nationwide infrastructure will be fully functioning in just over a decade? Look how the roll-out of full-fibre broadband has turned out.

They’re proposing to ban hybrids, too, which are already penalised under EVincentive schemes. This is self-defeating.

Owing to the lack of infrastructure, many who won’t currently buy EVs are willingly buying hybrids, thus incrementally lowering emissions, but if hybrids are to be treated as petrols or diesels, there’s no incentive to buy them and gain confidence in going fully electric. People will stick with what they know.

Next there’s the low-volume and specialist part of the car industry, ranging from classic cars through small manufacturers to Formula One. As well as employing significant numbers in design, production and parts supply, these are serious export earners and technological innovators. Yet their overall numbers are so small that their environmental impact is negligible. They should be exempted.

Finally, it may often escape ministerial attention that most people don’t buy new cars and never will. They’re too expensive – EVs even more so. If the switch to electric is rushed, there won’t be time for a remotely affordable used-EV market to develop; in which case, the majority of drivers will be forced to hang on to what they’ve got, thus keeping emissions up.

Governments should set standards rather than specify legal restrictions, and they should avoid virtue-signalling. Bear in mind that about 70 per cent of EV batteries originate in China, where they’re often made in coal-fired power stations, and end up in landfill after a stint in wind-power storage.

Banning UK ICE production in 2032 rather than 2040 will compel more people to stick to ICE and probably have no measurably beneficial effect on global warming. But by 2040 we might achieve it without crippling our industry and condemning most drivers to old technology. And we might lower emissions more this way rather than by rushing it.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

I’ve taken the paper out of newspapers We are told that post COVID-19 many things will change for ever.

I’m not certain about that, but I can confirm one permanent change that has taken place in the Webster household.

We now receive our daily newspapers online, rather than on paper, and I don’t regret it at all.

The decision was rather forced on me, initially, when at the start of lockdown our newsagent gave up deliveries. I don’t blame him; it’s a pretty thankless and not

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Online reference books https://www.bartleby.com/reference/ Bartleby.com A large collection of freely available online works including Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and Roget’s Thesaurus.

Big Dave’s Crossword Blog http://bigdave44.com From his Worcestershire village, this retired IT consultant offers help with Daily & Sunday Telegraph crosswords.

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

very lucrative service at the best of times.

So I had either to collect it myself each day or take the drastic step of going online. I chose the latter.

By online, what I really mean is on-tablet. You need to have an iPad or the non-Apple (Android) equivalent that can run the application (or ‘app’) supplied by each newspaper – but you need not pay a fortune.

A basic Android tablet can be had for less than £100, or less than £200 if you want a bigger screen (which I recommend); iPads are more expensive (over £300) but have very loyal followers who say they are worth the extra. I don’t think they are, if all you are using them for is reading the papers, but each to his own. Either kind can also be bought more cheaply second-hand from the likes of musicmagpie.co.uk or uk.webuy.com.

The newspapers’ apps also work on smartphones; this is, like a warm gin and tonic, acceptable in a crisis, but to my mind they are too small for extended reading.

Each member of your household needs a tablet: you can download the morning paper onto all of them under the terms of a single subscription. This means that my wife and I each have our own copy; no more fighting over the various sections at breakfast.

Once you’ve bitten the bullet and sustained this capital outlay, the savings are significant. The Telegraph is currently offering a year of online newspapers for £197; it’s £728 if you want it in print as well. The Times want £312 for a year

online, or £780 for print copies as well.

Add to that the cost of delivery, and you are rapidly heading towards £1,000 pa, just for the pleasure of having something to use to line the guinea pig’s cage. The Oldie is an even bigger bargain at £29.99 for 12 issues, digital only.

I had not really noticed how expensive print newspapers had become; this sort of thing does rather creep up on you. The financial savings alone are enough to persuade me to stay digital, but also my wife tells me that since starting to read her newspaper on an iPad she has been reading far more of it, and is far more inclined to finish an article.

I should add that it’s a very different experience from reading a newspaper’s website. You really do download one day’s whole newspaper, organised in sections, onto your tablet, and it stays there for as long as you wish. By comparison, a paper’s website will be different each time you look at it.

I’m a bit late to the party. Most newspapers, here and in America, have more digital than print subscribers. I suppose the writing is on the wall for print editions.

The only problem is the crossword.

You can do it on the tablet. It is very clever technology but, after so many years of scribbling in the margins to work out anagrams and so on, I can’t get used to it. But I probably shall, in time, and in the meantime I am hundreds of pounds better off each year – and fewer trees have been sacrificed.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The seesaw price of your shopping basket Oldie readers will remember the hard times of 1980 when inflation hit 18 per cent, after bank base rate had peaked at 17 per cent and interest on mortgages was a painful 15 per cent. It is very different nowadays.

Today the government’s aim is to keep inflation at around 2 per cent because a little inflation helps the economy. If it’s too low, people stop spending and wait for prices to get even cheaper, so businesses go bust and employees lose their jobs.

72 The Oldie September 2020

During the lockdown, we could not go shopping even if we wanted to and, as a result, inflation is way below the government’s target – and businesses are failing.

The official inflation rate is calculated by comparing today’s prices in an imaginary shopping basket with those of a year earlier.

In May, inflation hit a four-year low of 0.5 per cent and, in June, it unexpectedly crept up to 0.6 per cent, pushed up by

computer games and recreation generally, and also by clothing because there had been no bargain sales. Nearly 70 things were unavailable at any price, from cinema popcorn to foreign holidays, so these price changes were estimated.

Even without the current upheavals, there are arguments about the relevance of the monthly inflation figure. There are three different price indices. The one used for inflation is the consumer prices index (CPI), which ignores all housing

costs, an outlay that can account for a third of household budgets.

There is a separate index that does include housing costs (CPIH), and the long-standing but scorned retail prices index (RPI), which is known to be flawed and comes out about 0.8 per cent a year higher than it should.

In 2013, RPI lost its status as a National Statistic, but it is still used to calculate increases in rail fares and interest on student loans. In contrast, the Government uses CPI to calculate rises in benefits and the state pension; it uses the lower inflation figure when it pays money out, and the higher one when it is charging people.

National Savings and Investments switched to paying CPI instead of RPI on index-linked certificates in May 2019 because, it said, this would save taxpayers’ money.

The inflation figure is important because, as well as influencing some of our outgoings and salary rises, it is a key factor in the Bank of England’s decision to change base rate, which affects how much we pay to borrow and what we earn on our savings.

Base rate is already at a historic low of 0.1 per cent – perilously close to zero.

The next step would be negative interest rates, when you might pay the bank to hold your savings rather than the other way round. Banks would probably not dare try that.

Anyone looking for a silver lining among collapsed inflation and rockbottom interest rates can find a few savings accounts paying close to 1 per

cent, a ‘real’ rate of interest because even that low rate is higher than inflation.

While that does not add up to much in money terms, your savings are not losing value – at least in theory.

In practice it depends on exactly what you spend your money on. In every month’s shopping basket, some prices go up as others come down.

The Oldie September 2020 73

Getting Dressed

A cutter above the rest

DAFYDD JONES/SHUTTERSTOCK

Patricia Milbourn, stylish hairdresser to Jackie O and Maggie Smith brigid keenan Who could have guessed that the absence of hairdressers would change the whole world’s appearance? Millions went grey, blondes revealed telltale dark roots and elegant middle-aged women morphed into bag ladies…

The sigh of relief when salons reopened after lockdown was of typhoon proportions.

The queen of British hairdressing is Patricia Milbourn, now 86 and still snipping. She was the first ‘real’, posh London hairdresser I ever had an appointment with, back in the sixties.

Until then, every trip to the local salon at home ended in tears, with one of us three siblings consoling the one sobbing at the mirror: ‘Don’t worry – it will grow out.’

Those were days of mouse-brown hair, perms and terrible fringes with a kiss curl arranged on either side of the forehead.

And then my journalist older sister, Moira, discovered Patricia: a red-haired Welsh wonder, smiling and friendly, sharp and funny, working in Aldo Bruno, a salon in Sloane Street, London – and she changed all our lives.

Milbourn spent the war years with her grandmother in Wales, passed her 11-plus in English and Welsh, and was then sent to a grammar school in London where for five years she was teased mercilessly about her accent.

‘Not being a genius academically, I decided I wanted to a beautician and my very clever headmistress suggested the Barrett Street Technical College.’ It’s now the London School of Fashion. ‘I found I enjoyed hair more than beauty – I LOVED cutting hair and, anyway, nobody wanted a young girl to give them beauty treatments.’

Milbourn’s first job was at a grand salon, Alan Spiers, in Berkeley Square, where she stayed for seven years, learning a huge amount from her boss, ‘a wonderful cutter’. One of her clients was an aspiring young Silk shirt from Madeleine; leather jacket from Massimo Dutti; jeans from Peter Jones; Tod’s shoes 74 The Oldie September 2020

actress called Maggie Smith. They were the same age, shared the same humour and have been friends ever since.

Smith followed Milbourn through the various stages of her hairdressing career: after Aldo Bruno, the Cadogan Club (her own ‘shop’), and finally to Motcomb Green in Ebury Street, Belgravia, where, until a recent back operation, she still tended certain clients – and hopes to again soon – and where she has her own hair cut, by Brian, and coloured.

Milbourn is cagey about revealing clients’ names; just think of almost anyone – man or woman – in Debrett’s, Who’s Who or Burke’s Peerage in the last 50 years and the chances are that Milbourn will at some time have had her hand in their hair.

The most famous of them all was Jackie Kennedy, who came whenever possible, originally recommended by her sister Lee Radziwill, who was a fan. ‘The salon had a basement which most grand clients never wanted to go down to, but Mrs Kennedy always did because it shielded her from the paparazzi – and once she’d been seen going down there, all the ladies wanted to do the same!’

Milbourn has ‘done’ countless society weddings (for which she charged a fortune, she says). ‘I always sent the mother out, so I could talk to the bride alone. I think I was a soothing influence.

Husbands often said, “Thank God you were here.”’

Through her life, hairdressing has dictated what she wears: ‘Always

Above: in Capri, 1998. Right: Maggie Smith and her Oscar, 1979

Tod’s shoes as they are comfortable and one is always standing, and slacks and loose tops so that I can move easily. I like Eskander – a great designer I have known for years.’

For skin care, she uses Environ. ‘It is a range made in South Africa and is very good in the sun, plus it is reasonably priced – unlike the Black Rose Cream Mask by Sisley, which I love to use as a very special treat.’ Milbourn loves walking in London but, following surgery, her exercise is currently restricted to physio twice a week.

Ten years ago, she went to India for two months with Smith, filming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. ‘We stayed in the best hotels in Jaipur and Udaipur – it was pure heaven!’ While there, Milbourn saw another favourite client, the chic Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur.

Twice Maggie Smith asked Milbourn to go with her to the Oscars. ‘We had terrific times. It is hysterical, a bit like a cross between a coronation and a Cup Final; all those famous people everywhere. They sit the ones they think are going to win at the ends of the rows of seats, so they can get out more easily to receive their awards. I remember when Maggie won, in 1979, for California Suite, we were sitting in the middle of a row and she didn’t take it in at all… “IT’S YOU, IT’S YOU!” I was shouting.’

The coot

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd And in odd scatt’red pitts, the flags and reads beneath, The coot, bald, else clean black, that whiteness it doth bear Upon the forehead starred, the water-hen doth wear Upon her little tail in one small feather set.

Michael Drayton, from Poly-Olbion ‘Even old Harry in Suffolk never brought me a coot. He did once bring in a magpie!’ says Paul Langley of Cramers, York Way, Islington, epitome of a ‘Traditional English Family Butchers’.

So much for the 1st-September opening of the coot and moorhen (water hen) shooting season, both such unlikely game birds: loath to fly, people-friendly at hint of food, pond-weed feeders (especially coots); and the coot so unappetising, with its ‘bald’ head patch and huge lobed feet, as if God absentmindedly gave it frog legs.

The coot’s sharp beak and calls are enough to send bigger birds such as mallard on their way. Internecine war is endemic, two birds leaning back and striking fiercely with feet and wings; or one attempting to drown another, 10 seconds the limit they can hold their breath.

They mostly dive to feed, heaving weed to the surface on their backs. Nest heaps are often balanced on a submerged support and can be washed away.

Arthur Ransome’s 1934 Norfolk Broads adventure story, Coot Club, has the club’s Bird Protection Society saving a coot’s nest from being destroyed by the yobbish Hullabaloos’ gross motor cruiser.

Building encourages sophisticated co-operation, reeds or sticks carried by a pair like builders placing a girder.

Co-operation can be communal: flocks ward off birds of prey by collectively kicking up a fountain field.

After a week or so, young are jealously divided between the parents, sometimes to the fatal cost of a chick.

The name coot comes from Dutch koet and the mass of Britain’s birds migrate from Holland, 26,000 residents – boosted in winter to 205,000.

Mark Andrew, of Deepdale Marsh on the north Norfolk coast, remembers the shoots, normally a one-off in January, dying out by the late 1970s.

Hickling Broad was especially famous, with up to six drives in a day depending on the wind, the birds driven by a fleet of punts, the guns in punts or hides.

Mark says, ‘Coots are strong flyers and can rise to a height surprisingly quickly. The guns in the boats got the

best shooting. The meat is very dark but not unpleasant.’

Although associated as food with the workers, coots were held in high esteem as a sporting quarry – royalty, titled and landed gentry making up the guns.

The last big coot shoot on Hickling Broad was in January 1961, with Prince Philip one of the party.

Coot-shooting continues in the USA. The internet provides ample evidence and also recipes. A freezer bag is advised and breasts should be stripped of skin and fat within two hours. Toxins soon turn the dead meat rancid.

The Oldie September 2020 77

Travel Hidden Staffordshire William Cook visits Samuel Johnson’s Lichfield house and Tamworth, home to Robert Peel and Queen Aethelflaed

IAN DAGNALL/ALAMY

S

ometimes, it’s the strangest things that bring you back to places you’ve forgotten.

What brought me back to Staffordshire was seeing a statue of Sir Robert Peel in Tamworth, his adopted home town, concealed in a big black box to protect it from protestors. This surreal spectacle reminded me what fun I used to have in Tamworth, and how I’d love to go there again.

I first set foot in Staffordshire 35 years ago, when I scraped a place at Keele University, near Stoke-on-Trent. In the idle years that followed I got to know this enigmatic county fairly well. Two of my student friends got married and bought a house in Tamworth, and I spent many happy weekends there. They left Tamworth 20 years ago and, this year, they got divorced. This news was a shock – it felt as if a chapter of my life had ended.

And then I saw that statue of Sir Robert Peel, boarded up outside Tamworth Town Hall. It may sound daft, but something seemed to be calling me back to Staffordshire again.

Like most oldies, I try to see both sides in any quarrel. I was glad that the statue of Edward Colston was removed, and saddened when Churchill’s statue was 78 The Oldie September 2020

defaced, but it seems the targeting of Sir Robert Peel was a case of mistaken identity. It was Peel’s father (also called Robert) who opposed the abolition of slavery, not his son, who created the modern Conservative Party and founded the Metropolitan Police (another sin in statue-topplers’ eyes). Here’s hoping his statue is uncovered as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, there’s lots more to see in Tamworth, and Staffordshire’s other market towns – such as Newcastle-

Triple-spired Lichfield Cathedral

under-Lyme, in the Potteries, and Leek, the gateway to the Peaks.

Staffordshire is one of England’s less fashionable counties. Sandwiched between Stoke and Birmingham, it’s a place people tend to pass through in a hurry on the way to somewhere else. But if you take the trouble to stop off and nose around, you’ll find plenty of surprises. Maligned, neglected Tamworth is a perfect case in point.

The ancient capital of Mercia, Tamworth has a long and illustrious history but, during the 1960s, its town planners had a jolly good go at eradicating it. Hundreds of antique buildings were torn down and replaced with modern eyesores. If you can ignore these monstrosities, there’s still loads here to discover. Twenty years since my last visit, Tamworth is on the up.

An unsung champion of the town’s rich heritage is David Biggs, chairman of the local Civic Society. His parents started the society in 1973 – he revived it in 2015. He met me outside the train station, beneath a striking modern statue of Aethelflaed (aka Ethelfleda), the formidable woman who ruled Mercia, repelled the Vikings and laid the foundations for modern England.

SUSAN BIGGS

Tamworth Town Hall (1701), with Sir Robert Peel’s statue (1853) – boarded up in June for fear of its being toppled

Our first stop was St Editha’s, Tamworth’s grand old parish church.

Established in the eighth century as part of the palace of King Offa, it’s a spectacular mishmash of Romanesque and Gothic, with some stunning Victorian stained glass (by Edward Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown for William Morris) and a fine, modern window, depicting Queen Aethelflaed, donated by David and his sister Susan in memory of their parents.

After a light lunch at the 15th-century Tudor House Café we dropped in on Sue Verity, a local artist, in her compact studio next door. Sue paints dramatic portraits and cityscapes (Peaky Blinders and Birmingham are her specialities).

It’s fantastic to see creative industries thriving here, even in the wake of COVID. Now big firms are cutting back, Sue believes it’s time for smaller businesses like hers to come into their own, especially in smaller places like Tamworth. ‘I’ve never been so busy,’ she says. ‘You feel the history around you every day.’

Back in the town centre, we met up with George Greenaway, an affable chap who runs an award-winning microbrewery called the Tamworth Tap. George led me down a narrow alley, into a cosy courtyard which he’s converted into an intimate beer garden.

How heartening that punters are prepared to pay a bit more to sup the ales he brews in such a convivial hideaway, rather than staying in and drinking supermarket booze in front of the telly.

We finished our tour high above the old town, standing on the battlements of one of England’s finest motte-and-bailey castles. The curator, Louise Troman, took time out to show me round. Inhabited from Saxon times through to the Victorian era, Tamworth Castle is

intensely atmospheric, terrific fun for families, and the views of the surrounding countryside are sublime.

Tamworth, full of hidden treasures, is mainly a day-trip destination. If you’re planning a weekend away, make your base in Lichfield, 15 minutes away by car or train. Since my last visit, 20 years ago, this charming cathedral town has continued to flourish. The cathedral is beautiful, of course, and the setting makes it special – surrounded by handsome townhouses, framed by lush green fields beyond.

Apart from the cathedral, Lichfield’s main attraction is the large, ramshackle house where Samuel Johnson was born and raised. His father built it himself, to house his bookshop and his family.

Though it was far too big and grand for a struggling bookseller, it was a perfect place for his precocious son to browse.

Today it’s a delightful museum, stuffed with Johnsonian ephemera – much of it acquired from the family of Francis Barber, the Jamaican slave turned manservant to whom Johnson left much of his estate.

After Johnson died, Barber left London and moved to Lichfield, but he fell on hard times and had to sell many of the items he’d inherited from Johnson.

This suitably eccentric museum is a fitting home for them. I was thrilled to learn that Barber’s family still live in Staffordshire – the closest thing Dr Johnson has to direct descendants.

‘Lichfield Cathedral, besieged during the Civil War, desecrated by iconoclasts’

Equally enthralling is the house of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin and an important scientist in his own right. Erasmus was a successful medic, with a thriving local practice, but he still found time for all sorts of experiments and inventions. He dreamt up countless prototypes, including a rudimentary robot. He even anticipated his grandson’s ideas about evolution.

Alongside luminaries such as James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus set up the Lunar Society, which provided the intellectual impetus for the Industrial Revolution. His grandson wrote his biography, acknowledging his immense influence; it was suppressed until the 1970s.

The best thing about Lichfield is simply wandering around town, admiring the gorgeous architecture and wondering what it’d be like to live here.

The town is mainly Georgian, but there are many medieval buildings too, and it’s not just a place to gawp at – there are lots of quirky shops and cafés.

I ended up in the cathedral, just in time for evening prayers. There were only a dozen of us there, all social-distancing, so small and inconsequential in this huge and holy space. It made me think of all the other ups and downs this place of worship has endured – besieged during the Civil War, desecrated by iconoclasts…

These violent disputes put our current troubles in perspective – even the coronavirus. I returned to London feeling a lot calmer, determined to return as soon as possible.

St John’s House, Tamworth (doubles from £100): www.stjohnshouse.co.uk.

Tamworth and Lichfield have good rail connections The Oldie September 2020 79

Overlooked Britain

What Delaval brought to the stable lucinda lambton Sir Francis Delaval added an equine palace to Seaton Delaval, Vanbrugh’s baroque jewel

The expression ‘stone cold’ comes chillingly and beautifully to life, even in summer, with the stables of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland. Feeling frozen to the marrow of your bones, you are surrounded by stone on all sides, to outstandingly noble effect.

It stands on the bleak windswept flatlands hard by the North Sea. Pity the photographer who took the picture opposite – ie me. I was chilled to the very roots of my boots when I took it.

Every centimetre of the building is made of cold, grey stone: the walls of finely dressed stone, the three broad, segmental transverse arches – all ashlar – the softly bulging floors, the stall partitions, the arched mangers and the hay racks.

The stables are of a monumental dignity worthy of attribution to Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of the great house these stables were built to serve. In fact, the stables date from a full 50 years later. Vanbrugh’s Palladian, lacedthrough-with-baroque masterstroke of Seaton Delaval Hall was started in 1718; the stables were begun in 1768.

Admiral George Delaval had commissioned Vanbrugh to design the house, writing that the architect was ‘not disposed to starve the design at all’.

Together, they forged forth with a forceful and aggressive masterpiece. The stables were, it would seem, the work of Delaval’s dashing great-nephew, Sir Francis Delaval.

There is no record of the architect, but a letter he wrote to his brother tells us all.

Having seen Lord Hopetoun’s ‘very magnificent stables’ at Hopetoun House in Midlothian, designed by John Adam between 1750 and 1756 – now, I’m afraid, converted into a gin bar – Delaval was determined to build his own on the same ‘grand plan’.

He wrote of the ‘stone divisions of the stalls, which I am sure you will like as they are very agreeable to the rest of the building. No man has finer horses than we saw there and they have received no inconvenience from the stone.’

He triumphed: the interior of the Northumberland stables is far more beautiful than that of those in Scotland.

Furthermore, as a west wing had already been added to the front of Seaton Delaval, this corresponding stable block to the east gave a handsome new symmetry to the façade of the house.

What an equine palace: 68 feet long by 35 feet wide, reflecting the newly fashionable and much-to-be-welcomed admiration for neoclassical stable design.

Three great arches sweep up to almost the full height of the building, with the central one spanning an apse in which there is a Venetian window looking out on the stable yard.

There are 12 stalls, each with a lead-lined feeding trough, below elegantly arched niches for the hay racks. Most endearingly, the name of each of the first horses to live here after 1768 was painted in graceful longhand above the keystones of the arched niches – and they survive to this day: Zephyrus, Hercules, Tartar, Regulus, Peacock, Julius, Chance, Prince, Pilot, Captain, Admiral and Steady. There they all are, the intimacy of their names most poignantly piercing through time.

When this top-notch beauty of a building was finished, Sir Francis Delaval held a celebratory banquet down the main aisle of the stables. Let us imagine at least a few of the horses’ heads nodding over the proceedings.

Sir Francis was one of the 13 children who were known as ‘the Gay Delavals’ on account of their colourful, outlandish pursuits – and he was the most colourful of the lot. As an MP, Knight of the Bath, soldier and dilettante, he would regularly stage his own theatricals, which were neither mean nor modest events.

When playing the title role in his

Seaton Delaval. Vanbrugh began the central block in 1728; the stables (left) were built 50 years later by Sir Francis Delaval 80 The Oldie September 2020

LUCINDA LAMBTON

Set in stone: the 12-stalled stables. In 1768, their completion was celebrated with a banquet down the aisle

production of Othello, he was given the Drury Lane Theatre for the evening – by no less than David Garrick himself. Even more exceptional, Parliament was adjourned two hours early for this performance!

Sir Francis loved practical jokes and installed devilish devices at Seaton Delaval: one that lowered the beds of his unsuspecting guests into tanks of icy cold water in the middle of the night; another that slid the walls aside to reveal the occupants of the adjacent bedroom.

The stables were his last great act of extravagance. While they have remained miraculously untouched and unspoilt by time, the house has suffered near-terminal disasters. As early as 1752 there was a fire in the west wing, and then in 1822 a fire ravaged the main block.

Yet every cloud, however dark, has a silver lining. With its dividing walls and floors gone, Vanbrugh’s skeleton of stone was revealed to be nobly rising up the full height of the building. And so it remained until the 1950s, when Lord and Lady Hastings, Delaval descendants, moved into the west wing and set about making what repairs they could.

After their deaths in 2007, in December 2009 the great skeletal hulk

‘Sir Francis loved practical jokes and installed devilish devices…’

was taken over by the National Trust.

Millions of pounds were needed – and millions of pounds were raised, thanks to an unprecedented groundswell of local support.

What many consider to be Vanbrugh’s greatest work – and he also built Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard – Seaton Delaval now stands safe and sound, enjoyed by local people, on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne.

With this tour de force, Vanbrugh produced a triumph of originality; no doubt an expression of his always having loved the north as opposed to what he called ‘the tame, sneaking south’. With his architectural adventure of Seaton Delaval and its stables, he showed where his sympathies lay.

The Oldie September 2020 81

Taking a Walk

Lincoln greens and meadow browns

GARY WING

patrick barkham

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows. There are oxlips and nodding violet, woodbine and eglantine.

This dream of midsummer must be reached over bleakly rolling flatlands of wheat and Italian rye grass – and there it glowers, in the darkest of greens, a fragment of fairyland poetry in a prosaic landscape.

Nothing billows quite so promisingly as the edge of a wood in the ordered, arable lowlands. So it was with Bardney Limewoods, an unkempt beast of blackthorn, hawthorn, sallow, hazel and small-leaved lime in the middle of intensively ploughed, scalped and tended Lincolnshire.

Forests are exceptional places – for, despite our many cultural celebrations of trees and woods, we are not a nation of woodlanders. As the great chronicler of British woods Oliver Rackham revealed, these islands were never swathed in dense wildwood, and most trees were swiftly felled when our neolithic forebears began their agricultural revolution. The Romans were notorious deforesters. Tree cover has probably remained below 15 per cent ever since.

So to step into a wood at any time of year is to enter a world very different from our own, cocooned from human noise, wind and other pressures. Woods are not necessarily peaceful places, however, for they seethe with life.

My favourite time of year inside a wood is whenever I happen to be there.

Each new month brings different delights. But an English woodland in high summer – what magic is this!

Bardney Limewoods was almost silent – and not just because I walked it before the nation was fully released from its lockdown to scatter spent portable barbecues and dog poo over every corner of this merrie land. Apart from the clatter of woodpigeons a-wooing, the birds were entering their post-breeding quiet. The last chiffchaffs sang from a high ash, and a woodpecker called shrilly as it darted among deadwood.

82 The Oldie September 2020

A grassy ride of dappled light beckoned between great pillows of sallow. Above stood oak and small-leaved lime, a relic of warmer climes and a signifier of ancient woodland. The breeze in the canopy above sounded like the wood’s breath.

Woodland music and merrymaking were provided by the insects. Metalliccoloured flying beetles of all shapes and sizes partied with humming bees in the airspace. Above them zoomed the predatory whirr of dragonflies. Through the grasses jinked midsummer butterflies: meadow browns, gatekeepers and ringlets.

In the trees above, a flash of something silver – a purple hairstreak.

These woods have found recent fame as a butterfly hotspot, an outpost of southern England that has welcomed the mysterious reappearance of once-extinct tree-dwelling species the purple emperor and the black and brown hairstreaks.

Moving from Great Scrubbs Wood to Little Scrubbs Wood, I reached two unexpected meadows, where conifers had been cleared. They’d been planted during the postwar industrial forestry boom, which bizarrely determined that ancient woods were a good place to plant new trees. Rackham called them ‘the locust years’ for the life they stripped from old woods.

Life had definitely returned. These clearings were hummocky with meadow ants and waving with knapweed, scabious and other wildflowers. Baby oaks poked through the grasses all over.

If these flowery glades weren’t cut every summer, the meadow would surge into forest again within a decade.

This was a short walk over several hours. An owl called and I jumped, thinking I must’ve really lost track of time – but it was only mid-afternoon. As the sunlight lowered, I bathed in the greenery and pondered life both seen and unseen. I tried to imagine the parallel world beneath my feet, the soil’s damp fecundity and the throbbing network of mycorrhizal fungi, the wood-wide web, which fed such miraculous flowering and fruiting.

I wished to plug myself into this life-source, too. It was only when I drove away, as refreshed as if emerging from a bewitched slumber, that I realised I had connected myself to the wonder of an English woodland in the best way we unrooted animals know – by taking a walk.

Bardney Limewoods National Nature Reserve is also known as Chambers Farm Wood. There is a car park and butterfly garden at Hoop Lane, Wragby, LN8 5JR

Country Houses

I’ve lost my Trust As a girl, Lisa White fell for the National Trust. After years working for it, she’s devastated by proposals to sack its senior curators My love affair with the National Trust (NT) began wondrously in 1960 – 60 years ago.

It ended last weekend, as love affairs sometimes do, in a fog of bewilderment and pain. How come?

It all began at Montacute House. Being a West Country child, I went there at the age of ten and, with tingling excitement, climbed the stone stairs on my own to the top floor, to be amazed by the vast, empty expanse of the Long Gallery.

Apart from churches and aircraft hangars, I had never been in such a huge space, and it fascinated me.

I explored all the little rooms at the sides and counted my footsteps along what were then the bare boards of the 180-foot-long gallery. It was sensational.

I returned soon and often and, in 1964, bought my first guidebook. I still have it. It cost 1s 6d, had no illustrations, and was written by the pre-eminent Elizabethan-architecture historian Mark Girouard. In two paragraphs, he explained the purpose, significance and later history of the space, and I was hooked.

A second early and equally captivating visit, with an elderly grandmother whose driving was terrifying, was to Stourhead gardens. Smitten again!

So my childish infatuation developed from excitement and wonder into curiosity, intellectual discovery and discernment. Through NT houses and gardens, I learned how to look, learn, judge and love even more deeply – and what a rewarding affair it was.

Exploring took me further afield across England and Wales and I learnt the basics of architectural history: mellow medieval (Cotehele), exultant Elizabethan (Hardwick), boisterous Baroque (Ham House), crazy Rococo (Claydon), neat neo-Classicism (Osterley Park), virtuous Victorian (Cragside) and soothing Arts and Crafts (Standen). I found the quirky places (A la Ronde, Blaise Hamlet), the tumbledown places (Alfriston Clergy House, Bradley Manor).

I began to differentiate between what my great mentor at the V & A, Clive Wainwright, referred to as ‘old and Real

Old’ – Gothic Revival versus real Gothic.

It was a marvellous education.

I began to learn about things, too: Tudor needlework, Grinling Gibbons carving, Irish glass, mahogany furniture and taxidermy (Calke Abbey!), not to mention mangles, bath tubs, coal scuttles, coaches and ploughs.

Learning through NT collections led me to train as a curator at the V & A, become a tutor in decorative art history at Bristol University and the Director of the Attingham Summer School for the Study of Historic Houses and Collections (otherwise known as the international curators’ boot camp).

In return, I gave my time for free to the NT as a member of the Wessex Regional Committee, the Arts Advisory Panel, as a specialist adviser, lecturing for the NT and Royal Oak Foundation across the USA, and delivered training programmes for newly appointed managers of the historic properties.

In doing so, I encountered some of the finest scholars in Britain, both those who worked within the Trust and those who advised, unpaid, because they knew it was worthwhile.

Through visits to historic properties, I met dedicated curators whose deep knowledge and sensitivity to the places they cared for often grew out of long service. I met conservators whose professional expertise in, say, textiles, metalwork, woodwork or plasterwork is

Start of the affair: Montacute, Somerset

among the best in the world. The loyalty, knowledge and enthusiasm of volunteers impressed me, too. The reward was the opportunity to stand alone in such houses or gardens, often at the end of a long working day, and simply breathe in the beauty.

So why the sudden end of the affair of a lifetime? At the beginning of August, the NT announced its proposals for what is now called ‘Curation and Experience’ as part of its ‘Re-set’ programme which addresses the £200m loss of income resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

It proposes the removal, at a stroke, of all the senior curatorial posts at the centre of the NT, the lead curators in the regions and many of the recently appointed junior curators whose posts had only recently been created.

Distinguished, internationally renowned scholars of architecture, archaeology, historic gardens, paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, silver, and libraries would be swept out. Similar posts in conservation would be ‘closed’, and existing staff invited to apply for a harshly reduced number of redefined jobs or take redundancy. The consultation period for these proposed changes will last until mid-September.

As a lifelong member and supporter of the NT, I am dismayed. I wonder whether deleting the Trust’s excellence in scholarship and conservation at a stroke is the best way to proceed. It will be almost impossible for the NT to rebuild this precious resource.

While I am sympathetic to all organisations facing the pandemic’s impact on their operations, I have the impression now that the NT is behaving harshly and uncharitably to its own people, and wrecking what it should value most.

I implore its senior management team to think again.

While I still love the properties and the collections, I have lost trust in the Trust.

Lisa White was Chairman of the National Trust Arts Panel, 2012-16 The Oldie September 2020 83

Genius crossword 391 el sereno S has the same meaning throughout Across 1 Counter arguments used for old burial sites (7) 5 Select actors after school production for internet transmission (7) 9 S is one name adopted by short bloke (5) 10 Clamps down on reporters employed by rejected visionary (9) 11 Starts off cutting rule – that’s the limit! (4,5) 12 Obsession of crew needing first-class return (5) 13 S Merkel’s positive about Bible (4) 15 S is like this collecting a wild grass (8) 18 Voting system one’s put in actual revenge (8) 19 S may be parent full of energy (4) 22 A name inscribed in record in accompaniment (5) 24 A shade down on prince, for example? (5,4) 26 Sailor’s mad aunt left a spider (9) 27 What’s left of building after the end of this inferno? (5) 28 Expenses must cover case of surrogate babies (7) 29 React badly in front of old women and suffer humiliation (3,4)

Down 1 Life is empty after dollar’s collapse (6) 2 Check condition and restore rank (9) 3 Tests of ethics when head is lost (5) 4 Shocks from broadcasting teacher awards? (9) 5 Fruit picker initially needing a hand (5) 6 Nod, seeing chap crossing line in fear (9) 7 Burglar’s only boxing offence? (5) 8 S may find time when on staff (6) 14 Turn up in Scottish island church – that’s conceit (9) 16 Event in which runners must get stick? (5,4) 17 A trifle that’s available at the bar (5,4) 20 Indian caught by S? (6) 21 Shout that hurt S (6) 23 Monsters held up by lesser gods (5) 24 Republican reveals overwhelming defeats (5) 25 Noted writer’s catalogue on air (5)

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 September 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 391 Across 1 Give way (4) 4 Space telescope (6) 7 Kerfuffle (3) 9 Lead actor (4) 10 Despot (8) 11 Spoil (3) 12 Killer whale (4) 13 Awful (8) 16 Lazy (13) 19 Seriousness (of crime) (8) 23 Ballet dress (4) 24 Anger (3) 25 To blood (8) 26 Attire (4) 27 Fib (3) 28 Astute (6) 29 Ill-mannered (4)

Genius 389 solution Down 2 Amusing (12) 3 Reserve; set aside (7) 4 Stash (5) 5 Swim; wash (5) 6 Coherent (5) 8 Produced; invented (12) 14 Respond (5) 15 Idiot; mule (3) 17 Supply weapons to (3) 18 Whole number (7) 20 Gag; regurgitate (5) 21 Effigy (5) 22 Surrender; generate (5)

Winner: T W Webb, Guisborough, North Yorkshire Runners-up: Mrs C Gait, Harrow, Middlesex; John Sparrow, Morecambe, Lancashire APOLOGY FROM EL SERENO El Sereno and the team apologise to frustrated readers for the grid error in the August issue, and are trying to keep their red faces covered.

Moron 389 solution Across: 1 Sane, 3 Home, 6 Oar, (Say no more) 9 Crocodile clip, 10 Aperitif, 12 Leer, 13 Nut, 15 Corner, 18 Rustic, 19 Dab, 21 Idle, 22 Probable, 25 Beyond the pale, 26 Red, 27 Gilt, 28 Font. Down: 1 Social climber, 2 Noose, 4 Origin, 5 Ewer, 6 Oiliest, 7 Rapprochement, 8 Noticed, 11 Fur, 14 Tumbler, 16 Relayed, 17 Rap, 20 Brutal, 23 Bravo, 24 Snug.

The Oldie September 2020 85

Competition TESSA CASTRO I rarely come across an end position as beautiful as the one that occurred on this month’s deal. The indicated line of play will force West to come down to just one heart.

The success of your optimistic slam venture will then depend on whether you can guess – at trick 12 – whether his remaining heart is ♥J or ♥K. You may wish to cover up the East-West cards and try to decide for yourself.

Dealer West North-South Vulnerable

West ♠ Q 10 ♥J8 ♦AJ982 ♣Q 7 6 5

North ♠ AKJ2 ♥Q432 ♦6 ♣K J 4 3

South ♠ 97653 ♥ A 10 5 ♦KQ5 ♣A 2

East ♠ 84 ♥K976 ♦ 10 7 4 3 ♣10 9 8

IN COMPETITION No 257, you were invited to write a poem with the title The Surprising Tree. Kevin Murphy celebrated a tree on a viaduct on the A413 at Gerrards Cross. Eden figured jauntily in Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry, a place for ‘Prancing round in the nude, eating fresh natural food,/With the serpent a vague background hiss.’ To that forbidden fruit, Michele Crawford added the apple of discord and the mistletoe that killed Baldur. Rob Stuart recounted the memorable finding of a skull in a wych elm. J E Tomlin had an ancient cedar triumphant in a Whig peer’s park.

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations going to Gail White.

The Bidding

Surprising Tree has partridges For every day of Christmas.

It floats a flock of ibises Along the ibis isthmus.

South West North East

pass 1 ♣ pass 1 ♠ pass 3 ♠ pass 5 ♠ (1) pass 6 ♠ pass pass pass

Surprising Tree has golden fruit That Eve put too much trust in.

It also bore the peach that once Was stolen by Augustine.

(1) General slam invitation, asking partner to focus in particular on trump quality.

West cashed ♦A and switched to ♠ 10.

Declarer rose with dummy’s ♠ K and cashed ♠ A, breathing a sigh of relief when West’s ♠ Q dropped. He then cashed ♠ J, crossed to ♠ 7 (both opponents discarding diamonds on the extra trumps), and cashed ♦K Q (discarding hearts from dummy). In order to wring the final, crucial discard from the opposition, he led his last trump, ♠ 9.

After some soul-searching, West discarded ♥8. Now ♣3 could be discarded from dummy – to leave ♥ Q 4 and ♣K J 4.

It was likely from his failure to discard a single club that West’s last four cards were ♣Q x x x and one heart. For the contract to succeed, it needed to be either ♥J or ♥K. But which?

Declarer cashed ♣A, led ♣2 to ♣J, the finesse against ♣Q succeeding (as expected); he then cashed ♣K, discarding ♥ 5, and had reached the critical point.

Which heart honour does West hold?

Think back to the bidding. West dealt and passed – yet he has turned up with ♦AJ, ♣Q and ♠ Q. If he also held ♥K, he would have 12 points and would have opened the bidding. Play him to have ♥ J left. Lead ♥ Q from dummy in order to ‘pin’ ♥ J. Say East covers with ♥ K: win ♥ A and, when West’s ♥ J does indeed appear, table the master ♥ 10. Slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

Don’t walk beneath Surprising Tree When darkness falls, reflecting That it can send a rain of bats Upon the unsuspecting.

Though others warn the kids away, I own I’m not so wary.

I’ll plant my own Surprising Tree And see what it may bear me.

Gail White ‘A Surprising Tree’ is what we’re asked to discuss.

But, for a clutch of reasons, I would say The afore-used adjective is superfluous: A tree – any tree – is surprising, anyway.

See: branches unfurling their leafy umbrella, Helping to keep you dry when you’ve forgotten yours; Hear: a tree’s feathered friends’ cheery a cappella, So sweetly civilising the rugged outdoors.

Imagine: all that sap invisibly rising; If that isn’t surprising, I ask you – what is?

Think: how we’d all need to be economising On breath, without a tree’s blest photosynthesis.

In amazement, a tree will always make me stare And if you can prove otherwise, I’ll eat my hat!

I mean: a slow, green fountain refreshing the air – What could possibly be more surprising than that?

I White Springing out of the ground, a tree Surprised me by the force within its life.

Was it this mighty living tower, Bastion against the army of the winds, That cell and cell idealised as they grew?

Was this their culture, world, aim, sense-of-one Half- or full-realised communal attempt To grope beyond their present minute lives And catch a reason for existence here?

Were they content to live within a state Of living wood, and do their task therein?

Surely a cell contentment must be there Or that strong tree would fade away and die As each constituent resigned his place And death, instead of life, would overcome.

Gillian W Poland Lightning had blasted it. Its bark had gone, Its naked boughs appealing to the sky For something to hide its shame. Cold sunlight shone On its bare trunk. There seemed no reason why The tree should stand. It groaned at night And waved its wasted form, welcoming shade And darkness to conceal the monstrous sight It had become. What purpose might be made Of this maimed giant God alone could know.

Its branches, with dead fingers, clawed the air Forbidding any greenery to grow, And with the winds of winter sang despair.

Yet life existed in its hollowed bole: A ghostly owl rose from its tortured soul.

Max Ross COMPETITION No 259 What with one thing and another, meals have been different in recent months. A poem, please, called Cooking for One. 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 postal address), marked ‘Competition No 259’, by 17th September.

The Oldie September 2020 87

UK Travel

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Larger house has wheelchair friendly ground floor with fitted hearing loops.

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88 The Oldie September 2020

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The Oldie September 2020 91

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The Oldie September 2020 93

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside I miss my murdered wife

Q

Twelve years ago I met Carol, who soon became the love of my life. She was 50, and I ten years older. We had both been married and divorced; so marriage was not considered. I would visit her every night, and my life was perfect. Tragically, last year, she was killed outright in a car accident, by a maniac on parole from prison, full of hard drugs and driving at 55 mph. I have found it very hard to cope with life after her death – no one to share a meal with and of a similar intellect as me. The killer is now serving ten years in prison. Why am I unable to come to terms with life? COVID-19 has been an additional burden to me. Please help me to find a way through the darkness of my life.

J B, Scotland I know this sounds a bit like fobbing off, but I wonder if you shouldn’t think of contacting a Cruse counsellor? At least that would give you someone to talk to, even if only on the phone. Just talking about Carol would surely be a comfort. You might also find SAMM a help (www.samm.org.uk); it’s an organisation that helps the families of people bereaved by murder or manslaughter. Never having been bereaved in this traumatic way, I can only imagine that there are particular aspects of grieving – such as a desire for revenge, perhaps – suffered by those left behind.

I won’t pretend that anything is going to make your life feel worth living again, at the moment. But having someone to lend an ear to you, or to hold your hand (metaphorically) during this time, might be worth a go. There are lots of good books on grief, too. I hesitate to recommend mine, but many people find

A

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

94 The Oldie September 2020

it helpful. It’s ‘You’ll Get Over It’: The Rage of Bereavement. The title is ironic and in inverted commas because in truth you never get over it, and often in some way your grief keeps your lovely partner alive, and close. One day you may be ready for, if not another partner, at least a close, female friend. But now isn’t the time even to consider that. I am so, so sorry.

My incontinent friend

Q

I have a dear friend, also in her 80s, who I have learned has become incontinent. I have not seen her since the COVID-19 lockdown, and she lives about a half an hour away from me. After a previous visit to me, I did notice she’d left a damp patch and have since had the chair re-covered.

Now that we are able to travel more freely, I feel I should invite her. What should I do?

Name and address supplied Do you have a chair that’s wooden, or covered with a plastic or wipeable material, to which you could direct your friend?

Otherwise, place a plastic bag over a chair and cover it with the cheapest cushion or material you can find – in local markets they cost hardly anything.

Choose something you’d be prepared to wash or throw away. Then pin the material to the chair with a staple gun or, if you don’t have one (but it’s an incredibly useful piece of equipment, anyway!), then just tack it loosely underneath. Or, if it’s an upholstered chair, you could push the edges down the sides. If, when she rises from the chair, her skirt is damp, then wring your hands in horror, full of apologies, pretending to worry that she might have sat on something wet. Then, one hopes, she’ll

A

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admit to the problem with a big apology and you can make a joke of it and offer some helpful suggestions, such as that she wear pads, at least while she’s out.

Don’t mask your troubles

Q

As I live on my own and most of my friends are still too frightened to go out, my only pleasure these days is going out to the shops and communicating at least with the local shopkeepers. I know their children, and the problems they have, and we have long chats. But, in a face mask, I can’t do this. I can’t read their expressions or even, sometimes, recognise them. I feel faint with breathing in all that carbon dioxide and their voices are muffled. Does this government know what a smile can do?

It can support me, at least, for hours.

Are there any see-through face masks that might be helpful?

Gwen G, Thurrock I’ve looked, almost in vain. I did find one – but, two months later, it still hasn’t arrived from the Ukraine. I’d try a face shield instead.

They may not be strictly within the rules, but they’re better than nothing and I think you’d get away with it. At least you’d be trying. It’d be a brave person who’d tick you off and the chances of your being prosecuted would, I imagine, be almost nil. Alternatively, see your doctor and ask if he or she can give you a note explaining that a mask makes you so distressed that you’re getting depressed and can’t sleep. Worth a shot.

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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